The Mahabharata is a socio-historical process that's also an incredible text

The blog has a lot of new readers, so most of you probably don't know that I've been reading The Mahabharata and that this newsletter is (at least notionally) a Great Books substack. I'm on Volume 3 of the Debroy translation. Right now we're in this part where the Pandavas are exiled in the forest, and Draupadi has convinced her husband that he should definitely fight back and kill the cousins who took his kingdom, but Yudhisthira is like, "We have to wait until the thirteen year period of exile that we agreed to." Not only are people more likely to support him if he keeps to the terms he agreed to (which he definitely considers breaking!) but he also needs the time to martial his spiritual forces.

What I love about the Mahabharata is that there is a story, and the narrative does keep sight of that story, and I always have faith that we will get back to the story, even though we quite frequently get so far away from that story.¹ Like, I cannot overstate the vast difference between my summary in the previous paragraph and my experience of the actual fifty pages of this book I read this morning.

Because to Yudhisthira, winning this war involves, basically, beating Drona, Bhishma, Kripacharya, and Karna, who are the most powerful warriors on Earth. Everyone is telling him we've got “We’ve got Arjuna on our side and with his Gandiva bow we’re sure to win”, but Yudhisthira knows it's not enough. So he goes off on this pilgrimage to gain spiritual power from all the most holy places in...well, I could say they're the most holy places in "India" but really they're just the most holy places in the world, as he conceives it.

Yudhisthira travels around the whole world and goes to these places and hears all these stories about why they're so holy. For instance, in one spot, he hears a story about how there was a king with sixty thousand sons, and they went looking for the horse used in their dad’s horse sacrifice, but the horse wandered into the domain of a God. These sixty thousand sons tried to bully the God to get back the horse, so he killed them. And the King now had just one male descendant left, a grandson, and he sent out the grandson to try and repair this wrong, and the grandson persuaded the God to give him the horse—in return for trying to do a divine task (refill the ocean, which was empty because of another story that is also related in some detail).

There's a layer of interpretation here that I'm certain some sage has done—the point of a horse sacrifice is you conquer whatever land it's walked over. It's all about bullying people. But sometimes you just can't do it—the other people are stronger. In this case the grandson is essentially admitting that the God is stronger. So he gets the horse and he rules the kingdom, but his son feels bad that his father never actually fulfills the task of refilling the ocean, so he later on he goes and does it, which is another story that also gets told in several chapters of its own.

By the way I'm relating all this from memory, that's why I'm not using any names or links here—I frankly don’t remember the names and certainly couldn’t spell them correctly. I could look it up, but I want to convey the actual experience of reading the text. You have just listened to a paragraph about this story, but I have read fifty pages of it! To me that was my morning of reading!

It is incredible. It's such a great experience. It's so deep and rich. I'm glad Yudhisthira is making the trip! I'm glad his sage companion, Lomasha, is taking the time to tell these stories—each of which is a great story and has some bearing on the themes of the Mahabharata itself. I can definitely imagine a reader who's like, "When's the actual war gonna start? When're we gonna get to the good stuff?" But I'm not that reader. Although the Mahabharata has an anthology quality, in that it's stuffed full of tales that clearly arose from somewhat-different cultures and different places within what we’d call India, I find the tales to be high-quality and very meaningful in themselves—I am rarely bored. Perhaps this is merely because I am Indian myself! But to my ears there is nothing in here that's just a crazy shaggy-dog story a la, for instance, the Tale of Sir Thopas in Chaucer (which is basically just an extended joke).

These Mahabharata stories are not just tales of adventure. Their purpose isn't just to entertain. But they also don't feel overly constructed. Sometimes there's a sort-of moral—like those sixty thousand sons definitely shouldn't have tried to bully a God. But on the other hand, their dad put a lot of pressure on them to get that horse. They kept going back and being like this horse isn't anywhere on the land. The King was like find that horse or don't come back. Turned out, it was in a giant pit owned by a God.

