The Great War was an apocalyptic war between Imperial cousins which made the end of European Imperialism inevitable. The Mahabharata- an Indian epic which featured a great war between Royal cousins- gained salience during this horrible time. In particular, the 'Bhagvad Gita'- a chapter from that epic- captured the imagination of many who had witnessed the horrors of trench war.
The MhB is not History as Chronicle- it is 'itihasa' a narrative constructed to elucidate the Vedic religion- or 'Dharma'- as it applies to actual conduct. Dharma was translated into Greek as 'eusebia' which was translated into Latin as 'Pietas' which is the English 'piety'. It is relational, not substantive. Your asebia can cause asebia (impiety) in others. This explains why dharmic people can be driven to impious actions.
Interestingly, the key to understanding the MhB was provided by a German Jewish female mathematician- Emmy Noether- in 1918. Her theorem showed that a system which has been built up on the basis of symmetries, will have conserved properties corresponding to those symmetries. The MhB is a 'non-dissipative' system which conserves karma- which is a law of causation through time applicable to individual souls- and dharma- which is the moral law which relates agents to each other across space. How this is done is by ensuring symmetry is maintained such that every episode and every agent has a 'dual' such that the nature of the law is elucidated. Furthermore, care is taken to make each episode a 'balanced game'- even if one party is a god and the other a mortal- so that there is some drama and suspense as to the outcome.
In this sense, as mathematical game theory, starting from Zermelo's theorem in 1913, was further elaborated, the MhB did indeed become a tale for our times.
Audrey Trushke, writing for Aeon, says as much but does not provide the true reason for it.
The Mahabharata is a tale for our times. The plot of the ancient Indian epic centres around corrupt politics,
There is no corruption. There are thymotic rivalries and personal affronts and vendettas. But nobody is taking bribes or betraying anybody.
ill-behaved men
Draupati's bad behavior is mentioned as a cause for the War. The men behaved nobly enough according the thymotic code of their times.
and warfare. In this dark tale, things get worse and worse, until an era of unprecedented depravity, the Kali Yuga, dawns.
Nonsense! Kali Yuga just means life-spans are shorter and work is more laborious. But there is an easier path to salvation available.
According to the Mahabharata, we’re still living in the horrific Kali era, which will unleash new horrors on us until the world ends.
And starts again. But, we may gain eternal salvation during it.
The Mahabharata was first written down in Sanskrit, ancient India’s premier literary language, and ascribed to a poet named Vyasa about 2,000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years. The epic sought to catalogue and thereby criticise a new type of vicious politics enabled by the transition from a clan-based to a state-based society in northern India.
Nonsense! It described an epic battle which occurred in remote antiquity. Plenty of the Kings and Chieftains existing at the time of its composition claimed descent from the heroes featured in it. However the 'state-based' society of Emperor Bharata had existed at a very much earlier period. Bharata was the son of Shakuntala. India is called Bharat because of him.
The work concerns two sets of cousins – the Pandavas and the Kauravas – who each claim the throne of Hastinapura as their own.
Nope. The Kauravas rule Hastinapura. The Pandavas rule Indraprastha. Sadly, their eldest brother gambles it away.
In the first third of the epic, the splintered family dynasty tries to resolve their succession conflict in various ways, including gambling, trickery, murder and negotiation.
There was no succession conflict. The Pandavas moved to Indraprastha and established their own city. It is related that the head of the Kauravas mistook polished marble for a pool of water and vice versa. Draupati, the common wife of the Pandavas, laughed at him. That's why he wanted revenge. There is a similar story about the Queen of Sheba in the court of King Solomon.
I suppose you could say there was bad blood between the cousins because of the childhood pranks of one of the Pandavas. However, the MhB explains that all these ostensible causes of the war were actually part of the Divine plan. One could say that the Kauravas represented the older thymotic society of the warriors while the Pandavas represent the new commercial outlook of the emporium cities.
But they fail. So, war breaks out,
as it was foreordained to do.
and the middle part of the Mahabharata tells of a near-total world conflict in which all the rules of battle are broken as each new atrocity exceeds the last. Among a battlefield of corpses, the Pandavas are the last ones left standing. In the final third of the epic, the Pandavas rule in a post-apocalyptic world until, years later, they too die.
Iron age epics end in this manner. For a while great heroes are animated by something nearly Divine. Then they grow old and die in a greyer world.
