|
On the Mahabharata
Notes on the Mahabharata
of Krishna Dwypaiana Vyasa.
prepared with a view to disengage the original epic of Krishna of the island from the enlargements, accretions and additions made by Vyshampaian, Ugrosravas & innumerable other writers. by Aurobindo Ghose
Proposita. An epic of the Bharatas was written by Krishna of the Island called Vyasa, in 24,000 couplets or something more, less at any rate than 27,000, on the subject of the great civil war of the Bharatas and the establishment of the Dhurmarajya or universal sovereignty in that house. This epic can be disengaged almost in its entirety from the present poem of nearly 100,000 slokas. Page – 277 It was hinted in a recent article of the Indian Review, an unusually able and searching paper on the date of the Mahabharata war that a society is about to be formed for discovering the genuine and original portions of our great epic. This is glad tidings to all admirers of Sanscrit literature and to all lovers of their country. For the solution of the Mahabharata problem is essential to many things, to any history worth having of Aryan civilisation & literature, to a proper appreciation of Vyasa’s poetical genius and, far more important than either, to a definite understanding of the great ethical gospel which Srikrishna came down on earth to teach as a guide to mankind in the dark Kali yuga then approaching. But I fear that if the inquiry is to be pursued on the lines the writer of this article seemed to hint, if the Society is to rake out 8000 lines from the War Purvas & dub the result the Mahabharata of Vyasa, then the last state of the problem will be worse than its first. It is only by a patient scrutiny & weighing of the whole poem, disinterestedly, candidly & without preconceived notions, a consideration Canto by Canto, paragraph by paragraph, couplet by couplet that we can arrive at anything solid or permanent. But this implies a vast and heartbreaking labour. Certainly, labour however vast ought not to have any terrors for a scholar, still less for a Hindu scholar; yet before one engages in it, one requires to be assured that the game is worth the candle. For that assurance there are three necessary requisites, the possession of certain, sound and always applicable tests to detect later from earlier work, a reasonable chance that such tests if applied will restore the real epic roughly if not exactly in its original form and an assurance that the epic when recovered will repay from literary, historical or other points of view, the labour that has been bestowed on it. I believe that these three requisites are present in this case and shall attempt to adduce a few reasons for my judgment. I shall try to show that besides other internal evidence on which I do not propose just now to enter, there are certain traits of poetical Page – 279 style, personality and thought which belong to the original work and are possessed by no other writer. I shall also try to show that these traits may be used and by whom they may be used as a safe guide through this huge morass of verse. In passing I shall have occasion to make clear certain claims the epic thus disengaged will possess to the highest literary, historical and practical value. It is certainly not creditable to European scholarship that after so many decades of Sanscrit research, the problem of the Mahabharata which should really be the pivot for all the rest, has remained practically untouched. For it is not exaggeration to say that European scholarship has shed no light whatever on the Mahabharata beyond the bare fact that it is the work of more than one hand. All else it has advanced, and fortunately it has advanced little, has been rash, arbitrary or prejudiced; theories, theories, always theories without any honestly industrious consideration of the problem. The earliest method adopted was to argue from European analogies, a method pregnant of error & delusion. If we consider the hypothesis of a rude ballad-epic doctored by “those Brahmins” -anyone who is curious on the matter may study with both profit & amusement Frazer’s History of Indian Literature -we shall perceive how this method has been worked. A fancy was started in Germany that the Iliad of Homer is really a pastiche or clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the time of Pisistratus. This truly barbarous imagination with its rude ignorance of the psychological bases of all great poetry has now fallen into some discredit; it has been replaced by a more plausible attempt to discover a nucleus in the poem, an Achilleid, out of which the larger Iliad has grown. Very possibly the whole discussion will finally end in the restoration of a single Homer with a single poem, subjected indeed to some inevitable interpolation and corruption, but mainly the work of one mind, a theory still held by more than one considerable scholar. In the meanwhile, however, haste has been made to apply the analogy to the Mahabharata; lynx-eyed theorists have discovered in the poem -apparently without taking the trouble to study it -an early and rude ballad epic worked up, doctored and defaced by those wicked Brahmins, who are made responsible for all the Page – 280 literary and other enormities which have been discovered by the bushelful, and not by European lynxes alone -in our literature and civilisation. Now whether the theory is true or not, and one sees nothing in its favour, it has at present no value at all; for it is a pure theory without any justifying facts. It is not difficult to build these intellectual card-houses; anyone may raise them by the dozen who can find no better manner of wasting valuable time. A similar method of “arguing from Homer” is probably at the bottom of Professor Weber’s assertion that the War Purvas contain the original epic. An observant eye at once perceives that the War Purvas are far more hopelessly tangled than any that precede them except the first. It is here & here only that the keenest eye becomes confused & the most confident explorer begins to lose heart & self-reliance. But the Iliad is all battles and it therefore follows in the European mind that the original Mahabharata must have been all battles. Another method is that of ingenious, if forced argument from stray slokas of the poem or equally stray & obscure remarks in Buddhist compilations. The curious theory of some scholars that the Pandavas were a later invention and that the original war was between the Kurus and Panchalas only and Professor Weber’s singularly positive inference from a sloka which does not at first sight bear the meaning he puts on it, that the original epic contained only 8800 lines, are ingenuities of this type. They are based on the Teutonic art of building a whole mammoth out of a single and often problematical bone, and remind one strongly of Mr.. Pickwick and the historic inscription which was so rudely, if in a Pickwickian sense, challenged by the refractory [Mr.. Blotton.] All these theorisings are idle enough; they are made of too airy a stuff to last. `Only a serious scrutiny of the Mahabharata made with a deep sense of critical responsibility and according to the methods of patient scientific inference, can justify one in advancing any considerable theory on this wonderful poetic structure. Yet to extricate the original epic from the mass of accretions is not, I believe, so difficult a task as it may at first appear. One is struck in perusing the Mahabharata by the presence of a mass of poetry which bears the style and impress of a single, Page – 281 strong and original, even unusual mind, differing in his manner of expression, tone of thought & stamp of personality not only from every other Sanscrit poet we know but from every other great poet known to literature. When we look more closely into the distribution of this peculiar style of writing, we come to perceive certain very suggestive & helpful facts. We realise that this impress is only found in those parts of the poem which are necessary to the due conduct of the story, seldom to be detected in the more miraculous, Puranistic or trivial episodes, but usually broken up by passages and sometimes shot through with lines of a discernibly different inspiration. Equally noteworthy is it that nowhere does this poet admit any trait, incident or speech which deviates from the strict propriety of dramatic characterisation & psychological probability. Finally Krishna’s divinity is recognized, but more often hinted at than aggressively stated. The tendency is to keep it in the background as a fact to which, while himself crediting it, the writer does not hope for universal consent, still less is able to speak of it as of a general tenet & matter of dogmatic belief; he prefers to show Krishna rather in his human character, acting always by wise, discerning and inspired methods, but still not transgressing the limit of human possibility. All this leads one to the conclusion that in the body of poetry I have described, we have the real Bharata, an epic which tells plainly and straightforwardly of the events which led to the great war and the empire of the Bharata princes. Certainly if Prof. Weber’s venturesome assertion as to the length of the original Mahabharata be correct, this conclusion falls to the ground; for the mass of this poetry amounts to considerably over 20,000 slokas. Professor Weber’s inference, however, is worth some discussion; for the length of the original epic is a very important element in the problem. If we accept it, we must say farewell to all hopes of unravelling the tangle. His assertion is founded on a single & obscure verse in the huge prolegomena to the poem which take up the greater part of the Adi Purva, no very strong basis for so far-reaching an assumption. The sloka itself says no more than this that much of the Mahabharata was written in so difficult a style that Vyasa himself could remember only 8800 of Page – 282 the slokas, Suka an equal amount and Sanjaya perhaps as much, perhaps something less. There is certainly here no assertion such as Prof. Weber would have us find in it that the Mahabharata at any time amounted to no more than 8800 slokas. Even if we assume what the text does not say that Vyasa, Suka & Sanjaya knew the same 8800 slokas, we do not get to that conclusion. The point simply is that the style of the Mahabharat was too difficult for a single man to keep in memory more than a certain portion of it. This does not carry us very far. If however we are to assume that there is more in this verse than meets the eye, that it is a cryptic way of stating the length of the original poem; and I do not deny that this is possible, perhaps even probable — we should note the repetition वेत्ति of अहं वेद्मि शुको वेत्ति सञ्जयो वेत्ति वा न वा.—. Following the genius of the Sanscrit language we are led to suppose the repetition was intended to recall अष्टौ श्लोकसहश्राणि etc. with each name; otherwise the repetition has no raison d’être; it is otiose & inept. But if we understand it thus, the conclusion is irresistible that each knew a different 8800, or the writer would have no object in wishing us to repeat the number three times in our mind. The length of the epic as derived from this single sloka should then be 26,400 slokas or something less, for the writer hesitates about the exact number to be attributed to Sanjaya. Another passage further on in the prolegomena agrees remarkably with this conclusion and is in itself much more explicit. It is there stated plainly enough that Vyasa first wrote the Mahabharata in 24,000 slokas and afterwards enlarged it to 100,000 for the world of men as well as a still more unconscionable number of verses for the Gandhurva and other worlds. In spite of the embroidery of fancy, of a type familiar enough to all who are acquainted with the Puranic method of recording facts, the meaning of this is unmistakeable. The original Mahabharata consisted of 24,000 slokas, but in its final form it runs to 100,000. The figures are probably loose & slovenly, for at any rate the final form of the Mahabharata is considerably under 100,000 slokas. It is possible therefore that the original epic was something over 24,000 and under 26,400 slokas, in which case the two passages would agree well Page – 283 enough. But it would be unsafe to found any dogmatic assertion on isolated couplets; at the most we can say that we are justified in taking the estimate as a probable and workable hypothesis and if it is found to be corroborated by other facts, we may venture to suggest its correctness as a moral certainty. But it is not from European scholars that we must expect a solution of the Mahabharata problem. They have no qualifications for the task except a power of indefatigable research and collocation; and in dealing with the Mahabharata even this power seems to have deserted them. It is from Hindu scholarship renovated & instructed by contact with European that the attempt must come. Indian scholars have shown a power of detachment and disinterestedness and a willingness to give up cherished notions under pressure of evidence, which are not common in Europe. They are not, as a rule, prone to the Teutonic sin of forming a theory in accordance with their prejudices and then finding facts or manufacturing inferences to support it. When therefore they form a theory on their own account, it has usually some clear justification and sometimes an overwhelming array of facts and solid arguments behind it. German scholarship possesses infinite capacity of labour marred by an irresponsible & fantastic imagination, the French a sane acuteness of inference marred by insufficient command of facts, while in soundness of judgment Indian scholarship has both; it should stand first, for it must naturally move with a far greater familiarity and grasp in the sphere of Sanscrit studies than any foreign mind however able & industrious. But above all it must clearly have one advantage, an intimate feeling of the language, a sensitiveness to shades of style & expression and an instinctive feeling of what is or is not possible, which the European cannot hope to possess unless he sacrifices his sense of racial superiority and lives in some great centre like Benares as a Pundit among Pundits. I admit that even among Indians this advantage must vary with the amount of education and natural fineness of taste; but where other things are equal, they must possess it in an immeasurably greater degree than an European of similar information & critical power. For to the European Sanscrit words are Page – 284 no more than dead counters which he can play with and throw as he likes into places the most unnatural or combinations the most monstrous; to the Hindu they are living things the very soul of whose temperament he understands & whose possibilities he can judge to a hair. That with these advantages Indian scholars have not been able to form themselves into a great & independent school of learning, is due to two causes, the miserable scantiness of the mastery in Sanscrit provided by our Universities, crippling to all but born scholars, and our lack of a sturdy independence which makes us overready to defer to European authority. These however are difficulties easily surmountable. In solving the Mahabharat problem this intimate feeling for the language is of primary importance; for style & poetical personality must be not indeed the only but the ultimate test of the genuineness of any given passage in the poem. If we rely upon any other internal evidence, we shall find ourselves irresistibly tempted to form a theory and square facts to it. The late Rai Bahadur Bunkim Chundra Chatterji, a genius of whom modern India has not produced the parallel, was a man of ripe scholarship, literary powers of the very first order and a strong critical sagacity. In his Life of Krishna (Krishnacharitra), he deals incidentally with the Mahabharata problem; he perceived clearly enough that there were different recognizable styles in the poem, and he divided it into three layers, the original epic by a very great poet, a redaction of the original epic by a poet not quite so great and a mass of additions by very inferior hands. But being concerned with the Mahabharata only so far as it covered the Life of Krishna, he did not follow up this line of scrutiny and relied rather on internal evidence of a quite different kind. He saw that in certain parts of the poem Krishna’s godhead is either not presupposed at all or only slightly affirmed, while in others it is the main objective of the writer; certain parts again give us a plain, unvarnished & straightforward biography & history, others are a mass of wonders and legends, often irrelevant extravagances; in some parts also the conception of the chief characters is radically departed from and defaced. He therefore took these differences as his standard and accepted Page – 285 only those parts as genuine which gave a plain & consistent account of Krishna the man and of others in their relation to him. Though his conclusions are to a great extent justifiable, his a priori method led him to exaggerate them, to enforce them too rigidly without the proper flexibility & scrupulous hesitation and to resort occasionally to special pleading. His book is illuminating and full of insight, and the chief contentions will, I believe, stand permanently; but some parts of his argument are exaggerated & misleading and others, which are in the main correct, are yet insufficiently supported by reasons. It is the failure to refer everything to the ultimate test of style that is responsible for these imperfections. Undoubtedly inconsistencies of detail & treatment are of immense importance. If we find grave inconsistencies of character, if a man is represented in one place as stainlessly just, unselfish & truthful and in another as a base & selfish liar or a brave man suddenly becomes guilty of incomprehensible cowardice, we are justified in supposing two hands at work; otherwise we must either adduce very strong poetic and psychological justification for the lapse or else suppose that the poet was incompetent to create or portray consistent and living characters. But if we find that one set of passages belongs to the distinct and unmistakeable style of a poet who has shown himself capable of portraying great epic types, we shall be logically debarred from this saving clause. And if the other set of passages show not only a separate style, but quite another spirit and the stamp of another personality, our assurance will be made doubly sure. Further if there are serious inconsistencies of fact, if for instance Krishna says in one place that he can only do his best as a man & can use no divine power in human affairs and in another foolishly uses his divine power where it is quite uncalled for, or if a considerable hero is killed three or four times over, yet always pops up again with really commendable vitality but without warning or explanation until some considerate person gives him his coup de grace, or if totally incompatible statements are made about the same person or the same event, we may find in either or all of these inconsistencies sufficient ground to assume diversity of authorship. Still even here we must ultimately refer to the Page – 286 style as corroborative evidence; and when the inconsistencies are grave enough to raise suspicion, but not so totally incompatible as to be conclusive, difference of style will at once turn the suspicion into certainty, while similarity may induce