The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic

148 Pages·2016·2.68 MB·English

by  R. K. Narayan

R. K. NARAYAN (1906–2001) was one of the most prominent Indian novelists of the twentieth century.
His works include Mr. Sampath—The Printer of Malgudi, Swami and Friends, Waiting for Mahatma, and
Gods, Demons, and Others, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
WENDY DONIGER is an American Indologist and the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of
the History of Religions in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. She is the author of more than
thirty books.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1978 by R. K. Narayan
Foreword © 2013 by the University of Chicago All rights reserved. Originally published 1978 by the
Viking Press.
University of Chicago Press edition 2000 and 2013
Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-22605165-9 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-22605747-7 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226057477.001.001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Narayan, R. K., 1906–2001.
The Mahabharata : a shortened modern prose version of the Indian epic / R. K. Narayan ; foreword by
Wendy Doniger.
pages. cm.
ISBN 978-0-22605165-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-22605747-7 (e-book) 1. Hindu mythology—
Fiction. 2. Hindu gods—Fiction. 3. Mahabharata—Adaptations. I. Doniger, Wendy. II. Title.
PR9499.3.N3M3 2013
823'.912—dc23
2013005614
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
The Mahabharata
A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic
R. K. Narayan
Foreword by Wendy Doniger
WITH DECORATIONS BY R. K. LAXMAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago & London

Also by R. K. Narayan
NOVELS OF MALGUDI
Swami and Friends The Bachelor of Arts The Dark Room
The English Teacher Mr Sampath—The Printer of Malgudi The Financial Expert
Waiting for the Mahatma The Guide
The Man-Eater of Malgudi The Vendor of Sweets The Painter of Signs A Tiger
for Malgudi Malgudi Days
Talkative Man The Ramayana
The Mahabharata The World of Nagaraj
STORIES
A Horse and Two Goats An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories Lawley Road
Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected
Stories
MEMOIRS
My Days
TRAVEL
My Dateless Diary
The Emerald Route
ESSAYS
Next Sunday
Reluctant Guru
CONTENTS
Foreword by Wendy Doniger Introduction
List of Characters and Places of Action in the Story
Generation Tree
1. The Eighth Baby
2. Enter—the Players
3. House of Joy—and Ashes
4. Bride for Five
5. Uncle’s Gift
6. City of Splendour
7. Stakes Unmatched
8. Wanderings
9. Hundred Questions
10. Servitude
11. Warning Shots
12. War or Peace?
13. Action
14. Hesitant Hero
15. Delirium of Destruction
16. Victory and Sorrow
17. Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
FOREWORD
Poets have told it before, and are telling it now, and will tell it. . . . What is here, about piety, profit, and
pleasure, is found elsewhere, but what is not here is nowhere else.
Mahabharata (1.1.23 and 1.56.33)
THUS THE MAHABHARATA DESCRIBES itself as unlimited in both time
and space. Its enormous scope poses two big problems that anyone who tries to
translate the Mahabharata must confront: choosing the parts to translate, and
finding the words to convey the unique spirit of the text. R. K. Narayan succeeds
in solving both of these better than any of the dozens of writers who have dared
to take on the task.
As for the choice, the Mahabharata is not only dauntingly large, as Narayan
points out in his own excellent introduction to the first edition of this volume; it
also refuses to stand still long enough for anyone to take an accurate picture of it.
Although the text was preserved both orally and in manuscript, it is so extremely
fluid that there is no single Mahabharata; there are hundreds of Mahabharatas
—hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions. A. K.
Ramanujan once remarked that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the
first time; others have described it as a work in progress or a living library that
does not belong in a book. There is a soi-disant critical edition of the
Mahabharata, with an apparatus of “interpolations” longer than the text itself,
but that edition has not been able to defend its claim to sit alone on the throne of
the urtext. (For instance, the story of the poet Vyasa dictating the Mahabharata
to the god Ganesha, which everyone who knows anything about the
Mahabharata knows is a part of it, did not pass the manuscript muster of the
critical edition; Narayan tells this story in his introduction, but not in the text.)
