"The Mahabharat": The Biggest Book of Them All

Rohini Gupta

1 August 2007, 18:41


Everything about the Mahabharat is huge, from its sprawling length, to the enormous breadth of its vision. The longest of all epics is like an encyclopaedia, a world all on its own. At its core is the powerful and moving story of the Pandava and Kaurava cousins who ultimately fight the greatest war of all, Kurukshetra. But that is not all, the Mahabharat is full of mythic stories, vast time spans of history, detailed geography and a massive body of spiritual teachings.

The author of the massive epic is Rishi Vyas, who, according to the text itself, spent three years creating it, rising every morning, and working on it every day. His abode was Vyas Gufa, a cave high in the Himalayas, which is still visited today by travellers on their way to Mansarovar.

According to legend, Vyas had composed it in his mind, but was unable to find a scribe for so huge a text. Despairing of finding a human he finally sought out Lord Ganesh. Ganesh was not pleased with the amount of work and he refused at first, then grudgingly said he would do it on condition that his pen did not stop writing for even a minute. Vyas agreed but made one condition of his own, asking Ganesh to write only if he understood what he was writing.

When Vyas needed time he would compose a complicated stanza so that Ganesh had to pause and think and Vyas could get a breather. Some of his knotty stanzas still give translators a headache.

The size of the text itself is staggering. The Mahabharat numbers around one hundred thousand verses. The main text has about eighty four thousand verses and may have been larger in the past. That is not all, it has an appendix, the Harivamsha with another twelve thousand. It has over a million words, and 18 complex chapters which are large enough to be books on their own. The longest chapter, “Shanti parva” has about fourteen thousand verses.

The Mahabharat contains hundreds of stories, all the main myths and even a retelling of the other great epic, The Ramayan. It also has long descriptions of geography, especially of all the sacred sites of India, most of which can still be located.

The main story of The Mahabharat is the quarrel between cousins leading to the Kurukshetra war, but woven into this narrative is a vast mass of other stories and teachings. The Mahabharat is traditionally classified as ‘itihas’, a history. It narrates the history of humanity and even before the first humans. Time spans are very large and The Mahabharat thinks in yugas, the four ages of the world.

The Mahabharat war comes at the end of the third yuga when the world was teetering at the brink of the dreaded Kali yuga, the last one, in which we live now. Kali yuga began with the death of Krishna and will last for more than four hundred thousand years. It is the shortest, each preceding yuga is double, triple and four times its length. Time in The Mahabharat is astronomical, covering many generations and thousands of years.

The main characters of The Mahabharat are the five Pandava brothers, Krishna and their relatives, their Kaurava cousins. However the story begins much before them. The Mahabharat gives the lineage of kings, tracing it all the way to Brahma, the creator. Forty generations of Kings come before the main characters are even born. Perhaps the most famous is Bharat after whom India was called ‘Bhaarat’, and The Mahabharat itself was named. Another was Kuru whose name lives on in the battlefield of Kurukshetra and who gave his name to the race of Kurus, from which all the main characters of The Mahabharat come.

The Mahabharat itself was composed about twenty years after the death of the Pandavas. Legend says that Vyas retired to his cave to write it and he taught it to his disciples. His main disciple was Vaishyampayan, who recited it at the fire ceremony of the great grandson of the Pandavas, where it was probably heard for the first time, and it must have taken him weeks or months to recite in full.

Most of The Mahabharat is recited by him, but there are sections by others, mostly additional stories, which some commentators feel are later interpolations. The earliest text may have been a shorter version called the Jaya, which later became the Bhaarat, named after King Bharat, and finally became the great Bharat, The Maha bhaarat.

The name is no coincidence. India was Bharat before the name India was chosen at independence, and The Mahabharat is so integral a part of the land that it would be hard to separate it. It is far more than a story, it has soaked into every part of the country, even the remotest villages.

Travelling around India you find Mahabharat connections everywhere. In the east, in Orissa, I visited a village where they told me the Pandavas has spent one night, during the wanderings of their exile. One night around five thousand years ago and it still lives on in memory and a temple marks the spot even today.

In the south, in the lushness of a remote forest I visited an unfinished temple said to be built by the Pandavas. They left it unfinished because they were travelling and had to leave. Left over stones and half carved pillars are everywhere. The carvings are incomplete but the memory remains.

In the west is Dwarka, Krishna’s mystical city where archeologists are unearthing underwater ruins which they thought to be no more than legend. In the north, on the banks of the icy blue river Yamuna the people still worship Duryodhan, the villain of the epic, especially around the tiny hill town of Lakhamandal where he tried to kill his cousins in the burning house of lac. The Mahabharat is not just a text for academicians, it is alive in every village and town in India.

The epic may be the biggest book of all but its impact is even bigger. Over thousands of years it has been told and retold over and over again. In stories by the fire after the day’s farming is over, told by mothers to sleepy children, acted on stage in plays and theatre, recreated in dance and music, and lately, made for the big and small scene in film and on TV. It has been told and retold in all the major languages of India, a country in which each state has its own language.

When The Mahabharat TV serial was aired the whole country came to a standstill. Sunday mornings became sacrosant, people were sternly warned not to call, visits and meetings were postponed and all schedules arranged so that the one sacred hour was undisturbed. Planes were delayed because the pilots, pursers and passengers were all together in the lounge clustered around the TV set. From one end of India to the other families were lost in the timeless magic of The Mahabharat.