us to suspend judgment. And where there is no inconsistency of fact or conception and yet the difference in expression & treatment is marked, the question of style & personality becomes all-important. Now in the Mahabharata we are struck at first by the presence of two glaringly distinct & incompatible styles. There is a mass of writing in which the verse & language is unusually bare, simple and great, full of firm and knotted thinking & a high & heroic personality, the imagination strong and pure, never florid or richly-coloured, the ideas austere, original & noble. There is another body of work sometimes massed together but far oftener interspersed in the other, which has exactly opposite qualities; it is Ramayanistic, rushing in movement, full & even overabundant in diction, flowing but not strict in thought, the imagination bold & vast, but often garish & highly-coloured, the ideas ingenious & poetical, sometimes of astonishing subtlety, but at others common & trailing, the personality much more relaxed, much less heroic, noble & severe. When we look closer we find that the Ramayanistic part may possibly be separated into two parts, one of which has less inspiration and is more deeply imbued with the letter of the Ramayan, but less with its spirit. The first portion again has a certain element often in close contact with it which differs from it in a weaker inspiration, in being a body without the informing spirit of high poetry. It attempts to follow its manner & spirit but fails and reads therefore like imitation of the great poet. We have to ask ourselves whether this is the work of an imitator or of the original poet in his uninspired moments. Are there besides the mass of inferior or obviously interpolated work which can be easily swept aside, three distinct & recognisable styles or four or only two? In the ultimate decision of this question inconsistencies of detail & treatment will be of great consequence. But in the meantime I find nothing to prevent me from considering the work of the first poet, undoubtedly the greatest of the four, if four there are, as the original epic. Page – 287 It may, indeed, be objected that style is no safe test, for it is one which depends upon the personal preferences & ability of the critic. In an English literary periodical it was recently observed that a certain Oxford professor who had studied Stevenson like a classic, attempted to apportion to Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne their respective work in the Wrecker, but his apportionment turned out [to] be hopelessly erroneous. To this the obvious answer is that the Wrecker is a prose work and not poetry. There was no prose style ever written that a skilful hand could not reproduce as accurately as a practised forger reproduces a signature. But poetry, at any rate original poetry of the first class is a different matter. The personality and style of a true poet are unmistakeable to a competent mind, for though imitation, echo & parody are certainly possible, it would be as easy to reproduce the personal note in the style as for the painter to put into his portrait the living soul of its original. The successful discrimination between original and copy depends then upon the competence of the critic, his fineness of literary feeling, his sensitiveness to style. On such points the dictum of a foreign critic is seldom of any value; one would not ask a mere labourer to pronounce on the soundness of a great engineering work, but still less would one ask a mathematician unacquainted with mechanics. To a Hindu mind well equipped for the task there ought to be no insuperable difficulty in disengaging the style of a marked poetic personality from a mass of totally different work. The verdict of great artistic critics on the genuineness of a professed Old Master may not be infallible, but if formed on a patient study of the technique & spirit of the work, it has at least considerable chances of being correct. But the technique & spirit of poetry are far less easy to catch by an imitator than those of great painting, the charm [of] words being more elusive & unanalysable than that of line & colour. In unravelling the Mahabharata especially the peculiar & inimitable nature of the style of Vyasa immensely lightens the difficulties of criticism. Had his been poetry of which the predominant grace was mannerism, it would have been imitable with some closeness; or even had it been a rich & salient style Page – 288 like Shakespeare’s, Kalidasa’s or Valmekie’s, certain externals of it might be reproduced by a skilled hand and the task of discernment rendered highly delicate and perilous. Yet even in such styles to the finest minds the presence or absence of an unanalysable personality within the manner of expression would be always perceptible. The second layer of the Mahabharata is distinctly Ramayanistic in style, yet it would be a gross criticism that could confuse it with Valmekie’s own work; the difference as is always the case in imitations of great poetry, is as palpable as the similarity.1 Some familiar examples may be taken from English literature. Crude as is the composition & treatment of the three parts [of] King Henry VI, its style unformed & everywhere full of echoes, yet when we get such lines as
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just And he but naked though locked up in steel Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted,
we cannot but feel that we are listening to the same poetic voice as in Richard III
shadows tonight Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers Armed in proof and led by shallow Richmond.
or in Julius Caesar
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.
or in the much later & richer vein of Antony & Cleopatra
I am dying, Egypt, dying; only I here importune death awhile, until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips.
1 Here an incomplete sentence is written between the lines in the manuscript: This unanalysable quantity is as sure Page – 289 I have purposely selected passages of perfect simplicity and straightforwardness, because they appear to be the most imitable part of Shakespeare’s work & are really the least imitable. Always one hears the same voice, the same personal note of style sounding through these very various passages, and one feels that there is in all the intimate & unmistakeable personality of Shakespeare. We turn next & take two passages from Marlowe, a poet whose influence counted for much in the making of Shakespeare, one from Faustus
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
and another from Edward II
I am that cedar, shake me not too much; And you the eagles; soar ye ne’er so high, I have the jesses that will pull you down; And Aeque tandem shall that canker cry Unto the proudest peer in Brittany.
The choice of words, the texture of style has a certain similarity, the run of the sentences differs little if at all; but what fine literary sense does not feel that here is another poetical atmosphere and the ring of a different voice? And yet to put a precise name on the difference would not be easy. The personal difference becomes still more marked if we take a passage from Milton in which the nameable merits are precisely the same, a simplicity in strength of diction, thought & the run of the verse "What though the field be lost".2 And when we pass farther down in the stream of literature & read "Thy thunder, conscious of the new command"3 we feel that the poet has nourished his genius on the greatness of Milton till his own soft & luxurious style rises into epic vigour; yet we feel too that the lines are only Miltonic, they are not Milton.
2 Paradise Lost 1.105. This sentence and the next were written in the margins of the manuscript. Sri Aurobindo apparently intended to cite longer passages. -Ed. 3 Keats, Hyperion 1.60. -Ed. Page – 290 Now there are certain great poetical styles which are of a kind apart; they are so extraordinarily bare and restrained that the untutored mind often wonders what difficulty there can be in writing poetry like that; yet when the attempt is made, it is found that so far as manner goes it is easier to write somewhat like Shakespeare or Homer or Valmekie than to write like these. Just because the style is so bare, has no seizable mannerism, no striking & imitable peculiarities, the failure of the imitation appears complete & unsoftened; for in such poets there is but one thing to be caught, the unanalysable note, the personal greatness which like everything that comes straight from God it is impossible to locate or limit and precisely the one that most eludes the grasp. This poetry it is always possible to distinguish with some approach to certainty from imitative or spurious work. Very fortunately the style of Vyasa is exactly such a manner of poetry. Granted therefore adhikara in the critic, that is to say a natural gift of fine literary sensitiveness & the careful cultivation of that gift until it has become as sure a lactometer as the palate of the swan which rejects the water mingled with milk & takes the milk alone, we have in the peculiar characteristics of this poetry a test of unquestionable soundness & efficacy. But there is another objection of yet more weight & requiring as full an answer. This method of argument from style seems after all as a priori & Teutonic as any other; for there is no logical reason why the mass of writing in this peculiar style should be judged to be the original epic and not any of the three others or even part of that inferior work which was brushed aside so contemptuously. The original Mahabharata need not have been a great poem at all; it was more probably an early, rude & uncouth performance. Certain considerations however may lead us to consider our choice less arbitrary than it seems. That the War Purvas contain much of the original epic may be conceded to Professor Weber; the war is the consummation of the story & without a war there could be no Mahabharata. But the war of the Mahabharata was not a petty contest between obscure barons or a brief episode in a much larger struggle or a romantic & chivalrous emprise for the rescue of a ravished or errant Page – 291 beauty. It was a great political catastrophe implying the clash of a hundred nations and far-reaching political consequences; the Hindus have always considered it as the turning-point in the history of their civilisation and the beginning of a new age, and it was long used as a historical standpoint and a date to reckon from in chronology. Such an event must have had the most considerable political causes and been caused by the collision of the most powerful personalities and the most important interests. If we find no record of or allusion to these in the poem, we shall be compelled to suppose that the poet living long after the event, regarded the war as a legend or romance which would form excellent matter for an epic and treated it accordingly. But if we find a simple and unvarnished though not necessarily connected & consecutive account of the political conditions which preceded the war and of the men who made it and their motives, we may safely say that this also is an essential part of the epic. The Iliad deals only with an episode of the legendary siege of Troy, it covers an action of [ ] days in a conflict lasting ten years, & its subject is not the Trojan War but the Wrath of Achilles. Homer was under no obligation therefore to deal with the political causes that led to hostilities, even supposing he knew them. The Mahabharata stands on an entirely different footing. The war there is related from beginning to end consecutively & without break, yet it is nowhere regarded as of importance sufficient to itself but depends for its interest on causes which led up to it & the characters & clashing interests it involved. The preceding events are therefore of essential importance to the epic. Without the war, no Mahabharata, is true of this epic; but without the causes of the war, no war, is equally true. And it must be remembered that the Hindu narrative poets had no artistic predilections like that of the Greeks for beginning a story in the middle. On the contrary they always preferred to begin at the beginning. We therefore naturally expect to find the preceding political conditions and the immediate causes of the war related in the earlier part of the epic and this is precisely what we do find. Ancient India as we know, was a sort of continent, made up of many great & civilised nations who were united very much Page – 292 like the nations of modern Europe by an essential similarity of religion and culture rising above & beyond their marked racial peculiarities; like the nations of Europe also they were continually going to war with each other; & yet had relations of occasional struggle, of action & reaction, with the other peoples of Asia whom they regarded as barbarous races outside the pale of the Aryan civilisation. Like the continent of Europe, the ancient continent of India was subject to two opposing forces, one centripetal which was continually causing attempts at universal empire, another centrifugal which was continually impelling the empires once formed to break up again into their constituent parts: but both these forces were much stronger in their action than they have usually been in Europe. The Aryan nations may be divided into three distinct groups, the Eastern of whom the Coshalas, Magadhas, Chedies, Videhas & Haihayas were the chief; the Central among whom the Kurus, Panchalas & Bhojas were the most considerable; and the Western & Southern of whom there were many, small, & rude but yet warlike & famous peoples; among these there seem to have been none that ever became of the first importance. Five distinct times had these great congeries of nations been welded into Empire, twice by the Ixvaacous under Mandhata son of Yuvanuswa and King Marutta, afterwards by the Haihaya Arjouna Cartoverya, again by the Ixvaacou Bhogiratha and finally by the Kuru Bharata. That the first Kuru empire was the latest is evident not only from the Kurus being the strongest nation of their time but from the significant fact that the Coshalas by this time had faded into utter & irretrievable insignificance. The rule of the Haihayas had resulted in one of the great catastrophes of early Hindu civilization; belonging to the eastern section of the Continent which was always apt to break away from the strict letter of Aryanism, they had brought themselves by their pride & violence into collision with the Brahmins with the result of a civil war in which their Empire was broken for ever by Parshurama, son of Jamadagni, and the chivalry of India massacred and for the time broken. The fall of the Haihayas left the Ixvaacous & the Bharata or Ilian dynasty of the Kurus the two chief powers Page – 293 of the continent. Then seems to have followed the golden age of the Ixvaacous under the beneficent empire of Bhogiratha & his descendants as far down at least as Rama. Afterwards the Coshalans, having reached their highest point, must have fallen into that state of senile decay, which once it overtakes a nation, is fatal & irremediable. They were followed by the empire of the Bharatas. By the times of Santanou, Vichitravirya and Pandou this empire had long been dissolved by the centrifugal force of Aryan politics into its constituent parts, yet the Kurus were yet among the first of the nations and the Bharata Kings of the Kurus were still looked up to as the head of civilisation. But by the time of Dhritarashtra the centripetal force had again asserted itself & the idea of another great empire loomed before the imaginations of all men; a number of nations had risen to the greatest military prestige & political force, the Panchalas under Drupada & his sons, the Bhojas under Bhishmuc & his brother Acrity who is described as equalling Parshurama in military skill & courage, the Chedies under the hero & great captain Shishupala, the Magadhas, built into a strong nation by Brihodruth; even distant Bengal under the Poundrian Vasudave and distant Sindhu under [Vriddhakshatra] and his son Jayadrath began to mean something in the reckoning of forces. The Yadava nations counted as a great military force in the balance of politics owing to their abundant heroism and genius, but seem to have lacked sufficient cohesion and unity to nurse independent hopes. Strong, however, as these nations were none seemed able to dispute the prize of the coming empire with the Kurus, until under King Jarasundha the Barhodruth Magadha for a moment disturbed the political balance. The history of the first great Magadhan hope of empire and its extinction -not to be revived again until the final downfall of the Kurus -is told very briefly in the Sabhapurva of the Mahabharata. The removal of Jarasundha restored the original state of politics and it was no longer doubtful that to the Kurus alone could fall the future empire. But here a contest arose between the elder & younger branches of the Bharata house. The question being then narrowed to a personal issue, it was inevitable that it should become largely a history of Page – 294 personal strife & discord; other & larger issues were involved in the dispute between the Kaurava cousins; but whatever interests, incompatibilities of temperament & differences of opinion may divide brothers, they do not engage in fratricidal conflict until they are driven to it by a long record of collision & jealousy, ever deepening personal hatreds & the worst personal injuries. We see therefore that not only the early discords, the slaying of Jarasundha & the Rajasuya sacrifice are necessary to the epic but the great gambling & the mishandling of Draupadie. It cannot, however, have been personal questions alone that affected the choice of the different nations between Duryodhana and Yudhisthere. Personal relations like the matrimonial connections of Dhritarashtra’s family with the Sindhus and Gandharas and of the Pandavas with the Matsyas, Panchalas & Yadavas doubtless counted for much, but there must have been something more; personal enmities [counted] for something as in the feud cherished by the Trigartas against Arjouna. The Madras disregarded matrimonial ties when they sided with Duryodhan; the Magadhas & Chedies put aside the memory of personal wrongs when they espoused the cause of Yudhisthere. I believe the explanation we must gather from the hints of the Mahabharata is this, that the nations were divided into three classes, those who desired autonomy, those who desired to break the power of the Kurus and assert their own supremacy and those who imbued with old imperialistic notions desired an united India. The first followed Duryodhana because the empire of Duryodhana could not be more than the empire of a day while that of Yudhisthere had every possibility of permanence; even Queen Gandhari, Duryodhan’s own mother, was able to hit this weak point in her son’s ambition. The Rajasuya Sacrifice had also undoubtedly identified Yudhisthere in men’s minds with the imperialistic impulse of the times. We are given some important hints in the Udyogapurva. When Vidura remonstrates with Krishna for coming to Hastinapura, he tells him it was highly imprudent for him to venture there knowing as he did that the city was full of kings all burning with enmity against him for having deprived them once of their greatness, driven by the fear of him to take refuge Page – 295 with Duryodhan and all eager to war against the Pandavas.
