Some books really are so magnificent that you put off finishing them for fear their delights will end. When that end comes, your two-sided relationship with the book ceases, and all you can do is re-experience your encounters with the same situations. Re-reading a book is like a friend long gone. Reliving it can be a wonderful experience, but the accompanying ruefulness can be crippling.
The Mahabharata attempts to solve this problem - it's a book to which you almost literally can't get to the end. The Mahabharata took roughly 1400 years to write, it is ten times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. It is a poem of 18 books, 200,000 lines, 1.8 million words. Its central story is perhaps the most exciting epic ever composed, and it has enough time left over for six side stories, countless folk tales and parables recounted from the oral tradition, and an endless profusion of debates over morality and theology.
This is the real multiculturalism. If you want to understand other cultures, you can't just read a couple writers your own age who make political points you conveniently agree with. You have to understand these cultures at their root and read the documents which formed them and all the generations before them. So if we need to place a text as central to World Literature as Shakespeare to Western lit and the Gospels to Christianity, there The Mahabharata sits as its shelves buckle under the weight of content so inexhaustible that only Hindu scholar or a Vedic priest can reach its end.
Like Shakespeare and The Bible, The Mahabharata is just that good because it always stays ahead of us - it's so universal that it seems to anticipate every new development around the world. The Mahabharata's central epic has scenes as dramatic as Shakespeare, battles as visceral as Homer, moral debates as nuanced as anything in Plato, and its own terrifyingly vast cosmos as spiritually charged as anything in Dante or The Bible.
And yet... the second half of The Mahabharata is basically a multi-player video game. The Mahabharata's main characters comb the Earth in search of spirits with unworldly powers, special weapons forged in unknown realms, special boons and blessings that allow them to fight with more ostentatious skill, and meanwhile, they kill literal millions of nameless soldiers who seem to come at them in packs of thousands only so its dozen-odd protagonists can mow them down.
And yet amid its distinct currency for the 'RPG'-era, it speaks to morality in a way that cuts through every potential thought we have that this book is only a game. It is a tale of Dharma, contrasting one potential king who follows the path of righteousness to a perhaps ridiculous extreme against his cousin, a potential king who completely disregards the Path of Dharma.
I have to imagine that it is impossible for any American to read those many many chapters of the good prince/demigod Yudhishtira who leads his followers through vulnerability, undergoing yet another episode of his crippling depression and anxiety, and not see in him the image of Abraham Lincoln. Yudhishtira is a man of good faith who lead his civilization into its bloodiest war - and like Lincoln, perhaps his very virtue is the force which drained so much life out of an old, corrupt era. In the wake of virtuous leaders like Lincoln and Yudhishtira, better new worlds are formed, but the price for the old world is so spectacular that one might be forgiven for thinking that maybe there would have been a little less pain if a little corruption remained. One of the many facets of The Mahabharata's genius is the fact that it so easily lets you say to yourself 'no virtue is worth this amount of pain.' The moral implications of this book are meant to be struggled with, and The Mahabharata trusts that eventually your life experience will bear out the view that the world is only livable through the path of maximum virtue.
And at the same time, it's impossible for any American to read of the bad prince, Duryodhana: venal, narcissistic, a collector of resentment who always operates in bad faith, and not think of Trump. Duryodhana is the very embodiment of a decadent society due for collapse. From birth, it's made clear that Duryodhana is every bit the demi-demon that Yudhishtira is the demigod. But everything about him is not only spoiled, but a complete embodiment of corruption in every manifestation - political, financial, sexual, human... He is, maybe, the best incarnation of villainy in literature, or certainly up there among the best I've read... He isn't just a bad guy or an evil guy, he shows us exactly how evil operates; Duryodhana and his blind father, Dhritarashta (maybe that symbolism's a little heavy-handed...), are the perfect incarnations of how evil is eternally able to seem like virtue. No matter how awful their motivations, their arguments are always sensible and show how easy it is for even the most comically obvious evildoers to convince people that theirs is the path of righteousness.
