The many voices of the Mahabharata.

• Author: Fitzgerald, James L.
• Position: Book Review

INTRODUCTION

Alf Hiltebeitel has consistently been the single most open-minded and fearlessly imaginative Western reader the authors and editors of the Sanskrit Mahabharata (MBh) have ever had for their masterpiece. He renews his claim to that distinction with this book. In The Ritual of Battle (1) twenty-five years ago Hiltebeitel was "rethinking the Mahabharata" in terms of then recent (Wikander, Dumezil, et al.) and contemporary (Biardeau) discussions of the newly edited Sanskrit epic, and he has been doing so ever since. A long-time advocate of the intentional unity of the MBh (more or less the Pune text) and, especially, a fierce defender of the importance of the divine Krsna and Krsna-bhakti in that text, he has given us a wealth of insights into the Sanskrit MBh in a long series of articles over the past three decades. Hiltebeitel has also carried out groundbreaking cultural-anthropological investigation of the wider Mahabharata tradition (his work on the Draupadi cult Mahabharata in Tamil Nadu (2)) and has studied and reflected upon all of India's major oral epic traditions. (3)

This newest work, Hiltebeitel's second book focused exclusively on the Sanskrit MBh, offers a number of new ideas and interpretive leads that will play a role in future discussions of the MBh, but perhaps its single most important contribution is its theory of the MBh text and its composition. Hiltebeitel sketches here a unified theory of the MBh's creation and literary character that directly argues for the artistic unity of the MBh more forcibly than anyone since Joseph Dahlmann a century ago. As was Dahlmann's work, this book is, in part, a gauntlet thrown down before the "excavationists," (the "analysts" of Dahlmann's era), who, Hiltebeitel believes, approach the MBh with "tired generalizations" (4) and have produced several "learned misreadings" (5) but few reliable results in understanding it. (6) Though Dahlmann was stubbornly wrong about the historical facts, his "synthesizing" scholarship insisted upon principles worthy of high priority in the interpretation of the MBh--the presumption that the parts of the text were connected intelligently (7) and that the whole of the text made a meaningful contribution to its time and place--and those principles have had a significant legacy across the last century. Hiltebeitel has learned more, it seems, from Madeleine Biardeau, the twentieth century's most powerful exponent of Dahlmann's basic legacy, than from anyone else, and like Biardeau, Hiltebeitel is far more sophisticated and interesting than Dahlmann was. I do not find Hiltebeitel's view of the MBh's composition persuasive, but his laying out of his views on the matter is a valuable contribution to advancing our general discussion of the text. A presentation and discussion of the central aspects of this theory will form the major portion of this review article.

Though Hiltebeitel styles this work "A Reader's Guide to the Education of the Dharma King," that is, Yudhisthira, the book actually spends most of its time and energy constructing the internal images of the text's authoritative voices against a new set of reflections by Hiltebeitel on the text's actual authorship. (8) Obviously such matters are relevant to a depiction of a prince's or king's education, and the book does carry out an interesting and innovative tracing of part of Yudhisthira's epic figure. But the book's actual center of gravity is its theory of the epic, and every other argument advanced in the book depends upon its theory of the epic text. This review will first look at the book and its structure as a whole and comment upon a few of the larger themes Hiltebeitel takes up in it. I will then turn to his theory of the Mahabharata and the Vyasa-author fiction he sees in it.

A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE BOOK

Hiltebeitel provides a precis of the book in his introductory first chapter, and that is a good place from which to view the book as a whole. "Chapter by chapter, the book takes up a series of enigmas: empire, author, transmission, the stars, noncruelty, love, the wife, and writing. Threaded through them, but especially chapters 2 to 7, is the education of king Yudhisthira.... For the Mahabharata is Yudhisthira's education. And woven throughout is the question of the author, Vyasa, the ever-receding figure behind this hero's education and the ultimate enigma of his own text. These topics, laced through this book as they are through the epic itself, serve to invite a reading 'against the grain'--and, to be precise, against grains that are as much the product of the Mahabharata's own craft as they are the results of its learned misreadings" (p. 4). With the exception of writing, which is not really addressed or discussed in the book in a sustained way, these seven topics do loosely organize the progression of the whole.

