The Ever-Moving Wheel: G.N. Devy on the Mahabharata
Photo: Karan Madhok
What is the purpose of the Mahabharata? In his short, succinct volume Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation, G.N. Devy tackles the biggest questions behind one the greatest epics ever composed.
Composed over a thousand years ago, the great Indian epic Mahabharata is estimated to be around 2 million words long, ten times the length of The Iliad and The Odyssey combined. Civilizations have come and passed, but this tale continues to be a major influence on the culture and lifestyle of India—a nation of one-sixth of the world’s living population. The epic covers a vast swathe of characters, geographies, and spiritual and philosophical questions.
In his short, succinct book Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation (Aleph, 2022), G.N Devy writes the oft-repeated aphorism in India, that there is “nothing in the cosmos that his not present in the Mahabharata” (6). Often credited to the sage Vyasa, the Mahabharata is a tale that brings together history, myth, and imagination, a story of a great war, a close sketch of hundreds of characters (human, beast, and divine), a philosophical treatise, a great drama that spans generations and geographies.
And yet, despite the wealth and breadth of detail in this epic, Devy in his text, over and over again returns to this central question: What is the Mahabharata’s purpose? What is it really about?
This is hardly a new question. For thousands of years, Indians and Indologists have been consumed by the great epic, devoured it, analysed it, attempted to understand it, attempted to bundle together all of its free-flowing threads and themes into a simpler definition, into a meaning, a purpose, a what and a why.
Devy, a linguist and scholar who has worked extensively with the Adivasi communities in India, explores many of these threads in this short and highly-readable volume. One by one, he dissects the relationship to the Mahabharata’s various causes and preoccupations to hover over that ultimate purpose, including its place among other epics in human history—and particularly, epics memorised and passed on verbally—and on the role of the evolution and synthesis of language.
One of his pointed questions, for example, is about character. Who he asks, is the Mahabharata about? Unlike the other great ‘national epic’—Ramayana, the story of Ram—the Mahabharata is of what Devy calls ‘The Endless Plot’ without an easy-to-identify central character. In what eventually descends to a ‘Great War’ between two sets of cousins—the Pandavs and the Kauravs—Arjuna, Karna, Krishna, Bhishma, Kunti, and Draupadi rise as possible candidates as the centrepiece, but none sustain the story from beginning to end. Devy instead suggests considering the divine being Yama, who inaugurates the clan of Kuru warriors central to story, meddles with human action and duties as Krishna, and stands at the gates of heaven in the epic’s finale. Known in modern times as the god of death and justice, but in pre-Mahabharata mythology was described as: “Time as well as Light… Yama was not yet seen as the God of Death. He was an immortal who opted to undergo death. In that sense, he is the first to be both a mortal and an immortal being. He combines light and darkness in his person, given his parentage.” (48)
The character and contradictions of Yama are a great example of the Mahabharata’s easy comfort with duality. Mortal and immortal, light and dark. Unlike the Ramayana, which is more straightforward parable of morality—good vs. evil—the Mahabharata makes it difficult to make those distinctions, between the light and the darkness. A number of the chief characters have multiple qualities: they’re flawed, they’re heroic, they’re charming, they’re devious, they’re human—even the divine ones.
The Mahabharata makes it difficult to make those distinctions, between the light and the darkness. A number of the chief characters have multiple qualities: they’re flawed, they’re heroic, they’re charming, they’re devious, they’re human—even the divine ones.
This is one of the major reasons why I adore the Mahabharata, perhaps more than any other surviving myth. It isn’t a scripture of spiritual or philosophical instruction, like the Vedas or Upanishads; and it doesn’t take sides like the Ramayana. It shows the flaws of humans and gods as they are. Like Devy mentioned, it is merely including all that is in the cosmos; we have to interpret it for ourselves.
It is a vast and immensely-popular story. But, perhaps because of its size and its many versions and interpretations, I have always found it truly daunting to capture the big ideas of this story in the vessel of my mind. Picking up Devy’s book, what surprises me most was the ambition of how such a slim volume—a mere 127 pages before endnotes—could possibly explain this mammoth epic and its relationship to our enormous, ancient country.
In the introduction to his book, Devy, with the ease of a learned expert, makes this near-impossible task look easy, summarising the bare bones of the epic in a few crisp lines: “a devastating war fought between cousins, with almost all the regional contemporary rulers of the time aligned on one or the other side. The story, read at this level, is spread over five generations, while the war itself is fought over eighteen days, each day bringing in new twists and turns to the narrative.” (2) He then goes on to list the major characters of the five generations—each name sparking a memory of epic mythology of their own.
One by one, Devy tackles the larger questions surrounding the epic, forming a chakravyuha around the story to help us find our way out of the maze. He explores the complications of attributing authorship to the Mahabharata, discusses the difference between written and oral epics, and deliberates on the difference of the poetic styles of Valmiki (author of Ramayana) and Vyasa. Vyasa, Devy argues, hardly embellished scenes—no matter how dramatic—so that even the great insult to Draupadi or the tragic deaths of the heroes were told as another straightforward chapter in history.