From the moment that the Mahabharata was first written two millennia ago, people began to rework the epic to add new ideas that spoke to new circumstances.
But they were careful to 'balance the books' by creating a dual for each episode or character.
No two manuscripts are identical (there are thousands of handwritten Sanskrit copies), and the tale was recited as much or more often than it was read. Some of the most beloved parts of the Mahabharata today – such as that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha wrote the epic with his broken tusk as he heard Vyasa’s narration – were added centuries after the story was first compiled.
But all such additions (or recoveries from some other Ur-text) were careful to preserve relevant symmetries.
The Mahabharata is long. It is roughly seven times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and 15 times the length of the Christian Bible. The plot covers multiple generations, and the text sometimes follows side stories for the length of a modern novel. But for all its narrative breadth and manifold asides, the Mahabharata can be accurately characterised as a set of narratives about vice.
No. It is about karma and dharma. If you uphold dharma you gain merit. If you fail to do, you will suffer karmic consequences. The MhB elucidates many aspects of Vedic religion and law. However, it shows the way to a theistic occasionalism which can be embraced by non-Vedic people.
Inequality and human suffering are facts of life in the Mahabharata.
No. They are the consequences of failure to uphold dharma or are the fruit of bad actions in previous lives.
The work offers valuable perspectives and vantage points for reflecting on how various injustices play out in today’s world too.
No. You actually need to know current law and economics to understand such things. We don't live in remote antiquity and can't get married to fairies or ogres.
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.
No. It refers to a pre-existing, quite diverse, tradition of dharmic texts and teachings. However, these injunctions are defeasible.
But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled.
No. Symmetries are carefully maintained such that dharma and karma are conserved properties of the system. The thing is not a hodgepodge. I suppose the 'book keeping' rule for its composition was simple enough. That's what makes the book as a whole 'balance'.
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.
No. People who are rash do silly things which lead to their own suffering. We might say 'don't be like Yuddhishtra who was crazy about dice games' or 'don't be like Draupati, who could not control herself from laughing at the discomfiture of a guest'.
Nobody is shackled. On the other hand, their actions were preordained. But if we knew God had preordained our actions, we would perform them all the more willingly.
Bhishma, a common ancestor
he is celibate and thus can't be anybody's ancestor
and grandfather-like figure to both sets of cousins, is a quintessential Mahabharata figure. Loyal to his family to a fault, he takes a vow of celibacy so that his father can marry a younger woman who wanted her children to inherit the throne. Bhishma’s motivation, namely love of his father, was good, but the result of denying himself children was to divert the line of succession to his younger brothers and, ultimately, their warring children.
Nothing wrong in that. Bhishma was the son of Ganga. He should have been killed as a baby as had been preordained for his own felicity.
Appropriately, Bhishma’s name, adopted when he took his vow of celibacy, means ‘the terrible’ (before the vow, he was known as Devavrata, ‘devoted to the gods’). Bhishma remains devoted to his family even when they support the Kauravas, the bad guys, in the great war.
So does the common Guru of the cousins. They abided by their dharma. But, it was clear that the thymotic age was coming to a close. The future lay with the commercial emporium cities where the Vyadha (butcher) gained wealth.
Sometimes even the gods act objectionably in the Mahabharata. Krishna, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, endorses dishonesty on more than one occasion.
Which is fine because he is God and can do no wrong. The narrative tension in the MhB arises from seeing whether the author will be able to find a way to preserve symmetries without sacrificing anything of aesthetic value. My pleasure in re-reading the MhB is to find some new (apoorva) subtleties which the author used but which, on previous readings, I had failed to grasp.
Even when Krishna advocates what the epic dubs dharma, the results can be hard to stomach.
For stupid people who don't understand the symmetries on which the epic is built up.
For example, when Arjuna, the third Pandava brother and their best warrior, hesitates to fight against his family and kill so many people, Krishna gives an eloquent speech that convinces him to plunge into battle.
No. Krishna fails to convince him. He has to reveal his 'universal form'. What is interesting is that Arjuna could have got this anyway but then he would have discovered his true eldest brother was Karna. Since Karna wanted to either kill or be killed by Arjuna, the Gita reveals the subtle way in which even incarnate God is 'gamed' by his own game-plan such that, not Krishna, but Karna's will is done.
