The tears of mothers, wives, and daughters

I was really, really young when I heard the word "posthumous."  My father used that word when referring to my aunt, who was a few-months old fetus when her father died.  In utero, a phrase that I learned much later.

I have never talked with this aunt about growing up fatherless.  Yes, there were father-figures in her life.  But, nobody that she called appa.  

I never talked to her mother either about losing her husband when she was a few months into her first and only pregnancy. 

In the old country, we never talked about such important things in life. 

But, we religious Hindus channeled them all into the grand epics.  Through those mythological characters--some of whom were/are divine to many--we shared the angst, pain, aches, sorrows, and everything unpleasant that life deals us.

In the Mahabharata, Parikshit is a posthumous child.  His father, Abhimanyu, was one of the many killed in the war at Kurukshetra. 

Kathika Nair gives voice to Abhimanyu's wife, Uttara, who was pregnant with Parikshit.

A young mother ready to give birth and her husband is killed.

There is plenty to be understood, and written, about the tears that mothers and daughters shed, and don't shed.  Yiyun Li writes about that in a moving personal essay.

"I have so little to keep, to hold, of you."  In the mythology and in real life.  Even today. 

Ill-behaved men and the abused women

Audrey Truschke, whose lecture on Aurangzeb I attended in Chennai in January 2019 during my sabbatical and was condemned by the Hindutva and its sympathizers as whitesplaining, writes this about the Mahabharata:

The epic itself foretells:

आचख्युः कवयः केचित्संप्रत्याचक्षते परे

आख्यास्यन्ति तथैवान्ये इतिहासमिमं भुवि

Some poets told this epic before.

Others are telling it now.

Different narrators will tell it in the future.

One of the latest narrators is Karthika Nair, whose interpretation of the Mahabharata is absolutely innovative.  It compels the reader to rethink the old epic, however familiar one might be with the tales and the characters.

Nair gives voice to the Queen of Panchala--Draupadi's mother--who is a "woman without a name" in the epic.  Through this queen, Nair condemns how men--kings in particular--defined life that was hell for mothers because of wars and bloodshed:

As Truschke also reminds us, the Mahabharata "condemns many of the appalling things it depicts, but one area where its response is more tepid concerns the treatment meted out to women."

The world of the Mahabharata is stacked against women. Our world today looks distinct in its details, but some basic principles are not much different. For example, more than one person has compared Draupadi’s plight with that of ‘Nirbhaya’, the name given to the young woman mortally gang-raped in Delhi in 2012. Nirbhaya (meaning ‘fearless’) resisted her attackers, and one of the rapists later said that this resistance prompted him and his fellow assaulters to be more brutal than they would have been otherwise. Two millennia later, the corrupt ‘moral’ remains: she should not have objected to unjust treatment.

The Mahabharata is not as straightforward a story about good and bad as one might expect from an epic that features practically all the Vedic gods.  

The Mahabharata claims to show dharma or righteous conduct – a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thought – within the morass of the characters’ immoral behaviours. But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled. The bad guys sometimes act more ethically than the good guys, who are themselves deeply flawed. In the epic’s polychromatic morality, the constraints of society and politics shackle all.

This is also why Nair prefers this epic over the Ramayana.  She writes that in the Mahabharata, "right and wrong and not so easy to spot anymore."  Tragic!

We often don't know about happenings in our own backyards

Reading never fails to underscore how much I don't know any damn thing.  I could spend all my hours reading, not wasting time playing bridge or doing any of my "wasteful" acts, and I will still not know any damn thing.

Yet, the alternative--to not read--is not appealing either.  Yes, people who don't know anything but claim to be the only one to know it all can get to positions of power and fame.  But, I don't want to be in that universe.

Karthika Nair's interpretation of the Mahabharata is a case in point.  One of the voices that she channels is that of Ulupi, whose connection to the Kuru family is through Arjuna.  A queen of the Nagas, Ulupi has a son, Aravan, through Arjuna during his exile years.  Nair refers to Aravan (Iravan) being celebrated by a few Tamils in the Koothandavar cult.

Koothandavar? Cult?

The first result in a Google search for Koothandavar is Koovagam.

It is famous for its annual festival of transgender and transvestite individuals, which takes fifteen days in the Tamil month of Chitrai (April/May) ... The festival takes place at the Koothandavar Temple dedicated to Iruvan (Koothandavar).

Aravan aka Koothandavar, who was born from the union of Arjuna and Ulupi, is celebrated thousands of miles away in the southern tip of the subcontinent?

It turns out that Koovagam is located not far away from Neyveli, which is where I grew up!

A mere 25 miles away from Neyveli is this place where annual celebrations for Aravan are held, and I am finding out about it when I am 10,000 miles away?

Maybe I didn't know because it brings transgenders and transvestites to the temple, and the mainstream--definitely back then--did not care much about them and tried to only marginalize them?

Too many questions!

Wikipedia adds:

The participants marry the Lord Koothandavar, thus reenacting an ancient history of Lord Vishnu/Krishna who married him after taking a form of a woman called Mohini. The next day, they mourn the god Koothandavar's death through ritualistic dances and by breaking their bangles. An annual beauty pageant and several other competitions like singing contests are held.

The more I read, it turns out that there is much more to know about.  So, read and learn I shall.

The Mahabharata echoes even after all the years

The doorbell chimed.

I saw a man in brown leave.

I knew what it was about, and rushed to open the door.

I hurriedly opened the parcel to reveal the book.

Source

I scanned through.  I was convinced that the reviewer had not exaggerated one bit. "The poems of Until the Lions are graphically typeset on the page so that they seem to be dancing, a celebration of visible sound."

