The Mahabharata - SHRUG EMOJI

Not that I'm indifferent to it, or undecided about whether I like it, but that I cannot resolve the moral riddle at its core. Thence the shrug.

For anyone not already aware, I'm reading the Doring Kindersley illustrated edition. This is almost certainly slimmed-down but does have the benefit of having lots of excellent images, historical information and a lot of social and cultural background that helps to make sense of the context of the characters decisions.

Draupadi - poorly scanned

I gave up doing chapter by chapter reviews as each chapter was so thick with incident and the moral and religious consequences and meanings were so complex and interlaced that I didn't really feel I could say anything meaningful about it quickly.


Wrote about the Adi Parva Here

The Sabha Parva Here

And the Vana Parva Here



LIKE ROME NEVER FELL

A feeling I kept getting through reading this was that it was a little like if Rome had never fallen

Apparently a huge amount of the texts inside the Library of Alexandria were commentaries on the Illiad, something that would already have been ancient history to Rome, but which people were still writing about and talking about in some depth a long time later.

The Illiad, with its opposing clans, charismatic warriors, complex personalities, curses, fates, gods turning up to do stuff etc. is probably the Western story most like the Mahabharata.

Every character and incident (almost it seems) in the Mahabharata has some temple somewhere in India or some tribe or subculture or grouping that is really into it and has a particular view of it, so if you walk around India (I would guess), its a little like walking around a vast encoding of cultural information in stone and ritual, all bound together by these stories, of which the Mahabharata is a primary one.

If Rome had never fallen I imagine Europe would be the same way. We would have shrines to Hercules and Achilles and whoever, and every local town would have a story about when Hercules visited and those stories would have expanded through the psychogeography of the culture and be a shared point of contact.




IT DID TURN OUT A BIT LIKE THE HORUS HERESY

As a whole the moral ecology is really different but it did turn out to be a little bit like the Horus Heresy, or at least, the parts centred around the Kurukshetra war did.

It’s about touchy, martial high-status men taking extreme offense at each other. And insecurity.

The war itself is very wargamy, The exact disposition of forces, the weapons, elephants, horses, squad makeup, the power levels of the heroes, all are exactly and precisely described. You could literally make a wargame out of it and I'm surprised no-one has, but maybe they have and I just don't know about it? Or maybe it would be a blasphemous wargame? What if the Kauravas win?

SUPER-WEAPONS - Plenty of these dudes. Super-armour. Nuclear arrows. Super-spears. Captain-America murder-discs. Fucking womb-poisoning mega-arrow missile demon things. If you like insane super-weapons you are in for a treat.

There are also special-super tactics like labyrinths of moving chariots and stuff. The DK version didn't go super-deep on the military stuff, I need to read one of the nerd-boy versions which focuses on important matters like exactly who's super-spear was more or less powerful that who's chakram so I can argue with other nerds about it online = PRIORITIES.

Tragic - Not only is it about family vs family and brother vs brother, but the war itself leads to the Pandavas rule, which is good, but falls apart and the Kali Yuga happens. This is One of the huge super-cycles of the cosmos and its one of the bad ones where everyone is fated to be an absolute dick to each other. That is the one we are living through now so in Hinduism it seems we live in a 'fallen world' also.

Krishna murderfucking a demon guy with his super-Chackram

THE FATES OF THE FURIOUS

There are sooooo many characters and incidents. Here are a few that stuck out in my memory;

Arjuna - The Pandava I had most sympathy for in the end.

Starts as a shallow hyper-talented super-archer who all girls want to bone, after his time hanging out in Swarga learning dance from the Apsaras he seems to become less of a tool.

Arjuna chilling in Swarga

Then he takes on the role of a dancing trans/eunuch while the Pandavas are hiding out for a year and learns to view the princess he's teaching as a friend (or relation really. At least he has expanded his inner social map to include 'girls who are not my mother that I am not currently trying to fuck).

At the start of the Kurukshetra war, Arjuna seems to be the only Pandava who wants to turn back, correctly realising that even if they win they will have slaughtered siblings and loved ones. Then Krishna comes in with the Bhagavad Ghita and changes his mind.

Towards the end of the story he tries to save the remaining people of Krishnas city after they nearly get annihilated, and finds his powers have fled.

Judged by his actions, he seems to change the most during the story.



Bhima - A big strong dude who loves food and his wife and who is loyal to his brothers and who pretty much remains that way till the end and that's about it.

The coolest Pandava in the stories opening parts where his strength saves his family a bunch of times, but the fact that he never really changes or grows makes him feel more and more childlike, simple and boorish as time goes on and moral complexity mounts up.