But probing these enigmas is not as simple as it may sound. The book is actually a set of thirty-one essays grouped into eight chapters that (in the seven post-introductory chapters) roughly parallel the epic's movement from the first utterances of the outermost voice of its ultimate authorial agency (9) through the frame-story of the bard Ugrasravas' recitation before brahmins doing a sattra in the Naimisa Forest, (10) down to the story of the Pandavas and Kauravas told by Vyasa's pupil Vaisampayana to King Janamejaya at that king's genocidal sattra to eliminate all the world's snakes. In broad parallel to the way that the MBh itself presents its basic authorial information early (and parallel to the more fundamental reality that any author's voice necessarily stands unframed outside the text it speaks), Hiltebeitel makes reflections upon the epic's authorship the subject of chapter two; and just as the MBh presents much of the critical information about Vyasa toward the back of the MBh (in the Moksadharmaparvan, especially in the Suka stories in 12.310-20 and in the immediately subsequent Narayaniya), Hiltebeitel closes his book by mining the story of Suka for indications of some of the transcendent-author themes he believes the creators of the MBh wrote into their fictional seer Vyasa. Having thus framed his own exposition within discussion of Vyasa's authorship, Hiltebeitel next traverses the subjects of the construction and background of the MBh's Naimisa Forest frame (along with some discussion of the frame defined by Janamejaya's sarpasattra) in chapters three and four, and he develops a number of interesting new ideas as he goes. Finally, after treating the epic's Naimisa Forest frame and the sarpasattra frame contained within it, Hiltebeitel turns, in chapters five, six, and seven, to the "main story" of the epic and pursues the theme of "The Education of the Dharma King": Vyasa's series of existential challenges and lessons directed at Yudhisthira. The "author-teacher" is sometimes cruel to his pupil, who is charged with a cruel task (Yudhisthira was formerly the god Indra, as were the other sons of Pandu, and he has been born on earth as the son of Dharma-Yama to bring about the slaughter of the ksatra (11)), and the fundamental lesson Yudhisthira must learn in the context of these cruelties is kindness (anrsamsya) or 'noncruelty', as Hiltebeitel prefers to gloss it.

Hiltebeitel's examination of the main story of the MBh through this lens of "The Education of the Dharma King" presents three series of interrelated essays (twelve in all). Among a number of other topics he traces the word anrsamsya (non-cruelty), which he says pertains to delimited contexts, and contrasts it with (the ambiguously universal) ahimsa; lays out the "reflections and enigmas" posed to Yudhisthira (and all readers of the epic) by the story of Nala ("Nala is perhaps the exemplary subtale ... 'encapsulating' the epic narratively as the Gita does theologically" [p. 216]); and probes the mysteries and questions surrounding Yudhisthira's mysterious gambling away of his wife, the mysteries surrounding Yudhisthira's marital relationship with Draupadi, and finally, where the epic itself ends, the tests put to him by his father Dharma.

Overall, these essays form less a "reader's guide" to a clear thesis about the MBh than a set of commentaries in progress, moving through the passages as Hiltebeitel marshals them, tenaciously building support for the author's insights as the author sifts etymologies and translations of particular words, seizes upon nuances in particular turns of phrase, infers the underlying assumptions of a passage by reading it in the light of passages far removed within the epic, insisting often that the text's solutions of surface continuity were deliberate artifice, much as they are in some contemporary prose. These commentaries are sensitive to the same kinds of existential, affective, and symbolic issues raised by such scholars as Wendy Doniger and David Shulman--rereading, in fact, some of the same episodes they have treated--and they are deeply influenced by Madeleine Biardeau's readings of the epic. These complex essays overflow with ideas and they often repay the close reading they require. But at the same time, Hiltebeitel's arguments are often intricate and subtle, and at times they seem to sprawl across the pages while the author is too often understated and oblique.

THE EDUCATION OF YUDHISTHIRA

Hiltebeitel's reflections upon Yudhisthira, his role in the epic, and his relations to Draupadi tap into especially rich epic veins and join his voice to mine and others that have claimed Yudhisthira is more central to the epic than Arjuna. (12) On the other hand, the claim that "the Mahabharata is Yudhisthira's education" is so strong and so fundamental to the argument of this book that some systematic and critical discussion of it is called for. The notion is a useful conceit for examining the epic, and it is obviously an accurate description of certain elements of the epic that are critically important to its overall...