And in the Mahabharata, human beings can definitely succeed in bullying gods! There's another story where, I forget exactly why, but Indra is mad at this sage and tries to kill him or something, but then the sage is so powerful that he freezes Indra! The God himself has to beg to be let go. It was insane! I was like, wow I didn't even know that was possible!² So you see, it's not entirely unreasonable on the part of the sixty thousand to think they could've fought the God and gotten the horse.

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I am legitimately gripped by these stories. In reading the Great Books, there are lots of times when I've thought, oh, this is filler. Like with Chaucer, he's trying out a lot of different things—it's understandable that some are less interesting than others. I don't think you can hold a single man to the standard that everything in an extremely long and diverse book has to be uniformly excellent. Look at Knausgaard—the first and final volumes are way more engaging than some of the middle ones. This is true of Proust as well—his quality is actually very good and fairly even throughout—but the penultimate volume is not that inspired. All the stuff where he gains and loses Albertine is basically a retread of themes we've already seen earlier in the story (with Gilberte in the second volume, for instance).

And we are discussing very different things here, which is something I've written about before—Chaucer, Proust, and Knausgaard wrote works that were composed by a single author, within historical time. The Mahabharata is not that. Now it’s also not some sacrosanct work: it did have composers who weren’t afraid to alter and change it. The text wasn’t sacred and immutable the way the Vedas were. But still, this is a book without a real author, as we understand the term—it’s a book that comes to us as a result of a socio-historical process—one that continues to this day. Like, until very recently there hasn't hadn’t been an unabridged translation of the Mahabharata into English in a century! The introduction of the volume I'm reading drips with condescension when talking about Western efforts to translate the Mahabharata.

Contrary to popular impression, unabridged translations of the Mahabharata in English are extremely rare. One should not confuse abridged translations with unabridged versions. There are only five unabridged translation: by Kisori Mohan Ganguly (1883-96), by Manmatha Nath Dutt (1895-1905), by the University of Chicago and J.A.B. van Buitenen (1973 onwards), by P. Lal and Writers Workshop (2005 onwards) and the Clay Sanskrit Library edition (2005 onwards)...Almost three decades later, the Chicago version is still not complete, and the Clay edition, not being translated in sequence, is still in progress.

Yes, thank you, University of Chicago and the Clay Sanskrit Library for taking decades to do what this one man has accomplished in, like, six years. Yes, there are strange things about the Debroy translation (not least being that the introduction is basically repeated verbatim across all the texts), but the footnotes are great and it reads incredibly well. I don't know much about the translator—obviously I get kind of a Hindu nationalist vibe off him. I doubt he’d mouth the anti-Modi and anti-caste shibboleths that I routinely espouse (and which I sincerely believe). But...what Indian person who knows Sanskrit is not going to give off Hindu nationalist vibes? Western academia had their chance to translate this work, and it really wasn’t wasn't that important to them.³

So what you get is an entirely different social process at work that has clearly done a superior job of marshaling enthusiasm for this enormous task.

I have no idea how Bibek Debroy is able to translate so much! He's the chair of India’s equivalent of the Council of Economic Advisors. He's a very eminent person in India who mostly gets press coverage for his government and policy work. He says that he does this translation in his spare time! The idea seems incredible. It's insane. Like...can you imagine if, say, Robert Reich was also translating Herodotus into Mandarin? I mean...it's not an exact analogy, because Herodotus is about one-tenth the length of The Mahabharata. But still, that's the whole point! There is no analogy! And by the way it's not like Indian economists all have excellent Sanskrit. Indian economists are produced through a training and educational program very similar to the one that produces American ones. But in India there's also a parallel process where some people learn Sanskrit for their own edification.

The fact that he's able to translate so much is astonishing! The result is pretty readable! He says he prioritizes keeping close to the sense and syntax of the original (presumably why he translates in prose rather than in poetry), and I have no reason to disbelieve him, but in English it reads really well. This is a major achievement.

