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Book Reviews
What is it in this epic-of-epics, eight times larger than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined — denounced as “a literary monster” and “monstrous chaos” by Occidental Indologists Winternitz and Oldenberg — that appeals so irresistibly to modern man in search of his soul, when the audience for which it was composed — the enthroned monarch and the forest-dwelling sage — has long since sunk into the dark backward and abysm of time? The account that follows shows the web of enchantment it weaves: “Shells were exploding over Leningrad. Enemy bombs were falling on the streets stirring up clouds of dust…Sanscrit language was being heard in the building of the Academy of Sciences on the Neva River embankment…First, in the original, and then in translation, Vladimir Kalyanov, a specialist on India, was reading Mahabharata, a wonderful monument of Indian literature, to his colleagues, who remained in the besieged city…He translated during the hard winter of 1941, with no light, no fuel and no bread in the city…The translation of the Indian epic into Russian was never interrupted.” Vyasa, master raconteur, weaves together a bewildering skein of threads to create a many-splendoured web from which there was no escape for the listener of those days and there is none even for the reader of today. The thousands of years that separate us from Vyasa have not, surprisingly, dimmed the magic of his art that had entranced Janamejaya and Shaunaka. We find here a storyteller par excellence laying bare, at times quite pitilessly, the existential predicament of man in the universe. If, later in the epic, Vyasa shows us what man has made of man, here, in the first two cantos, he plumbs the depths of the humiliatingly petty pre-occupations of the Creator’s noblest creation. Indeed, the dilemmas the characters find themselves enmeshed in cannot even be glorified as ‘tragic’. Perhaps, that is why we find the epic so fascinating — for, how many of us are cast in the heroic mould? We do not have to strain the imagination to reach out and identify with Yayati or Shantanu. We need no willing suspension of disbelief to understand why the Brahmin Drona should sell his knowledge to the highest bidder, or why Drupada does not protest too much when his daughter is parcelled out among five brothers who had routed him in a skirmish. Passions do, indeed, spin the plot and we are betrayed by what is false within. Then, as now, there is no need to look for a villain manoeuvring without. If we resonate in empathy with the sense of tears in human things, we also thrill with joy on meeting the indomitable spirit of woman in an epic that many misconceive as celebrating a male chauvinist outlook. Whether it is Shakuntala proudly asserting her integrity and berating the mean-minded Dushyanta in open court; or Devayani demanding that Kacha return her love and imperiously brushing aside a lust-crazed husband; or Kunti refusing to pervert herself into a mindless son-producing womb to gratify the twisted desires of a frustrated husband; or Draupadi rescuing her five husbands from slavery despite being staked by them at dice-time and again it is woman standing forth in all the splendour of her spirited autonomy as a complete human being that rivets our attention and evokes our admiration. The transcreation by Prof. P. Lal — Padma Shri awardee, Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow and Distinguished Visiting Professor at many American colleges — was begun in 1968, published in monthly fascicules from plates of his inimitable calligraphy. The single volume editions of each canto (so far the Book of Beginnings and the Book of the Court are published) allow us to grasp each in its entirety (though depriving us of the artistry of the calligraphy), letting the epic grow on the reader through 19 and 11 chapters respectively without any critical paraphernalia, for “the story’s the thing, catching conscience of commoner and king” as the transcreator writes so perceptively. Forthcoming volumes contain the individual prefaces, notes and glossaries. This is the only English rendering that follows the Sanskrit text of the epic verse by verse as it is current today (the “vulgate”) in all the recensions — “the full ragbag version” as he puts it — eschewing the not very consistent text of the Critical Edition that JAB van Buitenen translated with its numerous excisions (being continued under . Fitzgerald’s supervision). |
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