A BATTLEFIELD OF A TEXT INNER TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION IN THE SANSKRIT MAHABHARATA

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CmCAGO

A BATTLEFIELD OF A TEXT INNER TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION IN THE SANSKRIT MAHABHARATA VOLUME ONE

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CIVll..rZATIONS

BY TAMAR CHANA REICH

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 1998

OMI Number: 9910937

UMI Microform 9910937 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. AIl rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized

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UMI

300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103

Copyright © 1998 by Tamar C. Reich All rights reserved

To Eli. No'a and Asaf.

Iv

Table of Contents Volume One

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................

VI

Abstract ...............................................................................................

viii

Introduction: What's Novel in the Epic? ................................................... .

Chapter I: Varieties of Textual Variation ...................................................

38

1.1. From Variation to Growth Through Reflexivity .................................

38

1.2. A Typology of Variations ..........................................................

42

1.3. Heterogeneity of Textual Production .............. ...... .... ...... ......... ... ....

77

1.4. A limit Case (Xll.29, XII.248-250, and VII Appendix 1.8) .. ... ... ...........

110

Chapter II: Praise-Blame Dialogues and Verbal Duels in the Kar1}a Parvan ......................................................................................

156

II.I. Fighting Words ........................................................... ............

156

II.2. Double Talk: The Salya and Karoa Verbal Dual (VIII.26-30).. ... ......... ....

184

II.3. Killing with Words: Arjuna's and

Yudhi~!hira's

Exchange of

Insults and Praises (VIII.45-49) ...................... ....... ... ...................

231

II.4. The Kama-Salya and the Arjuna- Yudhi~thira Exchanges Considered Together and in the Larger Scheme of the Mahiibhiirata ......... 245

v

Volume Two Chapter ill: Dialogic Forms In the Aivamedhika Parvan

.. ,............ ........... 250

m.l. Contestatory Discourse ..................................................................................250

m.2. A Contestatory Textual Relationship: The Story of The Brhaspati-SaTflvarta Rivalry (XIV.4-1O) and the Discourse on the Enemy Within (XlV. 11-13) ...................................................................289

m.3. Inner Textual Interpretation: The Mongoose Unit (XIV.92-96) .................... 301 m.4. Playful Manipulations: The Yoga as Internal Sacrifice Unit (XIV .20-25) ..................................................................................................323

m.5. Shifting Guilt in the Horse Sacrifice Complex Unit (XIV.61-91) .................345

m.6. Uttarika: Encounters with God and with Serpents (XlV.52-57) ................... 358 m.7. The Aivamedhika Parvan: Renewal and Redefinition of a Tradition ................................................................................................. 370

Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 376 Bibliography ................................................................................................................379

vi

Acknowledgments Many people made this work possible. I like to joke that my dissertation is a very belated paper for a seminar that David Shulman gave at the Hebrew University years ago. where my love and intellectual fascination with the Mahiihharata began. David's support and useful comments throughout the writing of this dissertation were invaluable to me. At Harvard I resisted at first Michael Witzel's steadfast insistance on the importance of critical editions. and his criticism of aspects of Heesterman's work which I found compelling. In retrospect I can see that struggling with his objections helped me to work out what I hope is a more sophisticated approach to the issues at hand. At the University of Chicago. Sheldon Pollock helped me through crucial stages of conceiving this project. was always thorough and honest in his criticism. and when I wanted to take the project in a direction which he felt uncomfortable with. he allowed me to do so. My encounter years ago with Wendy Doniger's structuralist treatment of Hindu narrative texts stimulated some of the questions and doubts out of which this project eventually grew. It was a pleasure finally to be able to work with Wendy who shares my love for the ambiguities of Mahiibhiirata narrative. Norman Cutler was a sensitive. thoughtful and constructive reader. Steven Collins' suggestions were very useful. Throughout my years at the University of Chicago I received financial aid from the university, in particular from the Committee on South Asian Languages and Civilizations. In 1996-7 I received a generous write-up grant from the Whiting Institute. I am grateful to all these people and institutions. I am also grateful to my family. Without the financial support of our parents. Chava and Sholom Kahn and Jenny and Yisrael Reich, my husband Eli and I would not be able to pursue graduate work simultaneously. Eli has been a wonderful partner in all things. including academic work. Without our constant sharing of ideas, this dissertation would

vii

not have been possible. Neither would it have been possible without his willingness to share tasks at home, much beyond what is conventional in most families. I am also grateful to my daughter No'a and to my son Asaf, whose beloved presence sustained me through many difficulties.

viii

Abstract Euro-centric scholarship has always perceived the heterogeneity of the Sanskrit

Mahabharata's textual tradition as a problem. My approach to the Mahabharata is dialogic in the sense introduced by the Russian thinker M. M. Bakhtin. I positively strive to be sensitive to the variety of voices found within the textual tradition, and to the many ways in which intentional possibilities are being realized in specific. concrete directions. Chapter I treats heterogeneity on the level of manuscript variation. Classical stemmatics is bound to concepts of originality, unity and authorial intention. I use the critical edition to show that the process of textual production! transmission has been very different for different portions of the Mahabharata. I argue that the practice of textual expansion should be regarded as constitutive to the Mahiibharata, and that portions of the text can be most fruitfully read as a comment, a response, or an interpretation to other, pregiven portions. In a close study of a limit-case of doublets, I show that in spite of structural similarity, the two units are significantly independent both stylistically and in their ideological stance. In other words, by attending to surface features we can hear distinct voices which would be lost in a structuralist analysis, which deliberately lifts units out of their context. Chapters II and ill are devoted to exploring aspects of the heterogeneity of the

Mahabharata tradition. This means studying the specificity of selected units. I have deliberately chosen my units both to represent the contrast between heroic concerns which predominate in some parts of the Mahabharata and the priestly concerns which predominate in other parts of the textual tradition, and to demonstrate how these discursive worlds dialogically interact by appropriating each others imagery and tropes. The manuscript

IX

traditions of the two books which I have chosen to study are also almost at the opposite ends of the spectrum in that one has evidently never been centrally redacted whereas the other seems to have a single archetype. Chapter II address the rhetoric of heroic praise and blame and verbal duels in book

VIII. the Ka17)a Parvan. The primary function of these performances is to work up the combatants into a state of fury. The more complex exchanges go beyond this function into the realm of reflection on the reasons for the hostility between the parties. Some of the more interesting among these exchanges. two of which I treat in detail. are concerned with enhancing the ambiguities of the situation. The figure of KarIJa is most inviting of such explorations. but the fascination with ambiguities extends even to

Yudhi~thira

himself.

Chapter ill describes a rhetorical form which I call "contestatory discourse" and explores its function in book XIV. the Aivamedhika Parvan. Contestatory discourse is associated with agonistic or contestatory rituals. and involves the intertextual deployment of units of discourse against one another. I argue that this discursive pattern is central to the Parvan's thematics as well as to its textual organization. Chapter ill is thus also a reading of the Aivamedhika Parvan. The description of the horse sacrifice itself involves mostly battle scenes. but the bulk of the Parvan is concerned with the contestation of the nature of sacrifice and of a dhanna based on sacrifice. Rather than being arbitrary. the juxtaposition of discourses is deliberate. and is appropriate in a Parvan which is about a contestatory rite. It would be nice to be able to show how exactly the differences in textual production account for the different concerns of the two Parvans. but I don't think such a causal connection exists. Rather. we have to be content with the understanding that one can not expect unity of voice from the textual tradition. and that in fact. the dialogic processes which constitute the Mahabharata tradition are precisely where its richness of meaning lies.

Introduction What's Novel in the Epic?

The Mahiibhiirata, often referred to as the "great Sanskrit epic" and sometimes embraced as the "national epic" of India, eminently deserves the mahQ (great) component of its name. It is a great text, in many ways. First and foremost, it is long, very long. Tradition speaks of the 100,000 couplets (s1okas)

of the Mahiibnarata. 1 Some Western scholars still enjoy pointing out that the

Mahiibhiirata is "about ten times the length of the iliad and the Odyssey put together."

This huge mass of text is divided into eighteen books (parvan), which are further divided into chapters (adhyaya). There is also a parallel division into 100 (minor) books or (sub )parvans. This baffling scope is further compounded by the number and variation of manuscripts, which are extant from all parts of the Indian subcontinent, and in various scripts. 2 The Mahiibhiirata also has a number of traditional running commentaries or glosses) In modern times, a number of printed editions have been pubHshed. 4 For many IMost of the Mahabharata is in the anu$tubh (sometimes also called iZoka) meter of 32 syllables. Some verses are in other meters, of which the most common is the tri${Ubh of 44 syllables. There are also some prose passages. 2The Sanskrit Mahiibharata has been written in many different scripts. Apart from the pan-Indian Devanagart, regional scripts were used., the most important of which are the Sax-ada (of Kashmir, the NepalI, the Maithili (of North Bihar), the Bengali, the Telugu (of Andhra), the Grantha (of Tamilnadu), the MaHiyaJam (of Kerala). these tlkiis simply provide the meanings of difficult words or compounds. The earlier ones were copied separately from the text. The most notable early commentaries are by Devabodha (probably Kashmiri, used Kashmiri manuscripts, perhaps 11th century), Arjunamisra (used Bengali manuscripts, 16th century) and 3 Usually ,

2

purposes it is useful to further extend the definition of the Mahabharata by including its y

numerous adaptations or retellings, either in Sanskrit or in other Indian and non-Indian languages, old and new.s Many other works in various genres are closely related to the MahOhharata in various ways, from Sanskrit court drama and poetry based on episodes or

characters from the Mahabhiirata, to folk drama and song in which Mahabharata characters figure, to modem short stories, dramas, comic books as well as film and y

television versions. Many Indians feel that they know the Mahabharata quite intimately even though they have never read the Sanskrit version, and may not know the language at all. Any treatment of the Mahabharata must assume tha4 in an important sense, the Mahiibharata is more than a single text - it is a narrative tradition, a literature.

Nevertheless I have chosen to devote this study to the earliest known and historically most influential version of the Mahabhiirata, the Sanskrit Mahiibharata attributed to the legendary Vedic seer Vyasa I have done that because I feel that the complexities of this enonnous textual tradition are not yet sufficiently understood. A critical edition does exist and has been accepted by the scholarly community as the

standard text, yet it has not resolved the fundamental problems of textual boundaries and definition. On the contrary, even when accepted on its own terms - and whether these terms are acceptable is one of the issues addressed in this dissertation - the critical edition

NlIakantha (from Mahar~tra. wrote in Banares, late 17th century). Other early commentators include Vimalabodh~ Sir)Q.ily~ Sarvajiia-NiraYaIJa and Ratnagarbha. 40f which the most notable ones, beside the critical edition published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, are the Calcutta edition and the Bombay edition, both based on the text used by NIIakaJ).tila. The Kurnbhakonam edition and the edition produced by P.P.S. Sastri are based more on the manuscript traditions of South India. 5Among the earlier ones are the Javanese adaptation, Bharatam, caw 1000 e.E.; the Telugu adaptation, Andhra Bharatamu, by Nannaya Bhana, ca. 1025 C.E.; the Sanskrit adaptation, Bharatamaiijan, by ~emendra ca. 1050 C.E.; and a Persian rendering from ca. 1580 e.E..

3

has proved that heterogeneity is integral to the Mahiibharata. While it canfions that some portions of the Mahabharata are derived from a single original manuscript (an "archetype"), it proves that other large portions did not have such a single source. Furthennore, the so-called reconstructed text, and this is true even for the books with a relatively simple manuscript history, is no less generically and ideologically heterogeneous than any of the manuscript versions. The basic narrative of the Mahiihhiirata is a tale of a battIe fought between two factions of the Bharata royal family. The battle is staged in the distant past, during the transition between the previous cosmic age~ the dvapara yuga, and the present one, the kali yuga.6 The battle at Kuru.k$etra, or the field of the Kurus, was a catastrophic battle in

which virtually all the /qatriyas, or warrior-Icings, of the time participated, and all but a precious few perished. Of the whole Bharata lineage only one, a child called P~i~ survived to inherit the throne. He too had been killed in his mother's womb, but was revived by the grace ofKJ?I}.a. After P~it, his son~ Janamejaya, ruled the land of Bhara~

and it is to this Janamejaya that the bard VaisarppaYaIJa addresses the whole

narrative. When described briefly like this the Mahabharata seems to fit well the Euro-centric idea of an epic. Like the Diad, it is a long battle narrative placed in a remote heroic

pas~

attributed to an oral poet, and with imponant implications for the identity of a collectivity. However, and this is where the complications start, in any of the Mahiibharata's empirically attested versions, as well as in the critically reconstructed tex~ the narrative is interwoven with theological, cosmological and legal discourses, some of which are so long, they could easily be regarded as independent treatises if they were not framed by a question-and-answer exchange between protagonists of the battle narrative and interspersed

6According to Hindu cosmology, a cosmic age or mahayuga comprises four yugas,

from the longest and best (the krtayuga) to the shortest and worst (the kaliyuga).

with vocatives addressed to these protagonists. Many students of the Mahiibharata with Euro-centric training have found this mix of doctrine and narrative disturbing. To make things even more complicated, the narrative itself digresses into many side-narratives, whose connection to the main story often seems minimal. Some of these seem to belong to a very different genre from the main story; while the main story is about heroic deeds and dynastic struggles, the side stories include many cosmogonic legends ritual lore, folk y

stories parables and riddles. Neither do the doctrinal sections of the Mahabharata possess y

the kind of philosophical and terminological consistency that one can expect from the classical philosophical treatise of the Sanskrit tradition. The Mahabharata does not present anything like a single philosophical position. Thus the Mahiibharata is heterogeneous from both the generic and the doctrinal point of view. Considering all of this, it is obvious that the Mahabharata does not cater to readerly expectations shaped by nineteenth-century European standards. And why should it? Yet the serious encounter of Euro-centric scholarship with the Mahiibhiirata begins in the nineteenth century and is shaped even today by attitudes established then and this study y

inevitably stands within this tradition if only by virtue of the fact that it is an attempt to understand the problem of the Mahlibhiirata's textual identity in tenns that do not always coincide with traditional South Asian thought on the subject. This is not to say that the Mahabhiirata textual tradition itself or traditional South Asian thought has nothing worthwhile to offer on the subject. On the contrary, within the text itself are found numerous statements regarding the circumstances and the mode of its composition, its genre, its source materials, its boundaries and the nature of its authority or claim for truth. Most notable are the frame stories, which literally tell us when, where, by whom and under what circumstances the Mahabhiirata was recited on a number of first occasions. The whole text is cast in the shape of question and answer exchanges between a number of narrators and listeners.

