Sharon Maas's Blog, page 9
November 28, 2011
Not Just for Scholars...The Myths of Mankind video series...
Not Just for Scholars...
The Myths of Mankind video series was something of a marathon ride. In the next few weeks I'll return to discuss some of the issues brought up in the documentary. But for the time being -- if you got the impression that the Mahabharata is just for Vedic scholars, historians, archeologists, anthropologists and other terribly, terribly deep and serious people you'd be very wrong.
What I've left unsaid till now is this: reading the Mahabharata is hugely, delightfully entertaining! It's an absolutely fun read, and it's amazing to see what a great sense of humour its author or authors had in composing it. Take, for instance, Arjuna's year incognito in the court of Vitara. He's been cursed by a beautiful celestial dancer -- an apsara -- to be eunuch for a year -- what better disguise! So Arjuna hangs out in the women's quarters: Arjuna, the greatest warrior, the archetypical alpha male, dressed as a woman!
"... golden earrings dangled from his ears; womanly garments covered his hard muscles and scarred shoulders, so that he appeared as a woman and not as a man. His voice taking on a high womanly pitch, Arjuna delighted the young unmarried maidens with his jokes and stories -- but most especially Uttara, Virata's daughter, who flushed in delight and giggled at his clownish antics. When Arjuna teased the maidens they squealed in merriment and loved him, and never had the women's quarters known such frolicsome days." (from Sons of Gods: the Mahabharata retold)
But then, the Kauravas attack and Arjuna is forced to fight. He has great fun pretending to be useless, putting on his armour back to front and protesting that all he's good for is song and dance.
And then, the great reveal....
Humour is really timeless. The Mahabharata proves it. If we can laugh at the same things that people 50 centuries ago found funny then surely that's proof of the golden thread that binds all humans together. Whether you're 9 or 99: the Mahabharata story is about you. Because it's about the quintessential human spirit, a timeless entity that is as much a part of us today as it was at the dawn of civilisation, beyond change, beyond trends, beyond time and place.
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata, Part SixVedas , Astro...
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata, Part Six
Vedas , Astronomy and Spirituality: is the Word mightier than Stone?
………............................................................................................
"Oral tradition, the words themselves, may have carved a monument that withstands the ages better than rock, that is lost when it is written down; for it goes by the ear, by the rhythm of the heart. The sound silences the mind. It stills all thought: but as the book says, make one mistake, that's when the snake strikes: when the ear hears. Oral tradition needed no written records. If it could be remembered faultlessly for a thousand years, why not for thousands, or more?"
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"If the Mahabharata has one message to deliver it is that man should most concern himself with inner peace and real happiness which do not lie here in this world. It's through understanding this that one grasps the essence of Indian thought.
"The indifference to material possessions evinced by so many here and deemed almost a crime in the west stems from the knowledge that whatever one gains in this world is lost the moment the body is burns to earth, melts and vanishes into air So why concern oneself too much with ephemeral things? It may be a recipe for poverty, but t also one for the kind of riches you can take with you.
"It is there also where lies the greatness of the Mahabharata."
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"Spiritual science it seems, the precise technique of self realisation and liberation has been a part of Indian society from the very start. Just as those new soldiers and civil servants of empire were told anyone who understand this understand everything about India, and those who fail to understand it will never understand anything about her."
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata, Part FiveDestiny and F...
Destiny and Free Will: is Paradise open to dogs? (watch the video below for the answer!)
"'You must learn to see with the same eye a mound of earth, a heap of gold, a cow, a sage, a dog, and the man who eats the dog. There's an beyond the mind.' Krishna in Peter Brook's Mahabharata.
'Dharma belies the Western criticism of Hindu thought: that it leaves precious little room for free will, that it binds man upon a wheel of fate, a wheel of reincarnation, rebirth; a wheel that goes round and round and round and round and round.
'Dharma offers the escape from the fate of reincarnation; it is the path detached from this world of illusion, to the quintessential truth which Hinduism seeks.
"'From a western point of view it's impossible to understand that fate, destiny and free will can coexist. Everything in the western mind says if there is fate there isn't free will, if there's free will there can't be such a things as fate or destiny. The Mahabharata cuts that away and puts one in front of something very different, in that freedom exists in a quite different way and that one sees that the great freedom for each character is either to become himself or not to become himself.'
