Abstract
Nikhil Govind, The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2023), 161 pp.
Govind offers a new narratological tracing of interconnected moral concepts of the much-studied, large epic Mahabharata, which continues to be reinterpreted in various literary and artistic forms, including theatre, films, poetry and cartoons. As conservative political powers in contemporary India continue to exaggerate the Mahabharata’s martial values for violent ends, to the exclusion of the epic’s intricate moral world, this book is important and timely. Although Govind does not address contemporary mythopolitics of the epic directly, his book challenges simplistic readings of the epic’s moral concerns. Instead, by unpacking the rich story world of the Mahabharata, Govind investigates the interconnected moral categories of dharma (law and virtue), artha (worldliness), kama (desire) and moksha (peace and freedom).
The book is divided into four sections that correspond to these four moral categories. None of these thematic categories is more important than the rest, as each is intricately intertwined with the other three. Rather than treating them as separate moral categories, Govind considers contradictions and intimacies between dharma, artha, kama and moksha as key in the making of each of them in the epic narrative and is ‘sceptical of over-arching concepts and avowed statements of moral virtue’ (p. 13). He considers the didactic preachings of dharma in several parts of the Mahabharata, such as the Bhagavadgita or Gita, to be ‘red herrings’ (p. 144). Against the looming war in the epic, the intrigues of the peace negotiations between the Pandavas and the Kauravas are, for Govind, a more productive space to tease out the dilemma of dharma than the more direct and didactic discourses on dharma in the Gita or in ‘The Book of Peace’ and ‘The Book of Instructions’, two other pertinent sections of the 18 parts of the Mahabharata. Paying close attention to the formal inventiveness of the narrative, Govind illustrates that the epic itself partly contradicts those didactic preachings, thereby offering a richer understanding of the moral registers. He traces such conflicting moral discourses in ‘the uneven terrain and thickets of the narrative’ (p. 13). As a literary scholar committed to the richness of the narrative structures of the epic, he affirms the insight of the eleventh century scholar Abhinavagupta, that in the Mahabharata the poetic is not hostile to the didactic (p. 1). This argument is unravelled carefully throughout the book, as Govind studies the didactic parts of the epic also as poetic aspects of the epic.
For example, a large section of the first chapter on dharma focuses on the peace negotiations in the fifth book of the Mahabharata, ‘The Book of Efforts’. The negotiations raise insightful questions about morality that break open the didactic. Is the war inevitable, despite the efforts of gods? Do martial values make this war inevitable? What is the role of peace negotiations in the context of martial values? To what extent does dharma conflict with other moral values such as artha, kama, and moksha, or is it aligned with them? Govind traces these fundamental ethical questions in the Mahabharata that plague the contemporary cultural and political world. While these questions remain unanswered in the book, Govind illustrates how each possible answer given by the characters is questioned and critiqued within the narrative itself.
Chapter 2 traces how marital values, law and freedom in the epic are complicated and expanded through narratives of kama. Govind parses the connections between dharma and kama, showing how kingly duties and laws both converge and diverge from bodily pleasures. Such contradictions are particularly evident in Draupadi’s marriage to the five Pandava brothers and the law of monogamous cohabitation, or in entanglements between Arjuna’s adventures as a warrior and a lover. Kama here is about a ‘diverse phenomenology of the body’ (p. 100). Arjuna’s body, for instance, is of the warrior ‘with its scars’, of the dancer’s, ‘perfumed with sandalwood’, as well as of a resourceful man who wanders around in the jungle (p. 100).
In Govind’s book, the most striking analysis of how the imagination of kama structures the world of the Mahabharata comes through sensuousness beyond heteronormativity in the narratives of homoeroticism between Arjuna and Krishna or Arjuna and Shiva, or the interspecies love in the story of Rishyashranga (Antelope-horn). Desire in its multiple forms, Govind argues, is part of the moral ‘web that connects and traverses, making all beings part of a larger biome and cosmos’ (p. 87). To desire, in its broadest sense, is to seek the body’s ‘maximal openness to nature’s possibilities’ (p. 100).
Interestingly, similar to his theorisation of kama, Govind returns to nature’s possibilities, albeit in a different way, in his last chapter on moksha. Here, in contrast to the political, militaristic god of the Gita, Govind focuses on the narratives centred around the young Krishna, growing up in a seemingly idyllic village setting and amidst nature. Unpacking the resonance and dissonance between Krishna’s pastoral life and political destiny, Govind astutely points out that the imagination of Sanskrit narrative traditions is less concerned with everyday governance itself. Similarly, in the Ramayana, Govind writes, ‘Ram-rajya arguably has no content, except the benevolent character of the king himself’ (p. 127). This sidelong glance at the Ramayana hints at the scope of further research along these lines against avid contemporary interests in the invocation of Ram-rajya in Hindu nationalist myth-making by a populist leadership that seeks to (mis)use ‘tradition’ for political purposes.
The chapter on artha, depicted as ‘an ideologue of the worldly’ (p. 73), presents a detailed investigation into gender, dharma and artha, through the character of two fateful women: Satyavati, the first matriarch of the Kuru clan and Amba, who is later known as a transgender warrior named Shikhandi. Govind carefully places rare and often overlooked episodes of the Mahabharata alongside the more popular episodes to unpack new meanings. For example, he draws parallels between the lives of Satyavati and Karna, as well as Satyavati and Duryodhana, the eldest Kaurava. Through such unusual pairings, Govind also discusses how artha unsettles and interrupts the workings of dharma, which gains its rich multidimensional meaning through such interruptions.
Govind’s riveting style of narration makes this book strikingly as impressive for its storytelling as for its scholarly insights. The narration is highly theatrical, which serves the book’s emphasis on interconnections and contradictions in the epic. It brings out the entanglements of bodily pleasures and martial values, as well as the simultaneous veneration of values of peace and martial duties. It is therefore an important book not only to scholars, but also for performers, artists and storytellers interested in the Mahabharata. It speaks directly to some of the pivotal moral dilemmas of the South Asian cultural milieu. Govind’s book offers a model for a compellingly nuanced reading of the moral imagination of the epic that remains pertinent today.