Book name- THE MAHABHARATA IN GLOBAL POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT
Authors- Milinda Banerjee and Julian Strube
Publishers- Cambridge
Price- Rs 1,195
For a long time, global intellectual history has been severely occidocentric. Intellectual traditions of Oriental civilisations have, of course, been studied thoroughly, but only as culture-specific repositories, while the intellectual contributions of the West have been easily treated as global. In recent times, the trend is changing towards a positive direction and this volume edited by Milinda Banerjee and Julian Strube is a new, important addition to this. It is not just an addition to the several collections of essays on the Mahabharata, an ancient epic rightly introduced by the editors as “India’s most influential political text”, but also a pathbreaking work in reading the text in relation to its impact on global political and social thought. Its impact on India can hardly be overstressed, as Banerjee has shown in his thorough overview of how the Mahabharata has been a common source of legitimacy for the Mughal and the British stakes, moderate nationalists and revolutionaries, secularists and votaries of Hindutva, Brahmanical orthodoxy and Dalit politics, the Constitution of India and the present ruling disposition.
The Bhagavad Gita, the most celebrated excerpt from the text, has inspired Bal Gangadhar Tilak to preach selfless violence as a valid means to a noble end and Mahatma Gandhi to practise non-violence. Arkamitra Ghatak has shown how Gandhi’s strategy of reading the Gita as a text of ahimsa was possible by reading the context of the Kurukshetra war as a metaphorical conflict in one’s self rather than as a historical one. This strategy had to change, even veer a little closer to Tilak’s, when Gandhians like Mahadev Desai and Vinoba Bhave tried to reach out to the erudite, English-reading audience or to use it for a new social movement like bhoodan, respectively. In fact, the Gita has been such an influential text that its worth has often determined the credibility of the entire Indian, or Asiatic, knowledge system in the Europe-dominated field of global philosophy, as shown by the contradictory positions of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was enthusiastic about the text’s philosophical brilliance, and of G.W.F. Hegel, who negated its lack of freedom and systematicity, discusses Paulus Kaufmann, also commenting on how Hegel’s own method could be used for appreciation of Indic philosophy with a better knowledge of the source texts. Melanie J. Muller discusses the varied use of the Mahabharata in the multiple constructions of ideal Indian womanhood — be it in Gandhi’s absurd and problematic advocacy of women being equal to men by maintaining their essentialised gender roles or in the advocacy of bolder femininity in the representation of Draupadi in the novels of Pratibha Ray and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or in shifting the focus to the women on the margin who — when equipped with a voice in Mahasweta Devi’s short stories — could offer a freer world of womanhood to the women of privilege, tied to rigid gender norms.
Deemed as an itihasa (tradition about the past) and claiming to be an encyclopaedic account of everything, including dharma (social mores) and artha (politics and economy), the Mahabharata has naturally been used to construct pasts to suit present needs. Alok Oak reads such attempts by the Sanskritist, Chintaman Vinayak Vaidya, in Maharashtra, while Philipp Sperner shows how the German thinker, Friedrich Schlegel, and the Hindi poet, Maithilisharan Gupt, sought in the text a nostalgia for a pristine Indo-European and glorious ancient Indian past, respectively, a tendency that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru — aiming to look ahead rather than backwards — warned against.
The text’s viability in legitimising a certain notion of the past could affect its popularity, as demonstrated by David M. Malitz in the context of Thailand where the Mahabharata was an immensely popular repository of depicting the valour of the royalties till the sixteenth century but gradually lost importance when the concept of kingship changed. On the other hand, a text considered nothing but an example of Brahmanical violence inferior to Buddhism in ancient China and Japan gradually became one of the pan-Asian cultural treasures in the thoughts of the likes of Su Manshu in the colonial period and was even discussed as one of the possible sources of the name of China, as Egas Moniz Bandeira discusses.
However, a volume like this needed more detailed treatment of the Mahabharata’s overall impact in the Perso-Arabic world than Christopher D. Bahl and Abdullah Soufan’s case study of the introduction to Wadi al-Bustani’s Arabic translation of the text, or Amanda Lanzillo’s discussion on the different treatments of the
Persian (and Urdu) Mahabharatas in India and Iran. Though transliterations are bound to be varied in a volume like this dealing with sources in so many languages, some standardisation for the same word (such as sthitaprajna or jnana) would make the reading easier.