What I'm saying is that he's part of an ongoing historical process, similar to the one that underlay the composition of the Mahabharata. You can definitely argue that Chaucer is also part of such a process. He didn't leave a complete text when he died. Certainly not a text that could be published (not that the term “publication” had any real meaning in his time and place). He was a courtier whose court poetry was widely-heard and appreciated. He was very politically connected, and fairly well off (though not extremely so). But I imagine there’s a whole story to be told about the process that that turned his writings into the Penguin Classics Middle English volume of Chaucer that I read.⁴

And the point is—I read a book, the Penguin Classics Middle English text of The Canterbury Tales. And it was incredible, I loved it, I loved the language. It taught me rhythm and meter. I spent months murmuring it to myself in the mornings and evenings, as my wife will attest. But it did have boring bits.

And at least so far, there are far fewer boring bits in the unabridged Mahabharata. Even by the standards of the Great Books, it is pretty exceptional. It's not as absorbing browsing Instagram. It definitely takes effort to read. But...I think it's something most people could do and read and be interested in, if they wanted to! Like you could probably read it, and you'd likely enjoy it quite a bit.

I really want to describe the Mahabharata in more detail, but I find myself unable to. I’d have a much easier time describing Chaucer. At its core, The Canterbury Tales is an anthology—you're presented stories in a sequence. They have a variety of styles and themes. I (and most readers, I think) find the more contemporary stories to be a lot more interesting than the high knightly ones. But there's a clear frame. The pilgrims are each telling stories. And eventually each story ends, and you move on to the next one. There's about twenty-four stories, and while I forget the names of various tales, many of them were extremely engaging in themselves. I think the so-called marriage group, dealing with married life (honestly they're mostly about cuckolding) are the best-known, but I thought the religious fairy-tale-ish ones were really good too! Like there's one where a priest tries to make friends with a devil. I found it very entertaining.

Even The Canterbury Tales is itself a case where it’s difficult to describe the actual experience of reading the book, because most of the time you're reading these stories that share some similar elements, but don't necessarily have the strongest thematic or stylistic links, so one is not infrequently left wondering “Why is this story included? What relation does it have to the whole?” Which is not to say I disliked reading it, just that work lacked a certain sense of coherence. But to me Chaucer was never about the stories, it was about the language.

I genuinely went through a phase where I read a fair amount of Middle English (much more obscure stuff than Chaucer or the Pearl Poet) for fun, because I loved the sounds and rhythms of the language. It was one of my strongest experiences of just loving the sound of something. Chaucer is not even the best Middle English poet—the Pearl Poet is phenomenal. These works sound so good. Like I think even fairly pedestrian Middle English is already really beautiful, but the sounds of, say, "The Pearl" or "Gawain and the Green Knight" are something beyond that. The latter is insane because it's highly alliterative, but it also has a distinctly (though not strict) iambic quality, which is a combination of two totally different ways of making English poetry. Old English poetry was alliterative, while most Middle English poetry was accentual-syllabic. There was a revival of the alliterative style in northern England in the 14th century, and that’s the tradition that gave rise to the Pearl Poet. We know the Pearl Poet wrote other poems in a more regular iambic meter, and I think Gawain partakes of some of that iambic rhythm, which is quite difficult to do, because the whole point of alliterative verse is that there's a repetition of stressed consonant sounds.⁵ And you would think that if you were repeating stressed consonant sounds and having the regular (and by now familiar) clip-clop repetition of iambic stress, the result would be very repetitive. But it's not. It's so thrilling and original and dangerous.

As difficult as it is to describe the appeal of Chaucer, it’s so much more difficult to describe the Mahabharata, because the text is so looping and interweaving and yet so engaging on a purely narrative level. There's so many tales that it seems pointless to describe each one, even though each one would be totally worthy of comment on its own, as a story in its own right (which is not something that's necessarily true of, say, the early Middle English romances I liked to read).

It's definitely an effort to read The Mahabharata. It's not exactly like I'm reading Gone Girl (a book I also loved!). I do have to make time to do it. This morning I set a silent alarm to wake me up at 5:30 so I could read for forty-five minutes before starting my day. But I also find it to be an extremely valuable and rewarding experience.

