The Pandavas, as they do with every sagely figure they encounter, ask rishi Markandeya to tell them stories from a mythical time, when the structures that regulate life as they see it first found divine approbation. Markandeya tells them the story of Manu, charged by Brahma with saving all life and then classifying it for the sake of order. Yes, this is the same Manu who established the varna system and is, in our times, a (rightly) reviled figure.
Manu saved all the seeds of life from a great flood and did so on a large boat, making us think of similarities with Noah and Noah’s Ark in the Old Testament. We nod in the awareness of how the origin stories of different belief systems cross over in essence, even as they are revised as per political needs before they become codified. However, in the case of Hindu mythology, one fears the possibility that the implicit stratification of civilised life is in fact the defining feature, for at times it requires a good amount of intellectual pole-vaulting to subtract an essence that is free from the repeatedly asserted validity of the varna system.
The system is emphasised, for example, when Markandeya tells the Pandavas about the four yugas, and how the transition from one yuga to another leads to moral turpitude and the destabilisation of civilised life. In Markandeya’s account, the two are conflated in the sense that moral turpitude isn’t much differentiated from the flouting of the varna system. There is more, of course.
What Markandeya presents as moral turpitude is about corruption in dealings and the shunning of responsibility, and also, inevitably, about how sexual norms are broken. Unsurprisingly, he either demonizes women’s sexuality, or presents it as something whose unshackling is a cataclysm. “When the destruction of the yuga is near, women use their mouths as vaginas.” Or: “Women exhibit perverse conduct and deceive their husbands. These lascivious ones pleasure with servants, and even animals.”
Disruptions of civilised life terrify Markandeya, and he wants it to terrify the Pandavas as well. “The brahmanas perform the task of shudras. Shudras become the earners of wealth and resort to the dharma of kshatriyas. This is what occurs when the yuga decays.” The Pandava brothers should not be pardoned here as unwitting listeners. Why, one wonders, do the Pandavas, so inquisitive about matters of philosophy and so concerned with ethics, not question Markandeya. Why don’t they ask: “What’s wrong with brahmans performing the tasks of shudras?” “What’s wrong with the shudras earning wealth?” The answer is between the lines: in Mahabharata’s time (and it is irrelevant if this is the time of its events or the time of its codification), the varna system is so entrenched that its dissolution is considered a catastrophic potentiality, a end of times to be avoided at all costs. The muscle that protects the status quo, the kshatriya, has to be repeatedly convinced of its validity, and of its divine originations.
Tanuj Solanki
@tanujsolanki
The writer is reading the unabridged Mahabharata