The Mahabharata remains, in my opinion, perhaps the greatest fable ever composed. I have read it in abridged children's versions, Amar Chitra Kathas in English and Hindi, as the official Penguin Classics English translation (translated by John D. Smith). The iconic B.R. Chopra Doordarshan televised series was a major milestone of my early life in the late 80s, as it was for almost every Indian of my generation. I’ve seen theatrical snippets of the story, and seen scenes from the epic adapted into cinema.
My first acquaintance to the Mahabharata came in the form of my namesake. I was named after Karna, one of the epic’s main protagonists, and, as I would later learn, one of the great anti-heroes in all of literature. He remains to date a close character study of exploring nature vs. nurture. He is a brother of the Pandavs who fights for the Kauravs; he is of royal blood but raised by a commoner; he is cruel and he is kind, performing his duty in the philosophical sense explored in the epic (dharma) as well as the very opposite of his duties (adharma).
Every action, insult, mistake, or act of generosity has its reaction, all that comes around goes around. The wheel keeps turning. The epic of all cosmos is an epic of this wheel of Time.
The Mahabharata is filled with wonderful walking contradictions like Yama and Karna. While the heroic Pandavas are considered to be the protagonists of the story—disgraced and robbed of their rights and pushed to the brink of war—their downfall begins because a gambling spree spiralling out of control by their eldest and their leader, Yudhishthira. While much of the story’s preoccupation is to preach the practice of one’s right dharma, the protagonists achieve their biggest moments of victory by often doing the exact opposite. It is with the blessing of Krishna that Arjuna kills Karna while he was off of his battle chariot, going against the dharmic etiquette of war. Similarly, the final battle only comes to an end when Bhima breaks another ‘rule’ of combat, by striking Duryodhan below the waist with his gada to strike him down—once again on Krishna’s advice.
Krishna, Devy notes, is a late arrival in the pantheon of Hindu gods, but his integral role in the Mahabharata, and particularly his delivery of the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God) as philosophical musings on life, dharma, spirituality, elevated him too one of India’s most-important and beloved deities. “It is also difficult to say,” Devy writes,
if the great devotion to the Gita in the second millennium of Indian history was because it was a part of the epic, or whether the undiminished popularity of the Mahabharata till this day has been a result of the Gita being a part of it. And yet, one can be certain beyond any doubt that the essence of the Gita—the precept of detachment, and the perspective of an uninvolved witness, the sthitpragnya or sakshi—was the precise sentiment that the Mahabharata epic south to evoke in the minds of its audiences. (43)
So, to return to Devy’s initial question, is the purpose of the Mahabharata to be a tale of the theoretical lessons imparted in the Gita? Themes of war, tragic loss, and emphatic detachment from suffering are evoked in the shorter poem as well as the larger epic—and Devy rightly makes the comparison to these philosophical outlooks to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, who lived around the same time of the Mahabharata’s composition.
But, when exploring who the epic is about, Devy casts the net of the Mahabharata’s purpose even wider. If this is the story of Yama (and Krishna, a form of Yama), who is considered to be the ‘Great Arbiter of Time’, “Is it, therefore, possible to read the Mahabharata as an epic of Time? Since Yama is not exactly identified with death, but is the overlord of life and death, would it be possible to understand the epic as a great poem of Life and Death?” (52)
This wider cast of the net—of history and time and all of mortality—also seeks, ambitiously, to centre the story of the Mahabharata as the great common denominator between the vast variety of the Indian nation. Truly, it isn’t uncommon in India to often come across people from a diversity of backgrounds and cultural and linguistic backgrounds, who have their own version of the Mahabharata, their own interpretations and adaptions, stories from the epic specific to their particular region which they can still cite and apply to contemporary life, as a template of life’s great ongoing dilemmas and paradoxes, of conflicts resolved and unresolved.
Myths, Devy argues, are “a collective dream of an entire civilization” (69). The Mahabharata mixes mythology with history, imagination with itihasa (history). The Mahabharata, Devy writes, “does not employ myth as a literary element, it produces myth, and is entirely an extended myth by itself.” (71) It is with this spirit of myth-making—and in the process, making the ‘collective dream’ of this Indian civilization—that has made the Mahabharata stand the test of time and continue to influence such a large diversity of Indians even today. He writes:
the Mahabharata is one significant cultural production that brings Indians together. The diversity of language, land, and life patterns in this country is so vast that no Indian can genuinely relate to all of it. Probably, it is through cultural practices and icons like the Mahabharata that we have a sense of being united. But I must immediately add that I am thinking of a peculiar kind of unity, the unity in how we perceive our long past. (108)
The final sentence in the extract quoted above is particularly significant. While Devy goes great lengths to argue what the Mahabharat means to contemporary Indians’ idea as a nation, he is quick to warn us that this is a unity of what we imagine India as an ancient nation to be. Additionally, in mentioning the problematic politics of war adhered to in the Gita, the chauvinism, and the obsession in the Mahabharata of class and blood distinctions, Devy doesn’t shirk from spotlighting the negative legacy of the epic. And yet, he insists how and why this epic has been interpreted and celebrated by a wider variety of Indians across caste and class lines in the past few millennia; unlike India’s other myths and scriptures, the Mahabharata extends its arms down to all, inclusive even when its dividing.