Later in the night, I got to reading the book.  Yes, it is unconventional and impressive.  Even the simple explanation that Nair gives in the introduction for choosing the Mahabharata over the other Hindu epic, Ramayana: Unlike in the Ramayana, where the enemy is far away and some Other, here "that mortal enemy is one's own kin; the blood the heroes spill is all their own."

Think about the family disputes, among the rich and the poor alike.  While there might not be any literal blood spilling, the emotions are not that different from those described in the epic.  The Mahabharata is the one that I have always favored over the Ramayana, as I noted back in 2013:

I loved those epics.  Phenomenal works of literature from centuries ago.  What I read were mere re-telling; I can easily imagine that the works in the original will be quite a treat for those well-versed in Sanskrit.  The Mahabharata, which I prefer a tad over the Ramayana, was Rajaji's version that I read and it was one gripping page turner when I read that as a kid.

Nair lists the key characters from the Mahabharata who are featured in her innovative interpretation.  Those descriptions alone are enough compensation for the price of the book.  Consider the following about Vyasa:

"in his spare time."  What an editorial comment!

Over the decades of living in my adopted country, I have forgotten some of the characters.  Nair reminds me about them.  But, there was one in her listing that was new: Sauvali.  Dhritarashra chose her as a "concubine during Gandhari's pregnancy."  Yuyutsu was the son.  He was the only son among the Kauravas who survives the war, and performs "the last rites for all his fallen kin."

Not having known anything about Sauvali, I chose to read the chapter about her first, ahead of everything else.  Nair does not mince words--she writes about the rape of Sauvali.

 There's so much to understand about the human condition, which is what great authors have been doing over the centuries of storytelling.  

War and Peace

Back in January 2019, I wrote this about David Shulman:

I am stumped at everything that Shulman offers.  A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, seems to know more about Tamil than all but a handful of the 80 million Tamil-speakers put together!

A polyglot Shulman is.  In addition to English and Hebrew, "he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam."

Which is why Shulman comfortably writes that one of the most powerful interpretations of the Mahabharata was written in Malayalam: "By far the most powerful such interpretation that I have read, Wandering the Mahabharata, was written in the South Indian language Malayalam by a maverick scholar, Kuttikrishna Marar"

We are all better off thanks to scholars like Shulman who interpret history and old texts for the vast multitude of us who are barely literate in one language.

Shulman's essay is about a recent book on the Mahabharata.  The first paragraph alone blows my mind on how fluent he is with various aspects of life in the Subcontinent, in addition to his mastery of the epic itself:

The Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic, is a fiery, dangerous book. One is not supposed to keep a copy in the house, lest it burn down. And it is dangerous, perhaps fatal, to read it from beginning to end, in linear sequence. Similarly, translating it from Sanskrit into another language, beginning at the beginning, is not recommended. The classical Telugu version from South India has three authors; two died during its composition.

More than a year ago, when I helped my parents move, and when my parents were donating and getting rid of many of their possessions, my father complained that nobody will want his copy of a scholar's interpretation of the Mahabharata--for the very reason that Shulman notes.

Shulman weaves his phenomenal understanding of the Subcontinent when reviewing Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata.  After listing works that interpreted the epic in innovative and powerful ways--I have no clue about any of those!--he writes:

But surely the most lyrical of all such attempts to see the Mahabharata through the eyes of its characters is the remarkable dramatic poem Until the Lions by the Kerala-born, Paris-based poet, dance producer, and librettist Karthika Naïr.

She has given her book an appropriate subtitle: “Echoes from the Mahabharata.” The thirty haunting, heartrending chapters, in a wide range of forms and styles, resonate powerfully with one another; together they offer a text clearly meant for live performance, in oral recitation—or rather incantation—and in dance. ...

The poems of Until the Lions are graphically typeset on the page so that they seem to be dancing, a celebration of visible sound. Karthika plays with metrical modes—canzone, rima dissoluta, the Panjabi Sufi acrostic form known as Si Harfi, and the Tamil andadi, in which each new verse begins with the final syllables of the previous one.

Read the entire essay.  If you are like me, after reading it, you too will immediately place an order for the book from your favored retailer.

I will end with this nugget from Shulman on the continued relevance of the Mahabharata:

[This] two-thousand-year-old book is, in a way, a template for Indian civilization; it remains as vital and relevant today as it ever was, and not only for South Asia. The apocalypse it describes is something all too human, driven by greed, egotism, spite, and the usual phoney fixation on the glories of dying in war. 

Kashgar, Uighurs, Kashmir, and Aryans

With Xinjiang in the news, the curious person in me started wondering whether there might be connections between Kashgar--a major Uighur city--and the name Kashmir. After all, these are all place names up there in the mountains and it is possible that they are all derived from the same clan, of sorts?

If Wikipedia can be believed, they are indeed related.

The Khasas are an ancient people, believed to be a section of the Indo-Iranians who originally belonged to Central Asia from where they had penetrated, in remote antiquity, the Himalayas through Kashgar and Kashmir and dominated the whole hilly region. They are believed to have given their names to Kashgar, Kashi (Central Asia), Kashkara, Kashmir, Khashali (south-east of Kashmir) Kashatwar, Khashdhar (Shimla Hills) and other recognizable colonies at the present day in the hills from Kashmir down to Nepal as also in various plains.

Indo-Iranians? Aryans? How interesting!

The same Wikipedia entry goes on to discuss the role of Khasas in the Mahabharata, and in the famous Kurukshetra War in that epic. (BTW, apparently a friend was talking to his brother-in-law about the Hindu mythologies, and that BIL stopped him right there with an admonition that to him those are not mythologies but real gods he believes in, and events he believes unfolded centuries ago!)