This can have no intelligible reference except to the Rajasuya sacrifice. Although it was the armies of Yudhisthere that had traversed India then on their mission of conquest, Krishna was generally recognised as the great moving & master mind whose hands of execution the Pandavas were and without whom they would have been nothing. His personality dominated men’s imaginations for adoration or for hatred; for that many abhorred him as an astute & unscrupulous revolutionist in morals, politics & religion, we very clearly perceive. We have not only the fiery invectives of Shishupala but the reproach of Bhurisravas, the Vahlika, a man of high reputation & universally respected.
4 These lines (Udyoga Parva 92.23 26) are found at the top of the page in the manuscript. The next two Sanskrit quotations (Drona Parva 143.11 15 and Udyoga Parva 93.16) were written at the tops of the following two pages. Their place of insertion in the text was not indicated. -Ed. Page – 296 वृष्ण्यन्धकाः कथं पार्थ प्रमाणं भवता कृताः ||
Krishna himself is perfectly conscious of this; he tells Vidura that he must make efforts towards peace both to deliver his soul & to justify himself in the eyes of men.
न मां ब्रूयुरधर्मिष्ठा मूढा ह्यसुह्रदस्तथा | शक्तो नावारयत्कृष्णः संरब्धन्कुरुपान्डवान् ||
The belief that Krishna’s policy & statesmanship was the really effective force behind Yudhisthere’s greatness, pervades the epic. But who were these nations that resented so strongly the attempt of Yudhisthere & Krishna to impose an empire on them? It is a significant fact that the Southern and Western peoples went almost solid for Duryodhana in this quarrel -Madra, the Deccan, Avanti, Sindhu Sauvira, Gandhara, in one long line from southern Mysore to northern Candahar; the Aryan colonies in the yet half civilised regions of the Lower valley of the Ganges espoused the same cause. The Eastern nations, heirs of the Ixvaacou imperial idea, went equally solid for Yudhisthere. The Central peoples, repositories of the great Kuru Panchala tradition as well as the Yadavas, who were really a Central nation though they had trekked to the West, were divided. Now this distribution is exactly what we should have expected. The nations which are most averse to enter into an imperial system & cherish most their separate existence are those which are outside the centre of civilisation, hardy, warlike, only partially refined; and their aversion is still more emphatic when they have never or only for a short time been part of an empire. This is the real secret of the invincible resistance which England has opposed to all Continental schemes of empire from Philip II to Napoleon; it is the secret of her fear of Russia; it is the reason of the singular fact that only now after many centuries of great national existence has she become imbued with the imperial idea on her own account. The savage attachment to their independence of small nations like the Dutch, the Swiss, the Boers is traceable to the same cause; the fierce resistance opposed by the Page – 297 greater part of Spain to Napoleon was that of a nation which once imperial & central has fallen out of the main flood of civilisation & is therefore becoming provincial & attached to its own isolation. That the nations of the East & South and the Aryan colonies in Bengal should oppose the imperialist policy of Krishna & throw in their lot with Duryodhana is therefore no more than we should expect. On the other hand nations at the very heart of civilisation, who have formed at one time or another dominant parts of an empire fall easily into imperial schemes, but personal rivalry, the desire of each to be the centre of empire, divides them and brings them into conflict not any difference of political temperament. For nations have very tenacious memories and are always attempting to renew the great ages of their past. In the Eastern peoples the imperialistic idea was very strong and having failed to assert a new empire of their own under Jarasundha, they seem to have turned with one consent to Yudhisthere as the man who could alone realise their ideal. One of Shishupal’s remarks in the Rajasuya sacrifice is very significant
We remember that it was an Eastern poet who had sung perhaps not many centuries before in mighty stanzas the idealisation of Imperial Government & Aryan unity and enshrined in his imperishable verse the glories of the third Coshalan Empire. The establishment of Aryan unity was in the eyes of the Eastern nations a holy work and the desire of establishing universal lordship with that view a sufficient ground for one of the most self-willed & violent princes of his time [to] put aside his personal feelings & predilections in order to farther it. Shishupal had been one of the most considerable & ardent supporters of Jarasundha in his attempt to establish a Magadhan empire; that attempt having failed he like Jarasundha’s own son turned in Page – 298 spite of his enmity with Krishna to Yudhisthere as the coming Emperor. Even the great quarrel and the summary slaughter of Shishupal by Krishna could not divert his nation from its adhesion to the new Empire. The divisions of the Central nations follow an equally intelligible line. Throughout the Mahabharata we perceive that the great weakness of the Kurus lay in the division of their counsels. There was a peace party among them led by Bhishma, Drona, Kripa & Vidura, the wise & experienced statesmen who desired justice and reconciliation with Yudhisthere and a war-party of the hot-blooded younger men led by Karna, Duhsasana & Duryodhana himself who were confident of their power of meeting the world in arms; King Dhritarashtra found himself hard put to it to flatter the opinions of the elders while secretly following his own predilections & the ambitions of the younger men. These are facts patent on the face of the epic. But it has not been sufficiently considered what a remarkable fact it is that men of such lofty character as Bhishma and Drona should have acted against their sense of right and justice and fought in what they had repeatedly condemned as an unjust cause. If Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Aswatthaman & Vikarna had plainly intimated to Duryodhan that they would support Yudhisthere with their arms or even that they would stand aloof from the war, it is clear there would have been no war at all. And I cannot but think that had it been a question purely between Kuru & Kuru, this is the course they would have adopted. But Bhishma & Drona must have perceived that behind the Pandavas were the Panchalas & Matsyas. They must have suspected that these nations were supporting Yudhisthere not out of purely disinterested motives but with certain definite political objects. Neither Drupada nor Virata would have been accepted by India as emperors in their own right, any more than say Sindhia or Holkar would have been in the last century. But by putting forward the just claims of a prince of the imperial Bharata line, the descendant of Bharata Ajamede connected with themselves by marriage, they could avoid this difficulty and at the same time break the power of the Kurus and replace them as the dominant partners in the new Empire. The Page – 299 presence of personal interests is evident in their hot eagerness for war and their unwillingness to take any sincere steps towards a just and peaceful solution of the difficulty. Their action stands in striking contrast with the moderate, statesmanlike yet firm policy of Krishna. It can hardly be supposed that Bhishma and the Kuru statesmen of his party were autonomists; they must have been as eager for a Kuru empire as Duryodhana himself. At any rate they eagerly welcomed the statesmanlike reasonings of Krishna when he proposed to King Dhritarashtra to unite the force of Pandava & Kaurava & build up a Kuru empire which should irresistibly dominate the world. “On yourself & myself” says Krishna “rests today the choice of peace or war & the destiny of the world; do your part in pacifying your sons, I will see to the Pandavas.”