"That one work can contain both so much wisdom and entertainment after several millennia is mind boggling and without comparison. If Homer's Iliad could also contain the New Testament and was as popular today as it was 2000 years ago, even this would not compare with the poem attributed to Vyasa. By comparison Shakespeare himself seems like a lightweight, and indeed, all literary fame pales.
"We find it hard to believe that anything of such magnificence could be a legacy from a time before history began, but in the West our scholars have looked for the cradles of civilisation closer to home. To us India is a mere footnote to history. We require hard evidence, documents, records. And unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia where nothing will decay the Indian climate ensures than nothing, not even the hardest stone carvings, will survive much beyond one millennium.
"But could we be wrong? Instead of a footnote, should India be one of the main chapters of the history books?"
From: Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata. Part Five
November 27, 2011
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata. Part FourMythology and...
Mythology and Religion
"Indian mythology is like a mirror that shows their hearts' desire to all who look into it. So the Hindu in his shrine might greet you with : 'So you are a follower of this Jesus, brought his image with you! He is very nice too! Put him up there too in the shrine, there's plenty of room!'
"It is so because the original idea was never abandoned; it was merely enlarged, expanded upon for every imaginable taste. To this day though, in his heart, the Hindu really only believes in One ineffable God, creator of everything, to whom everything returns. Not the Christian father high up in heaven but inside us, everywhere, in all.
Sometimes this One is known as Para Atman, whereas the individual soul is atman. Para means supreme: the Supreme Soul.
"Our mind, our senses, separate us from that Soul. Our desires with which we shape the world around us distance us from the divine. So desire triggers the actions that shape reality but desires can never be satisfied, because they are illusory: what is called Maya, illusion, that is both the architect and the substance of this world."
From: Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata, Part 4
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata Part ThreeArchaeology (...
Archaeology (con'd) and Hinduism
"The quintessence of India, her religion, has remained unchanged ever since the great poem was composed. No invader or coloniser was ever able to overcome it, and indeed many, like the Aryan invaders form the north, were overcome by it, absorbed into its generous complexities.
"Jews were here since the times of king Solomon. India has the distinction of being the only country on earth where they were never persecuted. Almost every religions faith of the world was represented, like Islam in huge numbers, Christians numbering millions; and out of Hinduism have come reforms, movements like Buddhism that became major religions in their own right. But the Indian soul was never been conquered. Vedas and Mahabharata spring from an ancient and enduring civilisation, the scope of which we are only now beginning to fathom."
"The root of Hinduism is not just in the belief in one God, like the monotheism of Christians and Moslems, but that there is nothing in existence besides this One God. God is not only in everything and everyone, he literally is everything. For, asks the Mahabharata, is the drop of rain in essence any different from the vast ocean into which it falls and vanishes? If God is all he is in us, and we are he. Man's quest, therefore, is for the divine within to become part of all, part of God.
"At its core (Hinduism) is more of a philosophy than what we in the West would call a religion. It was out of this philosophy, too austere, intellectually taxing for most, that was born the bewildering diversity of India's estimated 26 million gods and goddesses.
From: Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata. Part Three
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata Part 3Archaeology (con'...
Archaeology (con'd) and Hinduism
"The quintessence of India, her religion, has remained unchanged ever since the great poem was composed. No invader or coloniser was ever able to overcome it, and indeed many, like the Aryan invaders form the north, were overcome by it, absorbed into its generous complexities.
"Jews were here since the times of king Solomon. India has the distinction of being the only country on earth where they were never persecuted. Almost every religions faith of the world was represented, like Islam in huge numbers, Christians numbering millions; and out of Hinduism have come reforms, movements like Buddhism that became major religions in their own right. But the Indian soul was never been conquered. Vedas and Mahabharata spring from an ancient and enduring civilisation, the scope of which we are only now beginning to fathom."
"The root of Hinduism is not just in the belief in one God, like the monotheism of Christians and Moslems, but that there is nothing in existence besides this One God. God is not only in everything and everyone, he literally is everything. For, asks the Mahabharata, is the drop of rain in essence any different from the vast ocean into which it falls and vanishes? If God is all he is in us, and we are he. Man's quest, therefore, is for the divine within to become part of all, part of God.
"At its core (Hinduism) is more of a philosophy than what we in the West would call a religion. It was out of this philosophy, too austere, intellectually taxing for most, that was born the bewildering diversity of India's estimated 26 million gods and goddesses.
From: Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata. Part Three
November 25, 2011
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata. Part TwoFilm and Archa...
