Edited by Milinda Banerjee and Julian Strube, the volume offers a reading of the political thought of the Mahabharata through distinct social thought or through the intertwining of political and social thought. This is an ambitious yet sine qua non engagement with the effective outcome. According to Banerjee and Strube, the text is critical for understanding the statecraft of the Hindu and Muslim superstructures, anti-colonialism, peasant rebellions and activism, Dalit-Bahujan feminism, and more. This book attempts to fill a research gap in the existing literature by mapping the socio-political-religious thought of the epic, and extending the reading beyond India. This volume attempts to take us away from ‘great men’ and metropolitan-based reading modalities. Everyone can think, and the transnational movement of ideas is to be accepted in the study of political thought. The concept of sovereignty in the epic has invited wider reading and geographies.
Sovereignty is used by the upper caste and countered by the subalterns through the invocation of the epic. It is a dialectical text that grounds its premises in contradictions. Neither locates the Mahabharata in the Brahmanical tradition. The audience is also the author of the epic due to their interpretive power. ‘When Dalit-Bahujan actors, Adivasi thinkers, feminists, and Muslim voices interpret the text, they announce their constituent power; they move the wheel of law. Democracy is perhaps just this—an unceasing renovation of constituent power, a relentlessness opening up of sovereignty by and to the multitudes. In this sense, the Mahabharata is, perhaps, the constituent text par excellence’ (p. 9).
Milinda Banerjee in ‘The Mahabharata and the Making of Modern India’ emphasizes decolonizing and democratizing sovereignty by forging the concept and practices of sovereignty in modern India. Akbar commissioned a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, known as the Razmnamah (Book of War). The engagement with the epic and just monarchy became a critical concern. James Tod declared the British to be the heirs of the Pandavas (the eventual shifting of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi, to rule over Indraprastha, as an association with the Pandavas), while establishing relations with the Rajput federacies. Precisely, States like Cooch Behar, Tripura, and Manipur read it differently to assert their linkages against the British conquest. The epic also proposed a nation called Hindu Dharma Rajya in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Nabinchandra Sen. Another development was the imagination of a country based on the confluence of Islam and Advaita Vedanta. Tilak and Hindu philosophy became historical assertions, while for Gandhi, the epic and the Gita became the sites of transhistorical ideals. The Mahabharata was contemporary with the historical search for democracy. It also found a place on the Left, particularly with Kazi Nazrul Islam, in the revolutionary struggle. Damayanti, Shakuntala and Savitri became reference points in women’s discourse. Mahasweta Devi used the epic to critique caste atrocities. BR Ambedkar had dubbed the text counter revolutionary. Tagore’s visits to Indonesia and Iran reference the epic forging of transnational solidarities. The reference to the Mahabharata is also found in the Constituent Assembly Debates, inviting attention to Bharat, capitalism, people as the centre of polity, and ethical principles governing the state. In contemporary times, subaltern politics remain alive in community politics, thus highlighting the relevance of the epic.
Reading the past for the present becomes important in Alok Oak’s ‘Epic’ Past, ‘Modern’ Present. British intellectuals found the epic inferior. There has also been debate about the search for the urtext and the date of the text-war. Chintaman Vinayak Vaidya’s epic trilogy authenticated the Mahabharat as Itihasa while promoting Aryan racial superiority. This is also the time history was eclipsed by anthropology. The British were historically not interested in India, but only in an anthropological sense. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute’s critical edition of the Mahabharata, under the leadership of Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar, took 48 years for completion and was published in 19 volumes. Sukthankar placed significance on the unity of text over the higher criticism, which is the extraction of nuclei of the epic from spurious interpolations.
Arkamitra Ghatak diligently uncovers the idea of interpretive community in the context of Gandhi and Gandhians’ reading of the Bhagavadgita in ‘The Bhagavadgita and the Gandhian Hermeneutic of Non-violence’. The reading of nonviolence became the central concern for the Gandhians. This led to the emergence of an interpretative community around the Gita. Unlike other readings, lived experience becomes a Gandhian hermeneutic. Against Shankara’s reading that the attainment of self-knowledge is the absence of participation in action, Tilak offered a reading of the Gita based on the desire or performance of action in the world, without much distinction between violence and nonviolence. In the Gandhian interpretive community, nonviolence became the central category in interpreting the Gita. Gandhi, Mahadev Desai, and Vinoba Bhave shifted their teaching of the Gita towards the self. For example, experiments with truth became a critical example. This intentional community constructed an alternative history. Desai and Bhave explored examples of nonviolent resistance from around the world. In fact, there is more emphasis on a history of nonviolent action than on one that may involve violence. Gandhian dialectical historicism becomes important in the case of the Gita, as it helps us understand anasaktiyoga, selfless action, as a historical development from cannibalism to the nonviolent precept.
Philipp Sperner reads a nostalgia for transcendental closure in three important interlocutors on the Mahabharata in ‘A Nostalgia for Transcendental Closure: The Relationship between the Mahabharata and Notions of Nationalism in the Works of Friedrich Schlegel, Maithilisharan Gupt, and Jawaharlal Nehru’. Sperner proposes an interesting submission regarding the arrival of the notion of the nation. The idea of the nation originated in Europe and was exported to India, but it is a bidirectional or multidirectional process, shaped here through a slew of exchanges. Friedrich Schlegel’s reading of Sanskrit and the text became necessary for his German assertion against the French. Gupt’s Bharat Bharati focuses on the nation’s loss. Nehru reads it for diversity and unity. According to Sperner, ‘Just as Schlegel’s and Gupta’s interest in the Mahabharata was premised on what Lukacs called “historical–philosophical realities” that in turn resulted from politico-historical events such as the Napoleonic Wars or the Rebellion of 1857, so was Nehru’s interest in the Mahabharata equally connected to historical events and the historical-philosophical realities shaped by them. With the Indian nation being a fact, the Mahabharata lost its appeal and most immediate effectiveness for progressive politics and became associated with the more politically conservative and parochial aspects of Indian nationalism’ (pp. 128-129).