Page – 300 तैरेवोपार्जितां भूमिं भोक्ष्यसे च परन्तप | यदि संपत्स्यसे पुत्रैः सहामात्यैर्नराधिप ||
But the empire of Yudhisthere enforced by the arms of Mutsya & Panchala or even by the armed threats meant to Bhishma & Kripa something very different from a Kuru Empire; it must have seemed to them to imply rather the overthrow & humiliation of the Kurus and a Panchala domination under a Bharata prince. This it concerned their patriotism and their sense of Kshatriya pride & duty to resist so long as there was blood in their veins. The inability to associate justice with their cause was a grief to them, but it could not alter their plain duty. Such as I take it is the clear political story of the Mahabharata. I have very scantily indicated some of its larger aspects only; but if my interpretation be correct, it is evident that we shall have in the disengaged Mahabharata not only a mighty epic, but a historical document of unique value. What I wish, however, to emphasize at present is that the portions of the Mahabharata which bear the high, severe and heroic style and personality I have described, are also the portions which unfold consecutively, powerfully and without any incredible embroidery of legend this story of clashing political & personal passions & ambitions. It is therefore not a mere assumption, but a perfectly reasonable inference that these portions form the original epic. If we assume that the Ramayanistic portions of the epic or the rougher & more uncouth work precede these in antiquity, we assume that the legend was written first and history added to it afterwards; this is a sequence so contrary to all experience and to all accepted canons of criticism that it would need the most indisputable proof before it could command any credence. Where there is a plain history mixed up with legendary matter written by palpably different hands, criticism judges from all precedents that the latter must be later work embodying the additions human fancy always and most in countries where a scrupulous historic sense has not been developed weaves round a great event which has powerfully occupied the national imagination. Moreover in judging Page – 301 the relative genuineness of different styles in the same work, we are bound to see the hand of the original writer in the essential parts of the story as we have it. It makes no difference to this question whether there was an original ballad epic or not, or whether it was used in the composition of the Mahabharata or not. We have a certain poem in a certain form and in resolving it to its original parts we must take it as we have it and not allow our judgment to be disturbed by visions of a poem which we have not. If the alleged ballad epic was included bodily or in part in the Mahabharata, our analysis will find it there without fail. If it was merely used as material just as Shakespeare used Plutarch or Hall & Holinshed, it is no longer germane to the matter. Now the most essential part of a story is the point from which the catastrophe started; in the Mahabharata this is the mishandling of Draupadie & the exile of the Pandavas; but this again leads us back to the Rajasuya sacrifice & the imperial Hall of the Pandavas from which the destroying envy of Duryodhan took its rise. In the Sabhapurva therefore we must seek omissis omittendis for the hand of the original poet; & the whole of the Sabhapurva with certain unimportant omissions is in that great & severe style which is the stamp of the personality of Vyasa. This once established we argue farther from the identity of style, treatment & personality between the Viratapurva & the Sabhapurva, certain passages being omitted, that this book is also the work of Vyasa. From these two large & mainly homogeneous bodies of poetical work we shall be able to form a sufficient picture of the great original poet, the drift of his thought and the methods of his building. This we shall then confirm, correct & supplement by a study of the Udyogapurva which up to the marching of the armies presents, though with more but still separable alloy breaking in, the same clear, continuous & discernible vein of pure gold running through it. Thus armed we may even rely on resolving roughly the tangle of the Adi & Vana Purvas and it is only when the war begins, that we shall have to admit doubt, faltering and guesswork; even here however we shall not be without some light even in its thickest darkness. That the poem can be disentangled, I hold then to be beyond Page – 302 dispute, but it can only be done by a long and voluminous critical analysis, and even this must be supported by a detailed edition of the whole Mahabharat in which each canto & chapter shall be discussed on its own merits. At present therefore I propose to pass over the method after once indicating its general nature and present certain definite results only. I propose solely to draw a picture, in outline merely, of the sublime poetical personality which an analysis of the work reveals as the original poet, the Krishna Dwaipayana who wrote the Bharata of the 24,000 [slokas] and not the other Vyasa, if Vyasa he was, who enlarged it to something approaching its present dimensions. And let me express at once my deep admiration of the poetical powers & vast philosophic mind of this second writer; no mean poet was he who gave us the poem we know, in many respects the greatest and most interesting & formative work in the world’s literature. If I seem to speak mainly in dispraise of him, it is because I am concerned here with his defects and not with his qualities; for the subject I wish to treat is Krishna of the Island, his most important characteristics and their artistic contrast with those of our other greater, but less perfect epic poet, Valmekie. I have said that no foreigner can for a moment be trusted to apply the literary test to a poem in our language; the extraordinary blunders of the most eminent German critics in dealing with Elizabethan plays have settled that question once for all. Educated Indians on the other hand have their own deficiencies in dealing with Vyasa; for they have [been] nourished partly on the curious and elaborate art of Kalidasa and his gorgeous pomps of vision and colour, partly on the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry. Like Englishmen they are taught to profess a sort of official admiration for Shakespeare & Milton but with them as with the majority of Englishmen the poets they really steep themselves in are Shelley, Tennyson & Byron and to a less degree Keats & perhaps Spenser. Now the manner of these poets, lax, voluptuous, artificial, all outward glitter and colour, but inwardly poor of spirit and wanting in genuine mastery and the true poetical excellence is a bad school for the appreciation of such severe & perfect work as Vyasa’s. Page – 303 For Vyasa is the most masculine of writers.5 When Coleridge spoke of the femineity of genius he had in mind certain features of temperament which whether justly or not are usually thought to count for more in the feminine mould than in the masculine, the love of ornament, emotionalism, mobile impressionability, the tyranny of imagination over the reason, excessive sensitiveness to form and outward beauty; a tendency to be dominated imaginatively by violence & the show of strength, to be prodigal of oneself, not to husband the powers, to be for showing them off, to fail in self-restraint is also feminine. All these are natural properties of the quick artistic temperament prone by throwing all itself outward to lose balance and therefore seldom perfectly sane and strong in all its parts. So much did these elements form the basis of Coleridge’s own temperament that he could not perhaps imagine a genius in which they were wanting. Yet Goethe, Dante & Sophocles show that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in femineity as Vyasa, none dominates so much by intellect and personality, yet satisfies so little the romantic imagination. Indeed no poet at all near the first rank has the same granite mind in which impressions are received with difficulty but once received are ineffaceable. In his austere self-restraint and economy of power he is indifferent to ornament for its own sake, to the pleasures of poetry as distinguished from its ardours, to little graces & self-indulgences of style; the substance counts for everything & the form has to limit itself to its proper work of expressing with precision & power the substance. Even his most romantic pieces have a virgin coldness & loftiness in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa’s numbers and
5 The passage below, uncancelled in the manuscript, was abandoned by Sri Aurobindo in favour of the corresponding passage in the printed text: Vyasa is the most masculine of writers. He has that is to say the masculine qualities, restraint, dignity, indifference to ornament, strength without ostentation, energy economised, a strong, pure and simple taste, a high & great spirit, more than any poet I know. The usual artifices of poetry, simile, metaphor, allusion, ornamental description, the decorative element of the art, he resorts to with unequalled infrequency and to a superficial or an untrained taste he appears to be even unimaginative and uninspiring. Page – 304 the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron & Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest of classics. It is indeed, I believe, the general impression of many “educated” young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives’ stories without a spark of poetry or imagination. But to those who have bathed even a little in the fountain-heads of poetry & can bear the keenness & purity of those mountain sources, the naked & unadorned poetry of Vyasa [is a perpetual refreshment.]6 To read him is to bathe in a chill fountain in the heats of summer; they find that one has [available an unfailing source] of tonic & [refreshment] to the soul; one [comes into relation] with a [mind] whose [bare strong contact] has the [power] of infusing strength, courage and endurance.7 There are certain things which have this power inborn & are accordingly valued by those who have felt deeply its properties, such are the air of the mountains or the struggle to a capable mind with hardship and difficulty; the Vedanta philosophy, the ideal of the निष्काम धर्म, the poetry of Vyasa, three closely related entities, are intellectual forces that exercise a similar effect & attraction. The style of this powerful writer is perhaps the one example in literature of strength in its purity; a strength undefaced by violence & excess yet not weakened by flagging and negligence. It is even less propped or helped out by artifices and aids than any other poetical style. Vyasa takes little trouble with similes, metaphors, rhetorical turns, the usual paraphernalia of poetry; nor when he uses them, is he at pains to select such as shall be new & curiously beautiful; they are there to define more clearly what he has in mind, and he makes just enough of them for that purpose, never striving to convert them into a separate grace or
6 Cancelled in manuscript. Several other words, also cancelled, were written above this phrase. The last complete version may have been “is a companion that never palls.” -Ed. 7 The words between brackets are cancelled in the manuscript. There are a number of uncancelled words between the lines whose connection with the text is not evident. -Ed. Page – 305 a decorative element. They have force & beauty in their context but cannot be turned into elegant excerpts; in themselves they are in fact little or nothing. When Bhema is spoken of as breathing hard like a weakling borne down by a load too heavy for him, there is nothing in the simile itself. It derives its force from its aptness to the heavy burden of unaccomplished revenge which the fierce spirit of the strong man was condemned to bear. We may say the same of his epithets, that great preoccupation of romantic artists; they are such as are most natural, crisp & firm, best suited to the plain idea & only unusual when the business in hand requires an unusual thought, but never recherché or existing for their own beauty. Thus when he is describing the greatness of Krishna and hinting his claims to be considered as identical with the Godhead, he gives him the one epithet अप्रमेयः immeasurable, which is strong and unusual enough to rise to the thought, but not to be a piece of literary decoration or a violence of expression. In brief, he religiously avoids overstress; his audacities of phrase are few, and they have a grace of restraint in their boldness. There is indeed a rushing vast Valmekeian style which intervenes often in the Mahabharata; but it is evidently the work of a different hand; for it belongs to a less powerful intellect, duller poetical insight and coarser taste, which has yet caught something of the surge and cry of Valmekie’s Oceanic poetry. Vyasa in fact stands at the opposite pole from Valmekie. The poet of the Ramayan has a flexible & universal genius embracing the Titanic and the divine, the human and the gigantic at once or with an inspired ease of transition. But Vyasa is unmixed Olympian; he lives in a world of pure verse and diction, enjoying his own heaven of golden clearness. We have seen what are the main negative qualities of the style; pureness, strength, grandeur of intellect & personality are its positive virtues. It is the expression of a pregnant and forceful mind, in which the idea is sufficient to itself, conscious of its own intrinsic greatness; when this mind runs in the groove of narrative or emotion, the style wears an air of high and pellucid ease in the midst of which its strenuous compactness and brevity moves & lives as a saving and strengthening spirit; but when it begins to think rapidly Page – 306 & profoundly as often happens in the great speeches, it is apt to leave the hearer behind; sufficient to itself, thinking quickly, briefly & greatly it does not care to pause on its own ideas or explain them at length, but speaks as it thinks, in a condensed often elliptical style, preferring to indicate rather than expatiate, often passing over the steps by which it should arrive at the idea and hastening to the idea itself; often also it is subtle & multiplies many shades & ramifications of thought in a short compass. From this arises that frequent knottiness & excessive compression of logical sequence, that appearance of elliptical & sometimes obscure expression, which so struck the ancient critics in Vyasa and which they expressed in the legend that when dictating the Mahabharata to Ganesha, the poet in order not to be outstripped by his divine scribe -for it was Ganesha’s stipulation that not for one moment should he be left without matter to write -threw in frequently knotty and close-knit passages which forced the lightning-swift hand to pause & labour slowly over its work. To a strenuous mind these passages, from the exercise they give to the intellect, are an added charm just as a mountain-climber takes an especial delight in steep ascents which let him feel his ability. Of one thing, however, we may be confident in reading Vyasa, that the expression will always be just to the thought; he never palters with or labours to dress up the reality within him. For the rest we must evidently trace this peculiarity to the compact, steep & sometimes elliptical, but always strenuous diction of the Upanishads in which the mind of the poet was trained & his personality tempered. At the same time like the Upanishads themselves or like the enigmatic Aeschylus, he can be perfectly clear, precise & full whenever he chooses; and he more often chooses than not. His expression of thought is usually strong and abrupt; his expression of fact and of emotion strong and precise. His verse has similar peculiarities. It is a golden and equable stream that sometimes whirls itself into eddies or dashes upon rocks; but it always runs in harmony with the thought. Vyasa has not Valmekie’s movement as of the sea, that wide and unbroken surge with its infinite variety of waves, which enables him not only to find in the facile anustubh Page – 307 metre a sufficient vehicle for his vast & ambitious work but to maintain it through [ ] couplets without its palling or losing its capacity of adjustment to ever varying moods & turns of narrative. But in his narrower limits & on the level of his lower flight Vyasa has great subtlety & finesse. Especially admirable is his use, in speeches, of broken effects such as would in less skilful hands have become veritable discords; and again in narrative of the simplest & barest metrical movements, as in the opening Surga of the Sabhapurva to create certain calculated effects. But it would be idle to pretend for him any equality as a master of verse with Valmekie. When he has to rise from his levels to express powerful emotions, grandiose eloquence or swift & sweeping narrative, he cannot always effect it in the anustubh metre; he falls back more often than not on the rolling magnificence of the [tristubh] which best sets & ennobles his strong-winged austerity. Be its limits what one will, this is certain that there was never a style & verse of such bare, direct & resistless strength as this of Vyasa’s or one that went so straight to the heart of all that is heroic in a man. Listen to the cry of insulted Draupadie to her husband
उतिष्ठोतिष्ठ किं शेषे भीमसेन यथा मृतः | नामृतस्य हि पापियान्भार्यामालभ्य जीवति ||
“Arise, arise, O Bhemasena, wherefore sleepest thou like one that is dead? For nought but dead is he whose wife a sinful hand has touched and lives.”, or the reproach of Krishna to Arjoun for his weak pity which opens the second surga of the Bhagavadgita. Or again hear Krishna’s description of Bhema’s rage and solitary brooding over revenge and his taunting accusations of cowardice: “At other times, O Bhemasena, thou praisest war, thou art all for crushing Dhritarashtra’s heartless sons who take delight in death; thou sleepest not at night, O conquering soldier, but wakest lying face downwards, and ever thou utterest dread speech of storm and wrath, breathing fire in the torment of thine own rage; and thy mind is without rest like a smoking fire; yea, Page – 308 thou liest all apart breathing heavily like a weakling distressed by his load; so that some who know not even think thee mad. For as an elephant tramples on uprooted trees and breaks them to fragments, so thou stormest along with labouring breath hurting earth with thy feet. Thou takest no delight in all the people but cursest them in thy heart, O Bhema, son of Pandou, nor in aught else hast thou any pleasure night or day; but thou sittest in secret like one weeping and sometimes of a sudden laughest aloud, yea, thou sittest for long with thy head between thy knees & thy eyes closed; and then again thou starest before thee frowning and clenching thy teeth; thy every action is one of wrath. Surely as our father Sun is seen in the East when luminously he ascendeth, & surely as wide with rays he wheeleth down to his release in the West, so sure is this oath I utter and never shall be broken. With this club I will meet & slay the haughty Duryodhan’, thus touching thy club thou swearest among thy brothers. And today thou, thou!, thinkest of peace, O warrior! Ah yes, I know the hearts of those that clamour for war, alter very strangely when war showeth its face, since fear findeth out even thee, O Bhema! Ah yes, son of Pritha, thou seest adverse omens both when thou sleepest & when thou wakest, therefore thou desirest peace. Ah yes, thou feelest no more the man in thyself, but an eunuch & thy heart sinketh with alarm, therefore art thou thus overcome. Thy heart quakes, thy mind fainteth, thou art seized with a trembling in thy thighs, therefore thou desirest peace. Verily, O son of Pritha, wavering & inconstant is the heart of a mortal man, like the pods of the silk cotton driven by the swiftness of every wind. This shameful thought of thine, monstrous as a human voice in a dumb beast, makes the hearts of Pandou’s sons to sink like (shipwrecked) men that have no raft. Look on thine own deeds, O seed of Bharat, remember thy lofty birth! arise, put off thy weakness; be firm, O heart of a hero; unworthy of thee is this languor; what he cannot win by the mightiness of him, that a Kshatriya will not touch.”
