Mahabharata deconstructed

Thanks to the ennui caused by endless television reruns of B R Chopra’s Mahabharat (1988) and its later clones with their tawdry settings and costumes, overacting to the hilt, with sham Sanskrit-studded stilted dialogues, I found great joy in rediscovering a prize jewel in my library, Dr Iravati Karve’s magisterial essays on the epic titled Yuganta. I reread it slowly, savouring every nuance the learned social anthropologist brings out as a priceless nugget from her careful reading of the original text. That this should happen in 2020, the 50th anniversary of her death, is an apt coincidence.

Dr Karve was born in 1905 in what was then Burma (hence her first name), earned her master ’s degree in sociology from Bombay University in 1928 and a PHD in anthropology from Berlin two years later. She was a daughter-in-law of the great pioneer of women’s education and widow remarriage Maharshi D K Karve. She helped run Maharshi Karve’s women’s university before joining that renowned institution of cultural scholarship, the Deccan College of Pune.

I first learnt of Dr Karve and Yuganta in the United States in 196869. Its Marathi version won the Sahitya Akademi award for the best Marathi book of 1967. It was then serialised in a Marathi literary magazine, now defunct, called rather inappropriately Satyakatha (True Stories). Shreekant, my husband, would read out from his subscription copy the Karve essay sentence by sentence and translate it into English. I found it engrossing.

But like most people, I can truly enjoy a literary work only through reading and the only language I read is English. We returned to India in 1971, a year after Dr Karve’s death. But she had published Yuganta in English before then, because many of her acquaintances did not know Marathi. She says that the English version is not a translation but a rewrite. And she being truly bilingual, nothing is lost in this transition. She writes lucidly, in a contemporary manner, despite the burden of tradition her theme carries. Her scholarship is wide-ranging, encompassing classic Greek and Latin texts as well as the Jaina manuscripts.

Dr Karve claims not to be a Sanskrit scholar. She read the Mahabharata because she liked it; can there ever be a better reason to do so? She read the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute’s critical edition, based on the earliest manuscripts from the seventh and the eighth century. Many later interpolations are omitted in this edition, but Dr Karve thinks that even this is not the original one, because there are internal discrepancies. She had hoped that someday the original core of Jaya (victory), a history ( itihasa), could be retrieved.

She first wrote an essay on the Kaurava matriarch Gandhari, because she found her fascinating. Dr Karve’s purpose in writing it was to communicate her feelings. When a reader asked “Who in the world was Gandhari?” she was dismayed and briefly considered abandoning writing, but luckily for us, continued her series over the next five years.

Dr Karve believes the Mahabharata to be the history of events that took place ca 1,000 BC, in the northern plains around present-day Delhi, culminating in a great fratricidal battle between cousins. It is the history of the pastoralist Aryans invading a new land and clearing it for cultivation, after vanquishing indigenous people, but in the process assimilating them through intermarriages and adopting some rituals and mores. The caste system was just emerging, Brahmins and Kshatriyas being the elite, with interchangeable roles. Their illegitimate progeny, the sutas, played supporting roles.

Stripping the epic of much embellishment through its careful reading, Dr Karve comes to the conclusion that, above all, it is a story of stoic people, not superhuman beings. They held certain values dear, but could not always adhere to them. The Bard says that the fault lies not in the stars but in the people themselves but Dr Karve believes that fate and character both affected the Mahabharata personalities. Bhishma, Kunti, Yudhisthira, Arjuna, Draupadi, all have character flaws. Some, notably Karna, aspire to nobility, but due to their fatal flaws cannot adhere to the code of gallantry and chivalry in moments of crises. Krishna Vasudeva is no avatara to Dr Karve but a most sagacious person; his eternal friendship of Arjuna is the luminous centrepiece of the narrative. But he, too, must suffer his ordained fate of being betrayed by his own warring kinsfolk.

“Men, women, kings, beggars and even gods cannot be liberated from the course of fate. They all have to see sorrow, hardship and ruin along with happiness, well-being and success…. Each had to behave as was expected of a person in that position and each strove hard to attain values implicit in that situation,” Dr Karve observes.

She believes that the later literature might have beauty and charm, but none has the sharpness of the Mahabharata or anything that provokes thought. She is especially severe on the bhakti cults and their romanticisation.

Dr Karve had probably not even heard of Jacques Derida, the patron saint of modern deconstructionism, because his first works appeared just before she died. But Yuganta is the deconstructionist classic of all times.

Stripping the epic of much embellishment through its careful reading, Dr Karve comes to the conclusion that, above all, the Mahabharata is a story of stoic people, not superhuman beings