5

The first recitation, according to this scheme, took place at king Janamejaya's extended snake sacrifice at the city ofT~aSiHi. On that occasion the brahman Vaisarppayana recited to Ianamejay~ P~it's son .. the story of his own Bharata lineage. However, not VaisaIppayana but VaisaIPpayana's teacher, the great Vedic seer Vyasa.. is considered the "author" of the Mahabharata. According to this presentation, Vyasa did not recite, but lent the authority of his presence to the first recitation. Vyasa's involvement with the Mahabharata narrative is much more complex than that of a mere author in the modem sense. He was also the progenitor of the other main protagonists, their spiritual guide, and an active participant throughout the events. The authority of Vaisaxppayana's recitation is derived from Vyasa's perfect knowledge and from his very presence. The part of the text which tells about VaisaIppayana's recitation can be called the main frame of the Mahabharata. Another, outer-most frame, further elaborates on the circumstances of the first recitation, and specifies more briefly the circumstances of its own recitation. According to this frame, the second recitation took place during the extended sacrifice (sattra) of the brahman sage Saunaka at the Naimi~a forest. This time the reciter was a suta, a bard of mixed caste, by the name ofUgraSravas. UgraSravas had heard the story of the battle of Bharata from Vaisarppayana at Janamejaya's sacrifice, and recited it to the brahmans participating in Saunaka's sattra. The emboxed frame structure is not just external "packaging.

If

It is repeated more

than once within the text. For instance, the entire Santi and Anuiiisana Parvans are narrated by the wise BhI~m~ as he lies wounded on his bed of arrows, to king Yudhi~thira.

This constitutes a frame within a frame. The frames are also tightly

interwoven into the body of the text by frequent reference to the narrative situation through

6

the constant return to the question and answer device and through the ubiquitous use of vocatives such as "Bharata!"7 The tradition thus has a rather complex self-presentation. Two frames, two main recitations. These may simply be two different traditions about the beginning of the Mahabharata, both of which have been included, but it is more likely that a distinction is being made within the tradition itself between a "Bharata," or a shorter version of 24,000 verses, as it was recited by

Vaisarppayan~

and a "Mahabharata," the full, 100,000 verse

version, which Ugra.sravas recited. There may also be a suggestion of the text being passed on from one kind of recitation tradition, represented by VaisaIPpayana to another, represented by UgraSravas. The frames also describe the early recitations of the Mahabharata as taking place during the lengthy perfonnances of a special type of Vedic sacrifice, called the sattra. Places are mentioned: Tak¥aSila, the N aimi~a forest. While the authority of Vyasa as ultimate source is invoked, the text is also interspersed with comments like "and here it is customary to recite the following," and with terms for types of sub-units of the text such as gatha, katha, or glta. Such usage may reflect an awareness of the eclectic sources on which the tradition draws, as well as a consciousness of something like generic differences within the text. The ParvaslllfZgraha subparvan of the first book, the Adi Parvan, gives a kind of table of contents of the Mahabharata by enumerating the 100 subparvans by name and even specifying the number of chapters and verses for each of the eighteen Parvans. 8 The Parvasa1!zgraha also mentions what seems to be Mahiihharata specialists: "those who reflect on the Mahabharata" and "experts on the numbers of verses in the Mahabharata".9 A popular (though late) passage in the Adi 7See Fitzgerld 1985; Minkowski 1989; Shulman 1991. A further discussion of the frames is also found below in section 1.2.2.4. 8M.Bh.BORI 1.2. 9M.Bh.BORI 1.2.172 and 176.

7

Parvan describes how the Mahabhiirata was written down directly from the mouth of Vyasa. As the story goes, Ganesa agreed to be Vyasa's scribe on condition that Vyasa dictate the text so fluently that his pen should not cease writing for a moment. Vyasa accepted this condition, but set his own condition in return, that Ganesa should stop writing

if he did not understand anything. Oanesa accepted, and Vyasa proceeded to dictate the Mahabharata, putting into his text 8,800 "knots" or difficult places to cause Ganesa to stall. 10 Another famous verse declares: "Whatever is found here may be found somewhere else, but what is not found here is found nowhere." I I All of these statements are obviously of great interest. One should not, however, take them for more than what they are, namely, more or less systematic attempts by people within the tradition both to understand and to shape the complex cultural activity in which they were participants. We don't know that the traditions about the first and second recitations are any less legendary than the story about Ganesa. This is why some of these statements contradict with others, as well as with some of the textual evidence. For example, the passage in which Vyasa dictates the text and GaneSa writes it down suggests that the text was written down immediately after its composition and directly from Vyasa. This is a different concept of the Mahabharata's authorship than the one suggested by the frame story, according to which the text has been recited and passed on orally for some generations at least between Vaismp.payana recitation and UgraSravas' recitation. 1

Similarly, there is no exact correlation between the Parvasamgraha's enumeration of

adhyayas and any existing manuscript or recension. The heterogeneity found at the level of the plot of the Mahabharata is found also at the level of its meta-text. This should not come as a surprise once we realize that the meta-

IOM.Bh. BORI I, Appendix It lines 7-15. 11 M.Bh.

BORI 1.56.34.

8

text itself also carne into being as pan of an ongoing process of textual production and expansion. The fact that these statements come from "within the text" certainly does not give them any kind of absolute authority (as if the Mahiibhiirata could "speak. for itself') or exempt the critical scholar from examining all the evidence as fully as possible. Traditional commentators on the Mahiibhiirata based their commentaries on what they understood to be the best text. and their idea of what a best text is did not necessarily coincide with modem ideas about texts. For instance. NlIakaQ.tha. who wrote his commentary in the late 17th century. consulted manuscripts from many parts of India and created the basis for an inclusive. highly eclectic text which later gained such popuJarity that both European and Indian scholars came to call it "the Vulgate."t2 The approach of the earlier commentators such as Devabodha and Arjunamisra to problems of textuality, has not been studied at all. The sense that something is problematic about the textual state of the Mahiibhiirata begins in earnest with the effoL'LS of European scholars to approach it historically and critically. It is of course necessary to recognize at the start that all scholarly work of the colonial period was touched by orientalist prejudices~ but it is not sufficient to do so. It is also necessary to understand what problems were perceived by these scholars and why_ both because the attitudes of the time are still with us

today~

and because these scholars

were often very perceptive. Around the turn of the century. most scholars (with the exception of 1. Dahlmann. who advocated a synthetic view of the epic l3 ) regarded the l'vfahiibhiirata as hopelessly chaotic. Winternitz. for instance bluntly described it as a "literary monster. "l4 The y

12S ukthankar

1933, lxv-Ixix.

13Dahlmann 1985. 14Winternitz 1927 326. 7

9

Holtzmanns· "inversion theory;· according to which the Mahabhiirata was originally an epic that glorified the Kauravas, and only later in its history was taken over by supporters of the upstart PfuJc;lavas who altered the story to suit their cause~ is another striking example of how the apparent contradictions of the narrative were felt to require a radical historical explanation. I5 In 190L E. Washburn Hopkins' The Great Epic of/ndia. Its Character and Origin distinguishes between the utrue epic" and the agglutinations to

it~

which he calls

the "pseudo-epic," and distinguishes periods in the epic's history .16 On the whole~ these historically-minded scholars attributed the perceived chaos to the lengthy and complex process of textual fonnation in which different individual

minds~

with their different

visions and agendas~ pulled and tugged at the Mahiibharta to produce the final result incoherence. More recently, with greater awareness of the ills of ethnocentrism and with changed literary sensibilities, scholars use less derogatory tenDS, such as "fuzzy boundaries" (Van Buitenen 1973), "fluidity" (Doniger 1988), "open text"

(Shulman~

1991). The term "fIuid u deserves special attention. It was used even by V.S. Sukthankar, the main editor of the Mahabharata critical edition, in 1933. Its more recent use may carry a newly introduced implication that the phenomena under consideration is uniquely Indian or South Asian. The idea has been put forth in the late 70's by McKim Marriot 17 that South Asians have a totally different way of conceptualizing boundaries of entities and persons than "Westerners." According to this

view~

South Asians think in terms of "coded

substances" or "dividuals" which are constantly in flux. South Asian entities have "permeable membranes/' they are constantly becoming by exchanging substances with 15Adolf Holtzmann Jr. 1985~ Das Mahabhiirata und seine Theile elaborated on the 1846 theory of his uncle Adolf Holtzmann Sr.. 16Hopkins 190 I. 17Marriot 1976; Marriot and Inden 1977.

to

other such entities. In recent scholarly literature, various South Asian social and cultural phenomena have been described as "fluid." 18 The valorization of fluidity has become much more positive in this recent discourse, but the notion still remains that this is something peculiarly South Asian. In this climate, it is just too easy to simply assume that the supposed "fluidity" of the Mahabharata is no more than another instance of that quintessentially South Asian way of thinking and being. 19 But is the Mahabharata's textual condition peculiarly Indian or South Asian? And is it nothing but that? CIearlY7 many non-South Asian texts, such as certain European medieval texts 20 or Jewish Hechalot literature.,21 share some of the qualities that are found in the

Mahiihharata and in other South Asian texts such as the Purii1)as and the Agamas. These texts have no single author, great variation amongst manuscripts., much overlap with other texts, no defmite moment of composition. This should not come as a surprise once we consider that the individual author, the notion of a moment of composition, the idea of a bound book - all these are products of a certain, rather late moment in the history of European thought. 22 Moreover, it has been amply shown that these concepts are

18Notably Daniel 1984. Fluid Signs: Being A Person The Tamil Way (even though in the case of this book there is also the implication that the "fluid" way is Dravidian and the suggestion is that the "not fluid way"bas been imposed on South Indians from the North). 19Doniger, for instance writes (with reference to the Mahabhiirata): "The fluidity of the Indian oraVwritten tradition is in part merely one aspect of the more general fluidity of Indian attitudes to all kinds of truth. This fluidity was eloquently described by E.M. Forster in A Passage to India: 'Nothing in India is identifiable; the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge into something else.'" She goes on, a few lines later:"There is no Ur-text, for there is no Ur-reality." Doniger 1988~ 64. 20PearsalI 1985. 21S chafer 1982. 22Foucault 1970; Barthes 1977.

11

problematic even when applied to literature produced under the spell of these very ideas. 23 The Orientalists of the turn of the century did not possess this awareness but we do. 7

Today it simply makes no sense to segregate the MahabhGrata case and treat it as a South Asian problem, thus inadvertently continuing the implicit or not-so-implicit Orientalist suggestion that the Mahiibharata is a failure to measure up to Western standards. In fact, now that we can distance ourselves from the ideas of individual authorship and authorial intention, I think the case of a very sophisticated composite text such as the Mahabharafa should be of great interest to anyone interested in textuality, and not only to South Asianists. On the one hand the Mahabharata's textual condition has much in common with many texts which are not South Asian, and on the other hand it is very special among 7

South Asian texts. 1. A. B. van Buitenen has pointed out that there may be a peculiar aspect of the Mahabharata story itself which invites the endless expansion of the plot and its ambiguities and contradictions.

The epic is a series of precisely stated problems imprecisely and therefore inconclusively resolved, with every resolution raising a new problem until the very end, when the question remains: whose is heaven and whose is hell?24 He calls it the "riddle" design of th~ Mahabharata. and it is clear that the Mahabhiirata does not share this "riddle" quality with other Indian texts.

In a more recent contribution, David Shulman contrasts the poetics of the (Yyasa) MahOhharata with that of another great text often referred to by Euro-centered scholars as

23 Jerome

McGann has shown that even their application to romantic poetry is problematic. McGann 1983. 24Yan Buitenen 1975,29.

12

an "epic," namely,. the (VaImlki) Ramaya1)a.25 Shulman emphasizes fonnal features of the Mahabharata which in his view make it an open-ended text. Among these are the multiple em boxed frames; the statements within the Mahabharata about multiple

Mahabharatas, or about multiple beginnings; Vyasa's multiple role as progenitor of the major heroes, participant and guide, survivor and author all in one. Shulman approaches this open- endedness26 as a literary device, an almost self-conscious fonnal quality of the

MahabhO.rata. 27 He further argues that the medium and the message resonate. On the thematic level, he emphasizes the encyclopedic quality, the tendency to include all things, the "endless dialogues [which] tend to feed into the structure of ongoing dilemmas," the "conscious thematic concern with fiery destruction as transcendent power." So the Mahabharata is coterminous with the world - not a modest claim perhaps, but one that does help to clarify the aims of this text. There is no escape built into it from its relentless, bleak vision. It represents itself not as a work of art but as reality itself. No boundary marks off this text from the world. 28 Van Buitenen and Shulman see the Mahabharata's special way with boundaries not as generically but as somehow peculiar to that text, part of the text's specific constitution. Furthermore, for both it is not a problem but a fascinating phenomenon worthy of study. 25Shulman 1991. 26Shulman 1991, 10. 27Shulman uses anthropomorphic language in talking about the Mahabharata. ("The Mahabharata represents itself'). Raising the issue of subjectivity and reflexivity in a text to which he himself does not attribute a single author, or even a grand editorial design, must of necessity raise the question: who is being reflexive, who is presenting himlher/itself? I think this personified language is misleading: it represses the historical nature of the Mahabharata, suggesting some original impersonal MahabJzarata impulse which might have expanded immensly, but was still trapped from the beginning "in its own bleak vision." 28Shulman 1991, 11.

13

My work is much indebted to their approach. In a way I am a little more old fashioned than Shulman in that I feel that fonnalist analysis has to be complemented with an understanding of the way the text developed~ the processes by which it was actually produced. My hypothesis is that what Shulman calls the "endless dialogues [which] tend to feed into the structure of ongoing dilemmas" reflects not so much a preconceived riddle design, as an ongoing process of textual growth of a certain kind. This is why I believe the history of the manuscript tradition deserves more attention.

The most monumental attempt to explain systematically and justify the relationship between the manuscripts is the critical edition, published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORl) in Poona between the years 1927 and 1970. 29 The edition has been largely accepted by the scholarly community, at least in the practical sense that it has virtually taken the place of all other editions as the standard text to quote, but not without considerable debate and some notable dissent. The debate started as early as 1929, when Sylvain Levi wrote, in response to the first sample edition of a portion of the Virata Parvan: ...je me sens mains assure de [Sukthankar] de I'authenticite de son texte. Je crains qu'il ait simplement cree une recension de plus, la recension de Pouna.

n a beau proceder sur un plus grand nombre de manuscrits que se

devanciers, Arjunamisra, NlIak3.I).tha et autres: son choix reste forcement aussi arbitraire que Ie leur... je conseillerais a l'editeur de renoncer... la reconstruction de "lUr Mahabharata" comme il se plait a dire~ d'accepter la Vulgate, - autrement dit l'editon de NIIaka.JJth~ par exemple - comme point de depart.. .3 0

29S ukthankar V. S. et al., ed. 1927 - 70. Mahabharata. 17 vols. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.