This passage I have quoted at some length because it is eminently characteristic of Vyasa’s poetical method. Another poet would Page – 309 have felt himself justified by the nature of the speech in using some wild and whirling words, in seeking vividness by exaggeration, at the very least in raising his voice a little. Contrast with this the perfect temperance of this passage, the confident & unemotional reliance on the weight of what is said, not on the manner of saying it. The vividness of the portraiture arises from the quiet accuracy of vision and the care in the choice of simple but effective words; not from any seeking after the salient and graphic such as gives Kalidasa his wonderful power of description; and the bitterness of the taunts arises from the quiet & searching irony with which [each] shaft is tipped and not from any force used in driving them home. Yet every line goes straight as an arrow to its mark; every word is the utterance of a strong man speaking to a strong man and gives iron to the mind. Strength is one constant term of the Vyasic style; temperance, justness of taste is the other. Strength and a fine austerity are then the two tests which give us safe guidance through the morass of the Mahabharata; where these two exist together, we may reasonably presume some touch of Vyasa; where they do not exist or do not conjoin, we feel at once the redactor or the interpolator. I have spoken of another poet whose more turbid & vehement style breaks continually into the pure gold of Vyasa’s work. The whole temperament of this redacting poet, for he is something more than an interpolator, has its roots in Valmekie; but like most poets of a secondary and fallible genius, he exaggerates while adopting the more audacious and therefore the more perilous tendencies of his master. The love of the wonderful touched with the grotesque, the taste for the amorphous, a marked element in Valmekie’s complex temperament, is with his follower something like a malady. He grows impatient with the apparent tameness of Vyasa’s inexorable self-restraint, and restlessly throws in here couplets, there whole paragraphs of a more flamboyant vigour. Occasionally this is done with real ability & success, but as a rule they are true purple patches, daubs of paint on the stainless dignity of marble. For his rage for the wonderful is not always accompanied by the prodigious sweep of imagination which in Page – 310 Valmekie successfully grasps and compels the most reluctant materials. The result is that puerilities and gross breaches of taste fall easily & hardily from his pen. Not one of these could we possibly imagine as consistent with the severe, self-possessed intellect of Vyasa. Fineness, justness, discrimination & propriety of taste are the very soul of the man. Nowhere is his restrained & quiet art more visible than when he handles the miraculous. But since the Mahabharata is so honeycombed with the work of inept wonder-mongers, we are driven for an undisturbed appreciation of it to works which are no parts of the original Mahabharata and are yet by the same hand, the Nala & the Savitrie. These poems have all the peculiar qualities which we have decided to be very Vyasa, the style, the diction, the personality are identical and refer us back to him as clearly as the sunlight refers us back to the sun; and yet they have something which the Mahabharata has not. Here we have the very morning of Vyasa’s genius, when he was young and ardent; perhaps still under the immediate influence of Valmekie (one of the most pathetic touches in the Nala is borrowed straight out of the Ramayana); at any rate able without ceasing to be finely restrained to give some rein to his fancy. The Nala therefore has the delicate & unusual romantic grace of a young & severe classic who has permitted himself to go-a-maying in the fields of romance. There is a remote charm of restraint in the midst of abandon, of vigilance in the play of fancy which is passing sweet & strange. The Savitrie is a maturer & nobler work, perfect & restrained in detail, but it has still some glow of the same youth and grace over it. This then is the rare charm of these two poems that we find there the soul of the pale & marble Rishi, the austere philosopher, the great statesman, the strong and stern poet of war & empire, when it was yet in its radiant morning, far from the turmoil of courts & cities & the roar of the battlefield and had not yet scaled the mountaintops of thoughts. Young, a Brahmachari & a student, Vyasa dwelt with the green silences of earth, felt the fascination & loneliness of the forests of which his earlier poetry is full, walked by many a clear & lucid river white with Page – 311 the thronging waterfowl, perhaps Payoshni, that ocean-seeking stream, or heard the thunder of multitudinous crickets in some lone tremendous forest; with Valmekie’s mighty stanzas in his mind, saw giant-haunted glooms, dells where faeries gathered, brakes where some Python from the underworld came out to bask or listened to the voices of Kinnaries on the mountaintops. In such surroundings wonders might seem natural and deities as in Arcadia might peep from under every tree. Nala’s messengers to Damayanti are a troop of golden-winged swans that speak with a human voice; he is intercepted on his way by gods who make him their envoy to a mortal maiden; he receives from them gifts more than human; fire and water come to him at his bidding and flowers bloom in his hands; in his downfall the dice become birds which fly away with his remaining garment; when he wishes to cut in half the robe of Damayanti, a sword comes ready to his hand in the desolate cabin; he meets the Serpent-King in the ring of fire and is turned by him into the deformed charioteer, Vahuka; the tiger in the forest turns away from Damayanti without injuring her and the lustful hunter falls consumed by the power of offended chastity. The destruction of the caravan by wild elephants, the mighty driving of Nala, the counting of the leaves of the [ ], the cleaving of the Vibhitaka tree; every incident almost is full of that sense of beauty & wonder which were awakened in Vyasa by his early surroundings. We ask whether this beautiful fairy-tale is the work of that stern and high poet with whom the actualities of life were everything and the flights of fancy counted for so little. Yet if we look carefully, we shall see in the Nala abundant proof of the severe touch of Vyasa, just as in his share of the Mahabharata fleeting touches of wonder & strangeness, gone as soon as glimpsed, evidence a love of the ultranatural, severely bitted and reined in. Especially do we see the poet of the Mahabharata in the artistic vigilance which limits each supernatural incident to a few light strokes, to the exact place and no other where it is wanted & the exact amount and no more that is necessary. (It is this sparing economy of touch almost unequalled in its beauty of just rejection, which makes the poem an epic instead of a fairy Page – 312 tale in verse.) There is for instance the incident of the swans; we all know to what prolixities of pathos & bathos vernacular poets like the Gujarati Premanund have enlarged this feature of the story. But Vyasa introduced it to give a certain touch of beauty & strangeness and that touch once imparted the swans disappear from the scene; for his fine taste felt that to prolong the incident by one touch more would have been to lower the poem and run the risk of raising a smile. Similarly in the Savitrie what a tremendous figure a romantic poet would have made of Death, what a passionate struggle between the human being and the master of tears and partings! But Vyasa would have none of this; he had one object, to paint the power of a woman’s silent love and he rejected everything which went beyond this or which would have been merely decorative. We cannot regret his choice. There have been plenty of poets who could have given us imaginative and passionate pictures of Love struggling with Death, but there has been only one who could give us a Savitrie. In another respect also the Nala helps us materially to appreciate Vyasa’s genius. His dealings with nature are a strong test of a poet’s quality; but in the Mahabharata proper, of all epics the most pitilessly denuded of unnecessary ornament, natural description is rare. We must therefore again turn for aid to the poems which preceded his hard and lofty maturity. Vyasa’s natural description as we find it there, corresponds to the nervous, masculine and hard-strung make of his intellect. His treatment is always puissant and direct without any single pervasive atmosphere except in sunlit landscapes, but always effectual, realizing the scene strongly or boldly by a few simple but sufficient words. There are some poets who are the children of Nature, whose imagination is made of her dews, whose blood thrills to her with the perfect impulse of spiritual kinship; Wordsworth is of these and Valmekie. Their voices in speaking of her unconsciously become rich and liquid and their words are touched with a subtle significance of thought or emotion. There are others who hold her with a strong sensuous grasp by virtue of a ripe, sometimes an overripe delight in beauty; such are Shakespeare, Keats, Kalidasa. Others again approach her Page – 313 with a fine or clear intellectual sense of her charm as do some of the old classical poets. Hardly in the rank of poets are those who like Dryden & Pope use her, if at all, only to provide them with a smooth or well-turned literary expression. Vyasa belongs to none of these, and yet often touches the first three at particular points without definitely coinciding with any. He takes the kingdom of Nature by violence. Approaching her from outside his masculine genius forces its way to her secret, insists and will take no denial. Accordingly he is impressed at first contact by the harmony in the midst of variety of her external features, absorbs these into a strong and retentive imagination, meditates on them and so reads his way to the closer impression, the inner sense behind that which is external, the personal temperament of a landscape. In his record of what he has seen, this impression more often than not comes first as that which abides & prevails; sometimes it is all he cares to record; but his tendency towards perfect faithfulness to the vision within leads him, when the scene is still fresh to his eye, to record the data through which the impression was reached. We have all experienced the way in which our observation of a scene, conscious or unconscious, forms itself out of various separate & often uncoordinated impressions, which if we write a description at the time or soon after and are faithful to ourselves, find their way into the picture even at the expense of symmetry; but if we allow a long time to elapse before we recall the scene, there returns to us only a single self-consistent impression which without accurately rendering it, retains its essence and its atmosphere. Something of this sort occurs in our poet; for Vyasa is always faithful to himself. When he records the data of his impression, he does it with force and clearness, frequently with a luminous atmosphere around the object, especially with a delight in the naked beauty of the single clear word which at once communicates itself to the hearer. First come the strong and magical epithets or the brief and puissant touches by which the soul of the landscape is made visible and palpable, then the enumeration sometimes only stately, at others bathed in a clear loveliness. The fine opening of the twelfth surga of the Nala is a signal example of this method. At the Page – 314 threshold we have the great & sombre line वनं प्रतिभयं शून्यं झिल्लिकागणनादितं |
A void tremendous forest thundering With crickets
striking the keynote of gloom & loneliness, then the cold stately enumeration of the forest’s animal & vegetable peoples, then again the strong and revealing epithet in his “echoing woodlands sound-pervaded”; then follows “river & lake and pool and many beasts and many birds” and once more the touch of wonder & weirdness
She many alarming shapes of fiend and snake and giant. . . . . . . . . . . beheld; making magical the bare following lines and especially the nearest, पल्वलानि तडागानि गिरिकूटानि सर्वशः ”and pools & tarns & summits everywhere”, with its poetical delight in the bare beauty of words. It is instructive to compare with this passage the wonderful silhouette of night in Valmekie’s Book of the Child
“Motionless are all trees and shrouded the beasts & birds and the quarters filled, O joy of Raghu, with the glooms of night; slowly the sky parts with evening and grows full of eyes; dense with stars & constellations it glitters with points of light; and now yonder with cold beams rising up the moon thrusts away the shadows from the world gladdening the hearts of living Page – 315 things on earth with its luminousness. All creatures of the night are walking to and fro and spirit bands and troops of giants and the carrion-feeding jackals begin to roam.”
Here every detail is carefully selected to produce a certain effect, the charm and weirdness of falling night in the forest; not a word is wasted, every epithet, every verb, every image is sought out and chosen so as to aid this effect, while the vowellation is subtly managed and assonance and the composition of sounds skilfully & unobtrusively woven so as to create a delicate, wary & listening movement as of one walking in the forests by moonlight and afraid that the leaves may speak under his footing or his breath grow loud enough to be heard by himself or by beings whose presence he does not see but fears. Of such delicately imaginative art as this Vyasa was not capable; he could not sufficiently turn his strength into sweetness. Neither had he that rare, salient and effective architecture of style which makes Kalidasa’s “night on the verge of dawn with her faint gleaming moon and a few just-decipherable stars”
तनुप्रकाशेन विचेयतारका प्रभातक्ल्पा शशिनेव शर्वरी |
Vyasa’s art, as I have said, is singularly disinterested; he does not write with a view to sublimity or with a view to beauty, but because he has certain ideas to impart, certain events to describe, certain characters to portray. He has an image of these in his mind and his business is to find an expression for it which will be scrupulously just to his conception. This is by no means so facile a task as the uninitiated might imagine; it is in fact considerably more difficult than to bathe the style in colour and grace and literary elegance, for it demands vigilant concentration, firm intellectual truthfulness and unsparing rejection, the three virtues most difficult to the gadding, inventive and self-indulgent spirit of man. The art of Vyasa is therefore a great, strenuous and difficult art; but it unfitted him, as a similar spirit, unfitted the Greeks, to voice fully the outward beauty of Nature. For to delight infinitely in Nature one must be strongly Page – 316 possessed with the sense of colour and romantic beauty, and allow the fancy equal rights with the intellect. For all his occasional strokes of fine Nature description he was not therefore quite at home with her. Conscious of his weakness Vyasa as he emancipated himself from Valmekie’s influence, ceased to attempt a kind for which his genius was not the best fitted. He is far more in his element in the expression of the feelings, of the joy and sorrow that makes this life of men; his description of emotion far excels his description of things. When he says of Damayanti
विललाप सुदुःस्विता | भर्त्रुशोकपरीताङ्गी शिलातलमथाश्रिता ||
In grief she wailed, Erect upon a cliff, her body aching With sorrow for her husband,
the clear figure of the abandoned woman lamenting on the cliff seizes indeed the imagination, but has a lesser inspiration than the single puissant & convincing epithet , her whole body affected with grief for her husband. Damayanti’s longer laments are also of the finest sweetness & strength; there is a rushing flow of stately and sorrowful verse, the wailing of a regal grief; then as some more exquisite pain, some more piercing gust of passion traverses the heart of the mourner, golden felicities of sorrow leap out on the imagination like lightning in their swift clear greatness.
हा वीर ननु नामाहमिष्टा किल तवानघ | अस्यामटव्यां घोरायां किं मां न प्रतिभाषसे ||
Still more strong, simple and perfect is the grief of Damayanti when she wakes to find herself alone in that desolate cabin. The restraint of phrase is perfect, the verse is clear, equable and unadorned, yet hardly has Valmekie himself written a truer utterance of emotion than this Page – 317
“Ah my lord! Ah my king! Ah my husband! why hast thou forsaken me? Alas, I am slain, I am undone; I am afraid in the lonely forest. Surely, O King, thou wert good & truthful; how then having sworn to me so, hast thou abandoned me in my sleep & fled? Long enough hast thou carried this jest of thine, O lion of men; I am frightened, O unconquerable; show thyself, my lord & prince. I see thee! I see thee! Thou art seen, lord of the Nishadhas, covering thyself there with the bushes; why dost thou not speak to me? Cruel king! that thou dost not come to me thus terrified here & wailing and comfort me! It is not for myself I grieve nor for aught else; it is for thee I weep thinking what will become of thee left all alone. How wilt thou fare under some tree at evening hungry & thirsty & weary not beholding me, O my King?”