The Mahabharata flits back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and
village storytellers, each adding new bits to the old story, constantly
reinterpreting it. Narayan is therefore just doing, and doing very well, what
others have done for centuries—selecting certain parts of the great text to retell
in his own words. One of the fault lines along which others have made such a
selection is between the basic linear plot (the tale of the five heroes, the Pandava
brothers, and the great war that they fight against their cousins) and the nonlinear
blocks of mythology and philosophy that constitute a major part of the
Mahabharata. Earlier European scholars regarded these parts of the text as
irrelevant interpolations, presumably made by devout Brahmins who didn’t mind
spoiling a good secular story with their pedantic and self-serving religious rants.
But none of this is true: the plot is not secular, to begin with, as the gods are
caught up with it at every moment; nor are the myths and philosophical
arguments extraneous to it. Indeed, for a Hindu reader (or listener), the myths
and debates (including such things as the Bhagavad Gita) are the heart of the
matter, framed and illustrated by the plot; as Narayan puts it, “In a sense, these
could be termed ‘asides,’ but no reader of The Mahabharata would miss any part
of it.” To cut these “asides” would be like cutting all the arias out of a Verdi
opera to make it easier to follow the action of the plot. Narayan brilliantly
integrates all the levels of the text, constantly enriching the central plot with an
awareness of its mythological and philosophical resonances. Right at the
beginning, he tells the tangled tale of the ancestry of the heroes by concentrating
on the supernatural intervention of the river Ganges and the subsequent
employment of gods as biological parents of the sons of the impotent king Pandu
—the five legitimate Pandavas and the illegitimate Karna, the dark, tragic figure
of the Mahabharata.
Narayan claims to be translating the Sanskrit version of the text, and for the
most part he does, though he spells the names of some characters as they would
have been familiar to him from his Tamil-speaking childhood rather than from
the Sanskrit text (Kunthi instead of Kunti, Satyavathi for Satyavati, etc.). But
occasionally he reworks the Sanskrit version of a story in ways that reflect the
uneasiness of the later tradition, its inability, or unwillingness, to deal with some
of the less admirable attitudes of the ancient text. For instance, there is an
episode in which the enemies of the Pandavas plan to kill them (and their
mother) by trapping them all in a highly flammable house and setting fire to it;
the Pandavas, learning of this plot in advance, dig a tunnel through which they
will escape when the fire is set. In the Sanskrit text, they invite a low-caste tribal
woman and her five sons to the house, get them drunk, and leave them there
when they set the fire and escape through the tunnel, so that their enemies find
the six corpses and think that the Pandavas have perished in the fire. The total
indifference to the fate of the low-caste tribals on the part of the Pandavas—and,
indeed, on the part of the narrator of the text—has become, in recent years, a
point of embarrassment to contemporary Hindus sensitive to the injustices of the
caste system. In Narayan’s retelling, the only person the Pandavas purposely trap
in the house is the wicked architect who designed it to kill them; yet afterward
people think the Pandavas perished because “the charred remains of a woman
and her five sons had been discovered,” and we never learn anything more about
how those six people got there. Here, and elsewhere, Narayan nimbly sidesteps
some of the more controversial social issues.
Another delicate point in the story is the fact that the princess Draupadi is
married to all five of the Pandavas; Hindu culture at that time allowed a man to
have many wives, but a woman could have only one husband. The Sanskrit text
justifies this irregularity at first by saying that, when Arjuna (one of the five
brothers) won Draupadi in a contest and returned home with her and with his
brothers, he announced to his mother, “Look what we found!” and, without
looking up, she replied, like any mother, “Share it among you.” Not satisfied
with this rather thin excuse, the Sanskrit text goes on to say that all five
Pandavas are really incarnations of the god Indra, and Draupadi the incarnation
of the goddess of Prosperity, Indra’s wife. And then it offers a third explanation:
The daughter of a great sage longed in vain for a husband; she pleased the god Shiva, who offered her a
boon, and she asked for a virtuous husband. But she asked again and again, five times, and so Shiva said,
“You will have five virtuous husbands.” She objected, saying that it is against the law for a woman to
have more than one husband, for then there would be promiscuity; moreover, her one husband should
have her as a virgin. But Shiva reassured her that a woman is purified every month with her menses and
therefore there would be no lapse from dharma in her case, since she had asked repeatedly for a husband.