Yudhishratha - A guy who is meant to be born super-wise from his God heritage.

He has one of the best scenes in the story where his undiagnosed gambling addiction completely crashes the Pandavas lives. Which is both psychologically interesting in the modern sense but also theologically and philosophically interesting since for Vedic rulers gambling is meant to illustrate that they are living within Dharma.

During the Padnavas exile he takes time out to apparently become even more wise, and seems to have done rehab at least as he doesn't repeat the gambling thing.

The most interesting part of his story is the end. Leading his family up into Swarga, one by one, all of them fall down into hell for their various failings. He doesn't turn around. In Swarga he finds his enemies already there in (lesser) heaven and his family in Hell. He travels to hell and wants to stay with his family. He ultimately ends up in (better) timeless philosophers heaven, free at last from Dharma and Adharma I suppose.

Yudhishrathas story is one of many point where the exact nature of renouncing attachment is thrown into really sharp relief as, considered from the point of being alive, a lot of its consequences are extremely creepy, and hard to reconcile with a human concept of 'good'.



Duryodhana - The 'bad guy', and a really good portrait of a man with capacities, but ruled by fear.

Duryodhana could never feel safe and could never escape his feelings of inferiority, and those lead him to his most shameful actions. A man in that danger zone of being powerful enough to cause trouble and vulnerable enough to act out.

He ends up in Swarga with the rest of his clan, I guess according to Karmic rules he 'did his job' and so gets entry. But we also learn that Swarga is no escape from the wheel and the everyone in (lesser) heaven will eventually end up in hell over several reincarnations and visa versa...



Karna - Probably my favourite character and the one who comes closest to be an Actual Hero.

Secretly the oldest Pandava brother, and the son of a God, abandoned by his mother out of shame he is raised by a charioteer, which according to the caste system makes him a charioteers son for life and nothing else ever.

His own brothers (and almost everyone else) mock and degrade him. The only person who every really values him fully and treats him well is Duryodhana.

And why does Duryodhana treat him well? Out of the goodness of his heart? Or because Karna is one of few people who can actually threaten the super-powerful Pandava brothers with his own abilities? The complexity of this realationship is fascinating.

Nevertheless, Karna remains loyal to Duryodhana, loyal to the one person who was ever loyal to him, throughout. He has one of the other great scenes when his mother comes to him during the war and he's like "have you come to acknowledge me? To love me, finally? Or do you want something from me?", and she asks him to spare the lives of his secret brothers.

Societies usually know what their flaws, are, tacitly and intuitively if not stated outright. Karna is an example of the flaws in the caste system and what Vedic society considers the necessity of social cohesion. But his story isn't a reform story ("we need to change this") but a grieving and acknowledgement story I think ("yes this is terrible, but do you want _chaos_?")




Krishna - Holy fuck this guy is weird. An avatar of Vishnu, and the speaker of the Bhagavad Ghita, the religious text at the centre of the story (hiding scripture in a war story = good work Vedic sages), so a kind of combined prophet/demigod/hero/wizard/supervillain?

Krishna embodies the arguable, or at least, perceived from the human point of view, (from my point of view), moral darkness at the heart of the story.

He's divine, which a lot of characters partially are, but he seems to be much more in touch with the divine aspect of himself, which makes him somewhat frightening and inhuman. His reasons for doing things always stretch across different layers of reality and his purpose seems to be as much fulfilling fate and bringing about the Kali Yuga as much as anything else.

But as a person, as a human being, holy fuck is this guy creepy.

Both sides in the Kurukshetra war are headed up by super-powered badasses, and as we know from the Marvel universe, when two equally powered heroes fight the only way to win is with a cunning trick.

Krishna provides the cunning and trickery for the Pandavas that allows them to win and which also causes them to break every rule of Dharma and battlefield conduct they agreed to at the start (which both sides do, but the Pandavas break _more_)

So to take out the Karuvas Main Guys they, let me see if I can remember;

- Bring a fated transgender/male-presenting female warrior into the field (not meant to do that) so the enemy general pauses in confusion and is shot by super-arrows.

- The 'pure' Yudhishrata lies (for the first time) to another Hero, telling him his son is dead, causing him to lose hope and thus become vulnerable.

- Karna gets shot in the back by Arjuna while trying to fix the wheel on his chariot. (Not meant to do that).

- Duryodhana gets hit below the belt (illegal) by Bhima, having his thighs broken and genitals crushed and dying slowly afterwards.

All of this is planned, organised and engouraged by Khrishna. Which serves his complex purposes of ending the war and making sure the Pandavas win it.