30Levi 1929, 347-48.

14

Fifteen years later, Franklin Edgerton, the editor of the Sabhii Parvan of the critical edition, expresses the opposite view in his introduction to that Parvan: .. .it is a text - in this case of the Sabhaparvan - which once existed, and from which all manuscripts of the work known to us are directly descended... every line of the text [which the critical edition approximates] had once a defmite, precise fonn, even though we are now frequently uncertain about just what that form was. It is not an indefinite tlliterature" that we are dealing with but a definite literary composition.31 A more recent Mahabharata scholar, Madeleine Biardeau, has taken Sylvain Levi's position. She does not quote the BORI edition. choosing instead to use the Vulgate text.3 2 Biardeau is also one of the few scholars who attempted a systematic critique of the theoretical presuppositions of the critical edition: The editors up till now have concentrated on the reconstruction of a single text out of the several known recensions, but it is recognized by everybody ~ including the editors themselves, that such a text never existed. It never represented the actual beliefs of any particular group, nor could it claim to stand for the minimum common beliefs of the Hindus. 33 Biardeau proposed the preparation of a synoptic edition in which all versions will be represented side by side, a perhaps impractical vision, but a solution which suits her structuralist approach, discussed below. 34 It is more common, however, for present scholars who are not quite comfortable with the reign of the BOR! edition to sidestep the

3lEdgerton 1944, xxxvi- xxxvii. 32S ee

also p. 23 below.

33Biardeau 1968, 123. 34Biardeau 1970, 30 I - 302.

15

issue and focus on other aspects of the Mahabharata, perhaps "making obeisance" to the

BORI text. 35 Since this dissertation is to a great extent a reassessment of the possibilities and limitations of the text-critical method applied to the Mahabhiirata in the BORI edition .. it is well worth our while to examine the assumptions underlying these and other positions in the debate. We may begin by placing Levi and Edgerton in their scholarly context.. since they represent two major schools in textual criticism. Edgerton's insistance on the one-time existence of a definite original text from which all manuscripts are derived may be taken as representative of the Lachmannian school of textual criticism. In its classical form, this method, also known as "stemmatics," assumes that a text has an original version and assumes that this version is the correct one. The process of textual transmission by the scribes is conceived as a source of error, and the object of the text critic is to trace this process in reverse, in order to eliminate such error as much as possible. The study of manuscripts is carried out within the tenns defined by an ancestral series. A tree-like diagram or "stemma" is prepared describing the manuscripts' hypothetical genealogy or "branching out. The least corrupt line of descent is identified, tJ

and by retracing the branching out process, the text-critic strives to arrive at an approximation of the "archetype, the hypothetical original manuscript from which all other II

manuscript are presumably derived. Stemmatics strives to be as mechanical and objective as possible by depending only on what is called lIextrinsic evidence," or evidence pertaining to text transmission on the basis of comparison of manuscripts. This is contrasted with "intrinsic evidence" such as the stylistic quality or merit of a reading in relationship to its manuscript variants.36 35Minkowski, 1989, 402. "I intend to avoid text - historical difficulties by relying on the findings of this standard edition. Therefore, having made obeisance, I begin." 36Patterson 1985.

16

Levi voices Joseph Bedier's objections to Lachmannian stemmatics. The French medievalist argued that in many cases the reconstruction of an original work from later textual constitutions was both impossible and misguided. He took the position that under such circumstances? one should only publish the "best text" among the extant documents~ with as little editorial intervention as possible.37 Evidently? at issue is the model of text presupposed by the method. Do all texts always have an original version? Is the original version of a tex4 even if technically it can be

reconstructe~

always the one that matters? Bemer arrived at his position based on his

experience with medieval texts? to which he felt such criteria do not apply. Leaving broader theoretical questions for a momen4 one may simply ask whether the

Mahabharata textual tradition suits the model presumed by stemmatics? and to this the answer is, yes and no. The differences between Levi and Edgerton may to some extent reflect the differences between the portions of the textual tradition they had an opportunity to study closely. Levi examined the edition of a portion of the Virafa Parvan, and Edgerton edited the Sabha Parvan. If SOy the problem may have a rather simple solution. Why not apply stemmatics when possible? But it is not as simple as that. Our reading practices don't just reflect the nature of the given text, they also press that text to yield one kind of meaning or another.

37Bedier 1928 is the best statement of his position - published? incidently? just a year before Levi's first review. McGann 1983, 65 - 66; Petterson 1985, 9; Hult 1991, 117 -118. In 1934 Levi responded again to Suktbankar's later formulations of his position in the Prolegomena to the Adi Parvan: "Au fond, c'est Ie probfeme de I'epopee homerique qui reparait sous une nouvelle fonn a propos du Maha Bhara~ et M. Sukthankar, forme a I'ecofe des pandits et a I'ecoIe de fa phifologie allemande, est tiraille entre la tradition indigene et Wolf. n ne peut sfempecher de tenir Vyasa et Vai~ampayana pour des personnages reels authntiues; il admet un poeme primitif, organique? a fa base de tous les remaniements; mais il declare aussi que 'pratiquement il n'ajamais existe un archetype' du poeme. 'Notre probleme, ecrit- il, est un probIeme de dynamique textuelle pIutot que de statique textuelle.'" but concludes more gently: " ...je dois a rna conscience de proclamer qu'il a accompli une oeuvre grande, belle et durable."

17

As David F. Hult points out, the Lachmannian method accepts the literary object as a gi ven~ and sees it as the un-mediated communication between an authorial figure and the present day reader. It accords precedence to authorial intentionality ~ to textual closure and to originality. In contrast, for the Bedierian editor, the text is an artifact. Bedierian theoretical skepticism rr does not take its own vocabulary or metaphors for granted. The It

Bedierian approach, he observes, is "more appealing to contemporary literary with its emphasis on

discontinuities~

fashions~

fragmentation and questioning of authorial

intentionality." Despite the striving to recover the individual authorial voice, the Lachmannian editor~ from the point of view of the manuscripts, is eliminating the individual, the accidental, separating it from the unique (and therefore, in Hult's analysis of Lachmann, transcendent) authorial voice. To use Hult's analogy, the reconstructed text stands to the manuscripts as (in the terms of the famous French structuralist, Ferdinand de Saussure) langue stands to

parole. The Bedierian editor, on the contrary, accentuates the particular and the accidentaL

To extend that same analogy, for that editor, the materiality of the manuscript is conceived as part of an individual act of speech.3 8 The practice of critical editing is closely bound up with the notion of authorial intent, with the assumption that there was a definitive moment in which the text as a whole was contained in the mind of an author. Recently, scholars have questioned the validity of such assumptions even when it comes to Romantic poetry. 39 When dealing with such texts as the Jewish Hechalot literature of late antiquity it is evident that such an intention and such a single moment of production can in no way be postulated. 40 But even in cultures where

38Hult 1991. 118-124. 39McGann 1983 40S c hafer

1982.

18

indi vidual authorship and originality in composition are not the nonn~ notions of originality, closure and intentionality seem to have some force. Michel Foucault has argued (in reference to the Euro-centric intellectual tradition) that readers postulate a creative intelligence behind a text in order to account for what they feel ought to be the text's unity, precisely because they sense that such a unity is lacking.41 We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men~ and so transcendent with regard to all languages., that as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fills a work; the author does not precede the work; he is a certain functional principle by which in our culture one limits, excludes and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction.... The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.42 This function of a text, which often, but not necessarily, coincides with the text's historical author, Foucault calls the "author function." Any student of South Asian culture knows that the "author function" is not a universal hermeneutical principle - the Mlmarpsa school of Vedic interpretation is such a prominent counter example. The hemeneutic presupposition of this school is that the Veda is not derived from a human source (apallruyeya). But precisely because the author function is not to be taken for granted in

the Brahmanical context~ it is striking that the MahObhiirata textual tradition does have a very specific kind of author function in the figure of Vyas~ the sage who sat through the first recitation lending the authority to the line of transmission without uttering a word. Vyasa's moral authority as both progenitor and teacher, his unlimited knowledge, his direct experience of and personal involvement in the events, all these validate the Mahabharata's 41 Foucault, 1984. 42Foucault 1984, 118 -119.

19

claim to being an itihiisa, a recounting of the past "as indeed it has been." But the

Mahabharata textual tradition as well as traditional interpreters seem unembarassed by the fact that the Mahiibharata has nothing to offer but the mediations. The critical edition's aggressive attempt to come as close as possible to an original radically diverges in this respect from the traditional approach to the text. But as Hult puts i4 "For all its backward concentration, the critical edition is a modem literary act pointing toward a future readership and thus takes its place within a present day economy of literary production. "43 The same is true of the project of critically editing the

Mahabharata which can only be understood in its historical context. The late 19th and early 20th century was a time of an emerging national consciousness in South Asia. Unlike the Veda, the Mahabharata in its different versions was familiar to and cherished by large segments of Indian society allover India. Sukthankar did not use the tenn

"national" in the 1933 Prolegomena at all, but in a 1936 article published in the Annals of

the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute he writes of "our Mahiibharata, the great epic of Bha:ratavar~a".44 Ronald loden has shown that the language of fragmentation and decay has played an important role in Orientalist rhetoric.45 For a text that is being proposed as the candidate for a national epic, the question of fragmentation must have been a delicate one, because the supposed fragmentary state of the national epic could be seen as reflecting the lack of national unity. A much later work by Sukthankar, published after

43Hult 1991, 125. 44Sukthankar 1936, 76. One wonders why he used the tean in the article and not in the Prolegomena. He might have felt that the readership of the article will be different from that of the Prolegomena. 45Inden 1990,169 ff., 185ff., 206 ff.,

20

independence. On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, presents the problem squarely. It begins by quoting a German Indologist: "The Mahabharata;' wrote Hennan Oldenberg, "began its existence as a simple epic narrative. It became, in the course of centuries, the most monstrous chaos. "46 Clearly. the project of critically editing the Mahabharata is an attempt by a scholar who studied in Europe and had interiorized the standards of Euro-centric culture through his education to address such negative assessments and to justify the Mahabharata somewhat in terms acceptable to scholars such as Oldenberg. The multiplicity of versions suddenly became a problem. and the figure of Vyasa in itself was no longer capable of perfonning the "author function:" The ultimate problem is to unify. as far as possible, this manuscript tradition: to evolve by comparative methods a form of the text that will explain this phenomenal wealth of divergent and conflicting texts" and

justify it.47 Justify to whom? Up to a point the project is addressed to the European scholarly establishment" but it is certainly not directed only at that audience. As he writes in the 1936 article, the Mahiihharata is our national epic." An edition of the Mahabharata that II

claims to belong to the people of India., that aspires to be more than regional or sectarian, must face the claims of different groups that have a stake in it. This is a time when a panIndian identity is claiming to replace regional and sectarian identities. Sukthankar himself points out that what distinguishes this edition from earlier ones is primarily the fact that it is exclusive instead of inc1usive. 48 Kesari Mohan Gangulj's English translation based on the

46S u kthankar

1957, 1.

47S u kthankar

1933, lxxvi. Italics mine.

48S ukthankar 1933, lxxx.

21

Bengali manuscripts and published by Pratapa Chandra Roy (1887-96) already faced this problem. In his Prolegomena Sukthankar quotes Roy's answer to the letter of a "Southern gentleman." The Southerner complained that Roy's edition was too favorable to Advaita and Visi~!lidvaita and not favorable enough to northern SaktiSI14 and that it omits many verses which the philosophers of the South cite in favor of their doctrines. Roy's reply, in essence, was: "You can't please everyone," and Sukthankar seems to sympathize a little, but not wholeheartedly."49 Throughout the Prolegomena Sukthankar is struggling with the issue of unity and diversity. On the one hand, he conceives of the diversity of the manuscript tradition as the problem, and of the critical edition as the answer to that problem. On the other hand, in the last part of the Prolegomena he seems to espouse positively that very same diversity: If the epic is to be a vital force in the life of any progressive people, it must

be a slow-changing book.50 To put it in other words, the Mahahhiirata is the whole of the Epic tradition, the entire Critical Apparatus. Its separation into the constituted text and the critical notes is only a static representation of a constantly changing epic text. 51 Sukthankar is clearly unable to resolve fully the dilemma of unity and multiplicity. One wonders whether his later book, "On the Meaning of the Mahabharata.," in which he basically argues for an allegorical reading of the text~ reflects a totaI frustration with the project of the critical edition.

49S ukthankar 1933. xxxi-xxxii.

50Sukthankar 1933, ci. 51Sukthankar

1933. cii. Italics mine.

22

But times have changed. I (being also very differently situated) am convinced that the critical edition of the Mahiihharata can serve purposes other than those originally intended by the people who conceived it. The dangers and limitations of a monolithic concept of nation are apparent today to many thoughtful persons. Recently, Indian intellectuals themselves have been critiquing Indian nationalist discourse for the exclusions it involves. 52 I believe that a dialogic reading of the Mahabharata., one that is sensitive to the variety of voices found within the textual tradition, may be useful in such discussions.

I use the tenn dialogic" in the sense introduced by the Russian thinker Mikhail I'

Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). At the heart of Bakhtinls work is a concept of the diverse or multi-vocal nature of language: Language ... is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system....Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems.53 According to Bakhtin, at any given time., there are both centripetal, or unifying forces, the forces of official monoiogic language, and centrifugal forces, the dialogic forces which constantly create heterogeneity or heteroglossia, operating in discourse. 54 Because of his fondness for tenns such as "dialogue" "voice" and "multivocality," Bakhtin can easily be misunderstood as championing the primacy of the voice over written language., but this is a serious oversimplification. Whether spoken or written,

52For example Guha 1997. 53Bakhtin 1981, 288. 54Bakhtin 1981, 270-275.

23

What is important to us here is the intentional dimensions, that is the denotative and expressive dimension of the "shared" language's stratification. It is in fact not the neutral linguistic components of language being stratified and differentiated, but rather a situation in which the intentional possibilities of language are being expropriated: these possibilities are being realized in specific directions, filled with specific content, they are being made concrete, particular, and are penneated with concrete value judgments ... 55 Bakhtin considered the novel, which he defined as "a diversity of social speech type (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized," as the highest expression of the this "polyphonic" quality of language. The novel is the dialogic form par excellence.56 Both Euro-centric scholarship and nationalist scholarship sought the center of

Mahiibharta discourse, and felt uncomfortable with the centrifugal forces that they recognized within it. This study proposed to do just the opposite, to examine the forces for heterogeneity within the textual tradition.