Krishna’s discourse to Arjuna, known as the Bhagavadgita (‘Song of the Lord’), or Gita for short, is often read as a standalone work today,
it is the dual of the Vyadha Gita which deals with the dharma of the principal as opposed to the agent. But the Vyadha is twinned with the Nalophkyanam which says that the principal should master statistical game theory to avoid 'Vishada' depression. This is subtle stuff. Even Andre Weil didn't understand this though he knew both Sanskrit and Mathematics.
and revered by many across the world for its insights on morality and even nonviolence. In the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi understood the Gita to support nonviolent resistance to colonial oppression.
Weil thought its message was to desert from the army. This almost got him killed. Apparently, his pal, Vijayraghavan was a Gandhian. Being a great mathematician doesn't prevent you from doing stupid shit. The Gita says 'do your duty. Fight!' Weil thought it meant 'run the fuck away'.
In the Mahabharata’s plot, however, the Bhagavadgita rationalises mass slaughter.
It was already valorized as the quick and certain way for warriors to gain Valhalla. If you don't want to be a soldier, resign from the army and go do something else.
‘Mahabharata’ translates as ‘great story of the Bharatas’, the Bharatas being the family lineage at the centre of the tale. However, in many modern Indian settings, ‘Mahabharata’ means a great battle.
Because it truly is an epic battle which engrossed kids like me.
War is the narrative crux of the epic. The war that settles the succession dispute between the Pandavas and the Kauravas
there was no succession dispute. The question was whether the Pandavas would get back their own kingdom.
draws much of the world into its destructive whirlwind. Along with peoples from across the Indian subcontinent, Greeks, Persians and the Chinese also send troops to stand and fall in battle.
Sadly, the Americans didn't show up. They thought the only good Indian was a dead Indian.
The Pandavas win, but at a magnificent cost of human life.
She means 'terrible'. However it is the 'night-slaughter' of women and children which is most horrific.
The epic compels readers to imagine that human cost by describing the battle in excruciating, bloody detail over tens of thousands of verses. The Pandavas kill multiple members of their own family along the way, including elders who ought to be revered.
They were revered. Then they decided to lay down their own lives. Not a bad way to go even if Bhishma prosed on at inordinate length.
Their victory is further soured by a night raid in which, on the last night of the war, the few remaining Kauravas creep into the slumbering Pandava camp and kill nearly everyone, including all the victors’ sons.
But one of them is brought back to life so that the dynasty continues.
After the slaughter, when blood has soaked the earth and most of the characters lie dead, Yudhishthira, the eldest of the five Pandavas, decides that he no longer wants the throne of Hastinapura. What is the point of ruling when you got there only through deceit, sin and death? Yudhishthira says:
आत्मानमात्मना हत्वा किं धर्मफलमाप्नुमः
This is a reference to Krishna's self-slaying through theophany (which is a condign self-praise and therefore a type of suicide) Yet, the fruit of eusebia (dharma) arises only when the self slays the self. Still, what Yudhishthira had not bargained on was that he would himself have to rule Hastinapura, which after all, would be loyal to the Kauravas and thus would look upon him an usurper
धिगस्तु क्षात्रमाचारं धिगस्तु बलमौरसम्
This was a common trope. Warriors lament their berserker fury and must expiate their sins before returning to peaceful life.
धिगस्त्वमर्षं येनेमामापदं गमिता वयम्
Since we slaughtered our own, what good can possibly come from ruling?
Damn the ways of kings! Damn might makes right!
Damn the turmoil that brought us to this disaster!
It is right and proper that some expiatory ceremonies are conducted and subjugated populations are conciliated so that Princes can return to their peaceful occupation of protecting commerce and promoting civilizing arts and crafts.
Yudhishthira’s fellow victors ultimately convince him to fulfil the duty to rule, regardless of his personal inclination to retire to the forest. In an attempt to address his numerous sharp objections, Bhishma – who lies dying on a bed of arrows – gives a prolix discourse on dharma in various circumstances, including in disasters. Still, for some readers, lingering doubt cannot but remain that Yudhishthira might be right to want to shun a bitter political victory.
It is important that after a bloody conflict, there are proper expiatory ceremonies and an attempt to conciliate the recently subjugated.