The whole of this passage with its first pang of terror & the exquisite anticlimax “I am slain, I am undone, I am afraid in the desert wood” passing quickly into sorrowful reproach, the despairing & pathetic attempt to delude herself by thinking the whole a practical jest, and the final outburst of that deep maternal love which is a part of every true woman’s passion, is Page – 318 great in its truth & simplicity. Steep and unadorned is Vyasa’s style, but at times it has far more power to move & to reach the heart than more elaborate & ambitious poetry. As Vyasa progressed in years, his personality developed towards intellectualism and his manner of expressing emotion became sensibly modified. In the Savitrie he first reveals his power of imparting to the reader a sense of poignant but silent feeling, feeling in the air, unexpressed or rather expressed in action, sometimes even in very silence; this power is a notable element in some of the great scenes of the Mahabharata; the silence of the Pandavas during the mishandling of Draupadie, the mighty silence of Krishna while the assembly of kings rage and roar around him and Shishupal again & again hurls forth on him his fury & contempt and the hearts of all men are troubled, the stern self-restraint of his brothers when Yudhisthere is smitten by Virata; are instances of the power I mean. In the Mahabharata proper we find few expressions of pure feeling, none at least which have the triumphant power of Damayanti’s laments in the Nala. Vyasa had by this time taken his bent; his heart and imagination had become filled with the pomp of thought and genius and the greatness of all things mighty and bold and regal; when therefore his characters feel powerful emotion, they are impelled to express it in the dialect of thought. We see the heart in their utterances but it is not the heart in its nakedness, it is not the heart of the common man; or rather it is the universal heart of man but robed in the intellectual purple. The note of Sanscrit poetry is always aristocratic; it has no answer to the democratic feeling or to the modern sentimental cult of the average man, but deals with exalted, large and aspiring natures, whose pride it is that they do not act like common men (प्राकृतो जनः ). They are the great spirits, the , in whose footsteps the world follows. Whatever sentimental objections may be urged against this high and arrogating spirit, it cannot be doubted that a literature pervaded with the soul of hero worship and noblesse oblige and full of great examples is eminently fitted to elevate and strengthen a nation and prepare it for a great part in history. It was as Sanscrit literature ceased to be universally read and understood, Page – 319 as it became more & more confined to the Brahmins that the spirit of our nation began to decline. And it is because the echoes of that literature still lasted that the nation even in its downfall has played not altogether an ignoble part, that it has never quite consented as so many formerly great nations have done to the degradation Fate seemed determined to impose on it, that it has always struggled to assert itself, to live, to be something in the world of thought and action. And with this high tendency of the literature there is no poet who is so deeply imbued as Vyasa. Even the least of his characters is an intellect and a personality and of intellect and personality their every utterance reeks, as it were, and is full. I have already quoted the cry of Draupadie to Bhema; it is a supreme utterance of insulted feeling, and yet note how it expresses itself, in the language of intellect; in a thought.
उत्तिष्ठोत्तिष्ठ कि शेषे भीमसेन यथा मृतः | नामृतस्य हि पापीयान्भार्यामालभ्य जीवति ||
The whole personality of Draupadie breaks out in that cry, her chastity, her pride, her passionate & unforgiving temper, but it flashes out not in an expression of pure feeling, but in a fiery and pregnant apophthegm. It is this temperament, this dynamic force of intellectualism blended with heroic fire and a strong personality that gives its peculiar stamp to Vyasa’s writing and distinguishes it from that of all other epic poets. The heroic & profoundly intellectual national type of the great Bharata races, the Kurus, Bhojas and Panchalas who created the Veda & the Vedanta, find in Vyasa their fitting poetical type and exponent, just as the mild and delicately moral temper of the more eastern Coshalas has realised itself in Valmekie and through the Ramayana so largely dominated Hindu character. Steeped in the heroic ideals of the Bharata, attuned to their profound and daring thought & temperament, Vyasa has made himself the poet of the high-minded Kshatriya caste, voices their resonant speech, breathes their aspiring and unconquerable spirit, mirrors their rich and varied life with a loving detail and moves through his Page – 320 subject with a swift yet measured movement like the march of an army towards battle. A comparison with Valmekie is instructive of the varying genius of these great masters. Both excel in epical rhetoric -if such a term as rhetoric can be applied to Vyasa’s direct & severe style, but Vyasa’s has the air of a more intellectual, reflective & experienced stage of poetical advance. The longer speeches in the Ramayan, those even which have most the appearance of set, argumentative oration, proceed straight from the heart; the thoughts, words, reasonings come welling up from the dominant emotion or conflicting feelings of the speaker; they palpitate and are alive with the vital force from which they have sprung. Though belonging to a more thoughtful, gentle and cultured civilisation than Homer’s they have, like his, the large utterance which is not of primitive times, but of the primal emotions. Vyasa’s have a powerful but austere force of intellectuality. In expressing character they firmly expose it rather than spring half-unconsciously from it; their bold and finely-planned consistency with the original conception reveals rather the conscientious painstaking of an inspired but reflective artist than the more primary and impetuous creative impulse. In their management of emotion itself a similar difference becomes prominent. Valmekie when giving utterance to a mood or passion simple or complex, surcharges every line, every phrase, turn of words or movement of verse with it; there are no lightning flashes but a great depth of emotion swelling steadily, inexhaustibly and increasingly in a wonder of sustained feeling, like a continually rising wave with low crests of foam. Vyasa has a high level of style with a subdued emotion behind it occasionally breaking into poignant outbursts. It is by sudden beauties that he rises above himself and not only exalts, stirs and delights as at his ordinary level, but memorably seizes the heart and imagination. This is the natural result of his peculiarly disinterested art which never seeks out anything striking for its own sake, but admits it only when it arises uncalled from the occasion. From this difference in temper and mode of expression arises a difference in the mode also of portraying character. Page – 321 Vyasa’s knowledge of character is not so intimate, emotional and sympathetic as Valmekie’s; it has more of a heroic inspiration, less of a divine sympathy. He has reached it not like Valmekie immediately through the heart and imagination, but deliberately through intellect and experience, a deep criticism and reading of men; the spirit of shaping imagination has come afterwards like a sculptor using the materials labour has provided for him. It has not been a light leading him into the secret places of the heart. Nevertheless the characterisation, however reached, is admirable and firm. It is the fruit of a lifelong experience, the knowledge of a statesman who has had much to do with the ruling of men and has been himself a considerable part in some great revolution full of astonishing incidents and extraordinary characters. With that high experience his brain and his soul are full. It has cast his imagination into colossal proportions & provided him with majestic conceptions which can dispense with all but the simplest language for expression; for they are so great that the bare precise statement of what is said and done seems enough to make language epical. His character-drawing indeed is more epic, less psychological than Valmekie’s. Truth of speech and action give us the truth of nature and it is done with strong purposeful strokes that have the power to move the heart & enlarge and ennoble the imagination which is what we mean by the epic in poetry. In Valmekie there are marvellous & revealing touches which show us the secret something in character usually beyond the expressive power either of speech or action; they are touches oftener found in the dramatic artist than the epic, and seldom fall within Vyasa’s method. It is the difference between strong and purposeful artistic synthesis and the beautiful subtle & involute symmetry of an organic existence evolved and inevitable rather than shaped or purposed. Vyasa is therefore less broadly human than Valmekie, he is at the same time a wider & more original thinker. His supreme intellect rises everywhere out of the mass of insipid or turbulent redaction and interpolation with bare and grandiose outlines. A wide searching mind, historian, statesman, orator, a deep and keen looker into ethics and conduct, a subtle and high aiming Page – 322 politician, a theologian & philosopher, -it is not for nothing that Hindu imagination makes the name of Vyasa loom so large in the history of Aryan thought and attributes to him work so important and manifold. The wideness of the man’s intellectual empire is evident throughout his work; we feel the presence of the Rishi, the original thinker who has enlarged the boundaries of ethical & religious outlook. Modern India, since the Musulman advent, has accepted the politics of Chanakya in preference to Vyasa’s. Certainly there was little in politics concealed from that great and sinister spirit. Yet Vyasa perhaps knew its subtleties quite as well, but he had to ennoble and guide him a high ethical aim and an august imperial idea. He did not, like European imperialism, unable to rise above the idea of power, accept the Jesuitic doctrine of any means to a good end, still less justify the goodness of the end by that profession of an utterly false disinterestedness which ends in the soothing belief that plunder, arson, outrage & massacre are committed for the good of the slaughtered nation. Vyasa’s imperialism frankly accepts war & empire as the result of man’s natural lust for dominion, but demands that empire should be won by noble and civilized methods, not in the spirit of the savage, and insists once it is won not on its powers, but on its duties. Valmekie too has included politics in his wide sweep; his picture of an ideal imperialism is sound and noble and the spirit of the Coshalan Ixvaacous that monarchy must be broad-based on the people’s will and yet broader-based on justice, truth and good government, is admirably developed as an undertone of the poem. But it is an undertone only, not as in the Mahabharata its uppermost and weightiest drift. Valmekie’s approach to politics is imaginative, poetic, made from outside. He is attracted to it by the unlimited curiosity of an universal mind and still more by the appreciation of a great creative artist; only therefore when it gives opportunities for a grandiose imagination or is mingled with the motives of conduct and acts on character. He is a poet who makes occasional use of public affairs as part of his wide human subject. The reverse may with some appearance of truth be said of Vyasa that he is interested in human action Page – 323 and character mainly as they move and work in relation to a large political background. His deep preoccupation with the ethical issues of speech and action is very notable. His very subject is one of practical ethics, the establishment of a Dharmyarajya, an empire of the just, by which is meant no millennium of the saints but the practical ideal of a government with righteousness, purity and unselfish toil for the common good as its saving principles.8 It is true that Valmekie has a more humanely moral spirit than Vyasa, in as much as ordinary morality is most effective when steeped in emotion, proceeding from the heart & acting through the heart. Vyasa’s ethics like everything else in him takes a double stand on intellectual scrutiny and acceptance and on personal strength of character; his characters having once adopted by intellectual choice & in harmony with their temperaments a given line of conduct, throw the whole heroic force of their nature into its pursuit. He is therefore pre-eminently a poet of action. Krishna is his authority in all matters religious and ethical and it is noticeable that Krishna lays far more stress on action and far less on quiescence than any other Hindu philosopher. Quiescence in God is with him as with others the ultimate goal of existence; but he insists that this quiescence must be reached through action and so far as this life is concerned, must exist in action; quiescence of the soul from desires there must be but there should not be and there cannot be quiescence of the Prakriti from action. ….
“Not by refraining from actions can a man enjoy actionlessness
8 This sentence was written at the top of the manuscript page. It seems to have been meant for insertion here. -Ed.Page – 324 nor by mere renunciation does he reach his soul’s perfection; for no man in the world can even for one moment remain without doing works; everyone is forced to do works, whether he will or not, by the primal qualities born of Prakriti. . . . Thou do action self-controlled (or else “thou do action ever”), for action is better than inaction; if thou actest not, even the maintenance of thy body cannot be effected.”
Hence it follows that merely to renounce action and flee from the world to a hermitage is but vanity, and that those who rely on such a desertion of duty for attaining God lean on a broken reed. The professed renunciation of action is only a nominal renunciation, for they merely give up one set of actions to which they are called for another to which in a great number of cases they have no call or fitness. If they have that fitness, they may certainly attain God, but even then action is better than Sannyasa. Hence the great & pregnant paradox that in action is real actionlessness, while inaction is merely another form of action itself.
“He who quells his sense-organs of action but sits remembering in his heart the objects of sense, that man of bewildered soul is termed a hypocrite.” “Sannyasa (renunciation of works) and Yoga through action both lead to the highest good but of the two Yoga through action is better than renunciation of action. Know him to be the perpetual Sannyasi who neither loathes nor longs; for he, O great-armed, being free from the dualities is Page – 325 easily released from the chain.” “He who can see inaction in action and action in inaction, he is the wise among men, he does all actions with a soul in union with God.”
From this lofty platform the great creed rises to its crowning ideas, for since we must act but neither for any human or future results of action nor for the sake of the action itself, and yet action must have some goal to which it is devoted, there is no goal left but God. We must devote then our actions to God & through that rise to complete surrender of the personality to him, whether in the idea of him manifest through Yoga or the idea of him Unmanifest through God-knowledge. “They who worship me as the imperishable, illimitable, unmanifest, controlling all the organs, one-minded to all things, they doing good to all creatures attain to me. But far greater is their pain of endeavour whose hearts cleave to the Unmanifest; for hardly can salvation in the unmanifest be attained by men that have a body. But they who reposing all actions in Me, to Me devoted contemplate and worship me in single-minded Yoga, speedily do I become their saviour from the gulfs of death & the world, for their hearts, O Partha, have entered into me. On Me repose thy mind, pour into Me thy reason, in Me wilt thou have then thy dwelling, doubt it not. Yet if thou canst not steadfastly repose thy mind in Me, desire, O Dhananjaya, to reach me by Yoga through askesis. If that too thou canst not, devote thyself to action for Me; since also by doing actions for My sake thou wilt attain thy soul’s perfection. If even for this thou art too feeble then abiding in Yoga with me with a soul subdued abandon utterly desire for the fruits of action. For better than askesis is knowledge, and better than knowledge is concentration and better than concentration is renunciation of the fruit of deeds, for upon such renunciation followeth the soul’s peace”. Such is the ladder which Vyasa has represented Krishna as building up to God with action for its firm & sole basis. If it is questioned whether the Bhagavadgita is the work of Vyasa (whether he be Krishna of the Island is another question to be settled on its own merits), I answer that there is nothing to disprove his Page – 326 authorship, while on the other hand allowing for the exigencies of philosophical exposition the style is undoubtedly either his or so closely modelled on his as to defy differentiation. Moreover the whole piece is but the philosophical justification and logical enlargement of the gospel of action, preached by Krishna in the Mahabharat proper, the undoubted work of this poet. I have here no space for anything more than a quotation. Sanjaya has come to the Pandavas from Dhritarashtra and dissuaded them from battle in a speech taught him by that wily & unwise monarch; it is skilfully aimed at the most subtle weakness of the human heart, representing the abandonment of justice & their duty as a holy act of self-abnegation and its pursuit as no better than wholesale murder and parricide. It is better for the sons of Pandou to be dependents, beggars & exiles all their lives than to enjoy the earth by the slaughter of their brothers, kinsmen and spiritual guides: contemplation is purer & nobler than action & worldly desires. Although answering firmly to the envoy, the children of Pandou are in their hearts shaken; for as Krishna afterward tells Karna, when the destruction of a nation is at hand wrong comes to men’s eyes clothed in the garb of right. Sanjaya’s argument is one Christ & Buddha would have endorsed; Christ & Buddha would have laboured to confirm the Pandavas in their scruples. On Krishna rests the final word & his answer is such as to shock seriously the conventional ideas of a religious teacher to which Christianity & Buddhism have accustomed us. In a long & powerful speech he deals at great length with Sanjaya’s arguments. We must remember therefore that he is debating a given point and speaking to men who have not like Arjouna the adhikar to enter into the “highest of all mysteries”. We shall then realise the close identity between his teaching here and that of the Gita.
