Visiting Magadh and its ancient capital, Rajgir, is to encounter three differing perspectives. There is, firstly, the historical Magadh, one of the great mahajanapadas of ancient India. Rajgir’s fortifications and other remains take you back to the beginning of the first millennium BCE and continue through the Nandas, the Mauryas, the Shungas and others well into early medieval times.
Secondly, there is Magadh as a great centre of Buddhism. The ruins of Nalanda Mahavihara near Rajgir are not simply a tourist attraction, and the site is far from being an inanimate archaeological monument. The vast bulk of those visiting it are pilgrims — both devout lay persons from all sections of the Buddhist cosmos as well as monks.
There is also a third perspective: the Magadh of mythology and epic. That is where Jarasandha comes in. In mythology, Jarasandha as king of Magadh was an early opponent of Krishna and the Pandavas. The enmity with the former arose because his daughters were married to the ruler of Mathura, Kamsa, whom Krishna killed. Thereafter arose a series of conflicts between Krishna and Jarasandha. Magadh also stood out as a formidable obstacle to the Pandavas’ ambitions to expand their domain.
Jarasandha would finally be killed by Bhima after a long wrestling match, but his defeat and death were only possible after Krishna revealed to Bhima the secret by which he could kill his opponent. Magadh, thereafter, became part of the Pandava alliance and in the war with the Kauravas Jarasandha’s son would be killed by Karna.
Jarasandha is far from being a major character in the Mahabharata but nor is he a non-entity. One section with 195 verses — the “Jarasandha Vadha Parva” — of the Sabha Parva in the standard (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute) version of the epic, is devoted entirely to his defeat and killing. There are other traditions in which Jarasandha is a more central character — in a Jain version of the Mahabharata, the principal vector of conflict is not between the Kauravas and the Pandavas but between Krishna and Jarasandha.
Evidently, his greatest fault was that he was ranged on the wrong side and in the wrong political company. It is this ancient geopolitics — whether historical or mythological — that explains why, in most popular depictions, Jarasandha is cast uniformly in negative colours. Given that the narrative emphasis of the Mahabharata is unequivocally in favour of the victors, this is hardly surprising.
But in this context, what was interesting to find in Rajgir, jostling for space among the remains of old stupas and the cyclopean walls of the old city, was a Jarasandha temple.
Why is this surprising? There are, after all, several temples dedicated to Ravana across the country and at least one for Duryodhana. But both Ravana and Duryodhana were larger-than-life characters and their invocation in large part is also the moral that despite other sterling qualities they were unable to resist the temptations that led to their doom. In any event, these temples invoke their positive achievements.
The Jarasandha temple, on the other hand, has a different quality to it. It celebrates him entirely because he was a local. The caretaker — perhaps even the priest at the temple — answered my question of “why Jarasandha” with another: “why not?” Why should not Magadh celebrate and invoke its own king regardless of however negatively he may have been portrayed in epical and mythological literature?
The Jarasandha temple is a modern structure — certainly not more than half-a-century old. Like much else in the republic of Bihar, a caste angle can be deciphered: the Chandravanshi subcaste identifies in particular with Jarasandha. So his modern invocation is not without a political angle.
But what is most clearly at play is a longer tradition of local and regional pride and loyalty to a native ruler. Jarasandha as the king of Magadh invokes those very sentiments. That such an invocation takes place despite the strength of the Mahabharata narrative means that regional patriotism and nativism have scored a small victory here.
Can Jarasandha’s narrative invocation in Magadh against all odds also act as a fable? At the very least, it is a reminder that metanarratives have their weaknesses and cannot override local and regional dynamics.
Our global environment may be dominated by a discourse of a world between orders or without any order. A new vocabulary is being fashioned to navigate contemporary geopolitics: data sovereignty, Artificial Intelligence, critical minerals resilience, supply-chain sustainability and so on. The US-China equation as a replay of the Thucydides Trap creates a compelling need to focus on it almost obsessively. The United States of America’s internal struggles with its own demons that now dramatically dominate its semi-quincentennial are one more of the larger narratives that dominate our imagination and foreign policy.
All these are necessarily the central issues of our times, and it can be nobody’s case that we either ignore or underestimate the significance of their impact on us. But these cannot exhaust either our vocabulary or our world view. In the past, non-alignment offered few solutions or pointers when it came to dealing with contested neighbourhood issues. The same applies to strategic autonomy or multi-alignment today.
All that weighs on our neighbourhood comes from the past: territorial disputes, ancient rivalries, governance deficits and identity politics. The civic insurrections that swept away governments in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal have a combined whiff of Europe in 1848, Tsarist Russia in 1917, and the Arab Spring of this century. No one can really predict where elections early next year in Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar will take these countries. Our relations with Pakistan remain mired in a web of strategic suspicion and mistrust alongside an absence of new ideas and strategies. The list can be expanded.
The point to ponder is that this regional reality will neither recede nor ease on its own. Our larger narratives will come to a grinding halt in our neighbourhood, much like Jarasandha who still holds his own in Magadh despite being vanquished in the Mahabharata. Non-alignment in the past, despite its other utilities, did not help us in resolving issues with our neighbours. Much the same fate awaits multi-alignment or strategic autonomy. We need a regional strategy to deal with our region — a metanarrative will not work.
T.C.A. Raghavan is a former High Commissioner to Singapore and Pakistan