This week, I came across a book that I read last year and its value struck me afresh. Particularly because I am far from ‘ashamed’ of knowing the English language, despite the odd political opinion in Delhi on the very many Indians who freely inhabit the unparalleled depth and range of the Anglophone world. The book I found was the late scholar-economist Bibek Debroy’s last published volume, Sacred Songs—the Mahabharata’s Many Gitas, devoted to the 24 gitas in the epic apart from the Bhagavad Gita. It joined a luminous list of translations from Indian scripture by other scholars. People like Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who rendered the Bhagavad Gita and the sixteen principal Upanishads into English; C Rajagopalachari, whose abridged English translations of Valmiki’s Ramayana and Vyasa’s Mahabharata in the 1950s are still very much around in new editions; and Kamala Subramaniam, who produced monumental English translations of the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Srimad Bhagavatam.
The value of such works is that they used the English language to repossess Indian scripture and make it accessible to the millions of Indians trapped in the English language. People who still longed to know their heritage better but had to get on with life, study, find jobs, sustain family responsibilities, all of which consumed their time.
For these millions, people like Dr Radhakrishnan, C Rajagopalachari, Kamala Subramaniam, Bibek Debroy, Ramesh Menon and a score of others performed a valuable public service. Through their labours, they gave the soul of India back to those cut off by history. To look at just Debroy’s prodigious output, he translated the unabridged version of Vyasa’s Mahabharata into English, in a series of 10 volumes. He also translated the Bhagavad Gita, the Harivamsa (an abridged Mahabharata also credited to Vyasa), the Vedas, no less, and Valmiki’s Srimad Ramayanam in three volumes.
His services to the Puranas were no less monumental. He translated the Bhagavata Purana in three volumes, the Markandeya Purana in one volume, which contains the Devi Mahatmyaham recited every year during Durga Puja, the Brahma Purana in two volumes, the Vishnu Purana in one volume, the Shiva Purana in three volumes and the Brahmanda Purana in two volumes. Besides Manmatha Nath Dutt (1855–1912), he is the only other person to have translated both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in unabridged form into English.
For his translations, he was conferred with the Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar Memorial Award in July 2023 by the venerable Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, which put the entire Mahabharata together in a critical edition. This edition was prepared with the painstaking efforts of committed scholars over nearly five decades, consulting 1,259 manuscripts. The completed critical edition of the Mahabharata was finally released in 10 weighty volumes on September 22, 1966 by Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the then President of India.
It is this milestone Sanskrit text that Debroy gamely translated into English in the service of modern Indians. Written simply and accessibly with footnotes, Debroy’s labours of love found favour with the Indian public for their reverse engineering, using the English language to re-possess these ancient spiritual texts and thereby filling the God-sized hole left in many Indian hearts because of the educational disconnect with their heritage. Debroy’s last legacy to us was Sacred Songs—the Mahabharata’s Many Gitas, released late last year. A dense, layered book of 684 pages, it has 25 chapters, each devoted to a gita, 24 from the Mahabharata, with the last being 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 these other gitas bejewel the unabridged Mahabharata, a gita being a philosophical or advisory passage that can be sung or chanted.
The first gita in this volume is the Shounaka Gita. This is named for an ancient rishi in the the forest of Naimisharanya (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 implant a sense of detachment in Yudhishthira, saying that attachment is the cause of all misery, that Yudhishthira should ideally “Perform karma, but also renounce it.” 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. Rishi Markandeya tells the Pandavas how a butcher taught a Brahmin dharmic righteousness. That he was 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’s a treat to be able to access their actual conversation through Debroy’s lucid text.
The Nahusha Gita is 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 asks who is a Brahmin, Yudhishthira responds that a Brahmin “is one in whom truthfulness, charity, forgiveness, good conduct, lack of cruelty and compassion can be seen”. Not otherwise. Which, like the grand old Upanishads, posits categorically that ‘caste’ is indicated by character, not birth.
This pattern of outright social subversion and valorising moral character high above the accident of birth comes across repeatedly in these ancient gitas, which amazes and gladdens the modern reader. But for such translations, we would never know what our scriptures actually said and how consistently.
Renuka Narayanan | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)