Melanie J Muller points out that the production of ideal women remained a concerted effort in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as seen in readings of the Mahabharata in ‘The Production and Deconstruction of the “Ideal Indian Women” based on the Mahabharata in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries’. After critically evaluating the birth of the myth of the ideal Indian woman in cultural nationalism and Gandhi’s reading of stri dharma, Muller offers an alternative reading of the epic through Mahasweta Devi’s short story collection After Kurukshetra. There is a difference of standpoint between rajavritta (royal folk) and janavritta (common folk). Devi brings the other women who are exploited. ‘Works like Devi’s remind us that feminism cannot complete its goal until it is inclusive and intersectional’ (p. 156).
The production, circulation and reading of the Mahabharata can also be located in the non-elite transnational domain. Amanda Lanzillo explores this dimension in the Persian and Urdu versions of the Mahabharata in India and Iran in ‘Rethinking Transnational Intellectual History and Epic Nationalisms through Lithographic Labour: Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas in India and Iran’. ‘When Perso-Arabic script renditions of the Mahabharata receive popular or academic attention, it is often in defence of elite Indo-Islamic cosmopolitanism. Mughal engagement with the Mahabharata is held up as evidence of interest in Hinduism or pre-Islamic Indic traditions among Muslim South Asian dynasties. Because the Mughal Persian translation of the Mahabharata, known as the Razmnamah (Book of War), was a courtly project, it is easy to overlook the fact that the Mahabharata in Perso-Arabic script reached broader, and increasingly transregional, publics, especially in the age of lithographic print’ (p. 161). Two communities or two traditions were present in Abul Fazl’s engagement with Razmnamah, and also in Munshi Tota Ram Shyam’s edited, abridged, and verified version of Abul Fazl’s in the form of Mahabharat-i-Manzum’. On the other hand, Mahabharat-i-Farsi was a nearly unbridged translation of the Sanskrit epic. ‘The intellectual agency of the lithographic labourers who adapted the Mahabharata for Persian- and Urdu-reading audiences of the late nineteenth century was predicated on their ability to negotiate both the private capitalist oversight of their work and its popular reception’ (p. 174).
The classic debate between Humboldt and Hegel about calling the Gita a philosophical treatise is a central theme in Paulus Kaufmann’s ‘“Philosophical Poetry” or a “Failed Beginning?” A Metaphysical Enquiry into Wilhelm von Humboldt’s and G.W. Hegel’s Perspectives on the Bhagavadgita’. Humboldt accorded the Gita the status of philosophical poetry. Hegel, while disagreeing with this, called it a ‘failed beginning’. Hegel’s assessment was based on a lack of freedom to do philosophy in India and a lack of systematicity. For Kaufmann, Humboldt was enthusiastic, and Hegel was critical.
Egas Moniz Bandeira in ‘East-Asian Uses of Indian Epic Literature: Refractions of the Mahabharat in Japan and China, Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century’ and David M. Malitze in ‘The Reception of the Mahabharat in Siam: Evolving Conceptions of Kingship’ invite attention to East and Southeast Asia. In both regions, Buddhism remained an important interlocutor and rival in understanding the epic, which was also dubbed an endorsement of the caste system and a Brahmanical text. There is renewed interest in China, Japan, and India. In Thailand, the Ramayana (the Thai version of the Ramayana) has gained more visibility than the Mahabharata.
The paratexts also become an essential means of understanding the Mahabharata’s transnational connections. Christopher D Bahl and Abdallah Soufan read Wadi-al-Bustani’s introduction of his Arabic translation of the Mahabharata, ‘Understanding Global Intellectual Exchanges through Paratexts: Wadi-al-Bustani’s introduction of his Arabic translation of the Mahabharata’. Paratexts, such as an introduction, offer crucial insights into the text in the new language. The text was perceived as part of world literature or as an epic form. In addition to its affinity for Asian culture or literature, the text was written to overcome the significant differences prevalent in social relations. Divinity in Indian and Abrahamic traditions formed an everyday basis and also shaped later expectations of monotheistic theology.
The book under review brings to the fore the forgotten domain in reading: the heterodox claim principle. Popular texts, and not to mention epic literature, take myriad forms. The orthodox political has always derived its strength from the epic due to the binary-based arrival of the nation and nationalism. The heterodox political offers an alternative reading that is open, transnational, and inclusive, an interpretive epistemic community that includes people en masse. The reading of the epic requires an open horizon in which intersectional flourishing is not abandoned. This book promises this hope. Political thought cannot be isolationist. Thoughts are a collective project and arrival. Resources of the nation and nationalism can be democratically interpretative and anti-exclusivist. This may also lead to the beginning of a new life for an anti-binary horizon.
References
Anderson, B. R. (2016). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically. Verso.
Schmitt, C. (1996). The Concept of the Political (G. Schwab, Trans.; Expanded ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Dhananjay Rai is Associate Professor and Head of Department, Department of Gandhian Thought and Peace Studies, School of Social Sciences, Central University of Gujarat, Gujarat.