“After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata”, translated by Wendy Doniger

Detail from Oxford University Press cover

Long related orally, the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata is believed to have been composed in written form  between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the epic narrates the tale of greed and compassion between two clans, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and has life lessons that transcend any particular civilization. The family feud over a kingdom speaks of sacrifice, love, lust, and enmity. Its high point is the war fought between the cousins: the eighteen day battle that wreaks havoc, halving the population on the Earth. Modern retellings from the point of view of Draupadi, the woman who has five husbands (the Pandavas) have added nuance for contemporary readers: there is a warrior who can choose his moment of death and lies on a bed of arrows, there is a righteous warrior who speaks half a lie on the battlefield to win (and is punished after his death for it), there is a mother who appeals to her abandoned son who has joined her other sons’ enemies, there is a fetus who learns an important lesson in archery but dies because of being trapped in the battlefield because his mother had fallen asleep when the important concluding part of the lesson was being discussed, and of course there is the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna helping him rid himself of doubt and taking up arms against his extended family to get the property that rightfully belongs to him and his brothers.

While the story continues to fascinate readers with its convoluted plotlines of curses, myths and prophecies that explain the causation and succession of events in multiple ways, the conclusion of the epic seems to have been relatively overlooked. In her translation of the final books of the Mahabharata titled After the War, Wendy Doniger shifts the focus on the last books of the epic because these bring to light the aftermath of the war, the suffering it causes, and the way the characters meet their end. She sets out to remedy what she sees as neglect of what should have been seen as critical scholars and South Asian tradition itself. However, these parts are specifically helpful in seriously engaging with the paradoxes of the epic.

 

After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata,  Wendy Doniger (trans) (Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, August 2022)
After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata, Wendy Doniger (trans) (Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, August 2022)

The translation aims at making the ending of the Mahabharata accessible in a more or less contemporary idiom. Her selection starts with the Pandavas, the victors of the great war, visiting their mother and their uncle and aunt (the parents of the vanquished cousins in the war) who have moved to the forest living as hermits. The three die shortly after the visit. Then Krishna and his entire clan dies. The epic ends with the Pandavas going to Heaven. Interspersed among these episodes of death are deliberations on meaning of time, life, death, and karma, to name a few abstractions that seem to be helpful anchors in a world that has too much going on otherwise: too many characters related to each other in complicated ways, their actions dangling between free will and fate.

Here is an excerpt from the book about Arjuna listening to Vyasa about time as he (Arjuna) breathes his last:

 

This is the appropriate Time for you to go; I think that is the best thing for you to do. Strength, intelligence, brilliance, and foresight arise at Times of prosperity and disintegrate when Time becomes twisted. All of this has Time as its root, Wealth-winner. Time is the seed of the universe. And it is Time that once again draws things together into annihilation, spontaneously. Someone who becomes powerful once again becomes powerless; someone who becomes a ruler here once again is commanded by others. Your weapons did what was to be done, and today they have gone back to the place from which they had come. And they will come into your hand once again, when it will be the Time for that. It is Time for all of you, too, to go to the highest final destination; for I think this is the very best thing for you.

 

Snippets such as these might puzzle some (because one is reading them as a part of the fragment of the epic) but these are also small recognizable islands of meaning in explicating Indian philosophy of time, justice, causation and so on. One may not get much about the story and the immediate context from these last books because a lot of it refers to the past incidents from the Mahabharata and mythology in general. But with enough patience, one is sure to bump into passages that stand on their own while uncovering the mysteriousness  of Hindu philosophy of choice/fate, karma/fate, or dharma/fate. Here are the concluding lines from Vyasa’s hymn to dharma at the end of the book:

 

I myself cry out with my arms up, but no one hears me.
      From dharma comes politics and also pleasure; why is it not practised?
A man should never abandon dharma out of desire or fear or greed, not even for the sake of his life. Dharma is eternal, but happiness and unhappiness are transient; the soul is eternal, but its cause is transient.

 

As a new focus on the ending of the epic, Doniger’s translation will be of interest to those familiar with the story, or the “history” that the Mahabharata is understood to be in Indian tradition (for it is called itihasa or history, rather than a work of poetry). But Doniger’s introduction is also likely to be appreciated by a much wider audience. In it, Doniger brings together the themes of the epic as well as the suggestive, even contrasting, implications of the deaths of different characters. Are the characters to be blamed for the war? Or are they merely pawns being used by the gods or time or the curses unleashed because of their past karma? Doniger points out that all of these threads of death, war, and karma come together in the sense of time:

 

Time stands for the inevitable entropy of all things; often when bad things start to happen in the Mahabharata, someone simply says, “Time! Time!’ The term kala-paryaya, literally the turning or twisting of Time, which is often cited as an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable catastrophe, means both that Time is turning back – that a curse from the past has come forward to work its effect now – and that Time has twisted in an evil way, that it has become per-verse (literally, ‘turned wrong’). I will call it ‘the twisting of Time’, meaning both that Time twists certain events and that Time itself is twisted by other forces. Time actually appears personified as a most sinister character along with other bad omens.

 

Doniger’s commentary is very insightful. For instance, she calls the Mahabharata “an ancient Wikipedia” to which anyone aware of the tradition could add, making it a conversation rather than a static text. These observations make the book smart and intelligible; the translation itself might be secondary.


Soni Wadhwa lives in Mumbai.