Krishna being, in human terms, incredibly creepy and manipulative, and also being the most 'holy' figure and delivering the core religious text of the story is clearly meaningful in some way but I'm damned if I can understand it. My intuition would be that just as Karnas character is built on an irresolvable societal faultline of caste, Krishas story is "this is what it takes to truly serve divine ends, to be really holy, you up for it?"





LABYRINTHINE

At the start of the book, the opening story is about a King who wants to take revenge on some Naga (Snakes and/or Snake-people) for his fathers death, and who is sat down by a sage and told this story, the Mahabharata. The sage tells him to look for wisdom in the complex Labyrinth of its narrative.

So the fact that it is morally and personally, and historically complex, and thick with incident is part of the point.

I haven't read the Ramayana but my friend says its much more classically a legendary moral guide text, where a super good dude fights super-evil.

Most of the main characters in the Mahabharata are highly multifaceted. Most of them could be perceived as villains or heroes at different points in the tale, and seen from different perspectives.

The story that's being told, over all, I felt, was not the story of the Pandavas or the Kauruvas or any of the people, or even groups in the narrative, but about the complex, winding, endlessly shifting moral nature of the world. The close relationship between Dharma and Adharma.

Exactly what counts as Dharma and Adharma is perhaps the key theme of the story, and if it has an answer that I can perceive, it’s that they flow endlessly into each other, opposing and renewing each other. One being the parent of the other, and that the only way to escape from this Labyrinth of Dharma and Adharma is to renounce attachment to the world, when, hopefully they let you in to the slightly better heaven for philosophers which lies above Swarga which is Disneyland-heaven for peasants and normal people.

For as long as you remain attached to, and interested in, the world, you will be doing good and creating evil, or doing evil and creating good.

The Vana Parva and Viata Parva

Two books this time, the Vana Parva, the Book of the Forest, and the Viata Parva, the Book of Virata, the name of the Lord at who's court the Pandavas hide themselves.


Book of the Forest First

Something of a Rocky montage, a wisdom quest. A little like a 'greenwood story' - like the Robin Hood stories in which the heroes live in a place where their identities become negotiable, and without social context people become who they say they are (though really the Vana Parva is more like that). Also a bit like the Clone Wars cartoon - coming between two major parts of the main story,  but with a huuuuge amount of time to cover, and room enough for the characters to get up to potentially anything.

I suspect this is also a part of the story where, since the Pandavas have enough time to get anywhere in India. If you have a local temple or a local Mahabharata story anywhere outside the north where most of it happened then this is the period where you can say "Ah yes the Pandavas came here while they were banished to the forest".

Or a bit like Neal Adams Batman Oddesy thing where, here's our main character on the move, in a variety of other situations.

Their main sage tells the Pandavas that, since they are banished for 13 years they should use that time to learn and gain wisdom, the primary method by which they do this is by wandering around, getting into adventures  and meeting sages and hearing even more stories from them. All of these tales have some kind of Dharmic point.

None of them seem to inculcate enough wisdom to persuade the Pandavas to not hate Duryohana, its pretty clear they are still going to try to kick his ass when this exile thing is over. Clearly I don't understand Dharma that well...

Arjuna ends up going off to Heaven, or Swarma and encountering Apsaras who teach him to dance, which comes in useful later on. He also gets DIVINE SUPERWEAPONS - which are hidden away.




Then the Book of Virata

the Pandavas have to spend the last year of their exile hidden, so they take up low-status disguises and go to work in the court of Lord Virata.

This is pretty much like every 'Fair Unknown' story from the Arthurian mythos, where a suspiciously clean servant arrives one day and does menial work for a while then turns out to be a Prince. Shared into-European story-structure or parallel story evolution?

This is where Arjunas dancing skills and Apsara experience comes in handy, as he acts the part of a eunuch dance instructor - taking on a female, or quasi-female role. He's actually much nicer like this, its pleasant to see him not being a tit, maybe all that forest stuff did wear off on him.

Their cover is blown towards the end of this period by a sketchy aristocrat lusting after Draupadi, Bhuima takes that guy out. This leads Duryohana to suspect them and he launches an attack on that kingdom, (the sketchy aristocrat was the kingdoms main defender). The Pandavas go to help him, still in nominal disguise, but are clearly super duper guys so give themselves away.

Duryohana says this breaks their promise as it hasn't been 13 years by the solar calendar. They say no we were calculating by the Lunar calendar....



I think my main question from all of this is did they really learn much from all this stuff?

Considered as ordinary people - they went from a state of conflict, learned about Dharma and humility, and then went straight back into conflict. But apparently these are divine beings, or semi divine, and what they do, the whole of it, is a lesson or a ritual for humanity, acting out the divine order.