I do not think, however that I'll do any book-reviewing or read-alongs or anything like that. I don't think anyone should read along with me. I assume some of you will read the Mahabharata at some point, if you're interested, because it's the right time in your life for that!⁶ We are all very aware, I think, that reading the Great Books is quite worthwhile. Even if I'm bored by an individual work (as I am by wisdom literature, for instance), I usually feel confident that it’s beautiful in the original. I don't have that same unmoored feeling that I often get with a work of contemporary literature where I'm like "Why does this even exist?" To me that kind of cosmic certainty—the sense of being happy that this work has a place and continues to have a place in the world—is much more important and meaningful than any feeling of sense-pleasure or even interest in the work itself.

That’s true even though I really do enjoy reading the Great Books! I think my own pleasure in reading the Great Books is something that reinforces and is reinforced by the existence of the Great Books as a social process. I am glad people take the time to translate and write about the Great Books. That’s a process I am happy to support with my energies, both because the books usually bring me pleasure and because I think old things and old ideas have worth in themselves. A friend has been pushing me to read Fleishman Is In Trouble for ages. I am dead certain that I would love the book, but it’s a part of an institution—contemporary American literature—that has brought me more sadness than joy, and as a result I feel unexcited about spending five hours of my time reading the book.

Anyway, I will likely continue to read the Mahabharata for at least the next...six months? I haven't looked at the rate at which I've gone through volumes, but six months seems about right. I will definitely write about it. But I think mostly my reading will just come out in the vaguely Mahabharata-ish flavor of the blog! It'll be kinda like the two months where it was all Icelandic sagas, all the time. I have no idea what I specifically wrote about them, but I'm pretty sure everyone who was reading the blog back then came away feeling like these sagas were pretty darn compelling.

1. I hope people are okay with my decision to stop italicizing ‘the Mahabharata’. It’s frankly silly to pretend like you might mistake the word ‘Mahabharata’, which is extremely different from any other word in the English language, for anything other than the title of one of the world’s most famous literary works.

2. Okay this story I did actually look up: what happens is that this sage is giving an offering of soma, a holy drink, to the Ashvins, two gods who Indra thinks are unworthy of soma, so Indra decides to hit the sage with a holy weapon: “Then [Indra] hurled the vajra, terrible in form, at him. Just as he was about to hurl it, Bhargava paralysed his arm.” This all comes after Indra repeatedly warning the sage that he shouldn’t do the bad thing, and then the sage proceeding to do it anyway.

3. If you google Bibek Debroy and the Mahabharata, you’ll get tons of hits of people seething about his translations in terms that are very reminiscent of how right-wing people in America complain about Emily Wilson’s translations of the Greek epics. His project is one that is very politically fraught, and it takes a not-inconsiderable amount of effort and courage to produce something that’s meant to be (and is!) legible to more-secular readers. Part of the reason he doesn’t have much in the way of introductions, I imagine, is that every single thing you could say about the historical or literary background of The Mahabharata would be a very politically controversial point, and if he wrote more in the way of introductory material, then half of his potential readers would likely get so mad before they hate page one that they’d dismiss the project out of hand.

4. Honestly that story is probably in the introduction to the volume itself, but back when I read Chaucer I wasn’t in the habit of reading introductions—a failure I really regret. I cannot imagine what kind of hubris led me to put in so much effort into reading these books, only to eschew the prefatory material thoughtfully compiled by scholars on the very subject to which I was devoting so much attention.

5. Do not quote me on any of this by the way—I'm certain much of my understanding of how stress and poesy works is inaccurate or uses different words than an academic would use, but isn't that kind of the point? I came by my knowledge of it through a much different route than they came by theirs! Just like Bibek Debroy came by his knowledge of The Mahabharata through a different route than would, say, an academic Sanskritologist.

6. I will note that Robert Boyd Skipper was inspired by a previous post to start reading the Mahabharata and has already written about it. This makes me so happy, it's probably the happiest any reader has ever made me.