After Bhima is freed from the grasp of the boa constrictor Nahusha, the Pandavas live peacefully in and around the Kamyaka forest. Two seasons, the monsoons and the autumn, pass. It might be worth our time to note how these two seasons are described in the text.
The monsoons are presented as an exciting season, with the capability to provide great joy; but also acknowledged as carrying some dangers. Flies and reptiles are ‘intoxicated’. Other animals — boars, peacocks, male cuckoos — are described as ‘maddened’. Differentiation in topological features becomes difficult — ‘nothing could be discerned, plain and uneven terrain or rivers and land’.
Then autumn, and the water that flows down, muddy all through the monsoons, finally becomes clear. ‘The sky and the stars’ are clear, too. Autumn seems to be associated with clarity and calmness in the Mahabharata, especially after the rambunctious months of the rainy season.
Sometime between the autumn and the winter, Krishna — traveling with his third wife, Satyabhama — visits the Pandavas. He brings news of the Pandava’s many children, and it is here that we learn that Draupadi’s sons, and even Subhadra and her son, Abhimanyu, are in the custody of the various Yadava kingdoms under the aegis of Krishna. This shows us the deep alliance between the Pandavas and Krishna’s dominions. When we approach the war, Krishna will attempt to present himself as bipartisan; but the knowledge that he’s kept the Pandavas’ larger family safe during the years of their exile shall remove any doubts with regards to where his allegiances truly lie.
Later, the great sage Markandeya approaches the gathering, and soon after making himself comfortable, is assailed with a flurry of philosophical questions by none other than Yudhistira. For example: If man is the agent for all his deeds, ‘how can god then be the agent?’ Or: ‘Do we reap the fruits (of our deeds) in this world or in another world after death?’ Or: ‘When an animal is dead, where do his deeds remain?’
Coming from the Pandavas, who have access to a living god (Krishna), who have accessed the abode of the gods (as Arjuna did with Shiva), who once ruled from an airborne palace often visited by the celestial telepath Narada, these questions — of god’s agency or the existence of an afterlife — can appear rather disingenuous.
Can the Pandavas really claim that they are just men, that they are at a remove from whatever is divine, that they have existential quandaries like other common men? The epic is inconsistent with regards to how special the Pandavas really are. In its spirit of hyperbole, it allows the Pandavas to achieve great feats, feats that no other human being can aspire to. At the same time, it endows them with many all-too-human defects — doubt, frailty, cruelty, bigotry, and whatnot. What this duality creates is a mild degree of disbelief in both modes — human or divine. One could argue that this in fact creates a fascination for Kauravas, whose motives and actions are easily explained in the human plane.
Tanuj Solanki
Twitter@tanujsolanki
The writer is reading the unabridged Mahabharata