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.