The
Mahabharata is one of the two oldest literary
masterpieces of India. It is breathtaking in not only its
length but also in its poetic and intellectual quality. It
is precisely because of this reason that scholars differ on
what
genre does the Mahabharata belong to. In English, the
genre given to it is that of an epic. Epics are long tales
developed through oral culture, myths and legends. They are
usually based on themes of love and war. Epics are stories
about princes and princesses; its diction is exalted and
dignified.In Indian context, the mahabharata belongs to the
genre of ‘itihasa’. The word breaks up
into ‘iti’+’ha’+’asa’. In Hindi, the word simply means
history, but in Sanskrit, it means, “so indeed it was”.
Here, the idea of history is connected to the idea of time.
Time was perceived in two different paradoxical ways in
ancient India. One was that time is never ending entity
which never comes to a halt. The second concept is
paradoxical to the first. It says that time is continuously
completed, that is, a single moment is complete in itself.
In the mahabharata, time that has gone by is critically
analyzed to see its universal significance and also learn
from it. The mahabharata has been accorded several names by
various scholars. It is also known
as ‘Akhyan’, ‘purana’, ‘dharmashastra’,arthshastra’, ‘nitish
astra’ and mokshashastra’. It is an ‘akhyana’ because it
deals with many myths like those of shakuntala, nala and
damyanti, vidula, prahlada and others. As a purana, it
deals with creation and also with genealogies and
geographical lists.
dharma is extensively dealt with in the
text,making it a dharmashastra. Similarly artha, niti and
moksha are also dealt in detail. Therefore, the mahabharata
is all of these and not any one of them. Sukhthankar
abstains from giving it any genre, but discusses the three-
dimensional view of the mahabharata—its an epic on the
mundane, ethical and metaphysical planes. On the mundane
level, it’s a fratricidal war. On ethical level, it’s a war
between dharma and adharma. On the metaphysical, it is just
a process of cosmic evolution, of time being in its flow.
The Vedas and the upanishads are the major source of Indian
philosophy,ethics and morality. however, they were
accessible only to the elite who knew sanskrit. Some
critics say that the mahabharata was created to brigde the
gap between the lower classes and the vedas. It simplified
the meaning of artha, dharma, kama and moksha through the
story of a feuding family.It is profoundly clear and
scholars agree that it is a
text beyond any one definition
or a genre. Each genre becomes partial when applied to a
text of such magnitude. The mahabharata's
narrative technique matches its complexity and depth of philosophy.
The technique of narration is that of a story within a
story. The main account of the puru dynasty begins after
several small stories. The narration happens at many
levels. Vaismpayana narrates the tale to janmajeya at the
snake ceremony. Another sage who heard the story at the
ceremony narrates it to the bhrigu brahmans whom he meets
in the naimisha forest.Finally,there is vyasa, the
overarching narrator, who is telling the tale to lord
ganesha, the penman of the mahabharata. such an intricate
and elaborate narrative structure prepares the readers for
further framings. Hegarty says that the narrative structure
of the text is so complex because of the “dialogic
relationship among voices” in the mahabharata. To
illustrate, he says that the sage brihadasva narrated the
story of nala and damyanti to yuddhishthtira in the forest
to console him for his loss in the
dicing match. It also
serves the purpose of comparing the results of dicing for
yuddhishthira and nala. Such narratives are spread all over
the text and they all add to its encyclopaedic quality.
Various responses to a particular vent of a specific
problem adds to the comprehensive dimension of the text.
Lets discuss the embedded narrative in the dicing with the
story of prahalada. The tale gives comparative insight to
the present happening of the dicing sequence. It is
ironical when compared to draupadi's question. Prahalada
always knew who the better man was-his son or sudhanvan
angirars. He was not able to decide whom should he favour
because of his parental love. This story does not explicate
the issues raised by draupadi, but emphasizes the breach of
duty by the elderes who didnot follow the dharma codes. The
backbone of the mahabharata is its dialogues. These
dialogues bring out the various ideologies and view points
to a particular situation. Nonetheless, it is not necessary
that they reach a conclusion. To any question of dharma,
several answers are given and no answer is adjudged
supreme. Everyone answers according to his dharma and the
reader has to choose according to his own dharma. That is
why, the mahabharata is considered to be a text of debates.
The most important function of the dialogues is that it
proivides a meditative moment to characters to explore
various moral options available to them for a given
situation. Therefore, we can see how complex is the style,
structure and narrative technique of the mahabharata is.
However its language is so free flowing and rhythmic that
the philosophies that are really hard to understand are
made easy to read.
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