Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (92 page)

The
Mahabharata
as a whole is solidly encased in three outer narrative frames, nested successively inside one another, that are never dislodged over its entire length. For us, as an audience, the outermost frame always belongs to the “voice” that tells
us
the story, in a recitation or on the page, here and now; inside this anonymous frame is Ugrashravas’s frame, retelling the epic to the sages gathered in the Naimisha Forest; and inside that frame is Vaishampayana’s frame, in which the latter recites the entire
Mahabharata
at Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice. All the events we read about or hear being narrated in the epic are always
inside
Vaishampyana’s frame—except for the meta-events that reach us from Ugrashravas’s outer frame. My rough estimate is that, inside the three outermost frames, we encounter some four hundred distinct narrative frames that fall along a spectrum, one end of which is marked by narrators who appear many times, and the other end by narrators who appear only once each, to convey a single fable, explanation, vignette, or thumbnail sketch.

This vast structure of emboxed narrative frames—conceptually resembling a set of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes, fitting snugly one inside another—allows the
Mahabharata
to create the most compact configuration for the integrated narration of multiple stories, in which both the causal interrelations among events and the mimetic force of their representation in the poem are articulated clearly. The tightness of this structure in each recension, as in the critical edition of the poem, cannot be overemphasized. In the various Sanskrit recensions we have inherited, each narrative frame is duly opened and closed, and the poem stands consistently as a well-crafted whole, its great diversity of themes held together by the underlying grid of narrative frames.

FORM AND GENRE

The
Mahabharata
derives one kind of structural integrity from its scaffolding of framed narratives, but its poetic qualities depend as much on what it communicates as on its mode or manner of communication. What, then, is the text’s shaping principle with respect to its raw material, and what kind of poem does it become in the process of representing its content? In the past two centuries, Euro-American scholars have often found it difficult to respond to the Sanskrit work as an aesthetic object; as a consequence, they generally have ignored its structural integrity, and have focused instead on its uses as a religious text and its usefulness as a cultural document for outsiders, especially as a source of information about ancient Indian society, religion, politics, law, and morality. For a much longer time, Indian audiences have also turned to the
Mahabharata
primarily for its content, and perhaps secondarily for its aesthetic qualities—but this is so because, in the practice of Hinduism, the Sanskrit text has the status of scripture or quasi-scripture, next in spiritual authority only to the four Vedas. As a “fifth Veda” or body of authoritative knowledge and discourse, it is valued for its guidance on duty and ethics, its teachings about right and wrong, its arguments about the human self and the ends of life, its analysis of war and justice, and its vision of a good ruler and a good society. At the same time, however, the subcontinent’s artists have long affirmed the epic’s power as a work of beauty and imagination—not apart from, but in addition to, its power as a text linked to scripture revealed in “the language of the gods.”
⁹

Nevertheless, just as the
Mahabharata
provides a picture of its author, its authorship, and its transmission, it also offers commentary on its form and genre. One of its classifications of itself is as an
akhyana
, which identifies its mode of presentation and its poetic function. This label means that the poem sees itself as a telling, a narration, or an informative communication; that what it relates is specifically an old tale or a legend; and that its preferred mode of delivery is speech or oral performance rather than writing. The Sanskrit text also describes itself as an
upakhyana
which, as a nuance of
akhyana
, means that it is a retelling, rather than an original narration, of a tale heard earlier from others.

When the
Mahabharata
uses a different self-descriptive label,
samvada
, it characterizes its own form as dialogue. This is a precise specification because, in recitation and on the printed page, the Sanskrit text presents itself, from beginning to end, as a vast dialogue involving primary and secondary (and sometimes also tertiary) characters, nested inside and outside its numerous narrative frames. The poem, in fact, is fundamentally dialogic, not only in the sense of being cast in the form of a verbal exchange, but in the more robust sense of belonging to “the dialogic mode.”
¹⁰
In Bakhtin’s theory, this is the mode in which individuals exist in human society in constant interaction with others, so that any one person’s thought and speech on any given occasion are always already “in dialogue with” some other—or someone else’s—prior thought and speech. The poets of the
Mahabharata
explicitly understand and acknowledge dialogism as the shaping principle of their poetry, and they systematically flesh out the entire poem as a vast, multivoiced, ongoing
samvada
about everything on earth and in the universe, inside as well as outside the borders of human experience, so that, as they claim, “Whatever is found here may be found somewhere else, but what is not found here is found nowhere else.” As a dialogic poem that goes well beyond the surface form of verbal exchange, the
Mahabharata
is an active response to the states of affairs it depicts, and its narrative therefore is always a multifarious modification of plain mimetic representation.

Finally, the Sanskrit poem also describes its genre in terms of its theme or content. Almost two millennia ago, the poets who finalized its text cast it as an epic, but they did not have a label for their enterprise.
Itihasa
was the everyday word they adopted to name the genre with which they could represent the absolute past of the people and the land of which they were the imaginative inheritors. At least two thousand years old, the word
itihasa
literally means “thus it was” or “so it happened,” and is the exact Sanskrit precursor of the German phrase
wie es eigentlich gewesn ist
, “as it has been actually.” By claiming to be an
itihasa
, the
Mahabharata
seems to assert its function as a mimetic representation of events past. Following this implication, Indian as well as Euro-American scholars since the nineteenth century have tried to interpret the
Mahabharata
as history—often too literally, and usually with absurd outcomes. Any encounter with the
Mahabharata
’s narrative, however, indicates immediately that the poem does not define itself as a history in the modern sense. Its poets are under no illusion that they somehow are composing a factual, empirically verifiable, or documentary account of the past, and they do not wish to impose any such illusion on their audience. Instead, they seem to focus on events that are long over, even for them, to which they themselves no longer have any real access (through direct experience or personal memory or reliable eyewitness reports), and which they know they can memorialize only
poetically
—events that can be “recovered” solely by imagining and reimagining, narrating and renarrating what Goethe, with a fellow poet’s acuteness, called “the absolute past.”