The Mahabharata follows Yudhishthira’s reign for some years. It concludes with the demise of the five Pandava brothers and their wife Draupadi. In an unsettling twist, the six wind up visiting hell for a bit, en route to heaven. This detour calls the very core of dharma, righteousness, into question, again reminding us that the Mahabharata is an epic ordered by undercutting its own professed ethics.
No. It is a marvel of consistency. Bad actions have bad consequences- even for divine beings. However, there is also a theological point. The dharma of the agent is theistic and occassionalist. That of the principal need not be so. Yudhishthira is free to chose some better dharma or path of piety. But then, so was the Vyadha who merely butchered animals, not men.
In its philosophy and ethics, the Mahabharata proffers riches to its readers, in particular about the nature of human suffering as an ever-present challenge to any moral order.
Nonsense! The fact that I have a tummy ache because I ate too much cake isn't a challenge to the moral order. Rather it is a reproach to the planet Jupiter which I requested to kindly do the washing up because I can't be arsed. It said nothing and silence implies consent. Yet my washing up hasn't been done.
But how does the work measure up as literature? The work is considered to be kavya (poetry). In classical Sanskrit literary theory, each kavya ought to centre around a rasa, an aesthetic emotion, such as erotic love (shringara) or heroism (vira). But what aesthetic emotion might a tale of politics and pain, such as the Mahabharata, spark in readers?
Shanti rasa. There is a purgation of the emotions by means of pity and terror. But it is the artfully constructed symmetries which are aesthetically satisfying. Karma and Dharma can take care of themselves. We- like the Vyadha- can concentrate on doing well at work and having a happy domestic life. The honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya is available to us even if we aint been edumicated and are as common as muck.
Confounded by this question, one premodern Indian thinker suggested adding a ninth rasa to the line-up that might suit the Mahabharata: shanta, quiescence or turning away from the world. The idea is that, after perusing the vicious politics and violence endemic to the human condition as depicted in the Mahabharata, people would be disenchanted with earthly things and so renounce the world in favour of more spiritual pursuits, as Yudhishthira wished to.
Fuck that. The one guy in MhB ordinary peeps- as opposed to Brahmin seers or Kshatriya warriors- we want to emulate is the Vyadha. How come he is so rich? The answer is he supplies good quality meat and thus has bigger market share and thus enjoys economies of scope and scale. Since he pays his taxes, he doesn't need to bother with either the Pundit or the Politician.
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.
Not to mention the treatment they mete out.
The story of Draupadi, the leading Pandava heroine, is the most well-known. Before the great war, her husband Yudhishthira gambles her away in a dice game,
This is a reference to the Vedic hymn known as the 'gambler's lament'. His own wife has been gambled away and is stripped before his eyes. The hymn ends by praising 'Krishi' or agriculture- which has its risks but which is a 'positive sum' game.
and Draupadi’s new owners, the Kauravas, strip and publicly assault her at their court. The Mahabharata condemns this event, but Draupadi’s notorious sharp tongue also undercuts the empathy many might have had for her.
Actually, she poses a good legal question. If her husband was already a slave then he could not have a free-born woman as his wife. True, the men could rape or kill her but in that case her Royal father would have a claim against their kingdom. Indeed, he could say that any son she has is his own by putrika-putra. Nobody wants some other King to have a legal claim to their own throne.
After she is won at dice, Draupadi argues with her captors. First, she speaks up privately, from her quarters of the palace. Then, after being dragged into the Kauravas’ public audience hall, traditionally a male space, she advocates openly about how the situation is ‘a savage injustice’ (adharmam ugraṃ) that implicates all the elders present. Her self-assertion in a hall of men works. She convinces Dhritarashtra, the Kaurava king, to release her and eventually the rest of her family. But in a world favouring demure women, Draupadi’s willingness to speak about her suffering means that she has always carried a reputation as a shrew and a troublemaker.
Not in Tamil Nadu where there are plenty of Draupati Amma temples. Tamil women very sharp tongued. Mind it kindly. Incidentally, Draupati was born from fire with the aim of gaining revenge for her father.
Draupadi entered the Pandava family when Arjuna won her in a self-choice ceremony. In such ceremonies, the name notwithstanding, the woman is given as the prize to the victor of a contest. However, Draupadi ends up with five husbands, when Arjuna’s mother tells him – without looking over her shoulder to see that she is speaking about a female trophy rather than an inanimate one – to split his prize with his brothers. To make her words true, all five Pandavas marry Draupadi.