I must therefore explain also how my work relates to another important strand in South Asian studies which is (perhaps a little too loosely) grouped under the tenn "structuralism." I will use the tenn to refer to scholars who consciously put aside historical considerations in an effort to unravel the "deep structure" underlying either a body of texts or even a whole cultural system. Such scholars are interested in decoding the "grammar" of the system as a whole (langue, in Saussure's terms), and not interested in any of its contingent historical events (parole, in Saussure's terms). Madeleine Biardeau, a prominent French Mahiibharata 55Bakhtin 1981 ~ 289.

56Bakhtin 1981, 262.

scholar~

seeks to go beyond the surface of the

24

Mahiihhiirata text to unravel the total meaning of the Mahiihharata as a monument of the cultural synthesis of classical Bhakti Hinduism. She considers each attested version of a certain myth to be the record of an oral performance., "parole" in Saussure's terms. She therefore argues that her object would best be achieved by bypassing (transcending?) the historical panicularity of these concrete textual

events~

through the juxtaposition of as many

versions as are available to us, whether they are found in different recensions~ in different places of the written tex~ or even in a recorded oral tradition that didn't enter the written text:

If now we consider the plot of the Mahahhiirata and its overall pattern, we can easily conceive of different recensions, and different versions inside those recensions, which have all the same thing to say, though they may say it somewhat differently, owing to the variation of local traditions... the major variations in the text are likely each to have its own significance

fitting into the whole. That is why it would be more fruitful to search out the meaning of each and every part of all versions rather than to try and reconstruct one text out of the existing many.51 Despite fundamental theoretical differences between the structuralist and some performance-oriented approaches~ structuralists cite the orality of the Mahahharata in support of their own position. As mentioned before, Biardeau has objected to the use of the reconstructed tex.t as the authoritative version. In her work she follows the Bedierian strategy and quotes the Vulgate text, based on the inclusive and eclectic text which was used by the 17th century NlIakagtha for his commentary't though she has suggested that a synoptic edition should be the ideal research tool. 58

57Biardeau 1970. 301 - 302., italics mine. lt

58 For this reason, the main concern of the editors should be to publish not only the

different recensions as they are, but also, when necessary, the different versions of each recension. It would be very useful if each text could be published in parallel." Biardeau 1970, 301-302. Such a synoptic edition is not yet available, and is not likely to be, because of the technical difficulty of producing one. I must also note that more recently, Biardeau

25

Biardeau's type of structuralism is exactly what Bakhtin calls "grammer" and considers an inadequate discription of how discourse operates. I agree with him. Whereas Biardeau posits a monolithic and encompassing Mahabharata

world~

another structuralist, Wendy Doniger, has treated in some of her works the manuscript tradition primarily as a storehouse of myth to be studied along with other South Asian mythic materials. As a resul4 the boundaries between the Mahabharta text and other South Asian discourses are blurred. Like Biardeau~ Doniger justifies her practice of lifting textual units out of their context on the grounds that the written text is only an artificial fIXing of the "real" tex4 the life of which takes place in the sphere of oral performance. 59 Despite these affinities, Doniger's work differs significantly from Biardeau's. Her structuralism (in some of her works complemented by psychoanalytical methods) is UviStraussian, and she has especially drawn on Levi-Strauss' tenet that myth grows out of the contradictions in the culture's classificatory systems. This focus on tensions and contradictions enables Doniger, in my view, to articulate much better certain complexities within the texts. Nevertheless, the analysis in tenus of Levi-Straussian logical oppositions is in my view still too restricting, because it leads to a static representation, suggesting a cultural deadlock. The best known example of this is Doniger's presentation of Siva as "the erotic ascetic. "60 I would not deny that such polarizations and deadlocks do occur. but we must start out with a model of text that allows also for the possibility of process and dialogue.

has changed her mind, and proclaimed that the Mahabharata had a single author. I do not consider this, however, to be her important contribution to Mahabharata scholarship (see Biardeau 1985, 28). 59Doniger 1988. 60Doniger 1973.

26

The attempt to liberate the text from the constrictions of its inscription in a linear fonn is characteristic of the structuralist approach. Following Saussure this intellectual tradition 7

differentiates the syntagmatic (sequential) dimension of a text from its paradigmatic (associative) dimension, and studies the latter. My objection to this practice follows Fredric Jameson's critique, namely, that this analytic separation suppresses the diachronic aspect of the text. the fact that it is an historical entity. 61 In the case of a text like the

Mahiibhiirata which involves centuries of textual production, the price of ignoring diachronic processes is even higher than usual. My project is largely an attempt to work out a method that can better account for the diachronic dimension within the textual tradition even though it is technically impossible to separate fully the historical layers in it.

Fin all y, a further comment must be made about the supposed orality of the

Mahabharata. Scholars of the Bedierian school such as Levi and Biardeau have argued that the Lachmannian method can not work with the Mahabhiirata, because it is an orally transmitted texts. Why the insistence that the Mahabharata is orally transmitted? Some recent claims for the orality of the Vyasa MahObhiirata are based on the work of Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. 62 Daniel H. H. Ingalls, for instance has argued that since the Mahiibharata can be shown by statistical methods to be fonnulaic in Parry and Lord's sense, it must be orally composed. 63 I agree, however, with John D. Smith's argument that the Parry-Lord theory, as it is commonly applied, is logically flawed. Smith emphasizes that Parry and Lord did not just describe the composition techniques of a certain Yugoslav oral epic tradition, but also suggested that any text which

61 Jameson 1972.

62Lord 1960. 63Ingalls & Ingalls, 1985.

'27

is "formulaic" in the sense they defined~ must be that way because it has been orally composecL like the epics they recorded. This is faulty logic. Clearly, the statement "Some texts which are orally composed are formulaic" is not the equivalent of the statement "If a text is fonnulaic it is orally composed." Smith empirically shows that a cenain

tex~

and it

happens to be a South Asian text, exists which we know is not orally composed even though it is formulaic in Parry's sense. Furthermore, Smith points out that the bulk of recent work has been concerned with the application of the oral theory to early literature~ extant in writing, in order to prove its orality. 64 This faulty reasoning has only too easily been applied to the Mahabhiirata. To say that the Mahabhiirata is "reallyl1 an oral text is absurd. With such masses of manuscripts, how can anybody deny that writing is a factor? Writing and all that it implies culturally and politically is constitutive to the Mahahhiirata. That is not to say that only writing is a factor. Parts of the Mahabharata may have been composed orally. The Mahabharata has been and still is performed orally. Techniques originally used by oral perfonners may have played a significant role in detennining the fonn and content even of parts that were not strictly orally composed. But all this does not mean that the Mahabhiirata "is really oral." The Mahabharata was produced in an environment in which writing and orality were intertwined in very complex ways. The distinction between oral and written literature is misleading here, and in fact it does not hold for numerous important and influential texts. 65 Of course, the tendency in contemporary South Asian and other cultural studies to shift the focus of research from text to performance is not accountable only to Parry's influence. Scholars who perceive a connection between writing and domination want to

64S m ith 1977. 65See for instance Thomas 1992; Zumthor 1987.s

28

give voice to those devoid of access to power via writing by studying oral performance traditions. The relation between writing and domination is however itself a complex issue. In pre-modern South Asia the situation was especially complicated because the dominant

brahmanic culture itself had a complicated, ambivalent attitude to writing. One cannot simply identify oral culture and folk culture in a context where the text most connected with power, the 8,gveda, was jealously prevented from being written for a long time, and where sacred learning in general had to be transmitted orally from master to disciple. The shift in South Asian studies to more interest in orality and performance is welcome, as long as it does not foster the naively optimistic notion that by simply ignoring Sanskritic, brahmanic culture, we can make it and the hegemonic position it enjoyed during many periods of South Asian history go away. The nlogocentric bias" which Jacques Derrida has shown runs through Western intellectual tradition underlies some of this "discourse of orality." In his

Of Grammatology

Derrida analyses Rousseau's and Levi-Strauss' reflections on writing. His analysis brings to light a connection between a strand (in the Euro-centric intellectual tradition) of condemning culture because it is perceived to be based on domination, and a strand of condemning writing because it is perceived as the foundation of complex civilization. Derrida points to a "metaphysics of presence," or a belief that only un-mediated, direct communication, that is, oral communication, especially as it is imagined to take place in hypothetical primitive societies, can be undistorted by power relationships. Derrida's commentary on Levi- Strauss' "The Writing Lesson" is especially revealing because it shows that the condemnation of writing can be double-edged and can have an ethnocentric aspect. We can idealize "primitive societies" as we imagine they have been before they became exposed to "civilization," but that only seems to give us the right of contempt toward the real historical existence of these societies. Derrida himself rejects this

29

valorization of speech over writing, since in his analysis, any system of signs, whether it involves actual writing or not, is "inscribe~rr involves the mediation of the sign.66 I think Derrida is right on this issue. There is danger in reifying the oral-written dichotomy and in pretending that the oral realm is one of pristine beginnings, of innocence, of transparency, of authenticity and so forth .. while demonizing writing correspondingly as the source of all evil. In the South Asian case, the idea that the scribes are guilty of the

Mahabharata's supposed deterioration is linked with the Orientalist myth of the fall of Indian civilization after the Vedic period. In other words, Indians were all right, even noble, as long as they were illiterate nomads, but once they settled down and started to build a complex civilization they did it all wrong, introducing the caste hierarchy, a conupt priesthood and so forth. This study attempts to get away from the dichotomies and the otberings that are activated by locating the Mahabharata within such narratives. For instance, it is well wonh investigating the baggage that we unwittingly carry simply by calling the Mahabhiirata an epic. The tean marks the text with such double edged labels as "archaic," or "belonging to an heroic age," and draws us into a whole mythology of origins from which I prefer to keep my distance. Even sophisticated theoreticians such as Bakhtin structure their theory of literature around such myths of origins. For Bakhtin epic means "monologic," and is contrasted with (lyric) poetry. The y

tenn serves him as a foil for his notion of a "dialogic" text, for which the "novel, his It

favorite form (or I would say, counter-foan) is the most developed example. In Bakhtin's scheme, the epic is by definition the rigid voice of a dominant ideology which stifles the voice of the social other. While Bakhtin explored some premodern genres which he considered to be the precursors of the novet he never really made a study of any historic epic to show in what sense it really was monologic. 61 I hope to develop fully what has 66Derrida 1967. 67Bakhtin 1981.

30

already been hinted at by other scholars (Van Buitenen 1978: Shulman 1985,256-269, Shetty,. 1993), namely, that in Bakhtin's terms, there is much "novet" a strong dialogic dimension, in the so called Sanskrit epic. In fact, I doubt whether a pure "epic" in Bakhtin's sense ever existed. Derrida himself uses the tenn to designate that mythic pre-literary origin of the literary, even as he exposes the oppressive dimension of the longing to retrieve such a state.

In his scheme, which is somewhat different from Bakhtin's, epic and poetry are synonymous and stand for un-mediated communication:

If there is something in literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice, to epos or poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously isolating the bond that links the play of fonn to the substance of graphic expression. (It will by the same token be seen that "pure literature" thus respected in its irreducibility, also risks limiting the play, restricting it. The desire to restrict play is, moreover, irresistible ... 68 Derrida (unlike Bakhtin) is aware that the specific philosophical sense in which he uses the tenn epic in this passage cannot be properly applied to any historical textual entity. Certainly it can not be applied to one with a long manuscript tradition such as the

Mahabharata. This may be all for the better. Without the shadow of a pure epic either in Derrida's sense or in Bakhtin's sense, we may be able to appreciate the play of meanings so abundantly found in the real Mahabho.rata, the Mahabho.rata of "after the faIl," and we may also be able to face squarely the fact that the Mahabhiirata is an elite text. Being a Sanskrit text perfonned and written-down by Sanskrit speakers. probably mostly brahmans~

for an audience which had to be at least conversant with the Sanskrit language .. it

inevitably filters out the voices of those who did not have access to this prestige language.

68Derrida 1967, 59. Italics mine.

31

The Mahabharata is mostly concerned with kfatriyas and brahmans~ and is therefore far from being "folk literature" in Bakhtin's sense. It was the mouthpiece of groups that possessed.. or at least aspired to possess~ hegemony, namely kings and priests. It articulated ideas about power and claims to power. However~

it is always a mistake to conceive of the dominant group as a simple entity.

The Mahiibharata especially, since it was produced over a very long expanse of time and space and by multiple authors, bears the maries of the ideological struggles which those who aspired to the status of Iqatriya and brahama.T:za engaged in at different historical junctures. In this process many types of discourse were brought together dialogically, in the sense that when they were juxtaposed within the same flXed textual entity a dialogical relationship between them could emerge.

Well~

actually, Bakhtin's tenn "dialogical" is a

little too benign - "contestatory" more precisely describes the quality of the verbal interaction in many cases. Since this was the text of dominant groups, the text has become a "battle field" for cultural hegemony. And since at the time of the fonnation of the

Mahabhiirata brahmans were not the only contenders for royal patronage - the Buddhists and the 1ains were around and they had their own narratives of kings and dharma - the discourse of the Mahabharata is engaged with other, competing discourses, in particular, Buddhist and lains. In this study I hope to show that a story placed in a legendary past, before the beginning of the present cosmic age or yuga, a mythic narrative, if you will, can serve as the stuff with which controversies present at the time of its formation were debated. In the

Mahabharata, present issues could not be addressed directly. Nevertheless, the telling, retelling, elaboration and sometimes interpretation of the stories of old have enabled those who inserted their words into the textual tradition to address such issues indirectly. The complexity, and from my point of view, the fascination of the Mahiibharata arises specifically from the fact that it is not the work of a single person, circle or time. It is

32

a text that grew by expansion. The most decisive period of formation is about 400 BCE to 400 CE, but some of the materials in it may go further back in time and we know that it continued to be expanded even after the formative period was over. It is this very expansion process that enabled the textual tradition to be taken on by various agents with various agendas. My study examines some of the mechanisms of this process. This is why questions of textual identity, textual formation and fonn are so intimately connected with interpretative questions in the case of the Mahiibhiirata. If, as I will attempt to show, the multi- vocality of the text is intimately connected with the practice of textual expansion, one cannot try to weed out the later stuff with the hope that the older "core" will give us the ureal," Iforiginal" meaning. Similarly, one cannot try to rid the main narrative from the huge mass of secondary narratives attached to it, with the hope that the "main" narrative will give us the "main" meaning. It is precisely by examining the ways in which the later materials connect with the earlier ones that we will begin to recognize the agency of the anonymous authors and hear their voices. It is precisely in trying to understand why a secondary story is introduced at a certain juncture of the main narrative that we will get some idea of how the anonymous person who attached this secondary story at this point at some time understood and used the idiom of the Mahabharata.