So this returning to conflict thing is part of that

Also quite possibly this is a beowulf-style situation with a story coming from a slightly older more 'honour-culture' culture, being written down and interpreted in the terms of a more settled 'dignity-culture' culture, so all this barbaric vengeance-based stuff actually has hidden meanings and layers of interpretation.

We will see....

Thoughts on the Sabha Parva

Its book two! The Book of the Assembly Hall. And it has the best quality of any book - that it is short.

I'm pretty sure a guy gets cut in half in this, maybe two guys?

There's some dude who was born in two halfs which were then sealed together by a demon chick - well Bhima rips that guy like open a phone book.

Then there's a ceremony or something. An underachieving relative gets honoured and some irritant starts giving everyone shit

There's a self-fulfilling prophecy (there always is).

Anyway, thus guy tells the irritant "I'm gonna let you insult me exactly one-hundred times. Because of that dumb prophecy. But that one-hundred and first time.. mate don't fucking do it...."

But the guy is a tool and does it one more time and gets bisected by a high-speed chackram.

Anyway......




The main thing that sticks in my head about this is the horror of severe Gambling addiction.

The Pandavas main guy, Yudhishritha  is the son of a God, and meant to be incredibly wise. (Though *not* his monthers first son, that child was raised by a charioteer so even though he's super-amazing he can never be important ever).

The Pandevas build a big wonderful palace in the kingdom they made from that forest they torched.

There is an official ceremony where you basically Brexit yourself, or sign your own constitution and get your own flag and now you are a proper kingdom.

The Pandavas want a bunch of kings to come to this thing to validate it, so the go and beat up a bunch of local neighbouring kingdoms who were "bad" (one, the demon-sewn half-n-half guy, was apparently "about to" do a human sacrifice, which sounds like a 'they have weapons of mass destruction' situation. The Pandavas deal with this guy the same way they deal with a lot of things, like Old School D&D PCs - sneak in dressed as Priests then have Bhima tear the guy in half).

So the Pandevas do some local regime changing and invite everyone to their big ceremony.

Duryodhana of the Karuvas, their main rival, arrives. His low self-esteem is about to get everyone in trouble.

He's so amazed (and jealous) about this palace that, staring about at all the cool stuff they have, he falls over.

AND Draupadi, the wife of the Pandavas mocks him public ally.

AND she makes fun of his blind parents at the same time!

So this seems some very classic Mahabarata stuff - pride, shame, public shaming, the little impulsive worm desire to publicly dominate or degrade someone.






Duryodhana  goes home, and in his increasingly customary Dick Dastardly manner, comes up with a clever scheme - invite the Pandavas to a big gambling thing.

An interesting thing from the Doring Kindersly edition - apparently at the time, inviting a King to gamble or play games of chance was completely normal and, in fact, it would be weird for a King to *refuse* such an offer.

Dharma and the Gods express themselves through the random generation method (usually dice I think) so for a King, the chance to show that they were 'lucky' is the chance to show that Dharma favours their rule, because they themselves live within Dharma.

So turning down an opportunity to gamble is slightly sinful (wrong word) and questionable. Which is an interesting inversion from the West.




But the Kanavas have a gambling expert.

(This guy has his own backstory - a branch of the Pandavas family imprisoned his whole family and as they starved slowly to death in prison they gave all their food to him, the most intelligent of them all, hoping that he would survive and take revenge for them. Which he did and does.)

Yudhishritha the Pandavas main guy has an absolutely crushing gambling addiction.

Its a really horrid scene, still effectual through a few millennia and multiple translations

The Karuvas just keep winning

Yudhishritha just keeps going back - the Karuvas gently chide and humiliate him if he tries to to leave, and the mania for gambing and the sunk cost situation make him go back and back and back, each time losing more and each time thinking he can win it all back.

There is a general atmosphere of increasing horror to this as everyone can feel it going deeply wrong but no-one has the will, strength or authority to stop it

Its not Duryodhana doing it *directly*, so he is disassociated. The king is blind and weak. The Pandavas all have to go with their older brother, because = Vedic India, but he is temporarily mad.

So he loses the money, the kingdom, the houses, his brothers one by one then himself, then his wife. The same wife who humiliated Duryodhana in the palace, and who he now systemically humiliates in front of everyone by dragging her in, stripping her naked (divine intervention stops this) and making it extremely clear that her husband gambled her away.

Then she flips out and says the next time she braids her hair it will be after she washes it in his blood.

You went too far dude. It's such an overwhelmingly bad idea to humiliate your enemies.