Then she asked him if she could be a virgin again for each act of sexual union, and he granted this, too.
[1.189.42–8]
When Narayan comes to this sensitive point, he subtly strengthens the first
argument by having Arjuna say (“wanting to sound lighthearted”), “Mother,
come out, see what bhiksha we have brought today”—thus making Arjuna in
part responsible for the misunderstanding by misrepresenting his wife as
bhiksha, alms won by begging. But Narayan, like the Sanskrit text, also reaches
for a stronger justification, and, omitting the second excuse (the five incarnations
of Indra), strengthens the third excuse by telling, in place of the tale of the
impatient virgin, a story that is not a part of the Sanskrit tradition at all but a
well-known Tamil story as well as the subject of a 1936 Tamil film, Nalayani.
Narayan’s version occupies two full pages, but could be summarized thus:
Draupadi in her previous life was called Nalayani and was married to a cantankerous, leprous sage named
Moudgalya. She was utterly devoted to him for many years. One day he told her that he was in fact
young and handsome and well, but had assumed his leprous form to test her; and now he would grant her
any boon. She asked him to make love to her as five men in five forms; he did, and they spent years in
blissful union. She never tired of it, but he did; he told her of his intention to retire into loneliness and
introspection. Still unsatifisfied, she begged Shiva for a husband, over and over, and so he granted her
five husbands.
In fact, Narayan leaves out the more lurid details of some versions of the Tamil
story, such as the one in which, one day, one of Moudgalya’s leprous fingers
falls off into her food, and Nalayani continues eating the rice without displaying
any revulsion. In Narayan’s version, Shiva does not appear, and in place of the
god’s boon the sage curses Nalayani to have, in her next life, five husbands to
quench her desire. Just as the Sanskrit text cobbled together three different
justifications of Draupadi’s polyandry, so Narayan picks from his knowledge of
several more Tamil versions the two that best suit his own vision of the text.
That vision is limited to events in which the Pandavas appear, but it does
include some of the episodes that might be listed among the disposable
mythological and philosophical “asides”—as long as they involve the central
characters. Thus Narayan devotes two pages to a summary of the Bhagavad
Gita, because it is a conversation between Arjuna and the incarnate god Krishna.
And he includes five pages of the famous metaphysical riddles of a goblin,
because Yudhishthira, the eldest of the five Pandavas, is the one the goblin tests.
When the goblin asks, “What is the greatest mystery?” Yudhishthira replies,
“Day after day and hour after hour, people die and corpses are carried along, yet
the onlookers never realise that they are also to die one day, but think they will
live for ever. This is the greatest wonder of the world.”
Narayan’s telling follows the Sanskrit text in treating Krishna as a mortal
prince who is nevertheless, at times, clearly aware of his divinity, such as in the
Bhagavad Gita. Krishna shifts back and forth between divinity and mortality in
the Sanskrit text, and Narayan captures this ambiguity beautifully. When
Krishna is sent to the enemy camp to make a final attempt to avoid the
Armageddon that does, in fact, take place, he behaves like a mortal prince and is
treated like one; Yudhishthira expresses concern for his safety: “I feel nervous to
let you go into their midst. They may harm you.” But then Narayan adds,
“Krishna, who was, after all, a god and confident of himself, said, ‘Don’t worry
about me.’” When Krishna sets out, the weather is literally ominous: thunder
comes out of a clear sky, rivers reverse their direction, trees are uprooted. But
Narayan remarks, “However, where Krishna’s chariot passed, flowers showered
down and a gentle cool breeze blew.” He selects the precise details to keep the
mortal/immortal tension in Krishna alive throughout the book.
Narayan tells the stories so well because they’re all his stories, like the tale of
Nalayani, stories he never heard for the first time (to use Ramanujan’s criterion).
He doesn’t have to look them up in a book. And he tells them well because he is
a novelist of the first water. He is what William Butler Yeats, who translated the
ten principal Upanishads with Shree Purohit Swami in 1938, might have been
had he also known Sanskrit. Narayan really does know the texts, and the
scholarship of the texts, and at the same time he is such a fine novelist, such a
great storyteller. He is the ideal person to tell this great story.
Wendy Doniger
Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the
Divinity School; also in the Department of South Asian Languages and
Civilizations, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College