I have divided my work into three chapters: Chapter One treats textual heterogeneity on the level of text criticism. As explained above, the classical task of the text-critic is to reconstruct the original text, and at any rate he or she is bound to concepts of textual unity and authorial intention. For my project, however, variations and expansions become more relevant the more they can be shown to constitute an intervention in the larger pre-existing unit's meaning. Essential to my work is my argument that the practice of constant textual expansion by insertion of new textual units into an existing linear text is constitutive of the Mahabharata textual tradition. It is

33

also essential to understand that on the larger scale, the extent and the quality of textual variation is not uniform. Some chunks of the tex~ even very large ones, are remarkably unifonn, suggesting not only the existence of a written archetype, but also fairly uneventful transmission/reception. Other portions., in contrast., have a single underlying version. a single archetype, but have attracted so many insertions that the underlying unity is less evident. For other portions still, no underlying archetype can be reconstructed. Even though the evidence supporting these facts has been available in the critical edition for some time, their significance for understanding the Mahahhiirata as a cultural artifact has not been appreciated. I show that the process of textual production/ transmission has been very different for different portions of the Mahabharata. To understand this situation is preliminary to an appreciation of the extremely composite quality of the Mahabharata as a textual entity. The last section of Chapter Ones is a study of a limit-case of two sets of doublets, or the repetition of a pair of nearly identical units, the Sixteen-Kings and Lady-Death units, which are each found in two different locations in the Mahiibhiirata. I show that in spite of a striking similarity, the two textual units are significantly independent, both formally and in their ideological stance., and that this distinctiveness is achieved by what I call "texture" or "surface qualities/' such as sequence, framing and so forth. In other words. I show that we can hear two distinct voices despite the sameness of the overall structure. The transmission history of each unit, as evidenced by the manuscripts't is also treated. I show that the scribes, who expanded amply on both units, clearly appreciated the distinct quality of each unit and respected it. The separate transmission history of the units is particularly revealing when the subject was such a universally widespread theme as Rama's rule, where the temptation to embellish by simply filling in the well known and beloved details of the Riimayar:za narrative is obvious. The point is that structuralist practices such as lifting textual units out of their place in the running text or assuming that different

34

"versions" tell basically the same story efface these complexities. If we approach the text with such presuppositions, we are bound to read it as monologic in Bakhtin's tenns. Chapters II and ill are devoted to exploring aspects of the heterogeneity of the

Mahabharata tradition. This means studying the specificity of selected units. I have deliberately chosen to represent the contrast between heroic concerns which predominate some parts of the Mahabharata and the priestly concerns which predominate other parts of the textual tradition. The manuscript traditions of the two books which I have chosen to study are almost at the opposite end of the spectrum in that one has evidently never been centrally redacted whereas the other seems to have a single archetype. It would be nice to be able to show that these differences in production account for the different concerns of these Parvans, but I don't think such a causal connection exists. Chapter Two deals with an aspect of the Mahiibharata's 8th book, the Kan:za

Parvan, which has so far drawn little scholarly attention. It addresses the rhetoric of heroic praise and blame and verbal duels. These are verbal perfonnances which typically take place right in the middle of a battle scene. Some are monologues uttered by the hero about to enter into combat. Pure monologues are rare, however. The hero is more likely to address his constant companion in battle, the charioteer, or to cry out loud to anybody present on the battlefield. Many exchanges involve two prospective combatants. Sometimes a third party is in vol ved, urging one or both of the heroes to fight hard. Verbal encounters between oon- combatant observers, such as the gods in heaven, are also found.

In this range of fonns, the verbal duel holds a place of honor, because of the obvious parallel between a combat of anns and a verbal "fight." The primary function of these perfonnances seems to be to work up the combatants into a state of fury, so that they will be able to perfonn super-nonnal~ heroic feats. The accompaniment of physical fights by verbal ones serves as "encouragement," both in the sense of the cheering of a crowd in a wrestling match and in a more specific magic or ritual

35

sense, a "quickening" effect. Here we begin to touch upon the complex semantic connections between battle and ritual which are invoked in various ways throughout the epic. The more complex exchanges go beyond this function into the realm of memory and reflection. One or both combatants, or a third party, will recollect verbally the reasons for the hostility between the parties. The limited battle scene is thus contextualized within the

Mahiihharata's larger narrative. We may get a glimpse into the state of consciousness of the side who is about to be killed, including his reflection on his own action and its motivations. We are allowed to contemplate alternative possibilities in the development of the plot. Some of the most complex among these exchanges, two of which I treat in detail. seem to be most concerned with enhancing the ambiguities of the situation. The figure of Kan:t~

of all the characters in the Mahiibhiirata, is perhaps the most inviting of such

playing-around with ambivalences, because of his unusual psychological complexity. The fascination with ambiguities is however not restricted just to the figure of KarQa. but extends even to one of the most central figures of the Mahiibharata., to

Yudhi~thira

himself. Chapter Three is the most ambitious chapter of this study. It describes a rhetorical form which I call "contestatory discourse" and explores its function in the fourteenth book of the Mahabharata, the Aivamedhika Parvan. The name "contestatory discourse" is intended to suggest two characteristics. First, that such discourse is associated with agonistic or "contestatorylt ritual practices. Second, that it has to do with the contestation of ideologies. It involves the intertextual deployment of units of discourse against each other, so as deliberately to draw out their difference. This discursive activity is conceived of by its practitioners as an essential part of sacrificial ritual (yajna), understood by them in a specific sense which I will explain. I argue that in the Aivamedhika Parvan, this discursive pattern plays a constitutive role. It is quite central to the Parvan's thematics as well as to its textual organization. This

36

chapter of my study is thus also a reading of the Asvamedhika Parvan, or the Book of the

Horse Sacrifice - a task which has never been systematically undertaken, despite the fact that a number of scholars have looked at portions of the Parvan for various purposes. The

Aivamedhika Parvan is one of those Parvans which seems at first a rather rambling collection of heterogeneous materials of the kind that gave rise to the image of the

Mahabharata as a Uliterary monster."69 Because of their thematic or structuralist nature, none of these prior studies attempted to describe the nature of the textual dynamics which hold the Parvan together. This is the task I have undertaken in Chapter Three. I read the apparently diverse units of the Parvan as dialogically engaged in the ideological problematic around which the Parvan revolves. The Aivamedhika Parvan narrates the events of the aiva-medha, or horse-sacrifice, which the protagonists of the Mahabharata offered after their terrible victory, a victory won at the price of the lives of most of the warriors on both sides. As is well known, the frrst part of this royal sacrifice involves sending a horse to roam over the land for a year, accompanied by an anny, with the understanding that the rulers of any part of the country through which the horse passes will become subjects of the king who is offering the sacrifice unless they attack the horse, thereby challenging the sacrificing king to battle. The part of the Parvan which describes the sacrifice itself involves mostly a description of the itinerary of the horse's wondering and quite a number of battle scenes .. but the greater bulk of the Parvan is concerned with speculations about the nature of sacrifice and a dhanna based on sacrifice. Precisely because of this juxtaposition of the sacrificial and the heroic, the Aivamedhika Parvan is a good place to approach the question of the Mahiibhiirata's unity or textual integrity. I contend that in the Aivamedhika Parvan, the impression of heterogeneity is a result of the deliberate juxtaposition of radically different discourses. Rather than being arbitrary, such juxtaposition is appropriate in a Parvan which is about a 69Winternitz 1927,326.

37

contestatory rite. I read the Aivamedhika Parvan as an arena in which the work of

defining and redefining a dharma around the tenn "yajna" and against the nastikas' nonsacrificial dhannas of the time took place. The authors are trying to square the circle of the intimate connection between sacrifice and battle, or between their understanding of the socio-cosmic order, dharma, and violence, hirpsQ.

38

Chapter One Varieties of Textual Variation

1.1. From Variation to Growth Through Reflexivity

When the manuscripts within a textual tradition do not all variation.

Clearly~

agree~

we speak of textual

the range of complexity of the phenomena so defined is great. The

extent of the disagreement can be of a single letter or of a whole book. Some disagreements are clearly due to a scribe's

rnistak:e~ others~

to other reasons such as the

practices of oral performers? or to a deliberate change introduced into the manuscript tradition by a scribe. Sometimes a difference of one word or phrase can make a radical difference in sense, and sometimes the opposite: parallel units in two different manuscripts rt

may tell practically the "same story or make practically the "same" philosophical points, though they employ altogether different words. The latter type of variation, called "substitute passages" or "parallel running versions," can also vary in extent. Sometimes a certain textual unit may be present in one manuscript and absent from another. In most cases, such a passage will be considered an tlinterpolation," an "insertion" or an "expansion" (the appropriateness of these terms will be further discussed below). In some cases, the same events may be recountecL or the same ideas expounded, and perhaps even the same or almost the same words are used, but the order or sequence of the narrative or lt

didactic units may differ. This is called a "transposition or a "sequence variation.

It

39

Even when looking at only two manuscripts. broader textual patterns such as frequency of variation should be taken into account. Large scale distribution of the variations should be distinguished from local irregularity. This or that verse, this or that short episode. may for some reason be particularly dense with variation, though the larger unit within which it is set may be fairly unifonn - and vice versa. On the other hand, variations of a certain type may be common in ODe large unit such as, in the case of the

Mahiibharata, a Parvan, and virtually non-existent in another. Finally, all of these types of variations quite often occur in combination. What on a larger scale appears as a case of a parallel-running texts may also involve smaller-scale sequence variation. In the case of the Mahabhiirata, the local single-word or single-phrase type of variation is virtually omnipresent, whether the manuscript tradition is otherwise

regular or not. Furthennore, in the case of the Mahabharata, the vast number of extant manuscripts greatly amplifies the complexity of the simation which we have hypothetically described as involving only two manuscripts. It is not at all uncommon that the manuscript tradition will attest not two but fifteen alternative possibilities for a single word or phrase. Even when a certain chapter or verse is peculiar to a group of related manuscripts, we may find that between themselves these manuscripts will locally disagree about a smaller unit. An original written text from which all the manuscripts in a group of manuscripts can be shown to have descended is called a (primary) archetype for these manuscripts. 1 When a textual tradition has had such an archetype, it can be very useful to reconstruct a tree-like diagram representing the hypothetical branching out of the manuscripts. The work of reconstruction may be hindered, or even totally

baffled~

however, by the practice of cross-

borrowing between the branches of the manuscript tradition ("contamination," as it is called

1An

archetype for a sub-group of manuscripts is c:!lled a secondary archetype.

40

by editors intolerant of textual practices which do not serve their ends). Sometimes? furthermore, and this appears to be the case for some of the Parvans of the Mahabhiirata., independent oral transmission over a long period and separate commitment to the writing of local traditions has taken place. In such cases., the notion of a single original and therefore correctn text is groundless, so that stemmatics is not only ineffective but It

completely misleading. In the Introduction we have discussed the difference between the Lachmannian and the Bedierian schools of textual criticism. The fIrst school is based on the simplistic assumption that texts are derived from an archetype. The second recognizes that for many texts this is not the case. The solution that it offers., to chose a best manuscript and print it~ is also unsatisfactory.

In this chapter I show that certain types of textual phenomena testify to textual practices which simply defy the underlying assumption of stemmatics. For example., when a substantial textual unit is repeated in two different places of the same manuscript (often with minor or major change), it is instructive to think of the repetition as a kind of tex.tual variation, in this case occurring not between manuscripts but within the same manuscript. Repetition is closely related to variation in sequence.

v. S. Sukthankar has already done in his Prolegomena the work of establishing a detailed typology of textual variation in much greater detail than I would ever wish to go into.2 I have drawn freely on his exposition., both for terminology and for the convenience of the many examples he supplies. This will have the advantage of enabling me also to use his exposition in order to raise methodological issues.

A product., among other things, of the German (Lachmmanian) school of textual criticism, Sukthankar often treats variation and especially expansion unsympathetically.

2S ukthankar 1933 CM.Bh. BOR! vol. 1, "Prolegomena")., xxxi-xlvii, especially xxxvii-xlv.

41

This is obvious from the occasional use of terms such as "deviation~"3 tlinterpolation.tr4 "contamination,"S Itcorruptiontr6 and even "derangement."7 In the part of the

Prolegomena where he compares the Northern and Southern recensions, he treats expansion~

or as he calls it, "inflation," as a vice to which the Southern scribes were

particularly prone, though he later somewhat qualifies this position. 8 My own approach is different. In this section I will argue for a continuity between the dynamic poetics tha underlie the Mahabharata's narrative logic and those that underlie

the process of expansion as revealed by analysis of the manuscripts. Sukthankar has already recognized this continuity: The view that the epic has reached its present form by a gradual process of addition and alteration receives strong support from the fact that the process is not stopped by scriptural flXation. 9 Sukthankar nevertheless continued to regard the expansion process as a distortion, whereas I treat it as a source suggestive of the practices of textual production which shaped the Mahabharata even in its earlier formative period, a period which we cannot directly

3S ukthankar 1933, lxxxvii. 4Sukthankar 1933. Ixiii; lxxv. c, ci, etc .. 5Sukthankar 1933, Ii; lvii; Iviv; lxxxiv, etc .. 6S ukthankar 1933, lxiv; Lxxxiv, etc .. 7Sukthankar 1933, Ixxvi. 8Sukthankar 1933, xxxii-xlvii. See below section 1.2.2.3. for a detailed discussion of what is going on here. After editing the Ara1J.yaka Parvan and finding that its Northern recension is more "inflated" than its Southern, he retracted on this point. 9S ukthankar 1933, lxxvi.

42

trace through manuscripts, since the earliest extant ones are probably from the 15th century. This section is designed to lead the reader into recognizing these continuities and appreciating their complexities. Once this is done~ Chapter One will proceed to complicate our analysis of variation in ways which more radically defy the distinctions made by Sukthankar. We will eventually focus our attention on an example in which the analytical tools offered by terms such as variation or expansion are clearly useless. Why choose to focus on such limit cases? After all~ they could just be freaks of the textual tradition, places where things have gone a little awry. The weight of this chapter's argument is to convince the reader that this is not the case, that on the contrary, precisely in those places where the text gets entangled with itself, so to speak, we can get a glimpse of the Mahabharata in the making of the ideological battles which were fought in and 7

through its production/transmission. This will lead us toward the argument made in the following chapters of my study, namely, that such complex cases of variation are most fruitfully approached as a subcategory of the larger phenomena of textual heterogeneity and ideological contestation which are the subject of this study.

