For the last two weeks, this column went to summarising the year past and looking forward to new books in 2017. Now, with that concluded, we return to the topic of the Mahabharata. Regular readers would remember that in previous weeks, I presented the tough verifiability of the events in the Mahabharata, and also commented on the complexity of narrative voices in the text.
The first two parvas of the Mahabharata (going by the 100 parva classification) only provide a summary of the events, a gesture akin to adding a table of contents before a long book.
The third parva is called the Poushya Parva. There, we are in the time of Janamejaya, Arjuna’s great grandson, who is now the ruler of Hastinapur. The section is haphazardly told, and often appears aimless. We follow a multitude of characters, all attempting to placate their gurus or preceptors. One puts his own body on the line to plug a dam breach. Another almost starves to death (and also loses his eyesight, which he later recovers) while trying to ensure that all comestibles are offered first to the preceptor.
A third one, named Utanka, stays at his preceptor’s house for fulfilling household duties, where he is goaded on to perform the husband’s duties on the preceptor’s wife. ‘You must stand in his place and ensure that her period does not go barren,’ say the household women to Utanka. The passage is one of innumerable junctures where the Mahabharata shall present itself as a text of thoroughly patriarchal times, where women had little agency, especially with regards to sexual matters.
Utanka refuses, but is ultimately charged with the duty of getting a queen’s earrings for the preceptors’s wife. On the way, a man on a bull urges him to eat the animal’s dung (bulls***, literally). On his return journey, the earrings are stolen by the naga king Takshaka.
To recover the earrings, Utanka is advised by a man to blow into a horse’s anus (please grant my pardon, but this is how it is). The man is Indra, the horse Agni; soon Takshaka is forced into submission.
Nevertheless, Utanka is angry at Takshaka, and goes to Janamejaya to inform him of the facts of his father’s death (just why this information was previously held back from JJ isn’t clear). Parikshit, Arjuna’s grandson and Janamejaya’s father, was killed by Takshaka.
And it is thus that the seeds of Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice are sown. The sacrifice is the event that would begin the retelling of the tale that would come to be known as Mahabharata.
A SHORT NOTE: In an article published the previous week, I made the error of assuming that Sumana Roy’s forthcoming book, How I Became a Tree, is a book of poetry. It is, in fact, a book of essays. Having enjoyed Roy’s poetry in various literary magazines and anthologies, it seems that my wish translated easily to being an assumption. Hope this little note exonerates me a little bit.
(The writer’s first novel ‘Neon Noon’ is now available)