Mahabharata 6—translated by Bibek Debroy

The moral fog of war

Ghatotkacha Karna war statue near Denpasar airport, Bali

Volume six of Debroy’s amazing translation of the Hindu epic contains five parvas¹ which describe days thirteen through fifteen of the Kurukshetra War between two branches of the same family², a war that began in the previous volume and will end in the next. In this volume, we learn of how one Jayadratha kills Arjuna’s son, Abhimanyu, how Arjuna then kills Jayadratha in revenge, and how Karna kills Ghatotkacha, a half-human-half-rakshasa³ creature. We also learn how Yudhishthira brings shame on himself by lying as a means of killing Drona, commander of the Kaurava forces. The volume ends with the unleashing of a divine weapon, the Narayana Astra. The moral ambiguity that permeates the Mahabharata seems to peak in volume six as the “good guys” resort to deceit. But I don’t know yet how low they will go before the war ends.

Everyone has a duty to follow their dharma,⁴ and breaking with one’s dharma means following adharma. Hinduism eschews violence, yet warriors have a role to play and a dharma of their own, the kshatriya-dharma, that restrains their conduct. The best I can figure out, this particular dharma calls for protecting the kingdom and its people, enforcing law and order, waging war when necessary (but never for personal gain), showing courage, and upholding truth and justice. As the war drags on and the combatants become more desperate, these ideals give way to pragmatic considerations. I’ve noticed through all the volumes I’ve read that battles usually start with everyone using conventional weapons, but as the troops start to wear down, divine or magical weapons get dusted off and used. A quick escalation of miraculous fighting then follows.

But I want to pause here and share a few thoughts about narrative style in the Mahabharata. Every tale has its narrator and its listener, both of whom have some family connection to the combatants. The telling of the Kurukshetra War actually occurs as a story within a story within a story, three levels deep. Whenever the narrator pauses, the listener asks questions about what just happened, or about what happens next, and the story picks up again. In this volume, Sanjaya, a charioteer, relates the ongoing events, in real time, to the blind king Dhritarashtra, father of the Kauravas (the “bad guys”). Sanjaya has a divine gift of vision, letting him see and describe events taking place far away with greater understanding and insight than those actually experiencing the event. This magical narrative device makes Sanjaya into an omniscient narrator.

Narrative omniscience in the Mahabharata hasn’t puzzled me before now. But this week some things started to come together. In past volumes, for instance, characters would often pause and consult with others or with themselves before undertaking an important action. They might hesitate before taking a fateful step and discuss or think about the significance or the morality of their plans. Such moments provide an excuse for the narrators to throw in a moral lesson. In volume four, you might recall, when King Virata can’t sleep, he calls on Yudhishthira to keep him company till morning. There followed a long lecture on what makes a good king. And again, in volume five, when Arjuna has qualms on the eve of what he knows will turn into a bloody internecine war, Krishna⁵ himself delivers the spiritual centerpiece of the Mahabharata, often excerpted as the Bhagavad Gita.

At first, I only thought of such moments of reflection as vehicles for moral instruction. But this week, I realized that Sanjaya presents some of these musings as internal monologues that no one other than the character himself could possibly know about. I finally see the significance of this narrative device. (I will step out on a limb here, so it wouldn’t surprise me if someone comes up with a convincing counterexample.) For many centuries, Western authors, from Homer to Spenser, rarely described the interior lives of fictional characters. Admittedly, we do get autobiographical or poetic accounts of inner anguish, say in Augustine’s Confessions, or Petrarch’s Sonnets, but in prose fiction, narrators only offer words and behaviors, or allegories and symbols. Or divine intervention: Achilles doesn’t reflect and think better about keeping Hector’s corpse; the goddess Thetis has to order him to do the right thing. Characters seldom pause and think; and when they do, we never overhear their thoughts. Their behavior may change; they may state aloud how their opinion has changed; they may show some surprising emotions. But until the soliloquies of Shakespearean characters, we never get any real sense of interiority in fiction. And even within Shakespeare’s plays, we only learn of inner turmoils when the characters express their worries to an empty room, as though ranting into a live mic. The psychological turn in Western fiction took a long time to gestate, but by the nineteenth century, it flourished, and by the twentieth century any author who shut the reader out of the mind of a central character had a lot of explaining to do. When Sam Spade spends a whole page rolling a cigarette alone in his room after learning of his partner’s murder, the mental silence deafens us.