Page – 327
The drift of Vyasa’s ethical speculation has always a definite and recognizable tendency; there is a basis of customary morality and there is a higher ethic of the soul which abolishes in its crowning phase the terms virtue and sin, because to the pure all things are pure through an august and selfless disinterestedness. This ethic takes its rise naturally from the crowning height of the Vedantic philosophy, where the soul becomes conscious of its identity with God who whether acting or actionless is untouched by either sin or virtue. But the crown of the Vedanta is only for the highest; the moral calamities that arise from the attempt of an unprepared soul to identify Self with God is sufficiently indicated in the legend of Indra and Virochana. Similarly this higher ethic is for the prepared, the initiated only, because the raw and unprepared soul will seize on the non-distinction between sin and virtue without first compassing the godlike purity without which such non-distinction is neither morally admissible nor actually conceivable. From this arises the unwillingness of Hinduism, so ignorantly attributed by Europeans to priest-craft and the Brahmin, to shout out its message to the man in the street or declare its esoteric thought to the shoeblack & the kitchen-maid. The sword of knowledge is a double-edged weapon; in the hands of the hero it can save the world, but it must not be made a plaything for children. Krishna himself ordinarily insists on all Page – 328 men following the duties & rules of conduct to which they are born and to which the cast of their temperaments predestined them. Arjouna he advises, if incapable of rising to the higher moral altitudes, to fight in a just cause because that is the duty of the caste, the class of souls to which he belongs. Throughout the Mahabharata he insists on this standpoint that every man must meet the duties to which his life calls him in a spirit of disinterestedness, -not, be it noticed, of self-abnegation, which may be as much a fanaticism and even a selfishness as the grossest egoism itself. It is because Arjouna has best fulfilled this ideal, has always lived up to the practice of his class in a spirit of disinterestedness and self-mastery that Krishna loves him above all human beings and considers him and him alone fit to receive the higher initiation.
स एवायं मया तेऽद्य योगः प्रोक्तः सनातनः | भक्तोऽसि मे सखा चेति रहस्यं ह्येतदुत्तमम् ||
“This is that ancient Yoga which I tell thee today; because thou art My adorer and My heart’s comrade; for this is the highest mystery of all.”
And even the man who has risen to the heights of the initiation must cleave for the good of society to the pursuits and duties of his order; for if he does not, the world which instinctively is swayed by the examples of its greatest, will follow in his footsteps; the bonds of society will then crumble asunder and chaos come again; mankind will be baulked of its destiny. Srikrishna illustrates this by his own example, the example of God in his manifest form.
Page – 329
“Looking also to the maintenance of order in the world thou shouldest act; for whatever the best practises, that other men practise; for the standard set by him is followed by the whole world. In all the Universe there is for Me no necessary action, for I have nothing I do not possess or wish to possess, and lo I abide always doing. For if I abide not at all doing action vigilantly, men would altogether follow in my path, O son of Pritha; these worlds would sink if I did not actions, and I should be the author of confusion (literally illegitimacy, the worst & primal confusion, for it disorders the family which is the fundamental unit of society) and the destroyer of the peoples. What the ignorant do, O Bharata, with their minds enslaved to the work, that the wise man should do with a free mind to maintain the order of the world; the wise man should not upset the mind of the ignorant who are slaves of their deeds, but should apply himself to all works doing customary things with a mind in Yoga.”
It is accordingly not by airy didactic teaching so much as in the example of Krishna -& this is the true epic method -that Vyasa develops his higher ethic which is the morality of the liberated mind. But this is too wide a subject to be dealt with in the limits I have at my command. I have dwelt on Vyasa’s ethical standpoint because it is of the utmost importance in the present day. Before the Bhagavadgita with its great epic commentary, the Mahabharata of Vyasa, had time deeply to influence the national mind, the heresy of Buddhism seized hold of us. Buddhism with its exaggerated emphasis on quiescence & the quiescent virtue of self-abnegation, its unwise creation of a separate class of Page – 330 quiescents & illuminati, its sharp distinction between monks & laymen implying the infinite inferiority of the latter, its all too facile admission of men to the higher life and its relegation of worldly action to the lowest importance possible stands at the opposite pole from the gospel of Srikrishna and has had the very effect he deprecates; it has been the author of confusion and the destroyer of the peoples. Under its influence half the nation moved in the direction of spiritual passivity & negation, the other by a natural reaction plunged deep into a splendid but enervating materialism. As a result our race lost three parts of its ancient heroic manhood, its grasp on the world, its magnificently ordered polity and its noble social fabric. It is by clinging to a few spars from the wreck that we have managed to perpetuate our existence, and this we owe to the overthrow of Buddhism by Shankaracharya. But Hinduism has never been able to shake off the deep impress of the religion it vanquished; and therefore though it has managed to survive, it has not succeeded in recovering its old vitalising force. The practical disappearance of the Kshatriya caste (for those who now claim that origin seem to be with a few exceptions Vratya Kshatriyas, Kshatriyas who have fallen from the pure practice and complete temperament of their caste) has operated in the same direction. The Kshatriyas were the proper depositaries of the gospel of action; Srikrishna himself declares
“This imperishable Yoga I revealed to Vivaswan, Vivaswan declared it to Manou, Manou to Ixvaacou told it; thus did the royal sages learn this as a hereditary knowledge”,
and when in the immense lapse of time it was lost, Srikrishna again declared it to a Kshatriya. But when the Kshatriyas disappeared or became degraded, the Brahmins remained the sole interpreters of the Bhagavadgita, and they, being the highest Page – 331 caste or temperament and their thoughts therefore naturally turned to knowledge and the final end of being, bearing moreover still the stamp of Buddhism in their minds, have dwelt mainly on that in the Gita which deals with the element of quiescence. They have laid stress on the goal but they have not echoed Srikrishna’s emphasis on the necessity of action as the one sure road to the goal. Time, however, in its revolution is turning back on itself and there are signs that if Hinduism is to last and we are not to plunge into the vortex of scientific atheism and the breakdown of moral ideals which is engulfing Europe, it must survive as the religion for which Vedanta, Sankhya & Yoga combined to lay the foundations, which Srikrishna announced & which Vyasa formulated. No apeings or distorted editions of Western religious modes, no Indianised Christianity, no fair rehash of that pale & consumptive shadow English Theism, will suffice to save us. But Vyasa has not only a high political & religious thought and deep-seeing ethical judgments; he deals not only with the massive aspects & worldwide issues of human conduct, but has a keen eye for the details of government and society, the ceremonies, forms & usages, the religious & social order on the due stability of which the public welfare is grounded. The principles of good government & the motives & impulses that move men to public action no less than the rise and fall of States & the clash of mighty personalities and great powers form, incidentally & epically treated, the staple of Vyasa’s epic. The poem was therefore, first & foremost, like the Iliad and Aeneid and even more than the Iliad and Aeneid, national -a poem in which the religious, social and personal temperament and ideals of the Aryan nation have found a high expression and its institutions, actions, heroes in the most critical period of its history received the judgments and criticisms of one of its greatest and soundest minds. If this had not been so we should not have had the Mahabharata in its present form. Valmekie had also dealt with a great historical period in a yet more universal spirit and with finer richness of detail but he approached it in a poetic and dramatic manner; he created rather than criticised; while Vyasa Page – 332 in his manner was the critic far more than the creator. Hence later poets found it easier and more congenial to introduce their criticisms of life and thought into the Mahabharata than into the Ramayana. Vyasa’s poem has been increased to threefold its original size; the additions to Valmekie’s, few in themselves if we set apart the Uttarakanda, have been immaterial & for the most part of an accidental nature. Gifted with such poetical powers, limited by such intellectual and emotional characteristics, endowed with such grandeur of soul and severe purity of taste, what was the special work which Vyasa did for his country and in what beyond the ordinary elements of poetical greatness lies his claim to world-wide acceptance? It has been suggested already that the Mahabharata is the great national poem of India. It is true the Ramayan also represents an Aryan civilisation idealised: Rama & Sita are more intimately characteristic types of the Hindu temperament as it finally shaped itself than are Arjouna & Draupadie; Srikrishna though his character is founded in the national type, yet rises far above it. But although Valmekie writing the poem of mankind drew his chief figures in the Hindu model and Vyasa, writing a great national epic, lifted his divine hero above the basis of national character into an universal humanity, yet the original purpose of either poem remains intact. In the Ramayan under the disguise of an Aryan golden age the wide world with all its elemental impulses and affections finds itself mirrored. The Mahabharata reflects rather a great Aryan civilization with the types, ideas, aims and passions of a heroic and pregnant period in the history of a high-hearted and deep-thoughted nation. It has, moreover, as I have attempted to indicate, a formative ethical and religious spirit which is absolutely corrective to the faults that have most marred in the past and mar to the present day the Hindu character and type of thought. And it provides us with this corrective not in the form of an alien civilisation difficult to assimilate and associated with other elements as dangerous to us as this is salutary, but in a great creative work of our own literature written by the mightiest of our sages ( Krishna has said), one therefore who speaks our own language, Page – 333 thinks our own thoughts and has the same national cast of mind, nature & conscience. His ideals will therefore be a corrective not only to our own faults but to the dangers of that attractive but unwholesome Asura civilisation which has invaded us, especially its morbid animalism and its neurotic tendency to abandon itself to its own desires. But this does not say all. Vyasa too beyond the essential universality of all great poets, has his peculiar appeal to humanity in general making his poem of worldwide as well as national importance. By comparing him once again with Valmekie we shall realize more precisely in what this appeal consists. The Titanic impulse was strong in Valmekie. The very dimensions of his poetical canvas, the audacity and occasional recklessness of his conceptions, the gust with which he fills in the gigantic outlines of his Ravana are the essence of Titanism; his genius was so universal & Protean that no single element of it can be said to predominate, yet this tendency towards the enormous enters perhaps as largely into it as any other. But to the temperament of Vyasa the Titanic was alien. It is true he carves his figures so largely (for he was a sculptor in creation rather than a painter like Valmekie) that looked at separately they seem to have colossal stature but he is always at pains so to harmonise them that they shall appear measurable to us and strongly human. They are largely & boldly human, impressive & sublime, but never Titanic. He loves the earth and the heavens but he visits not Pataala nor the stupendous regions of Vrishopurvan. His Rakshasas, supposing them to be his at all, are epic giants or matter-of-fact ogres, but they do not exhale the breath of midnight and terror like Valmekie’s demons nor the spirit of world-shaking anarchy like Valmekie’s giants. This poet could never have conceived Ravana. He had neither unconscious sympathy nor a sufficient force of abhorrence to inspire him. The passions of Duryodhana though presented with great force of antipathetic insight, are human and limited. The Titanic was so foreign to Vyasa’s habit of mind that he could not grasp it sufficiently either to love or hate. His humanism shuts to him the outermost gates of that sublime and menacing region; he has not the secret of the storm Page – 334 nor has his soul ridden upon the whirlwind. For his particular work this was a real advantage. Valmekie has drawn for us both the divine and anarchic in extraordinary proportions; an Akbar or a Napoleon might find his spiritual kindred in Rama or Ravana; but with more ordinary beings such figures impress the sense of the sublime principally and do not dwell with them as daily acquaintances. It was left for Vyasa to create epically the human divine and the human anarchic so as to bring idealisms of the conflicting moral types into line with the daily emotions and imaginations of men. The sharp distinction between Deva & Asura is one of the three distinct & peculiar contributions to ethical thought which India has to offer. The legend of Indra & Virochana is one of its fundamental legends. Both of them came to Vrihaspati to know from him of God; he told them to go home & look in the mirror. Virochana saw himself there & concluding that he was God, asked no farther; he gave full rein to the sense of individuality in himself which he mistook for the deity. But Indra was not satisfied: feeling that there must be some mistake he returned to Vrihaspati and received from him the true God-knowledge which taught him that he was God only because all things were God, since nothing existed but the One. If he was the one God, so was his enemy; the very feelings of separateness and enmity were no permanent reality but transient phenomena. The Asura therefore is he who is profoundly conscious of his own separate individuality & yet would impose it on the world as the sole individuality; he is thus blown along on the hurricane of his desires & ambitions until he stumbles & is broken, in the great phrase of Aeschylus, against the throne of Eternal Law. The Deva on the contrary stands firm in the luminous heaven of self-knowledge; his actions flow not inward towards himself but outwards toward the world. The distinction that India draws is not between altruism and egoism but between disinterestedness and desire. The altruist is profoundly conscious of himself and he is really ministering to himself even in his altruism; hence the hot & sickly odour of sentimentalism and the taint of the Pharisee which clings about European altruism. With the perfect Hindu the feeling of self Page – 335 has been merged in the sense of the universe; he does his duty equally whether it happens to promote the interests of others or his own; if his action seems oftener altruistic than egoistic it is because our duty oftener coincides with the interests of others than with our own. Rama’s duty as a son calls him to sacrifice himself, to leave the empire of the world and become a beggar & a hermit; he does it cheerfully and unflinchingly: but when Sita is taken from him, it is his duty as a husband to rescue her from her ravisher and as a Kshatriya to put Ravana to death if he persists in wrongdoing. This duty also he pursues with the same unflinching energy as the first. He does not shrink from the path of the right because it coincides with the path of self-interest. The Pandavas also go without a word into exile & poverty, because honour demands it of them; but their ordeal over, they will not, though ready to drive compromise to its utmost verge, consent to succumb utterly to Duryodhana, for it is their duty as Kshatriyas to protect the world from the reign of injustice, even though it is at their own expense that injustice seeks to reign. The Christian & Buddhistic doctrine of turning the other cheek to the smiter, is as dangerous as it is impracticable. The continual European see-saw between Christ on the one side and the flesh & the devil on the other with the longer trend towards the latter comes straight from a radically false moral distinction & the lip profession of an ideal which mankind has never been either able or willing to carry into practice. The disinterested & desireless pursuit of duty is a gospel worthy of the strongest manhood; that of the cheek turned to the smiter is a gospel for cowards & weaklings. Babes & sucklings may practise it because they must, but with others it is a hypocrisy.