Then the Pandavas get banished to the Forest for so many years.

All of this fine-grained humiliation relies on people really wanting to hurt each other but staying juuuust within the rules, and sending the Pandavas off to the forest is using their sense of honour against them "hey you gave your word right? In public?"

They leave in this ritualistic way, each performing some action that symbolises how much shit they are going to cause in the future.



Its made pretty clear that this isn't just one persons failure. Its a systemic societal or general human crime. Everyone in the Assembly Hall had something to do with it, and everyone somehow contributed to it.

Draupadi humiliates Duryodhana.

Duryodhana sets up the game but Shakuni the evil dice master does the dicing.

(But is he actually evil? He is taking revenge for his starved family and in some versions his cool dice are his dads fingerbones.)

Yudhishritha just keeps going back, the Kauruvas plan works waaaay better than they thought it would. Too well in fact.

None of the other brothers have the nerve to act in an un-Vedic way and to tell the older brother to knock it the fuck off.

The blind king doesn't stop things going wrong.

Duryodhana publicly humiliates Draupadi in turn.

Just a biiiig web of circumstance and different failings, with everyone trapped in it and contributing to it. Which I suspect is the point with the whole Dharma thing. You can win the big fight at the end but how do you get out of that web?

Thoughts on the Adi Parva

Just finished the Adi Parva - The 'Book of the Beginning', first part of the Mahabarata, this thing is so huge that I will have to review it piece by piece as I go along.

A friend recommended this to be as being 'like the Horus Heresy', which it isn't, yet. But it's getting there.

The bits that are extremely unlike the Heresy are that there are loads more women in it, a really surprising amount of gender-bending and trans representation. Its all about families (which is a bit heresy), but has multiple overlapping divine hierarchies. And instead of its moral axis being dark-good vs ultimate super-evil, its Dharma vs Vengeance/Justice, which is very different indeed.

The story doesn't really have a villain.

The ways in which its getting to be more like the Heresy is that it has a lot of very tough, ultramasculine and VERY FUCKING TOUCHY men, and a complex attitude to what might have been a little bit of a genocide, or at least a dab of ethnic cleansing, if the Nagas are indeed standing in for or representing an earlier forest-dwelling snake-worshipping people and if book is also about how Aryans burnt down the forests and dispossessed the Naga to build Civilisation, which was terrible, but necessary.

A few things made this a challenge (for me specifically) to wrap my head around.

It’s an epic based on descent so there are multiple family trees and a complex cast of characters, plus the specifics of how parentage work in the ancient Indian society are reeeallly important.

It's Doring Kindersy so everything is quite carefully laid out, with lots of reminders, but I would still have had a big, main family tree with portraits on a dominant page.

Non-anglo phonemes and unfamiliar cultural stuff make it more of a maze than it otherwise might be for my born-in-the-80's ass, but that’s the path of Dharma I guess.


INTERESTING BITS AND PIECES

The extreme intergenerational obedience between fathers and sons would be strange for me even in a historical European context.

The curses are fascinating, they are often more like challenges, or weirdly specific superpowers.

Long chains of circumstance which often begin with the mild or errant wish of some god, or the unwise (or too-quick) promise of some king. A god basically momentarily arranging furniture can really fuck up someone’s life, or fundamentally change its context.

In many cases the originating crack is a worm of superiority and contempt, a desire for social dominance.

So far I find myself probably more on Duryohanas side, even though he is "the baddy".

This story has really complex feelings about status, gender, ethnicity, civilisation and interpersonal bitterness.

There are lots of things here that remind me of old dark-age Euro-stories being 'reinterpreted' by Christians so "actually" they were spiritual, and not just about men and death.

The thing with 100 sons, I couldn't help but imagine a historical king going "Well this Yogic magic has DEFINITELY WORKED and now I have 100 SONS and absolutely not just a chunk of abortive meat. Any FUCKING QUESTIONS ANYONE???"




WHAT IS THIS ABOUT REALLY?

Dharma- what is this story really about, a bunch of dudes hitting each other? Or spiritual growth, via dudes hitting each other.

Well they do tell us at the start that actually its about Dharma so really we should be looking out, not just for dudes smacking each other up the head but *what it means* that they chose to smack each other up the head, in this or that particular instance.

We will see how this goes.

You can lose, but win spiritually. Or be in the right, but still fail.

You can win, but lose spiritually. Or be in the wrong, but learn and change, and hence attain Dharma or whatever.

This book is large so I read it on a pillow across my crossed legs and I feel extremely deep and philosophical doing so. I feel like I want a Prince to wander into the room with a complex query and I can be like "Ahhh, the answer is Dharma..."