1.2. A Typology of Variations

1.2.1. Minor Variations (Different Readings) 10 Open the critical addition of the Mahabharata at random and you will find that the

text is accompanied by an apparatus. M.Bh. BOR! XIV .2.1, for example, reads: 11

lOSukthankar 1933, xxxvii-xxxviii. 11 I avoid the fIrst adhyaya since things get more complicated at the beginning and at the end of a Parvan.

43

evam uktas tu rajiUi sa dhrtar~treQa dhlmati tii~IJlm babhiiva medhavl tam uvacatha kesaval:t

Thus addressed by the learned king

DImar~tra

The wise Kesava fell silent at frrst~ and then spoke: This verse, taken from a relatively unifonn book, the Aivamedhika Parvan, is as common and as straightforward as an epic verse can get. Nevertheless, the critical apparatus tells us that K6, B 1, 0 (except DC 1, D 1), G 1, M all read raja instead of rajna; Treads (a)tha. and G2 read (a)sau for sa;

S1 reads dhrtara$trena for dhrtaraoftre1J.a;

D3

reads tu.wlm and D4 tU$T.Zim for tii~I.1im; SI, KI,K3 and K5 reads nrpatis for medhiivl; K4 reads keiava for kesavab.. Some of these variations are simply scribal errors or spelling variations. For instance,

tu$T.Zlm and tii$l)im. as well as dhrtarQ,ftrena are straightforward spelling mistakes, and keiava in the vocative does not make any sense in the context because we know that the addressee in this scene is Janamejaya, not ~Qa. Others fall quite neatly into the category of variations that Albert Lord, following his mentor Milman Parry ~ has shown to be typical of formulaicaUy composed texts. 12 The reading raja (nominative) for rajfia (instrumental) is an acceptable alternative reading, since the subject of the sentence,

Kr~lJa.

being the chief of the Yadus, is a king of sorts, and

thus raja could qualify him, rather then king Yudhi~t.hira (even though

Kr~IJa's

royal status

is contested, and even though Yudhisthira is certainly the more paradigmatic king in this exchange), To have nominatives (raja sa) in one pada and instrumentals (dhrcara${rer;a

12Lord 1960. As I explain in my Introduction, the stronger claim, that if a text is formulaic then it is orally composed, is problematic.

44

dhfmatii) in the second may feel smoother than to alternate between instrumentals and nominative as the reconstructed text does (rajna sa dhrrari4p-eT)a dhlmatii). Since sa in

any case carries no meaning in this context and functions simply as a metric space-fiUer, the metrically heavy (a)sau, which means the same as sa, may replace it in this

position~

achieving a more regular metric pattern, and this may have motivated this change. Similarly the light (a)tha., which often carries little meaning., can stand in the same place as sa without any change of meaning, perhaps interrupting a little less than the sa does the

sequence of instrumentals in rajfiii sa dhrtar~tre1)a dhlmata. There is no end to such variations in the Mahiibharata. For the whole Adi Parvan of over 8,000 verses, for instance, Sukthankar was able to record only 30 verses (!) for which no variants whatsoever have been found. 13 The great majority of such local variations make little difference to the sense of the larger linguistic unit., just like the (a)tha alternative for sa in the above example. Very rarely, a single-word variation may indeed make some difference, as when the Southern recension has Atjuna exiled for twel ve months (masiinzl rather than for twelve years (var$ii~i).14 This study will, from now on, ignore such minor variations unless they are compounded with some other problem that is of more concern.

1.2.2. Expansions and Omissions 15 The critical editors of the Mahlibharata considered passages which occur in some branch or branches of the manuscripts and not in all of them to be most probabl y

13S ukthankar 1933, lxxxviii- xci. 14S ukthankar

1933, xxxviii.

15S ukthankar 1933~ xxxviii-xlvii.

45

"expansions."16 In other words, they are supposed to have been at some point insened by a scribe into an already existing running text that scribe had received and was copying. Expansion was a very common practice at least in the case of some of the Parvans; for some Parvans, the reconstituted text is shorter than Appendix I, to which relatively longer passages suspected of being insertions were relegated! It was often done quite artfully, in a seamless way. Most expansions would be impossible to detect without the comparison of manuscripts. This, as well as the inclusivist tendency of the scribes - in other words, their preference to include a passage in the new manuscript that they were preparing even if they were aware that not all manuscripts had that passage - ensured that expansions ended up being integrated into all derived manuscripts, and often spread into other branches of the manuscript tradition. We thus must depend on stemmatics, the comparison of all extant manuscripts and the tracing of their branching out process, to identify expansions with any degree of certitude.

1.2.2.1. The Problem of Expansion Versus Omission: On the face of it, when a passage is found to be present in one branch of manuscripts and absent from another, it seems just as reasonable to consider that it has been omitted from the second branch as to suppose that it was inserted into the flfSt. The editors of the critical edition have not gi ven equal weight to each of these possibilities. Why? Before we go into this, however, it must be clear that at issue are only deliberate omissions. The manuscripts contain many cases of accidental omission, and these are easily identifiable. For example: often the reason for the omission is evident, as with the common scribal error of skipping to the next occurrence of a repeated opening formula. In such cases the similarity has caused the scribe's eye to skip down a portion of the text.

16The tenns "insertions" or "interpolations" are also used. I prefer "expansion," the most neutral of the three terms.

46 When a leaf or more of the manuscript is lost, the text is likely to be strangely cut off and

to resume at a totally arbitrary point, and if we have the manuscript from which it was copied, it is obvious that a whole page has been skipped. Accidental omissions will occur either in a single manuscript or in a group of evidently related manuscripts. There are, however, many cases when a whole episode or adhyaya is present only in some of the manuscripts, and both versions seem equally seamless. Positive proof that either a deliberate omission or a deliberate insertion has occurred is hard to produce in such cases. Nevertheless, Sukthankar and most other editors thought that omission is unlikely, though they did not exclude the possibility altogether. One of the editors, Franklin Edgerton, took an even stronger position. He claimed that he had not seen any deliberate omissions in the Mahiibharata and that therefore, he considered them almost impossible. 17 The problem is much more fundamental than it may seem at first, because it is built into the very principles of stemmtics underlying the critical edition. Let us reconsider the two basic editorial rules laid out by Sukthankar and followed throughout the edition: (a) Universal attestation: "To accept as original a reading or feature which is documented unifonnly by all manuscripts alike." 18 (b) When in doubt, follow N: "When the two recensions have alternate readings

neither of which can have come from the other and which have equal intrinsic merit, I have for the sake of consistency and for the sake of avoiding unnecessary and indiscriminate fusion of versions, adopted as a stop gap the reading of the Northern recension." 19

17He does admit that "the older the borrowal [sic] and the more interesting the passage borrowed, the wider will be the area over which it will spread in its new habitat. It then becomes difficult to prove the borrowal ... rr but does not draw the necessary radical conclusions from it. Sukthankar 1933, lxxxi. 18Sukthankar 1933, lxxxvi - xci. 19Sukthankar 1933, xci.

47

What is the reasoning behind the fIrst rule (which we shall from now on call "the rule of universal attestation")? Since stemmatics is a historical method, in the sense that it aims at reconstituting the earliest fonn of the text possible, adopting this rule is equivalent to the

assumption of insertion rather than omission in all but the most obvious cases. If omission was highly prevalant, if manuscripts were constantly losing verses in the copying process~

would it not be reasonable to take the fuller version as earlier and more original?

And indeecL Sukthankar posed the rule because he believed that the scribes were strongly inclined to inclusion, not to exclusion. But could Sukthankar and Edgerton possibly be mistaken? Perhaps they never encountered omissions not because they do not exist but because they lacked the tools to recognize them?

A new angle on the problem could be gained by the following thought exercise. What if a substantially long and self-contained textual unit were universally accepted into the manuscript tradition at a late point in the Mahabharata's history? The rule of universal attestation would prevent us from recognizing such a case a priori! But why shouldn't such a situation be possible? Consider a popular text such as the Bhagavadgna. Is it so improbable that it has been inserted at some point into a preexisting received tex4 probably

a battle narrative, and that it had simply spread into all branches of the manuscript tradition precisely because of its popularity? The extant manuscripts do not go very far back in time since the earliest dated manuscript is from 1511 C.E.,20 and the G[ta reached its preeminent position no later than by Sankaracarya's time or the the 9th century C.E..21 If

20S ukthankar

1933, vi.

21Mahadevan, 141.

48

such universal incorporation has occurred before any manuscript extant to us, we would never detect it through analysis of extrinsic evidence. 22 The example of the Bhagavadglta points to the likelihood of universal incorporation. But perhaps simply to argue the likelihood of a universal insertion is to make an absolutely unfaIsifiable, and therefore "unscientific" claim? My argument would certainly be much solider if I could point to such and such a passage as a definite case of universal insertion. This, unfortunatly, is in principle impossible to do since every verse that occurs in all the manuscripts could theoretically be a universal insertion. I can, however, do the second best thing to it. I can point to a concrete example that proves that universal insertion is very very likely. Consider the following. All cases in which only some of the manuscripts contain a passage can theoretically be placed along a continuum. Obviously, the fewer the manuscripts (or branches of manuscripts) in which the problem passage appears the more certain can we be that expansion has occurred. The greater the number of attestations, on the other hand, the less positive can we be that it is an expansion and not an omission. Now

22r am in fact not the frrst person to raise the question of universal incorporation. Paranjpe, the editor of a single minor Parvan, the strl Parvan, has raised exactly this specter. He argues that the single stri Parvan Appendix I. 44-line long passage, which is found in most KaSmlri and Bengali manuscripts is an example of both universal acceptance of a unit and a deliberate omission! He argues that the first eight adhyayas of the Strf Parvan. known as the Viioka sub-parvan, are late. The Viioka sub-parvan is attested in all manuscripts, but not mentioned in the Parvasa1!lgraha; some Northern manuscripts suggest by their colophons that the Viioka was considered a separate unit preceding the Strl Parvan. Based on these considerations Paranjpe suggests that at some relatively late point the Viioka sub- parvan was universally accepted into all branches of the tradition. He argues that the adhyaya relegated to Appendix 1. which deals more succinctly with the same subject matter as the Viioka uni~ was original, and that after the acceptance of the Viioka Parvan, the Southerners felt that it was redundant and so they omitted it. The fact that the Southern recension is here charged with "suppression on the ground of redundancy is worth noting of itself, since there have been so many charges that the Southern recension tends to inflation and repetition. See M.Bh. BOR! volume 12, xxiii-xxvi. II

49

my point is that as we approach universal

anestation~

omission as an alternative explanation

becomes more conceivable. Imagine the case of a passage occurring in all but one manuscript. If we

insist~

like

Edgerton, that the scribes would never deliberately omit a passage, we would have no choice but to assume that the passage has been inserted in all but one manuscript. But if we admit that an expansion couId have penetrated all but a single manuscrip4 could not another expansion have penetrated all manuscripts? Thus, the question of omission and the question of universal insertion are logically intertwined. Now it just so happens that a case of attestation in all but one manuscript of a substantial textual unit is actually found in the Mahabharata. A very long and interesting passage is attested in all but one Siradi manuscript (and a Devanagari version of the same) of the DroTJ.(l Parvan. Following the rule of universal attestation, the editor, S. K. De, has relegated this passage to Appendix I. De sensed, perhaps, that in this case to follow the rule blindly is a little problematic, so he also justified this editorial decision by the argument that the unit in question is inferior and that it looks like a reworking, a "repetition" of units already present in the Santi Parvan. The editors themselves recognize, however, that repetition cannot serve as a valid criterion of itself. When all manuscripts support a passage, the editorial practice has been to include it whether they regarded it as a "repetition" or not, and the fact is that the consistent application of this very editorial principal has established that the Mahabharata abounds with nrepetitions:' Being a "repetition" can therefore hardly mark a passage as Itextraneous." Moreover, the simple applicability of the term "repetition" is questionable in this case, as I shall argue in section

I.4. My concern is not to demand the inclusion of the passage in the reconstituted text -this would be a futile exercise - but to argue a theoretical point. If we insist that the passage in question is an insertion, than we must admit the likelihood of universal

50

acceptance of passages into the preexisting manuscript tradition. The realization that any passage in the "reconstituted text" may in principle be a latter expansion should caution us not to draw too strong a distinction between the reconstructed text and the materials which have been relegated to Appendix I. No doubt, many or even most of the textual materials relegated to Appendix I are late arrivals in the written Mahabharata tradition, but they could have been in circulation long before they entered the Mahabharata manuscripts. On the other hand, there is an important sense in which not just some, but most of the

materials of which the reconstituted text itself consists should be considered to be "expansions." We must begin to think of expansion as a practice constitutive to the

Mahabharata, and not as an aberration of [he tradition. One of Sukthankar's best fonnulations is: To put it in other words, the Mahabharata is the whole o/the Epic tradition.

the entire Critical Apparatus. Its separation into the constituted text and the critical notes is only a static representation of a constantly changing epic text ... 23 Sukthankar, of course, never recommended a simplistic use of the reconstructed text as a working tool. A cereful reading of the Introduction shows an ambivalence on

Sukthankar's part. Elsewhere he claims that the reconstituted text is Hthe oldest fonn of the text which it is possible to reach on the basis of the manuscript material available. "24 In what sense is the reconstituted text "a form" of the text? Is it an approximation, or an ideal reconstruction? Perhaps the rule of universal attestation is nothing but a political compromise. Mer aIl~ when there is concensus among all members of the community of interpreters, the best course is just to let things be. Sukthankar, however, only half

23Sukthankar 1933, cii. Italics mine. 24Sukthankar 1933, lxxxvi.

51

heartedly admitted this dimension of the enterprise of critically editing the Mahabharata. 25 He remained hovering between stemmatics' claim to scientific objectivity and a cautious recognition of the nationalist objectives of the project. From a different historical vantage poin~ one can see that the method of stemmatics~ designed to uncover the original, the archetype, of a manuscript tradition, allows us only to to scratch the surface of the phenomenon of textual expansion. We will never be able to measure quantitatively the depth of this phenomenon, or to reach its bottom in the shape of a truIly original archetype, but we do know that the Mahiibhiirata is a text which grew, which became what it is by expansion. The expansion practices which we can trace through stemmatics are probably similar to the expansion practices through which much of the so called reconstituted text of the Mahiibharata was produced. 1.2.2.2. Types of Expansion: Let us therefore set aside the big theoretical issues for a while and take a closer look at cases that we know for certain to be expansions. Again, I use Sukthankar's classification of examples taken from the Southern recension as a convenient starting point. a) Multiplication of the items of a list. For example, it is said that V asi~tha's cow could fulfill every desire. An expansion supplies a detailed list of the edibles and commodities which she was able to furnish (1.165. *1753). b) Repetition or anticipation of stories, motives or discourses. The story of Amb3: narrated in the Udyoga Parvan (V. 170- I97) is anticipated in the Southern recension by passage 55 of Appendix I of the Adi Parvan. c) Filling in the details of a ritual (e.g. 1.68. *625; 1.92. *921)

25See

also my Introduction pp. 19-21.