But in the Mahabharata, maybe as much as two millennia before Shakespeare, Sanjaya and other narrators tell us what characters feel and how they scheme. These characters don’t just pause and discuss matters with each other, they silently question their own motives, agonize over their adharma, tear themselves apart with self-doubts. Duryodhana, Mister Bluff-and-Bluster himself, suffers from near debilitating fears when alone, but never lets down his guard in public. These inner monologues show the reader how all people have hidden depths and warn against idolizing or demonizing anyone. They make the fictional characters human and thereby teach us about our own humanity.

Anyway, back to the story. After about two weeks of intense fighting, exhaustion has set in. Thousands of people have died. The battlefields reek of death. Corpses of warriors, horses, and elephants attract vultures and jackals. The feelings of invincibility that the survivors may have started with have given way to despair. In these dire conditions, the dharma of the warrior caste starts to weaken. Then occurs a remarkable moment. Warriors shouldn’t fight at night. But on day fourteen, the battle continues unabated after sunset, with predictable results. This passage describes the confusion nicely.

In that encounter, the son killed the father and the father killed the son. The friend killed the friend, the relative killed the relative and the maternal uncle killed the sister’s son. They were confused. In that battle, they killed those on their own side, as well as on that of the enemy.

The adharma of fighting at night actually has an ulterior function of giving the Pandavas an unfair advantage. Ghatotkacha, becomes much stronger and ferocious at night. This begins that familiar move away from conventional fighting that I noticed in previous volumes. Here we get a description of Ghatotkacha.

His eyes were red. His form was gigantic. He had the complexion of copper. His stomach hung low. His body hair stood up. His hair was green. His eyes were like cones. His jaw was large. His gaping jaw was wide, extending from one ear to another. His teeth were pointed and looked deadly. His tongue and lips were extremely long, with the hue of copper. His eyebrows were long. His nose was thick. His body was blue. His neck was red. He was as tall as a mountain and was a terrible sight.

No one can kill this ferocious creature at night by natural means. And when this fact becomes clear, Karna falls back on his last resort, a divine weapon that alone could kill Arjuna. He uses it successfully to kill Ghatotkacha, but in doing so, he knows he has wasted the weapon and given the battle away. Nothing else and no one else, not even a god, can slay Arjuna now.

But the height of adharma, at least in this volume, occurs with the killing of Drona, the acting commander of the Kaurana army. Drona loves his son, Ashvatthama, and everyone knows he won’t have the heart to continue fighting if his son gets killed. So someone kills an elephant, coincidentally named Ashvatthama, and tells Drona that he has killed Ashvatthama. Drona doesn’t believe the lie, and he seeks out the one person he trusts: Yudhishthira. Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandava brothers, never lies. Even though he and Drona fight on opposite sides, Drona knows he can believe anything Yudhishthira says. Yudhishthira reluctantly tells Drona that yes, Ashvatthama, the elephant, has died. But he mutters “the elephant” indistinctly. Convinced now of his son’s death, Drona’s resolve weakens, and when one of the Pandavas accuses him of adharma, he simply gives up. Drona sets aside his weapons and withdraws into meditation. As soon as he does so, a warrior beheads him.

Yudhishthira’s deception of Drona weighs heavily on him, despite the reassurances of Krishna, whose argument strikes me as little more than a flimsy pretext for cheating. Krishna says,

“If Drona is enraged and fights for even half a day, I tell you truthfully that your army will be annihilated. Save us from Drona. In this situation, falsehood is superior to truth. If one utters a lie for the sake of saving lives, one is not touched by the taint of falsehood.”

So Yudhishthira lets himself betray his own dharma. I love the way Sanjaya conveys Yudhishthira’s shame. No need for interiority here. A little bit of magic gets the idea across just fine.

Before this, his chariot used to be borne four fingers above the ground. However, after he uttered that falsehood, his chariot started to touch the earth.

Fittingly, the volume ends when Drona’s son unleashes a truly magical weapon, the Narayana Astra. This weapon destroys anyone who tries to fight back. The harder one fights, the more powerful the weapon becomes. Thus, the only defense consists in total non-resistance, and the Pandavas comply.

When I started reading this volume, I feared it would simply catalogue one death after another. And indeed, hundreds of people I’ve never heard of kill hundreds of other people I’ve never heard of. Gazillions of arrows fly, and we learn exactly how many arrows pierce whom, the shape and material of the arrowhead, the color of the fletching, how much damage they do, and so forth. We also get fabulous descriptions of combat and the awful beauty of carnage.