She should also have been split with Karna. That was a good enough reason for him not to press his claim to lead the Pandavas.
Nobody ever says that a bride should be like Draupadi, unless the goal is to curse the newlywed
Draupaid is a kula devam for many in my native Tamil Nadu.
Nobody ever asks Draupadi if she wanted polyandry, and the question has rarely interested readers. However, the Mahabharata offers further justifications for this unusual arrangement that blame Draupadi. For instance, in a prior life, Draupadi had asked for a husband with five qualities; unable to find a man who had all of them, Shiva gave her five husbands. She should not have asked for so much.
She suffered no harm by it. If men can have multiple wives, why shouldn't women? The big question was whether she could treat all five equally. If the answer was yes, then she had achieved a great Vedic quality- viz. indifference between different awards of land at time when a new agricultural settlement was made.
Draupadi has never been considered a role model in mainstream Indian cultures. Some later Sanskrit and vernacular works mock her. Even today, a refrain at Hindu weddings is that the bride ought to be like Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana.
To whom Lord Ram is faithful.
Nobody ever says that a bride should be like Draupadi, unless the goal is to curse the newlywed.
You can say she is the incarnation of Parashakti- at least in the South.
In the Mahabharata, kidnapping is also an acceptable way to compel a woman to marry.
No. It is one of the recognized forms of marriage provided this is acceptable to the lady.
For instance, Arjuna falls in love at first sight (or perhaps in lust) with Subhadra but, unsure whether she would accept him, he abducts her.
Krishna, her brother, suggests this. Nowadays, the expenses of marriage have grown so great that we wish some nice boy will abduct our daughters.
This story has been cleaned up in some modern retellings – such as the TV serial from Doordarshan (one of India’s largest public service broadcasters) – which tend to water down misogyny.
The story of Draupati is entertaining. It sticks in our minds. Also, it gives an actress lots of scope.
The world of the Mahabharata is stacked against women.
Did you know that Bhishma refused to undergo gender reassignment surgery? At least Arjuna spent a year dressed up as a woman. But then so did Achilles.
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.
Which suggests that more than one person is as stupid as shit. Draupadi wasn't raped.
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.
No it doesn't. What was sad was that Delhi's women refused to vote for ex-police officer Kiran Bedi who would have made women completely secure within a month of taking over as CM. Instead, women voted for Arvind Kejriwal who had a female MP from his party thrashed in his own house! Incidentally, that woman says she was raped by her daddy.
The Mahabharata represents a world of caste and class, where bloodline determines identity.
No. It depicts a world where various dudes are the partial incarnations of various Gods. Karna's bloodline doesn't determine shit.
Many characters try to break out of the bonds of lineage, but they usually fail in the end.
None do. It is a different matter that a young chap might disguise his caste origin to receive a particular type of instruction.
Among the many tales in this vein, that of Karna stands out as offering harsh reflections on the limits of an individual to reshape his identity.
Nonsense! He is granted a kingdom because of his martial prowess. If he wants to take over the leadership of the Pandavas he is welcome to do so.
Karna’s mother is Kunti, mother of the five Pandava brothers, but Karna is not counted among the five.
He could be. It is up to him.
The story goes that, when Kunti was a girl, a sage gave her a boon that she could call any god at any time to impregnate her. Still unmarried, one night she calls Surya, the Sun god. Surya’s brilliance scares Kunti, and she asks him to leave, but he insists on seeing the matter through. And so, compelled by a male god who said she asked for it, Kunti conceives Karna.
Who is born immediately.
This troubling conception augured Karna’s future troubled life. Kunti fears her father’s wrath if he were to find his daughter with child but without a husband. So, after giving birth, she sends Karna, her first-born son, down the river in a basket. A low-caste barren couple finds the abandoned infant and raises him as their own. The story parallels (unintentionally, most likely) that of Moses,
or Sargon
with the classes of the birth and adopted parents reversed. Like Moses, Karna could never escape his birthright.
Hindu law said that the son born to a wife before marriage could be claimed by the father or, if the father was dead, he could claim to be of that father. Karna escapes his birthright by telling his Mum to fuck off. However he promises her that he will kill only one of her sons so that the total number will remain five.
