The Mahabharata and the Yugas: India's Great Epic Poem and the Hindu System of World Ages.

• Author: Bailey, Gregory
• Position: Book review

The Mahabharata and the Yugas: India's Great Epic Poem and the Hindu System of World Ages. By LUIS GONZALEZ-REIMANN. Asian Thought and Culture, vol. 51. New York: PETER LANG, 2002. Pp. xii + 298. $39.95.

The yugas or "ages of the world" have long been a vibrant object of study for scholars of early Hinduism. A high point was represented by the long article of Madeleine Biardeau ("Etudes de mythologie hindoue (IV)," BEFEO 63: 111-262), published in 1976, in which she defined the time frame of the Mahabharata (Mbh) in terms of the yuga scheme and also connected it with the kalpa, so important in Puranic cosmogony, a cosmogony which she considered crucial in enframing the Mbh within its larger temporal context. Received scholarly opinion has been that the narrated action in the Mbh occurs sometimes in the junction between the Dvapara- and Kaliyugas, the latter being regarded as the time when the dharma, which is supposed to govern the conduct of people in the world, is at its lowest ebb. Various passages in the Mbh support this assessment of the temporal situation, but what is made of it is the crux of the matter for Gonzalez-Reimann. His aim is to re-examine and re-interrogate completely the relationship between the Mbh and the yuga scheme in order to brush away the cobwebs of received scholarly opinion.

He rightly recognizes that the necessary implication of the view that the events leading up to the great battle described in the Mbh are begun in the junction between the Dvapara- and the Kaliyugas has been that this positioning sets the "ethical/moral" tone communicated throughout the entire epic. This then becomes an interpretative axiom in the study of the epic, because, as Gonzalez-Reimann writes, "The assumption that the influence of the Kali Yuga is an essential narrative element of the Mahabharata story is also shared by most scholars, who then seek to explain different components of the story through the gloomy background imposed on the Epic by the Kali Yuga" (p. 2, elaborated further at n. 70, p. 115). Irrespective of the validity of this judgment, I disagree strongly with the view that the background of the narrated action and the players' own interpretation of it is "gloomy," when in fact the problem is a different and highly specific one. The time of the epic describes a period when the values exemplified in the descriptions of the earlier yugas are in fact reversed, as seen most clearly in the reversal of the normative roles of...