The incident of the ill-behaved tourist at Kargil led me to muse on where we may find therapeutic thoughts, and the late Bibek Debroy’s name shone brightly.
Besides his prodigious public service record as an economist, Debroy translated the Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, Harivamsa (an abridged Mahabharata), Vedas, no less, and Valmiki’s Srimad Ramayanam.
His services to the Puranas were no less monumental. He translated the Bhagavata Purana, Markandeya Purana, which contains the ‘Devi Mahatmyaham’ recited every year during Durga Puja, the Brahma Purana, Vishnu Purana, Shiva Purana and Brahmanda Purana. Besides Manmatha Nath Dutt (1855-1912), he is the only other person to have translated both the Mahabharata and Ramayana into unabridged English.
For his translations, he received the Bhandarkar Memorial Award from the venerable Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. The institute has compiled the entire Mahabharata into a critical edition with the painstaking efforts of committed scholars over nearly five decades, consulting 1,259 manuscripts. The completed critical edition of the Mahabharata came out in 19 weighty volumes in 1966.
Debroy gamely translated our scriptural heritage into English in the service of modern Indians, many of whom are trapped in the English language by their colonial education. Written in simple, accessible language, with footnotes, his labours of love found favour with the Indian public for their reverse engineering—using the English language to re-possess these ancient spiritual texts.
Debroy’s last legacy to us was Sacred Songs: The Mahabharata’s Many Gitas. A gripping 684-page book, it has 25 chapters, each devoted to a gita: 24 from the Mahabharata and the Pandava Gita, which exists outside the Mahabharata.
The Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God, not included here, is of course the gita of gitas. But other gitas bejewel the unabridged Mahabharata, a gita being a philosophical or advisory passage that can be sung or chanted. The Sanskrit verses in each such gita are pleasingly printed above Debroy’s English translation and his explanation of each compact verse. As the Chandogya Upanishad said with satisfaction about the education of Satyakama Jabali, who did not know who his father was, “Nothing was omitted, yes, nothing was omitted”.
The first gita in this volume is the Shounaka Gita. It is named for an ancient rishi in the Naimisharanya forest—today’s Neemsar in modern Uttar Pradesh. Shounaka advises a depressed Yudhishthira in the Vana Parva or forest section of the Mahabharata. He tries to instill detachment in Yudhishthira, saying that attachment causes all misery and that Yudhishthira should ideally “Perform karma, but also renounce it”. This anticipates the Bhagavad Gita’s best-known words, ‘karmanyevadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachanah’, meaning, ‘You are entitled to perform actions but not automatically entitled to their results’. This is popularly understood to mean, ‘Keep going anyway because that’s what life is about’.
The Dharma Vyadha Gita is from a beloved Indian story, also from the Vana Parva. It is told by Rishi Markandeya, a favourite of the Pandavas and Sri Krishna, because he is a fantastic storyteller. On one occasion, he tells them how a butcher taught a Brahmin. The butcher, Dharma Vyadha, schooled a conceited scholar named Kausika. Kausika has left his old parents to fend for themselves, whereas Dharma Vyadha lovingly looks after his. He teaches Kausika about the nature of dharma, including emotional responsibility, and sets the scholar right on several matters. Dharma Vyadha being a butcher is of no consequence, for that too is a genuine profession in society, and a butcher is as capable of dharmic righteousness, in this case more so, than the Brahmin. It is delightful to be able to access their actual conversation through Debroy’s lucid text.
The Nahusha Gita occurs as a dialogue between Yudhishthira and Nahusha, an ancestor of the Pandavas, who was expelled from heaven and cursed to take the form of a python by Rishi Agastya. He coils himself around Bhima, and Yudhishthira must set him free by conversing with Nahusha. When Nahusha pointedly asks who may be considered a ‘Brahmin’, Yudhishthira responds that a Brahmin “is one in whom truthfulness, charity, forgiveness, good conduct, lack of cruelty and compassion are seen”. Not otherwise. This view, like the Upanishads, posits categorically that ‘caste’ is indicated by character, not by birth.
This pattern of outright social subversion, and valorising moral character way above the accident of birth, is repeatedly found in these ancient gitas, which amaze and gladden the modern reader. In their various ways, these gitas also emphasise the harm done by the ‘Shad Ripu’, or six enemies of the mind, found in every human being. Everyone has to fight them.
They are kama (lust), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (attachment to people and things), matsarya (jealousy) and alasya (laziness).
These enemies of the mind tend to spoil our lives. So, there is much useful advice here for a modern reader to consider in our stressful, violent times. The perspective from these gitas is that things were always stressful; there was always anger, jealousy, injustice or sheer bad luck.
Thus, Debroy’s last, moving legacy was to give us these ancestral voices to be read slowly and privately at home. They gently teach us how to cope with it all without disgracing ourselves in public, or needing to bare our souls in expensive therapy or on social media. Well worth a look, I’d say.
Renuka Narayanan | FAITHLINE | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)