It's the Prophet Isaiah who says 'woe unto them that call good evil and evil good,' but nothing in the Bible or even Shakespeare has The Mahabharata's uncanny ability to show how people reason themselves to a conclusion in bad faith. There are always two sides to every story, but even so, in every disagreement, the odds that both sides are '50% right' are as slim as the chance that one side is 100% right and one is 100% wrong. The 'bad side' may be mostly wrong, but they always have a legitimate point. There is always a justification to act badly and double down on the original sin - and none of us are Yudhishtira. There is a little bit of Duryodhana in us all, and the fact that we can recognize small parts of ourselves in him makes him all the more more sinister. The difference, and the didactic purpose the Mahabharata serves, is to show that we in the real world should have the sense to turn back from our greatest sins before we lose everything. And yet civilization after civilization creates its Duryodhana figure, who causes the country to double down on mistake upon mistake until everything is truly lost. Let no one say that Great Man History as Europe traditionally taught it has no precedent in the East...
We have not even mentioned the other five Pandavas yet. We haven't told of Arjuna and his bow or Bheema and his mace, we haven't told of the absolutely Shakespearean casus belli involving the Pandava wife, Dhraupadi, or the truly awesome scenes involving Krishna, whose presence occasionally seems more majestic and uncanny than Yahweh himself. And most tragically, as in the story, we have forgotten about Kama.
Even more than Yudhishtira, Kama is The Mahabharata's truest hero, and the one I'd imagine inspires the most devotion in believing Hindus, because unlike Yudhishtira and his Pandava brothers, Kama has lived a cursed life. The Mahabharata, like every ancient epic, is a story of the highest born people, who once were considered the only people worth singing about. But while born high, Kama was cast into the lowest classes from right after birth, and he is every person who has born their humiliations with nobility. Kama was offered multiple times the chance to be King of the World in Yudhishtira's place, but he refused every time. Why? Because the only person who recognized his nobility and gifts when he had nothing at all was Duryodhana, and even if Duryodhana is the evilest man on the planet, his loyalty is more important to him than the Empire. Perhaps that description makes him sound stuffy and wooden, but there are a number of moments in Kama's story that easily reduce a reader to tears.
Like all ancient tragedies, The Mahabharata is really about the overwhelming cost of pride. But epics are not only tragic, they are also celebrational, epic are supposed to take in all of life in its many seasons. The story of the Mahabharata is as much about how to navigate life to minimize tragedy as it is about the tragedy itself. It's partially a sacred text, and therefore supposed to have practical application, and it's also a joyful celebration of virtue - some of those virtues are warlike, yes, but also patience, generosity, sincerity, vulnerability, and emotional resilience.
On the one hand, The Mahabharata is a legend of the sort that I would imagine will soon be scrawled all over fantasy literature. All the tropes of medieval European epics were contained in The Mahabharata, and there's no way the original bards of Beowulf and Roland and King Arthur happened upon some versions of various tales from The Mahabharata's pages. But now that the world of Kings and Swords and Gods is so definitively back, I would imagine we're about to see an epic profusion of such tales taking place Asia and Africa before the West came to allegedly spoil it.
And yet, The Mahabharata is inexhaustibly more than just a sword and sandal epic. It just might be the foundational document in the literature of the entire earth, and once people around the world come to appreciate as Indians have for nearly 2000 years, it will perhaps light a path that will make the greatest writers of human history still ahead of us.
So here's the thing... I just read a 1450 page version, and I've got a little less than 100 pages to go. I know how it ends: all the Pandavas die. I'm so not ready to kill them off yet. So in a little while, I'm going to try to read a slightly longer, perhaps more inclusive version that gives us some of the detail I didn't get the first time, and my relationship to these characters will not die for as long as I need them to live.
https://archive.org/details/MenonRameshTHEMAHABHARATAAModernRenderingVol1
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