52

d) Addition of speeches detailed descriptions and other digressions." This is one of It

7

Sukthankar's more loosely defined categories but it covers some of the more interesting 7

cases of expansion. Here are some of the examples he adduces:

In the account of the churning of the ocean, the Southern recension also tells that on that occasion Siva drank the poison which came out of mouth of the serpent Yasuki's (Appendix I, No.9). The Southern recension describes in detail how Siirya persuaded the shy and reluctant KuntT to have sex with him (Appendix I. No. 59). The Southern recension depicts the death of PagQu (Appendix I, No. 68-69). Some detailed battle descriptions are peculiar to the Southern recension (e.g., Appendix I, No. 78, 93). The passages peculiar to the Southern recension contain alternative explanations for Draupadi's polyandrous marriage (Appendix 17 No. 100, 101). e) Additions of moral discourses, ethical maxims and so forth. f) Some elaborations on the description of feminine beauty. These, Sukthankar

observes, are peculiar to the Southern recension, attesting to the decadence of Southern culture. g) The Southern recension depicts a semi-secret marriage ceremony between Dul}~anta and SakuntaHi 0.67.*610), Yayati and Sarmi~tha (1.77.*807), Subhadra and

AIjuna (Appendix I, No. 114), Parasara and SatyavatT (Appendix I. No. 36) (Thus legitimizing Bharata, Puro, Abhimanyu and Vyasa respectively). h) "Filling out of lacunae." Again, a pretty nebulous category. Sukthankar mentions, for instance, passage 79 of Appendix I, which supplies an account of Drupada's birth.

1.2.2.3. Inner Textual Expansion or Interpretation: That Sukthankar's classifications are somewhat arbitrary does not matter so much. A more serious problem is his eagerness to dismiss as insignificant or even to condemn as inferior literature

53

anything that he considers to be suspect, on the grounds of manuscript evidence, of being a later addition to the text. In this particular part of the Prolegomena, this eagerness is unfortunately also combined with a peculiar version of the Orientalist meta-narrative of the historical deterioration of Indian culture, according to which the poor Southerners are the culprits. For instance. expansions which elaborate on descriptions of feminine beauty, Sukthankar describes as n Additional stanzas in S with, perhaps, a cenain amount of sexual appeal, bearing the taint of later decadence." To read Sukthankar, one would think that the Southern scribes were pedantic, legalistic, given to endless digression, both obsessed with sexuality and too prudish about sexual matters, and so on. These particular passages of the

Prolegomana attest to a sad psychological fact. Sukthankar, with all his great learning of Sanskrit literature, has internalized the negative stereotypes with which OrientaIist discourse is rife, and in order to distance his own (idealy Pan) Indian identity from what he finds embarassing about the Mahabharata, he tries to make the "decadent" South Indian pundits responsible for these aspects. In Sukthankar's defence it must be said that after editing the Ara1J.yaka Parvan and finding that its Northern recension is more lIinflated" than its Southern, he qualified his position. 26

In fact, most of these "decadent" tendencies are arguably just as typical of the Northern expansions. While I would not exclude the possibility that a detailed study might reveal some minor differences in regional patterns of textual expansion - it may instance~

be~

for

that the procedure of secretly marrying unwed mothers of famous forefathers is a

peculiar Southern invention - I am nevertheless convinced that every one of the larger categories of expansion described by Sukthankar is found in the Northern manuscripts as well. If anything, the difference is of extent, not of quality, and even in that regard, the

26See below section 1.3.2.

54

Southern recension is not consistently prone to expand more than the N onhern. One can very easily pick passages from the reconstituted text which would be as susceptible to the charges of repetition, anticipation of later events, systematization or moralizing as the passages which have been relegated to Appendix. I. Is every verse in the reconstituted

Siinti Parvan really that necessary for conveying the general sense? Are not most of the stories of the AraJJ.yaka Parvan digressions? Isn't most of the "snake lore" of the Adi

Parvan a digression? Do we really need all the genealogies of the Ad; Parvan? Is not the whole story of Ambi, even as it is narrated in the Udyoga Parvan, nothing but a way of anticipating and explaining BhI~ma's death, and thus "extraneous" to the core narrative? Let me put it more strongly. Suppose we were somehow to purge the Mahabharata of every passage that is concerned with enumeration of items on lists, with anticipation of and explanation of coming events, with rituals and ritual imagery and symbolism, with speeches, with descriptions, with digressions, with moralizing and philosophizing about human action, with erotically charged situations... Suppose we were to do away with attempts to legitimize in tenns of DharmaSastra older traditions which attest to archaic and non-DharmaSistric practices, and with materials that are concerned to prove the legitimacy of the lineage of that rather hazy emerging cultural-political entity that the Mahabharata is struggling to define ... Suppose we attempted to do away with attempts to "fill out lacunae" ... What would we have left? Nothing at all, I suspecL This is the stuff the

Mahiibharata is made of. Even if we were able somehow to identify the "rock bottom" of the tex~ the short epic from which the longer text has grown, we might discover that this short seed text would be lacking most of what makes the Mahiibharata the Mahiibharata. This is not to say that Sukthankar was altogether wrong in sensing that for some of the examples that he provides, the poetic principles of textual construction by expansion have reached, we might say, a point of diminishing returns. But he seems to be all too eager to extend this negative judgment to as many expansions as possible. We shall see

55

that some expansions are not quite as uninteresting as one might expect from his presentation of the matter. A correlate of this eagerness to dismiss any passage suspected of being an insertion is his inability to see that the logic of expansion observed through analysis of the manuscripts penneates some of the most important and integral parts of the

Mahiibharata. Even if we assume, along with Sukthankar that a fmal redaction of the whole text, a t

final fonnative stage, did take place, still one has to admit that the product of this act of closure was itself already very much a patch work of genres and discourses, originating from different social circles and periods. Discursive heterogeneity would be constitutive of the final redacted text, not a product of later textual manipulation or imposition. Therefore, the identification and the isolation of this or that passage as an expansion by text-critical means are useful, but these measures only begin to scratch the surface of the

Mahiibharata's textual heterogeneity. The continuation of the expansion process that the manuscripts attest to should not be thought of as a deviation but as the last breaths of the vigorous cultural impetus which produced the Mahabharata. To dismiss and condemn these expansion practices is therefore to ignore some of the most importance aspects of the Mahabharata, aspects which make the M ahiibhiirata the unique and fascinating text that it happens to be. The digressive and reflexive quality of the Mahabharata, the peculiar way in which the

Mahabharata text grows into itself. interprets itself, and questions itself from within itself, needs to be studied with an open mind if the Mahiibhiirata is to be understood. I would venture to call this dynamic quality "inner textual expansion, or perhaps, "inner II

textual interpretation," and it is the subject of this dissertation. I use the term "interpretation" quite deliberately and in a somewhat peculiar sense. An interpretation of a narrative can include anything from a grammatical analysis or a philosophical explanation,

56

to another story which is produced either to expound on that story's

meaning~

or to counter

a possible undesirable reading of it.

1.2.2.4. The Mahabharata's Frame Structure and its Ritual Context: 27 As is well known~

the Mahabharata reports that its first main telling took place at king Janamejaya's

snake sacrifice (sarpasattra) at the city ofT~aSiHi On that occasion the brahman Vaisruppayana recited the story of Bharata to the yajam.ana king, Janamejay~ Parlk~it's son. The author of the Mahiibharata, Vaisarppayana's teacher, Vyasa, was present at this fIrst

telling~

and his silent presence lent authority to the line of transmission. This main

narration-frame is however contained in an outer-most narration-frame which, among other things, greatly elaborates on the circumstances of the frrst narration, and specifies more briefly the circumstances of its own narration of the Mahabharata. This second narration took place during the sage Saunaka's sattra at the Naimi~a forest. Here the sura UgraSravas narrated the story of the battle of the Bharatas~ which he himself has heard from Vaisaqlpayana at Janamejaya's sacrifice, to the brahmans participating in the sattra.

In a highly suggestive 1989 article, C. Z. Minkowski fonnally analyses the sophisticated use of frame stories and of sustained embedding in the Mahiibharata. Among other things, Minkowski observes resonances between the theme of sacrificially destroying all snakes in a grand snake sacrifice, and the theme of the destruction in battle of the whole Iqatriya race in the great battle at

Kuru~etra..

He points out that the frequent

breaks in the sacrificial procedures, during which the yajamana must remain in his consecrated state~ made long sacrificial sessions such as sattras a suitable situation for the narration of a long text like the Mahabharata. Minkowski also points out that "embedding is not simply a phenomenon found at the borders of the Mahabhiirata. It is a narrative technique employed throughout." Books 6-9 and part of book 10, for instance are narrated

27The frame has already been briefly discussed in the Introduction.

57 by Saiijaya to Dhrtar~tra, and the vocatives of address such as Bharata Raja etc. are 7

spread so thickly throughout the battle episodes so that it would be difficult to excise them.

In theAdi and Vana Parvans, the layers of embedding become especially dense, reaching up to five levels in the story of Aurva (M.Bh. BOR! 1.196-171). Minkowski's article continues and complements an argument made earlier by Michael WitzeL 28 Witzel traces the history of the story of the Bhrgu .11i Cyavana as it grows from the 8gveda, the Yajurveda SaTflhitas and the Satapatha and the Jaiminlya

Briihma1')as. It was Witzel who first suggested that in the Yajurveda Sa",hitiis and the Brahma1)as we see the early stages of the development of the narrative framing technique which is then found in its fully developed fonn in the Mahabharata and other well known South Asian narratives. Minkowski, coming at the question from the side of

Mahabharata studies, agrees with Witzel that there is a structural similarity between the formal organization of Vedic rituals and that of the Mahilbharata narrative, and that the connection is probably historical and genetic. "In both7 the fonnal principle is one of embedding characterized by a hierarchy established by inclusion and by interrupting, subordinating sequence. "29 "It would thus appear... that the Mahabharata draws its inspiration for using a sustained frame story from the embedding structure of the Vedic ritual. 1130 Whatever the particular historical connections may have been, clearly embedding is not intrinsically derived from ritual. It is a logical construct found independently of ritual, most prominently in language itself. Minkowski himself points out that there are many well known frame-narratives in which ritualistic thinking plays no significant role - the

28Witzel 1987. 29Minkowski 1989, 420. See also Doniger 1984. 30Minkowski 1989, 420.

58

Pancatantra, the Buddhist ratakas~ the Arabian Nights, the Decameron and so on. The structural similarity in and of itself does not logically require a genetic connection, a historical development from ritual structure to narrative device. Minkowski argues. nevertheless, that since there is no extant evidence of any use of the frame story device in

any other pre-epic South Asian tex~ and since, as Witzel has shown, we do have evidence of less developed fonns of the frame story technique in late Vedic literature, and since we can in fact trace a development of the framing device from less elaborate to more elaborate uses in Vedic literature, and since, moreover, it is evident that in the case of the Mahabhiirata, the formal similarities are combined with a deep affinity with thematic concerns, it is highly feasible to assume that the MahObharata's frame device was inspired by similar structures in the earlier ritualistic literature. The frame as we find it in the Mahabharata, with its repeated thematic references to ritual activity, was most likely fashioned by people who were well acquainted with ritual discourse and had a strong interest in ritual matters. These are quite forceful arguments, but we must be very cautious about precisely how we deploy them, because this carries very strong implications for the interpretation of the Mahabharata tradition. We are making some most powerful connections here. Sacrificial ritual is the central paradigm of brahman ideology. In the Mahabhiirata itself, sacrifice is a dominant trope. Patterns of textual organization derived from ritual discourse are constitutive of Mahiibharata discourse. All of this is true. But does it follow that the ritual trope and ritual logic are absolutely encompassing in the Mahabharata? We are back to the inevitable problem of textual identity or heterogeneity which is the concern of this study, since the frame structure is a unifying device, by which apparently heterogeneous textual traditions are made to stick together. As Minkowski puts it: "Indeed,

if the Mahabharata has any unitary identity, it may be provided by its framing,

59

embedding, episodic style."31 For instance., that both Vaisarppayana's and Ugra.sravas' teIIings take place in a sacrificial cont~xt adds to the cohesive force of the frame device. But to over-emphasize the unifying force of the frame is to ignore the discursive heterogeneity which nevertheless so forcefully bursts through the seams of the texture of the Mahiibharata. When Witzel and Minkowski argue for a deep affinity between the worlds of Vedic sacrifice and of the Mahabharatat they are continuing a long line of Mahabharata scholarship which emphasizes the role of brahman ideology in finally shaping this monumental textual tradition. Madeleine Biardeau for instance, has read the Mahabharata 1

as a vehicle of a brahman religious synthesis of sacrificial, yogic and eschatological ideas which she calls "bhoJai". Sukthankar too believed that the final redaction of the epic was the work of a brahman clan., the Bhrgus. Even if it is true that the frame structure is the imprimatur of a circle of brahman redactors who used this text as a vehicle of propagating a totalizing socio-religious vision, one may still ask1 firs4 how coherent is the ritual thinking which supposedly unifies this total vision, and second., how deep is the penetration of this vision, how thoroughly are all the (evidently) diverse discourses which the

Mahabharata attempts to embrace subjugated to the totalizing vision which this frame supposedly proclaims. Clearly, many Mahabharata scholars have felt that the "priestly" layer in the

Mahabharata has not succeded in over-riding the force of other kinds of discourse. A good axample is J. A. B. van

Buitenen~

in whose view the Mahabharata passed from the

hands of royal bards to the hands of priests, and who felt that the earlier layers of the texts were often superior. 32 Though van Buitenen's dual dichotomy of kings versus priests is

31Minkowski 1989, 406.

32Van Buitenen 1973~ viii-xliv, and especially xxi-xxiii.

