HYDERABAD: From 2010 to 2014, volumes from Bibek Debroy’s grand project of translating the Mahabharata from Sanskrit appeared in the market. A few months ago, I bought the entire box set. I’ve often taken out a book from the set, turned it in my hands, and been teased by the back cover blurb that simply calls what is inside ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’.
In his introduction to the first book, Debroy attempts to place the events in the Mahabharata in history. No conclusive timeline - none shorter than a range of a thousand years - appears. There is speculation that the events in the epic might be from an era before those in the Ramayana - this is contrary to the commonly held belief that Ram precedes Krishna by an era (Treta Yug comes before Dwapar Yug). Debroy’s guess is based on observations regarding the relatively refined violence in Ramayana which, compared to all the gore in Mahabharata, would suggest itself as a product of a later, more measured civilization.
Debroy also notes that if his conjectures about the historicity of the events in Mahabharata were true, it likely followed that the central conflict in the epic was actually all about cattle. That the cousins fought over land might be a plot alteration mandated not by historical truth but by the importance of land in the era that the epic was effectively composed in.
That Mahabharata was composed entirely by Vedvyasa in a single lifetime is also marked as an impossibility. The epic was composed and refined, no doubt, over hundreds of years. A long oral tradition perpetuated it. Authorship is largely irrelevant.
Yet, Vedvyasa’s presence in the plot as a critical node on the Kuru family tree, and the references to him by the two main narrators of the Mahabharata-Vaishampayana and Lomharshana - suggest that things did begin with him.
Vedvyasa, in fact, is a title. The real name is Krishna Dvaipayana. Krishna Dvaipayana was the child of sage Parashar and Satyavati (Shantanu’s wife), and sired Dhritrashtra and Pandu with the wives of his own step-brother, Vichitravirya, who was Satyavati’s son with Shantanu. Thus, the fathers of Kouravas and Pandavas are in fact children of Krishna Dvaipayana Vedvyasa, the one granted credit for the shlokas of the epic. Perhaps it would not be outlandish to credit Vedvyasa as the creator, rather than biological father, of Dhritrashtra and Pandu.
What if the two brothers were Vedvyasa’s fictions, and everything that followed from them was also, therefore, fictional. The offense (to some) of the suggestion notwithstanding, it is no doubt charming to embed oneself in a royal family, father fictional heirs with royal wives, and concoct stories of conflict among one’s own grandchildren. That’s a fertile imagination if there ever was one.
(The writer’s first novel ‘Neon Noon’ is now available)