Morality and other curiosities | Review of ‘The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals’ by Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger explores Mahabharata's tales of moral ambiguity, dharma and subversion in her new book The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals

When author Henry James referred to the great 19th century novels as “loose, baggy monsters”, we can assume that he had never come across the great Indian epic. A looser, baggier monster than our Mahabharata would be hard to imagine. But an epic of ancient times was not just meant to be a unified narrative of a conflict between heroes and villains, with some women thrown in. It served as a receptacle of every tale ever told, and these extra tales were slipped in whenever a couple of characters were passing the time of day. 

In The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals, mythologist Wendy Doniger dips into our perennial wells once again. This time she looks into the 12th and 13th books of the Mahabharata, in which, as Bhishma lies dying on his bed of arrows, he and the newly victorious king Yudhishthira seize the opportunity to hold a discourse on the niceties of dharma, illustrating them through various stories. 

“Moral” is not quite the word we would use to describe the tales told here, starring the lascivious Indra and the other usual suspects, whose reckless or random acts are as hard to understand as the counter-measures taken by much-harassed wives, children and oppressed classes. In fact, let’s toss out “discourse” and “niceties” as well. For the reader of today, there is no way to tease even a simple lesson on right and wrong out of these struggles, and certainly no glimmer of light is shed on dharma. What Doniger has compiled here works only as a collection of curiosities. 

The translation is more pedestrian than expected. The structure of the book is repetitive, with many preliminaries and then a separate introduction to each tale, which seems to go over the same ground as the tale itself. And some of the sentences themselves are repetitive, as if thin material is being padded out. 

In telling a story about a mouse that frees a cat from a snare, while fending off an owl and a mongoose, Bhishma advises the king how to survive when surrounded by enemies. In another story, a starving Vishvamitra argues that he may steal, and steal meat, because he is hungry, while the hunter who has caught the animal pleads with him not to abandon his dharma. These are among the rare stories in which dharma is talked of at all. 

For the most part, we are walked through the deservedly obscure byways of the epic, and we are introduced to eminently forgettable characters. The Mahabharata is the epic of the Kali Yuga, and if there is a theme in this set of Bhishma’s tales, it is subversion, but subversion to what end? Is it to demonstrate that after a devastating war, we are left with more uncertainties than ever about what is right, what is wrong, and what may be the fruits of our karma? Is it to remind us that the world is still hurtling towards chaos? 

The reviewer is the author of ‘Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year’.