Mahabharata, The Epic and the Nation review: Mahabharata’s enduring appeal

In a time dominated by the Manichean concepts of good and evil, G.N. Devy re-reads an epic, with its unique place in the Indian imagination, as a call for sanity

The Mahabharata inhabits a crowded field in epic literature but has a unique place in the Indian imagination. It shines bright despite the historical precedence of the Ramayana and its obvious lineages in the obscurity of the Vedas. Philosophically, there are other scriptures dense with meaning that have engaged scholarly attention far longer. What then accounts for India’s enduring fascination with the Mahabharata?

Among the forces shaping the epic, literary critic and archaeologist of language Ganesh N. Devy argues, are references to the formation of India through a fusion of various cultural threads. David Reich, whose work Devy cites, has found from all available genetic evidence, that not very much could be gleaned about “the end of the Indus Valley Civilization”, though undeniable evidence exists of “dramatic demographic change and… cultural exchange… close to the fall of Harappa”. Drawing on David Anthony’s work on material cultures, Devy then asks if the Mahabharata could be read as a tale of the “early contact of the horse-driven chariot-riding pastoral people and the agrarian city-building people”.

Prior to the grand epic, Devy suggests, there was perhaps a war waged that acquired a resonance in the popular imagination, engendering the practice, diverse and diffuse, of the recitation of the Bharata. Vyasa’s rendition of the epic into a written text, when it acquired the prefix connoting its grandeur, happened perhaps between the third and first centuries BCE. It was not exactly “original”, but a vast and sprawling corpus incorporating an “earlier orally transmitted epic… and several other narratives”.

Vyasa may also have absorbed an entire catalogue of “remembrances of things past”, beginning with the early Vedic era.

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana were distinct from other ancient literature in not being “guarded by Vedic Brahminism”. They enjoyed a “free circulation among all classes of society”, being somewhat “ambivalently, exempted from the strict pollution rules of the time”.

History is a narrative of causality. A conjuncture of circumstances leads to outcomes through active and passive agency. These consequences in turn become the cause for another sequence of events. Devy argues that epics are different in their placement “at the beginning of a new civilization or a new era”, which makes them a statement of the “unconscious metaphysics of their time”. The epic is distinct also in having supernatural agencies that deflect them from rational historical causality.

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