Covered with arrows all over his limbs, [Abhimanyu] looked extremely radiant. Extremely enraged, he caused Karna to be covered in blood. Covered with arrows and streaming blood, the brave Karna was also resplendent. Both of them were beautiful with arrows on their bodies, and blood flowed from their wounds. Those great-souled ones looked like flowering kimshuka trees.

In case you don’t know, the blossoms of kimshuka trees look like this.

A kimshuka tree in full bloom

While most of this 500-page volume describes fighting, the abundance of nature imagery offers an odd contrast. I would expect the narrator to compare military actions to something from civilian life as a way of helping the reader relate to such unfamiliar scenes. For instance, in describing how an arrow pierces a person, the narrator could say, “like a skewer poking a potato,” or “like a nail driven through soft wood.” But instead we get, “like a snake entering a termite mound.” The exclusive use of similes invoking animals demands an explanation, I thought. I appreciate nature just as much as the next person, but maybe I’ve overlooked something? Well, just a smidgen of googling resolves the matter. This snake-and-termite-mound image, which sounded pretty random to me, strongly resonates with Indian folk mythology. I had mistakenly pictured a live termite mound attacked by a snake. But when termites abandon their ventilated mounds, snakes occupy them for protection from predators and from the heat of the sun. Not surprisingly, one finds snakes living in termite mounds often in Indian legend. You can follow this link for a bit more detail (https://devdutt.com/snake-in-the-termite-hill/)

Even though many of the animal references have cultural significance, I suspect that not all of them do. For instance, I bet this one simply makes the reader laugh.

Alas! Durmukha was not skilled in fighting. But [Duryodhana] sent him alone and he entered the fierce battle, like a deluded insect.

§ § §

I apologize for taking twice as long as usual before sending out this reflection. I hope to pick up the pace for the next few works. This week, I think I’ll take a stab at another, shorter epic: The Epic of Gilgamesh. I have it in the second Norton Critical Edition, translated by Benjamin R. Foster. Maybe this will give me some good points of comparison with the Mahabharata.

Thank you for sticking with me on this decade-long journey through great literature. I come at most of these books without a degree in literature. I trust my list to contain only important works, and I assume that anything I may not like reflects more on me than on the work. My own failure to appreciate something right away only means I haven’t tried hard enough.

I know that many people would prefer that I make value judgments about the books I read. I just don’t have much to say about good, bad, liking, or disliking. I don’t have the requisite gravitas. I just wander through these marvelous literary landscapes with wide eyes and a giant question mark floating over my head.

Having no advice or wisdom to peddle, I don’t hide behind a paywall; but I greatly appreciate your support of my project. Please consider taking out a free or a paid subscription if you don’t already have one, and, if you like what you see, tell others.

Some works mentioned or alluded to in this post

Mahabharata 4, 5, and 6, translated by Bibek Debroy

The Bhagavad Gita, contained in Mahabharata 5, translated by Bibek Debroy

Confessions, by St. Augustine

The Sonnets, by Petrarch

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Benjamin J. Foster

1. The Mahabharata contains 100 parvas, or sections, of unequal lengths. In this volume, one of the parvas consists of only 30 pages and another goes on for about 200.

2. Don’t worry too much about all the names. The main characters have long backstories that would only add useless information if I went into them here. Most importantly, the Kauravas have stolen the kingdom from the Pandavas. Duryodhana, Karna, and Dropa fight with the Kauravas, while Yudhishthira, Arjuna, and Ghatotkacha fight with the Pandavas. Yudhishthira acts as the leader and moral compass of the Pandavas, while Arjuna has become an invincible warrior. Everyone else doesn’t really need much explanation.

3. Rakshasas, demonic creatures of sorts, appear in a lot of these stories.

4. Dharma and adharma don’t have an exact equivalent in Western thought. As I understand it, every caste has its own moral code or ethos, called a dharma. The Kshatriya (warrior) caste follows the kshatriya-dharma. We Westerners might think of dharma as a combination of a calling and an ethical standard, only you don’t get to choose your dharma. It comes with birth. To follow adharma means to abandon, violate, or betray one’s dharma.

5. Krishna, one of the most important of the Hindu gods, has entered the war on the side of the Pandavas. In this part of the Mahabharata, he acts as a charioteer for Arjuna and an advisor for Yudhishthira. He doesn’t actually fight, but gives important strategic advice that affects the outcome of the war.