Karna is born with brilliant armour, inherited from his father, and other marks that he would be a great warrior. He is also drawn to fighting, which leads him, early in the epic, to enter a weapons competition in which the Pandavas and Kauravas also participate. When Karna is asked to announce his lineage, it comes out that he is the son of low-caste parents,
Not so low-caste. His adoptive father is of the charioteer caste. At Kurukshetra, Krishna is Arjuna's charioteer while King Shalya is Karna's.
and Bhima – one of the good guys – ridicules him. Sensing a chance to make a new friend, the Kauravas – the baddies of the story – give Karna a kingdom and so make him, technically, a king and eligible to fight. At this point in the tale, nobody knows that Karna is actually the eldest Pandava and that he is already royal by birth – except for his mother, Kunti, who watches the event silently.
This is dramatic but isn't about 'caste politics'. The plain fact is, a guy who is very good at fighting can become a King or Emperor or whatever. He can pay priests to have him declared a God or a Mermaid or anything else he fancies.
As the eldest Pandava by blood, Karna should have been king.
He could chose to reveal his identity and take over as the Pandava leader. Maybe his pal Duryodhana would not have wanted to go to war in that case.
In fact, Krishna goes to Karna to make this argument on the eve of the great war, as a last-ditch effort to avoid catastrophe, and the conversation is one of the most interesting in the Mahabharata. The core questions are timeless: what determines a person’s identity?
The choice that dude makes.
Can an individual reject or change who they really are?
Yes.
Who gets to say who each of us really is?
The guy in question.
Can we escape our destinies?
Yes because our destiny is to escape it.
Karna refuses Krishna’s request to take his place as the eldest Pandava and ascend the throne. Instead, choosing bread over blood, Karna fights and dies with the Kauravas.
He is a warrior. Dying in battle is the best of deaths. Who cares if you win or lose? Indeed, the problem with the Kauravas is that their commanders weren't wholeheartedly committed to victory at any cost.
But, according to Vyasa and the Mahabharata’s many unknown authors, Karna, no matter his actions, was never a Kaurava. At the end of the epic, in a scene twisted in more ways than one, Karna winds up in hell with the other Pandavas, briefly, while the Kauravas bask in heaven.
There is no twist. It was already apparent that something mysterious had happened at Kurukshetra. Someone should have remembered this was a sacred site. The two armies needed to find somewhere else to fight. But this 'vishodhana' or bloody lustration was foreordained. Lots of warriors got to go to Heaven. This was cool. Maybe there were simply too many warriors. Kurukshetra was a salutary 'shakeout'. It heralded the age of commerce and the decline of chivalry.
The epic’s stance that we can’t transcend our births can appear very dark to modern eyes (or at least to some modern eyes) in stories that feature low-caste characters. Take the tale of Ekalavya.
A prince of the Nishadhs- just like Nala.
Ekalavya is born a tribal (nishada), outside of the four-fold Hindu class system, but his heart is set on life as a warrior (kshatriya) and learning to fight from Drona, who taught both the Pandavas and Kauravas. Drona denies Ekalavya instruction because of casteism,
Drona was a retainer of the Bharatas. He wasn't supposed to be instructing warriors from a different tribe.
and so Ekalavya honours a clay statue of Drona every day while learning on his own. After a while, Ekalavya’s skills exceed those of Arjuna. And so, Arjuna cajoles Drona to demand that Ekalavya slice off his own thumb, thus ensuring that Ekalavya could never shoot an arrow again.
Which is why the guy wasn't slaughtered or slaughtering at Kurukshetra. He attained immortality by his Guru dakshina. After all, he had already attained his goal of becoming the greatest archer of his age. Some say he gained the boon of death at the hands of Lord Krishna and was reincarnated as Draupati's brother thus getting to slay Drona. As the saying goes- karma is a bitch.
Drona does so, under the guise of asking for gurudakshina (a teacher’s fee) since Ekalavya had built a statue of Drona’s likeness. Internalising the caste prejudice that condemned him, Ekalavya cut off his thumb and was never a threat to Arjuna again.
Why the fuck would a Prince of a different tribe 'internalize' the prejudice of some other bunch of guys? The plain fact is, Ekalavya gained merit by offering the daksina demanded of him by a preceptor.
The message is that, one way or another, varnashramadharma (moral behaviour according to one’s social class and life stage) prevails.