60

far too simplistic~ he was right to see the Mahiibhiirata as an arena of dialogue between ritualistic and other, non-ritualistic discourses. We must take into account the broader cultural and political context As S. Pollock has quite convincingly argued,33 a long-range cultural process took place around the time of the formation of the Mahiibharata, that is, in the few centuries around the beginning of the Christian era, by which a language which was in an earlier period used only in sacerdotal contexts extended its sphere of influence to encompass discourses which previously lay outside its sphere. We witness the sudden emergence of non-sacerdotal themes in the Sanskrit Mahiibhiirata, Ramiiyat)a. and the AnhaSastra. This sudden eruption of highly sophisticated non-sacredotal discourse in

Sanskrit suggests that despite the lack of direct evidence for the existence of earlier non-

sacredotal elite discourses, there must have been other such discourses out there which have simply not directly survived. We do not know yet exactly what the circumstances of this shift were, and we cannot be certain about the exact scope of input from these unknown sources, but we know that they somehow fed into the new emergent discourses, simply because we recognize their thematic and fonnal novelty. This recognizability is exactly the point. The incorporation is not complete assimilation. What is going on is a discursive encounter~ a dialogic process. The Mahiibhiirata frame, like the Sanskrit language itself with all its sacrificial references, certainly makes a claim for encompassment~

but at the same time it allows not only for very lengthy speculative and

legal discourses but also for extensive heroic narrative, love stories and so forth. In this process the meaning of, on the one hand~ such things as

love~

destiny, honor and war and,

on the other~ the central brahmanic concept of sacrifice as well as other religious visions are being contested and redefined. The very fact that soon thereafter we find court drama and

33pollock 1996.

61

love poetry in Sanskrit and that the frame story becomes popular in non-brahmanic texts proves the two-way nature of the process. These questions will not let go of us throughout this study. In this chapter however. y

I would like to take up one aspect of them7 namelY7 the connection between framing and textual expansion.

1.2.2.5. The Mahabharata's Frame Structure and the Practice of Inner Textual Expansion: Again7 I start with Minkowski's formulation 7suggested in his article only in passing, that "It [the frame structure] is also the source of the epic's perpetual growth."34 This proposition of Minkowski's has long intrigued me, because it seemed to be both very true and yet potentially misleading.

It does appear that the pattern of embedding7like a modular design in a line of furniture, not only technically allows for but also invites the virtually unlimited addition of new narrative units. Once the protagonists enter the forest and begin to listen to the sages' strings of stories, for instance7 there is in principle no limit to the number of stories that they can be made to listen to. The background or explanation for many crucial facts in the central narrative is given by way of an embedded narrative. For instance, the story of

Ambi is narrated in response to Yudhi~thira's question about BhI~ma's reasons for refusing to fight with Sikhandin (V. 170-197). The query takes the narrative back in time to BhI~ma's youth, and introduces new protagonists to the story. Again7 in principle there is

no end to how much this mechanism can be appIiecL to how far back one can inquire about causes or explanations for given events7and the relative frequency of its use makes it a constitutive part of Mahabhiirata narrative organization. Even more obvious in this respect are the frequent requests of the listener to hear "in extended detail" (vistare1)a) about something which has just been narrated briefly. Saiijaya, for instance, reports that

34Minkowski 1989 406. 7

62

KartJa is dead~ and Dhrtarii$tra asks to hear about how such a hero could have been defeated. As the Mahabharata presents things, this leads to the narration of no less than a whole medium-length Parvan! Now clearly, one may argue that this is nothing but a device, a literary conceit, a technique, a mechanism for incorporation of more textual material, but the use of this technique of diversion and regression is so ubiquitous and so crucial to the very organization of the Mahabharata., that to dismiss it as nothing but a way of connecting textual units is to beg the very basic question of Mahabharata textuality.

In principle, embedding can extend infinitely both outwards and inwards. The Mahabharata's main frame, for instance, deals with the circumstances of the telling of the

Bhirata war. Another, still more external frame, tells of the circumstances of that telling of the circumstances itself. Now we can imagine another frame which would expand on the circumstances of the second narration~ and so forth. Thus, in principle there is no limit to such outward narrative emboxing, and even though in practice such an infinite pattern cannot be realized, the structure does suggest an infinite regress and openendedness. Minkowski recognizes and addresses this fonnal reflexive feature. He explains it both as reflecting historical reality, namely., the transmission of the story through the ages., and as a narratological-metaphysical problem, calling it lithe threat of an infinite regression."35 He continues:

It is also true that in an ideological system which includes an absolute transcendent reality, nothing can regress infinitely. It must always end up striking bottom. It appears to me that the attribution of the story [0 Vyasa and setting of the story in the Naimi~a forest, serve the purpose of fixing the text at a level beyond which, as the text says, one cannot go further.3 6

35Minkowski 1989 ~ 406, italics mine. 36Minkowski 420.

63

To this I must add that the infinite regress of the embedding structure can in principle

be extended inward as well as outward. Five levels of embedding are reached in the Adi Parvan, but in principle this can go on~ and more stories can be embedded within existing stories ad infinitum. While this formal potential is of course present in any narrative involving embedding~ the Mahabhiirata seems actively to explore its semantic possibilities further than most other such narratives. In the Mahabharata, narrative units are connected by more than a frame. Stories provide causal explanations for, elucidations of the

meanings of, or in some other way mirror the themes of other stories within the complex.3? The potential of every bit of narrative to invite an "in extension" (vistare{la) teIIing and the potential infinite regression of the embedding structure outwards as well as inwards should be viewed as a part of a textual aesthetics~ an aesthetics of expansion. This discourse proIiferates~ it delights in proliferating, it takes shape, becomes, rather than is. In this more abstarct sense, there is no doubt that this aesthetics had something to do with the Mahabharata's quite striking, indeed, totally

unparalleled~

history of textual growth. But

the precise nature of the connection is quite complex and needs to be studied in much greater depth and specificity. First of all, one must analytically distinguish between embedding and expansion. I can compose a narrative that has a secondary narrative embedded in it. I can also take any given narrative and expand on it without using any embedding pattern. These are distinct phenomena. They invite comparison, nevertheless, because they are to a certain extent structurally analogous. In specific cases they mayor may not coincide. At least as far as the manuscript evidence goes, most expansions are not introduced into the text by way of

37The Kathasaritsagara comes to mind. While the levels of embedding there can be numerous, there is less insistance on causal connections between the narratives.

64

the frame structure.38 On the contrary, most expansions are simply continuous with a voice already existing in the received text. This is an extremely imponant fact. The embedding structure may have provided a mechanism of textual expansion, but it did not provide the only such mechanism. For this reason, the popularity of embedding techniques in and of itself cannot be the reason for the tendency to expand, the driving force behind the practice.

In order to get a better sense of the place of the frame structure among the textual mechanisms which enable expansion to take place, I have studied the evidence of the manuscripts throughout a whole book of the Mahiibhiirata, the Sabha Parvan. My primary goal was to see whether most expansions were introduced via the frame, and as far as this goes, the conclusions were quite straightforward.

Why have I chosen the Sabha Parvan? From my detailed survey below (M.Bh. BORI 1.3.3) it will become quite clear that no single book can serve as representative of the general state of the manuscripts as far as patterns of expansion goes. The Sabhii Parvan, nevertheless. is at least as good a choice as any other. It is a very carefully edited book. It has enough variation to yield a worthwhile sample of expansions, and on the other hand it is not one of the more complicated books for which it is impossible to reconstruct an archetype. In these more complicated cases, one can hardly distinguish between insertions and parallel readings. Because of the existence of an archetype, there is no doubt that the passages relegated to the Sabha Parvan's Appendix I have indeed been inserted at some point into an already existing text. The results derived from the Sabha Parvan are unambiguous. Forty-four passages have been identified as expansions and relegated

380ne must distinguish, of course, between expansions which are definitely identifiable by text-critical means, and hypothetical "expansions," about which we can only speculate.

65

because of their relative length to Appendix I of the Sabha Parvan. Of these, only three are introduced in a way which evokes the frame at all. The remainder of this section is an analysis of the three cases where expansion coincides with embedding: 1) The fIrst case, passage # 6 of Appendix I, which appears after M.Bh. BORI II.20.34 in the Southern manuscripts, is the only expansion in the Parvan which is introduced by a question of lanamejaya, thus returning us to the main frame. The context is the slaying of J adisandha This wicked king has defeated by force and imprisoned many of his neighbor-kings and is just about to sacrifice all of them to Siva ~I)a, Arjuna and Bhlma have come to him in the guise of brahman mendicants with the intention of killing

him and liberating the captive Iqatriyas. Janamejaya's query is introduced right after the three have revealed themselves to Jariisandha as disguised Iqatriyas who have come to kill him:

Why were these two,

Kr~1)a

and the king of Magadha, enemies?

How did Jarasandha defeat Magadha in battle? What is Karpsa to the king of Magadha, that he should hate

~1)a

Because of him? Tell me all this truly, Vaisruppayana The killing of Jarasandha is one link in a chain of hostilities which are soon going to culminate in the dramatic encounter between SisupaIa, who was the commander of Jarasandha's army, and Kr$I)a. This encounter, in the The Slaying ofSiiupala episode, takes place during Yudhi$thira's royal consecration. Clearly, Kr$t).a's role in slaying Sisuprua's lord ladisandha is sufficient to establish Sisuprua's hatred for Kr~1)a and to explain his objection to

~lJa's

rise to prominence, and this prepares the ground for and

anticipates The Slaying of Siiupala episode. Janamejaya's query and the answer elicited by it serve nevertheless to expand intertextually the net of connections and meanings which the Slaying of Siiupala episode mobilizes. It supplies additional background knowledge

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which the aut.'1ors of this expansion seem to believe should guide the readers in their understanding of the situation. The story is well known from the Appendix" or Epilogue to the Mahabharata. the If

Harivaf!lia:

~1Ja

and J arasandha take two sides in an ongoing conflict over the

Vr~IJi

chiefdom. Karpsa, son of U grasena king of the V~l}is~ married J arasandha's daughter, and, apparently with this bully's military support, deposed his old father.

~I}a,

we are

reminded, is the son of Vasudeva, a Yadava. Vasudeva had married Devaki, KaJp.sa's sister. The passage goes on to tell us the famous story about the heavenly voice that announced at the moment of the marriage that a son of Devakl will be the death of Karpsa, and of Karpsa's ensuing plan to get rid of any offspring she might have in the future even as it is an embryo in her womb. The main point here is that Kn;Qa is that son of Vasudeva and Devakl who, just as the heavenly voice had predicted, survived to kill Jariisandha's ally. Karpsa, and to reinstate U grasena, the rightful king. This expansion is in fact telling us that Kr~1Ja

has already once frustrated Jarasandha's ruthless attempts to establish his own

influence over a large area In the light of this information, the Sabha Parvan's report of Kr~Qa's

role in checking Jarasandha's rise to illegitimate power gains importance. It

emphasizes K!?lJa's role as the protector of legitimate kingship and demonstrates that kingship based on raw power and defiance of "natural" hierarchies is as contrary to dhanna as is the human sacrifice which Jarasandha has intended to perform. Jarasandha, just like Karpsa, stands here for the rule of unchecked violence, for power without dhanna. The violence of Jarasandha's rule is epitomized by his intended mass human sacrifice. In the figure of Katpsa, this same violent nature is embodied in the usurpation of his own father'S scepter. Thus, the additional information introduced by the Southern insertion invokes a whole new idiom of family violence, one which would be more attractive to a psychoanalyst than to the Vedic specialist, even if actual patricide is not involved. This

67

idiom is not present in the Northern recension's version of the Killing of larasandha episode. Now surely, the story of Jarasandha could have developed historically independent of the ~IJa and Karp.sa complex., well known from the HarivaTflsa. Nevertheless, the

adhannic ruler's image as the unruly if not quite literally usurping son is not foreign to the world of the Mahabhiirata at large. 39 Though Duryodhana has not killed his father or fonnally deposed him, he has indeed effectively usurped his father's authority by ignoring his advice and commands. This aspect of Duryodhana probably epitomizes his adharmic nature more than his deviation from proper vaT1J.a rules or ritual practice, of which there is no evidence. To bring in KaIpsa is to strengthen this trope. In this case the Southern expansion draws on a larger narrative background which is familiar to both Northern and Southern readers in order to emphasize the semantic connections of the violent, adharmic ruler and the theme of father-displacement. It functions much as certain kinds of commentary might do in bringing forth a possible reading. 2) The context for the second expansion that invokes the frame structure is the digvijaya, the conquest of the quarters of space, performed to establish sovereignty and to

collect enough wealth for the Rajasiiya sacrifice. In this joint operation Sahadeva is appointed to conquer the Southern regions. An interesting incident in Sahadeva's round of conquests is his encounter with the fire god Agni in the city of Mahi~matl., where Sahadeva's troops kept catching fire. At this point, Janamejaya inquires:

UWhy did the blessed frre become Sahadeva's adversary in war, even though the

other was striving for the sake of a sacrifice, brahman?" (M.Bh. BOR! II.28.16)

39It has been often noted that patricide is extremely rare in brahrnanic tradition. Perhaps the closest thing to the royal patricide is the prince who deposes his father and takes his place, such as Kaqlsa, and the second closest is the prince who effectively rules in his father's place~ such as Duryodhana.

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Vaisarppayana responds with the story of Agni's boon to king NlIa of Mahi~mad, and goes on to narrate how Sahadeva eventually gains the fire-god's favor by ritual means. by reminding him that the battle is for the sake of sacrifice, by singing Agni's praise, and by sitting facing him in ritual fashion. This pleases Agni, and he causes Mahi~matI's ruler to submit peacefully to PfuJcJava overlordship. This episode, an eloquent example of the use of the sacrificial idiom to speak of a controlled, non-violent way of conducting power politics, is attested in all manuscripts. The insertion in question, passage # 14 of Appendix I, is found in all Bengali and all Devanagari manuscripts, as well as the one extant MaithilI manuscript. It is simply an extension of the short hymn to Agni which Sahadeva sings. The interesting thing about it is that most of the insertion is seamless, directly attached to the few lines of hymn given in the preexisting text, just before this hymn's last verse. The recourse to the frame comes only at the end, as a solution to a peculiar problem., namely that the ending of the inserted unit does not combine elegantly with the last verse of the hymn as it was before the expansion. Instead of simply omitting this last verse, it is sustained by introducing a question-answer exchange between J anamejaya and Vaisarppayana. 3) The context for the third case of expansion involving the frame is again the

digvijaya, and Sahadeva's conquest of the Southern regions. Sahadeva has subdued both relatively close and familiar kingdoms like Matsya and Mahr~mad, and more remote (in time and place) kingdoms and peoples like the Pfu)4yas, the Tamils, the Keralas, the Aodhras, the Kalirigas, and even Antioch and Rome! Finally, he sends envoys to VibhI~3.Qa Paulastya, and that pious ra/qasa ruler of Larik~ the younger brother of RlivaJ)a

and Kubera (who must have been pretty old by now since a whole yuga has passed since his consecration by Rama), happily delivered loads of wealth to sponsor Yudhi~thira's sacrifice. After M.Bh. BOR! ll.28.S3ab, the Southern manuscripts have a passage which

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the Northern manuscripts lack~ and which was therefore relegated to Appendix I as passage

# IS. It is introduced by Janamejaya's question:

Best of the twice

bom~

I wish to hear about Hi