Today’s India, in contrast to the one broached in the epic, in especially diverse: like the Indo-Aryans that formed the Kuru clans of the Mahabharata, many more migrant populations assimilated into the geographic idea of India, morphing the nation into a syncretic, brand-new thing. It is the nation of the Mahabharata—but it is also much more, and making simple generalisations of putting all Indians under the umbrella of the great epic’s influence would be a fool’s cause.
And yet, Devy keeps exploring, hovering over that chakravyuha, haunted yet by the deepest question: what is this great epic’s purpose? It is in the second half of the volume that the bigger picture comes together, where a central motif of the of this mammoth narrative is revealed, a literary cipher to help place the epic in its proper perspective.
The Wheel.
The motif of the wheel is omnipresent in the Mahabharata and the larger pantheon of Hindu spirituality. Devy gives several examples of this, including how the Vedic Trinity—Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh (Shiva)—all have a symbolic representation or association with the wheel (86-87), the relation of the wheel motif as the dhamma chakra from Buddhist/Pali texts (87), and how the dhamma of Buddhist philosophy relates—and diverges from—the unique dharma employed in the Mahabharata.
Our new nation is an assimilation of cultures that immigrated, old cultures forsaken for new ones, or the independent tribals who were always separated from the mainstream, ‘Vedic’ India. In such, the Mahabharata only speaks of Indian civilization as it was when it was written—it has become something entirely new.
Dharma—which roughly translates to moral conduct or duty in variations of Eastern philosophies—is a concept often visualised by the wheel, a chakra that determines how’s one’s past, present, and future are all linked by the ever-moving wheel, forever set in motion. Krishna muses further on these and more concepts in his delivery of the Gita to Arjuna in the Mahabharata; and Krishna—who is a form of Yama, the master of the wheel of Time—is often represented with the chakra in his hand: a literal weapon of war, and a metaphysical weapon of eternity.
The metaphor extends to Karna—Arjuna’s opponent at this moment—as the wheel of his own chariot is stuck in soil in the heat of battle. Karna is killed at this pivotal moment of the war, all but guaranteeing victory to the Pandavas soon. The Mahabharata war, Devy writes, “is, at one highly significant level of symbolism, the war for maintaining the kala chakra in its perpetual motion.” (90)
Even in the vast history and myth-making of the Mahabharata, there are hardly any loose ends. Karna’s fate is caused by a curse he had suffered earlier from the hands of Mother Earth (Bhoomi Devi). Other curses and boons with and against the fate of the mortals in the story. Karna’s mother Kunti, for example, uses a boon to give birth to him. But her husband, Pandu, is cursed by the sage Kindama that to attempt procreation with any of his wives would be his death—and so it happens.
Every action, insult, mistake, or act of generosity has its reaction, all that comes around goes around. The wheel keeps turning. The epic of all cosmos is an epic of this wheel of Time. So much so that, Devy writes of the very end of Mahabharata: “Similarly, several parvas [books] after the conclusion of the war, and even beyond the mythical svargarohana—ascension to heaven—indicate that the ever-moving wheel of life knows no ending. In fact, the Mahabharata makes the wheel in perpetual motion its central metaphor. For the Mahabharata, that movement is the essence of dharma.” (111-112)
In this manner, Devy tackles that pertinent question of the Mahabharata’s never-ending influence on the Indian nation and its people. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that the whole exercise of this book remains problematic. By using an ancient text to explain what it means to the ancient nation, we are presupposing that the nation is demographically of the same people as it always was, and falling into the same ‘bloodline’ trap of caste-discrimination that Devy himself criticizes in his reading of the Mahabharata. There are wider varieties of Indians than those that inherited the legacy of the Mahabharata’s chief characters, thousands of years ago. Our new nation is an assimilation of cultures that immigrated, old cultures forsaken for new ones, or the independent tribals who were always separated from the mainstream, ‘Vedic’ India. In such, the Mahabharata only speaks of Indian civilization as it was when it was written—it has become something entirely new.
The Mahabharata, thus, is valuable despite this newness; it’s valuable because, even with the changing times, serious and casual observers of the epic continue to understand it. It is an open-ended myth with no beginning and no end, no right and no wrong, only enriched with all that is in time and space, and growing stronger and denser with each interpretation that has followed—thousands of years later.
And for all of these years, there have been thousands of detailed analyses about this beloved epic. Where Devy shines is in the clean, lyrical focus to his purpose, in the way he connects the philosophical and literary themes of the Mahabharata to India’s history and culture; it only makes me wish that Devy’s text was a lot longer, that his voice could expertly guide a reader through the deeper caverns of the epic, and unravel even the most twisted entanglements.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