Besides history and geography The Mahabharat also contains some of the greatest teachings, including the most famous of all, the Bhagvad Gita, the song of the Lord, which is a small part of the first of the war books, Bhishma parva.

The armies are assembled, at daybreak, in formation, waiting for the signal to begin the war. Arjun asks Krishna to drive his chariot between the two silent armies, and there he loses his nerve and Krishna gives him the 18 chapters and 700 verses of the immortal Bhagvad Gita.

That one book alone would make The Mahabharat important, but it is not the only gita. There are several others, the Anu Gita, the Uddhav Gita, and other teachings of every kind. There are long passages on the description of the difficult Kali yuga, our modern age, and a long section in which the fallen patriarch Bhishma advised Yudhishtir how to be King after the Kurukshetra war.

The war is the central part of the story and takes most of the text. The eighteen days of war are described in extreme and sometimes confusing detail. The war is enormous, it is not one small kingdom fighting another. The stakes are very great, the whole of the land of Bharat is at stake, and every kingdom from the biggest to the smallest brings its armies to either the Pandava or Kaurava side.

The text mentions that only two people stayed out of the battle, one small time king Rukmi who was so arrogant that neither side wanted him, and Balaram, Krishna’s brother who did not participate in the war. Apart from these two, every king and army from all over India stood on that battlefield. Grandfathers, fathers, sons and grandsons all fought side by side. Grandmothers, mothers, daughters and grand daughters were all bereaved at the same time. That one war changed the whole political landscape of India.

Eighteen army divisions called Akshauhinis fought that war, eleven on the Kaurava side and seven on the Pandava. An Akshauhini consists of smaller divisions made up of the four essentials in battle, infantry, cavalry, mobile chariots and the heavy armour of elephant units. The numbers given are so mind boggling that many argue that they are completely unrealistic. They may be exaggerated but even if scaled down, the figures are still immense. When the armies were arranged in the battle formations, called vyuhas, they stretched for a couple of miles.

According to the figures given in the text, adding all the units, one Akshauhini consisted of around twenty thousand elephants and twenty thousand chariots, one hundred and nine thousand foot soldiers and sixty five thousand horsemen. 18 of these armies fought in the war.

The battlefield of Kurukshetra stretched for miles. In those days armies camped in a specially chosen battlefield where no farmers or villagers would be inconvenienced. The camps must have been immense to accommodate so many men and animals, not just the armies but also the cooks and attendants and healers and others.

War began at sunrise and ended when the sun went down. Rules were very strict. Unarmed people and non combatants must not be touched even if they strayed in the middle of battle, those who flee must be allowed to leave, and only equals could fight each other. After dusk both armies laid down arms and were free to wander from one camp to another.

The war lasted for eighteen days and when the final day was over only ten people were alive, the five Pandavas on the Pandava side and three warriors on the Kaurava side. After the war the Pandavas were the undisputed rulers of a massive empire and the effect of the war was so great that their descendants kept Kuru power supreme for thirty generations. In history that is a very long time. In comparison, after Rama, his kingdom of Ayodhya became marginalised in just a couple of generations and barely rates a mention in the later times of The Mahabharat.

The war is the central story of the epic, and it follows the lives of those who fought it, the Pandavas and Kauravas, from birth to death. That would be enough for most stories, but The Mahabharat has a much vaster perspective. Long before any of the main participants are born The Mahabharat mentions their previous births and why they chose to take birth. The past lives of all the main characters are given and the whole drama set up for the epic.

The war could have ended the story, but The Mahabharat is not done yet. The eldest Pandava Yudhishtir is crowned Emperor of the whole country and he rules for a long, eventful thirty six years. At the end of that period Krishna departs this world, his wonderful city of Dwarka sinks and the Pandavas turn their kingdom over to their grandson and make their last journey.

They follow an old tradition in which those who had finished with life walked into the Himalayan snows and kept walking. In later centuries many others followed the tradition of the Pandavas when they too did not wish to return. The route the Pandavas took is well marked out. Even today, if you go trekking in the Himalayas, you can find the village where they say the Pandavas ate their last meal, and the village where they left their weapons, and the mountain which is called the stairway to heaven where they climbed up into eternity.

Vyas describes how they climbed into the permanent snows above the tree line and the four brothers and their wife fall and die one by one. The story does not end there. Vyas goes where few story tellers dare to go. He follows Yudhishtir as he is taken to heaven in his physical body. Vyas ends his tale with the afterlife of the Pandavas in the realms after death. The last book is called the Swargarohan, the ascent to heaven.

The Mahabharat is huge and reading it is like taking a tough and emotional journey, at the end you feel exhausted by the richness of the story, by the joy and the sadness, the grief, and passion, the love and the success, but also satisfied and fulfilled, as if you have lived several lifetimes in those pages.

The Mahabharat says of itself, ‘what is in here may exist elsewhere, but what is not here is nowhere’ and its contents are so exhaustive that it is no empty boast. The Mahabharat is called the fifth Veda and the story goes that when the Vedas were put on one side of the scales and The Mahabharat on the other, the scales dipped heavily on The Mahabharat side.

It is not just the physical size, but also the richness, the depth and complexity, and the powerful impact of the book in which the Bhagvad Gita is just a small part, that makes The Mahabharat the biggest book of them all.

Comment

  1. Hi,
    Can i have the snap shot and description about this book.

    please give me some idea about this book.

    I am very interest to buy the book.]

    Regards,
    Srinivas

    — srinivas vangari · Apr 17, 14:05 · #

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