Bakhtin, again, explains what this means in a way that fits the
Mahabharata
with surprising precision. The genre that is designed to represent the absolute past is the genre that we now designate as the epic which, for the Russian theorist, has “three constitutive features”: it seeks to represent the “epic past” of a nation; it draws on “national tradition” for its narrative, and not on its author’s “personal experience and the free thought that grows out of it”; and, in “Goethe’s and Schiller’s terminology,” it establishes and works across “an absolute epic distance” between “the time in which the singer . . . lives”—or the worlds in which the author and his audience exist—and “the epic world” that it depicts. These three features, Bakhtin argues in his emphatic style, are interrelated:

The world of the epic is the national heroic past: it is a world of “beginnings” and “peak times” in the national history, a world of fathers and founders of families, a world of “firsts” and “bests” . . . The epic was never a poem about the present, about its own time . . . [It] has been from the beginning a poem about the past, and the authorial position immanent in . . . and constitutive for it . . . is [that] . . . of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendant . . . Both the singer and the listener, immanent in the epic as a genre, are located in the same time and on the same evaluative (hierarchical) plane, but the represented world of the heroes stands on an utterly different and inaccessible time-and-value plane, separated by epic distance. The space between them is filled with national tradition. To portray an event on the same time-and-value plane as oneself and one’s contemporaries . . . is . . . to step out of the world of epic into the world of the novel.
¹¹

The
Mahabharata
displays all the characteristics that Bakhtin attributes to an epic. It combines the epic mode with myth and romance, allegory and high mimeticism; and it perfects the method of narrative framing, using it to contain multiple plotlines and divergent points of view, as each of its main characters pursues his or her own quest. It is at once a telling and a retelling, a dialogue and a history—but it is especially a poem on a grand scale about a clan divided by hatred, a queen molested and avenged, a just war against an unjust disinheritance, a victory that is indistinguishable from defeat, and the death of an old order and the birth of a new one.

RETELLING THE
Mahabharata

Satyamurti, an established British poet with a connection to India, approaches the
Mahabharata
as a modern poet responding poetically to an ancient poem. In its most direct form, her objective is to understand the Sanskrit work, to capture her understanding of it in a poem of her own, and to place her text before contemporary readers in English—for whom it then becomes a means to experience the poetry of the
Mahabharata
, though necessarily at a remove. Her concern is with poetry at every stage in an idealized circuit: as an object of understanding, as a mode of understanding, as a medium of expression, as a vehicle of communication, and as an outcome of the process as a whole. Poetry thus becomes a seamless continuum enveloping her enterprise, an analogue of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s “hermetic egg,” which needs nothing outside itself in order to give birth to new life.

There is, however, one practical rupture in this continuum. Whenever a modern work sets out to represent an older work, it can only do so in a genre that shades off into other genres performing similar functions but in other ways. A text that represents another text may be a translation (“faithful”), an adaptation (somewhat “loose”), a retelling (relatively “free”), or even a reworking (“creative”). In the past two decades, literary theorists have argued persuasively that all these categories can be placed on a single conceptual gradient called “translation” in the broadest sense, which moves from the most literal rendering of a text at one end to the most approximate at the other. In the late seventeenth century, John Dryden suggested brilliantly that the three defining positions on this spectrum be labeled “metaphrase,” which is a word-for-word or interlinear version; “paraphrase,” which deviates from the letter of a text, but not its spirit; and “imitation,” which ignores the letter, and also merely “strives after” its spirit. In general, translators may pursue any of these shades of rendering legitimately, provided they identify the genre of their output without ambiguity—that is, as a translation, a paraphrase, an adaptation, an imitation, and so on. For whichever genre they practice, translators can choose one of two overall methods: the direct method, where the translator adequately knows and uses both the languages involved, the one from and the one into which she is translating; and the indirect method, where she knows only the language into which she is translating, and has access to the original text solely through preexisting intermediary renderings and other resources.

In Satyamurti’s project, the break appears at the link of genre of representation and choice of method. On the general spectrum of translation, her retelling can be seen as a paraphrase. Her method, however, is the indirect method, because she is not a scholar of the Sanskrit language, and has access to the original text of the
Mahabharata
only through intermediary English translations and commentaries. Since her poetics of retelling rests on the assumption that her English poem is a reliable representation of the Sanskrit poem, she has to ensure that her intermediary resources are as trustworthy as possible. Her version of the epic therefore is based on the most literal and scholarly renderings available in English, together with the most dependable and informative commentaries, selections, and condensations.

In its practical application, Satyamurti’s indirect method is as elaborate and systematic as it is fine-tuned. Her retelling is not a mere versification of an existing prose translation or someone else’s gloss or crib. Depending on the material and her selection, she chooses to narrate some parts in detail, some in a condensed form, and some only in brisk summary. The Sanskrit original and its prose metaphrases in English may handle a given episode in uniform depth, but Satyamurti omits some parts altogether and treats other parts differentially, guided by her sense of their poetic value and meaning, their significance in the larger narrative, and their potential imaginative impact on her readers. Even as she goes by the emotional flow of sounds, rhythms, images, characters, and events in her own verse, however, she works strictly within the limits of her intermediary resources, which determine the reliability of her rendering. Given the meticulousness of her craft and her strong sense of balance and proportion, restraint and understatement, her retelling emerges as a neatly scaled “miniature representation” of a gargantuan whole.