Fuck off! All the Pandavas and Kauravas are the biological descendants of Ved Vyas whose Mum was a smelly fisherwoman. Also, he was as ugly as shit.
A 20th-century poem by the Dalit writer Shashikant Hingonekar puts it like this:
If you had kept your thumb
history would have happened
somewhat differently.
This is also true if everybody had shoved their thumbs up their asses so as to avoid giving it to some Brahmin dude.
But … you gave your thumb
and history also
became theirs.
Ekalavya, since that day they have not even given you a glance.
Forgive me, Ekalavya, I won’t be fooled now by their sweet words.
My thumb will never be broken.
I had requested Shashikantji to cut off his dick and offer it to me. Sadly, he was refusing to do the needful even though I mentioned I was Wendy O' Doniger. Personally, I blame Mallikarjun Kharge for this outcome.
The Mahabharata claims to be about the totality of human life in a verse included in both its first and final books:
धर्मे चार्थे च कामे च मोक्षे च भरतर्षभ
यदिहास्ति तदन्यत्र यन्नेहास्ति न तत्क्वचित्
What is found here regarding the aims of human life –
righteousness, wealth, pleasure, and release –
may be found elsewhere, O Bull of the Bharatas.
But what is not here, is found nowhere.
because, by properly preserving symmetries, anything can be added to it except there would be no point and, in any case, we are too stupid or lazy to bother.
Indeed, the Mahabharata’s promise to explore (among other things) immorality, politics, sexism and identity problems as general features of human life rings true in our times.
It really isn't that sort of shitty virtue-signaling book. What is remarkable about it is captured by game theory (in each episode there is 'game balancing') and Noether's theorem. This is because symmetries are carefully conserved.
Over the past several years, politics in India and the United States have taken dark turns as both countries turn their backs on the values of pluralism
The US had genocide and slavery and a horrible Civil War. It had no 'pluralism'. India under the Brits had pluralism which is why it could feed & defend itself. Chasing away the Brits by insisting on Independence meant partition and much less pluralism.
and embrace ethno- and religious nationalisms.
Fuck off! The US has gotten a lot less racist during my lifetime. India, sadly, got rid of Whites though we were happy enough to import Sonia.
Violence and death are heavily used tools by governments in both countries.
They were more heavily used in the past.
Sexism has never gone away.
POTUS is refusing to chop off his own dick and offer it as dakshina to Wendy O'Doniger.
It is a critical part of the current surge of Right-wing ideologies and their embrace of male privilege. Moreover, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are reasserting retrograde gender roles in many places across the globe. The pandemic’s toll on women’s physical safety, mental health and careers is great and growing.
This own lady's mental health was destroyed long ago- probably because she chopped off her clitoris to offer it as Dakshina to Wendy O'Doniger.
Identity, too, plagues us.
Why can't we all be just one homogenous mass of quivering protoplasm?
The caste system is still very much alive, in both India and the diaspora.
No it isn't. Namboodri householders don't scruple to eat food cooked by an Iyer. Caste is dead save for purposes of arranged marriage. But even there educational status and occupation are given higher importance.
We also struggle with types of oppression birthed in modernity, such as racism.
Racism was thriving when Neanderthals walked the earth.
The Mahabharata makes no false promises of solving such problems,
whereas the Iliad and the Odyssey do- right?
but it does offer us tools for thinking them through, now and in the future,
It does offer tools which we can put into the language of Noether's theorem, duality, and Game theory. The uniqueness of the MhB is that, in the Nalopakhayanam, it shows some ancient type of discrete math being used to simulate decision problems in statistical game theory.
even if – or perhaps especially if – that future looks dark. 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.
Stupid narrators will tell of it in a stupid fashion. There was a time when few people who knew Sanskrit also knew Noether's theorem or Von Neumann's game theory. But, surely, that must have ceased to be the case by the Seventies. If Robert Aumann can find Shapley values in Talmud, why can't any smart dude (i.e. not me) give an up to date account of the 'open problems' addressed by MhB? Why are rancid nutters like Audrey still shitting upon that relatively high IQ epic?
I get that Indians are lazy but lots of non-Indians read the MhB. Surely, they can't all be wholly ignorant of basic math? Must Ind's epics turn into a Grievance Studies ghetto? I suppose so. Academia has become wholly adversely selective.
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