The gospel of the निष्काम धर्म and the great poetical creations which exemplify & set it off by contrast, this is the second aspect of Vyasa’s genius which will yet make him interesting and important to the whole world.Page – 336 Vyasa; some Characteristics.1
The Mahabharata, although neither the greatest nor the richest masterpiece of the secular literature of India, is at the same time its most considerable and important body of poetry. Being so it is the pivot on which the history of Sanscrit literature, and incidentally the history of Aryan civilisation in India, must perforce turn. To the great discredit of European scholarship the problem of this all-important work is one that remains not only unsolved, but untouched. Yet until it is solved, until the confusion of its heterogeneous materials is reduced to some sort of order, the different layers of which it consists separated, classed and attributed to their relative dates, and its relations with the Ramayan on the one hand and the Puranic and classic literature on the other fully & patiently examined, the history of our civilisation must remain in the air, a field for pedantic wranglings and worthless conjectures. The world knows something of our origins because much labour has been bestowed on the Vedas, something of our decline because post-Buddhistic literature has been much read, annotated and discussed, but of our great medial and flourishing period it knows little, and that little is neither coherent nor reliable. All that we know of the Mahabharata at present is that it is the work of several hands and of different periods -this is literally the limit of the reliable knowledge European scholarship has so far been able to extract from it. For the rest we have to be content with arbitrary conjectures based either upon an unwarrantable application of European analogies to Indian things or random assumptions snatched from a word here or a line there, but never proceeding from that weighty, careful & unbiased
1 This original opening of “Notes on the Mahabharata” was left uncancelled in the manuscript. See the Note on the Texts for an explanation of how the essay was revised. -Ed. Page – 337 study of the work canto by canto, passage by passage, line by line, which can alone bring us to any valuable conclusions. A fancy was started in Germany that the Iliad of Homer is really a pastiche or clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the time of Pisistratus.2 This truly barbarous imagination with its rude ignorance of the psychological bases of all great poetry has now fallen into some discredit; it has been replaced by a more plausible attempt to discover a nucleus in the poem, an Achilleid, out of which the larger Iliad has grown. Very possibly the whole discussion will finally end in the restoration of a single Homer with a single poem subjected indeed to some inevitable interpolation and corruption, but mainly the work of one mind, a theory still held by more than one considerable scholar. In the meanwhile, however, haste has been made to apply the analogy to the Mahabharata; lynx-eyed theorists have discovered in the poem -apparently without taking the trouble to study it -an early and rude ballad epic worked up, doctored and defaced by those wicked Brahmins, who are made responsible for all the literary and other enormities which have been discovered by the bushelful, and not by European lynxes alone -in our literature and civilisation. Now whether the theory is true or not, and one sees nothing in its favour, it has at present no value at all; for it is a pure theory without any justifying facts. It is not difficult to build these intellectual card-houses; anyone may raise them by the dozen who can find no better manner of wasting valuable time. A similar method of “arguing from Homer” is probably at the bottom of Professor Weber’s assertion that the War Purvas contain the original epic. An observant eye at once perceives that the War Purvas are far more hopelessly tangled than any that precede them except the first. It is here & here only that the keenest eye becomes confused & the most confident explorer begins to lose heart & self-reliance. But the Iliad is all battles and it therefore follows in the European mind that the original Mahabharata must have been all battles. Another method is
2 The four-page passage beginning with this sentence and ending with “moral certainty” on page 341 was incorporated by Sri Aurobindo in the rewritten version of this piece (pages 280 84). -Ed. Page – 338 that of ingenious, if forced argument from stray slokas of the poem or equally stray & obscure remarks in Buddhist compilations. The curious theory of some scholars that the Pandavas were a later invention and that the original war was between the Kurus and Panchalas only and Professor Weber’s singularly positive inference from a sloka which does not at first sight bear the meaning he puts on it, that the original epic contained only 8800 lines, are ingenuities of this type. They are based on the Teutonic art of building a whole mammoth out of a single and often problematical bone, and remind one strongly of Mr.. Pickwick and the historic inscription which was so rudely, if in a Pickwickian sense, challenged by the refractory [Mr.. Blotton.] All these theorisings are idle enough; they are made of too airy a stuff to last. (Only a serious scrutiny of the Mahabharat made with a deep sense of critical responsibility and according to the methods of patient scientific inference, can justify on in advancing any considerable theory on this wonderful poetic structure.) Yet to extricate the original epic from the mass of accretions is not, I believe, so difficult a task as it may at first appear. One is struck in perusing the Mahabharata by the presence of a mass of poetry which bears the style and impress of a single, strong and original, even unusual mind, differing in his manner of expression, tone of thought & stamp of personality not only from every other Sanscrit poet we know but from every other great poet known to literature. When we look more closely into the distribution of this peculiar style of writing, we come to perceive certain very suggestive & helpful facts. We realise that this impress is only found in those parts of the poem which are necessary to the due conduct of the story, seldom to be detected in the more miraculous, Puranistic or trivial episodes, but usually broken up by passages and sometimes shot through with lines of a discernibly different inspiration. Equally noteworthy is it that nowhere does this poet admit any trait, incident or speech which deviates from the strict propriety of dramatic characterisation & psychological probability. Finally Krishna’s divinity is recognized, but more often hinted at than aggressively stated. The tendency is to keep it in the background as a fact to which, Page – 339 while himself crediting it, the writer does not hope for universal consent, still less is able to speak of it as of a general tenet & matter of dogmatic belief; he prefers to show Krishna rather in his human character, acting always by wise, discerning and inspired methods, but still not transgressing the limit of human possibility. All this leads one to the conclusion that in the body of poetry I have described, we have the real Bharata, an epic which tells plainly and straightforwardly of the events which led to the great war and the empire of the Bharata princes. Certainly if Prof. Weber’s venturesome assertion as to the length of the original Mahabharata be correct, this conclusion falls to the ground; for the mass of this poetry amounts to considerably over 20,000 slokas. Professor Weber’s inference, however, is worth some discussion; for the length of the original epic is a very important element in the problem. If we accept it, we must say farewell to all hopes of unravelling the tangle. His assertion is founded on a single & obscure verse in the huge prolegomena to the poem which take up the greater part of the Adi Purva, no very strong basis for so far-reaching an assumption. The sloka itself says no more than this that much of the Mahabharata was written in so difficult a style that Vyasa himself could remember only 8800 of the slokas, Suka an equal amount and Sanjaya perhaps as much, perhaps something less. There is certainly here no assertion such as Prof. Weber would have us find in it that the Mahabharata at any time amounted to no more than 8800 slokas. Even if we assume what the text does not say that Vyasa, Suka & Sanjaya knew the same 8800 slokas, we do not get to that conclusion. The point simply is that the style of the Mahabharat was too difficult for a single man to keep in memory more than a certain portion of it. This does not carry us very far. If however we are to assume that there is more in this verse than meets the eye, that it is a cryptic way of stating the length of the original poem; and I do not deny that this is possible, perhaps even probable — we should note the repetition of वेत्ति — अहं वेद्मि शुको वेत्ति सञ्जयो वेत्ति वा न वा. Following the genius of the Sanscrit language we are led to suppose the repetition was intended to recall अष्टौ स्लोकसहस्राणि etc. with each name; otherwise the repetition hasPage – 340 no raison d’être; it is otiose & inept. But if we understand it thus, the conclusion is irresistible that each knew a different 8800, or the writer would have no object in wishing us to repeat the number three times in our mind. The length of the epic as derived from this single sloka should then be 26,400 slokas or something less, for the writer hesitates about the exact number to be attributed to Sanjaya. Another passage further on in the prolegomena agrees remarkably with this conclusion and is in itself much more explicit. It is there stated plainly enough that Vyasa first wrote the Mahabharata in 24,000 slokas and afterwards enlarged it to 100,000 for the world of men as well as a still more unconscionable number of verses for the Gandhurva and other worlds. In spite of the embroidery of fancy, of a type familiar enough to all who are acquainted with the Puranic method of recording facts, the meaning of this is unmistakeable. The original Mahabharata consisted of 24,000 slokas, but in its final form it runs to 100,000. The figures are probably loose & slovenly, for at any rate the final form of the Mahabharata is considerably under 100,000 slokas. It is possible therefore that the original epic was something over 24,000 and under 26,400 slokas, in which case the two passages would agree well enough. But it would be unsafe to found any dogmatic assertion on isolated couplets; at the most we can say that we are justified in taking the estimate as a probable and workable hypothesis and if it is found to be corroborated by other facts, we may venture to suggest its correctness as a moral certainty. This body of poetry then, let us suppose, is the original Mahabharata. Tradition attributes it to Krishna of the Island called Vyasa who certainly lived about this time and was an editor of the Vedas; and since there is nothing in this part of the poem which makes the tradition impossible and much which favours it, we may, as a matter both of convenience and of probability, accept it at least provisionally. Whether these hypotheses can be upheld is a question for long and scrupulous consideration and analysis. In this article I wish to formulate, assuming their validity, the larger features of poetical style, the manner of thought & creation & the personal note of Vyasa. Page – 341 Mahabharata .
The problem of the Mahabharata, its origin, date and composition, is one that seems likely to elude scholarship to times indefinite if not for ever. It is true that several European scholars have solved all these to their own satisfaction, but their industrious & praiseworthy efforts [incomplete]
In the following pages I have approached the eternal problem of the Mahabharata from the point of view mainly of style & literary personality, partly of substance; but in dealing with the substance I have deferred questions of philosophy, allusion & verbal evidence to which a certain school attach great importance and ignored altogether the question of minute metrical details on which they base far-reaching conclusions. It is necessary therefore out of respect for these scholars to devote some little space to an explanation of my standpoint. I contend that owing to the peculiar manner in which the Mahabharat has been composed, these minutiae of detail & word have very little value. The labour of this minute school has proved beyond dispute one thing and one only, that the Mahabharat was not only immensely enlarged, crusted with interpolations & accretions and in parts rewritten and modified, but even its oldest parts were verbally modified in the course of preservation. The extent to which this happened, has I think been grossly exaggerated, but that it did happen, one cannot but be convinced. Now if this is so, it is obvious that arguments from verbal niceties must be very dangerous. It has been sought to prove from a single word suranga, an underground tunnel, which European scholars believe to be identical with the Greek that the account in the Adi Purva of the Pandavas’ escape from the burning house of Purochana through an underground tunnel must be later than another account in the Vana Purva which represents Bhema as carrying his brothers & mother out of the flames; for the Page – 342
former they say,
must have been composed after the Indians had learned the Greek language &
culture and the latter, it is to be
assumed, before that interesting period. Now whether
suranga was derived from the Greek
σῦριγξ or not, I
cannot take upon me to say,
but will assume on
the authority of
better linguists
than myself that it was so
though I
think it is as
well to be sceptical of
all such
Greek derivations until the connection is
proved beyond doubt, for such
words even when not accounted for by
Sanscrit itself, may
very easily be
borrowed from the aboriginal languages. Bengali for
instance preserves the form suḍanga where the cerebral letter is
Dravidian. But if so, if
this . word came
into fashion along with Greek culture, and became
the word for a
tunnel, what could be
more natural than that the reciter should substitute for an
old and now disused word the one which was
familiar to
his audience? Again much has
been made of
the frequent occurrence of
Yavana, Vahlika, Pehlava, Saka,
Huna. As to
Yavana its connection with
Page – 343
Yavanas in
Buddhist writings we
will waive the demand for
strict philological intelligibility and suppose that Yavana answers to
Page – 344 |
4
does
not seem to me
beyond doubt. It
had certainly been at
one time applied to
the Bactrian Greeks, but so it has
been and is to
the present day applied to
the Persians, Afghans &
other races to
the northwest of
India. Nor is
the philological connection between