Film and Archaeology
From the documentary:
"Children in School, for example: if there is one child who is very strong or very fat they will say he is exactly like Bhima. And that is the kind of total liveability and contemporariness of the Mahabharata today."
But a Bhima played by an actor from Africa?
Director
From: Myths of India: The Mahabharata. Part TwoFrom the documentary:
Our ignorance of the vast age of India's civilisation was due.. to a tendency to view Europe, our world, as the heart of life on earth, an expedient that was self serving during the heady days of empire.
"We still think that all other civilisations were of minor quality, and that is why we still have difficulties accepting that in the Indian subcontinent something developed that was even more important than the other civilisations. " -- Michael Jansen, architectural history.
From:
November 24, 2011
Myths of Mankind: The Mahabharata. Part OneHere's a grea...
Here's a great documentary series on the Mahabharata, exploring it in the context of India's history, archeology, sociology etc.
"Young officers or civil servants arriving for the first time in their new home among the palm fronds and rice fields, or in the heat and dust of a desert cantonment, would commonly be told by some well-meaning old India hand that if they wished to grasp the essence of the place and its people they should read one book: the Mahabharata, the world's oldest epic by far, and with 90000 verses exceeding the Bible and all of Shakespeare's plays bundled together by far the world's longest and greatest epic poem."
From "Myths of India,: The Mahabharata. Part 1".
But why should modern readers, living in the West and eons away from India both in terms of mileage and mentality, want to read a book written centuries ago? What could such a book possibly have to say to them? Why should they pick it up, if there was no previous particular interest in India or its culture?
To this I say: because the story is timeless, and speaks to a dimension of the human spirit that is equally timeless, and behind the action lie themes that are as much a part of the human situation today as they were those 50 centuries ago in a far-off land. Values, that we cherish as much today as did the mythical heroes of this grand story: loyalty, friendship, truth, love, bravery. The "character flaws that drive the action in this story are as much alive today as they were: greed, envy, jealousy, lust, covetousness, betrayal, addiction...
It is a story larger than life, and as relevant to modern day America or Europe as to ancient -- or for that matter modern -- India.
If you have the time, watch the video below. The whole documentary series can be watched on this site:
Myths of India: The Mahabharata
November 23, 2011
Q & AOver the years, whenever I mentioned that I was ...
Over the years, whenever I mentioned that I was working on the Mahabharata, people have asked me questions. Such as:
Does the world really need yet another Mahabharata?
That's for every individual to decide. I certainly believe it does; that's why I wrote it!
What does this version have that the others don't?
A long time ago, it seemed to me that with every new version I read, some vital element was lacking. Either the writing was inadequate to truly reflect the subject, or essential elements of the story were missing, or major characters seemed lifeless, or it was just a basic summary without dramatic punch, or it was so long the actual story was buried in a thousand minor sub-plots or stories-within-stories, or it was too scholarly, or had too much authorial intrusion, or it lacked spiritual depth. What I wanted was a book the length of an average novel, a continuous story distilled down to its vital essence but dramatised so as to captivate the reader, with living, breathing characters, spiritually alive and written in an accessible style yet retaining the powerful spirit of the original. That's a lot to ask of one book. It took a long time...
How long have you been working on it?
Over thirty years. I suppose I've been working on it the moment I read my first version, in India in 1974. That was Kamala Subramaniam's huge tome, almost 800 pages long, in hardback with large print. Once I read the first page I could not put it down; I read day and night till it was finished. That gave me the model of what mine should be like: in the words of modern publishing, I wanted it to be unputdownable. And that meant following Subramaniam's example, which was to dramatise the story in her own words, using her imagination to create scenes that would draw the reader in. She achieved that brilliantly. However, her book seemed to be written primarily for children, in short simple sentences, and often too sentimental, especially for modern sensibilities. So while her version completely overwhelmed me by its sheer power of narration, it still left me wanting.
In the following years I bought or borrowed every English version I could get my hands on. But none of these satisfied me. Around 1978 I started on a first draft of my own, and have been working on it ever since. Sometimes I put it away for years at a time, only to dig it out again and improve on it, laboriously retyping everything from start to finish. In the 90's I typed the whole thing on to my first word processor, a very primitive Brother which could only save on floppy discs, a few chapters at a time. Once I had it saved digitally revising became much easier, and more frequent, maybe once a year. It was a labour of love, always at the back of my mind. I didn't even think of publication until recently.
And what made you think of publication now?
The fact that even today, there seems to be no definitive condensation available, particularly for Western readers. And I make no apologies for the fact that this is, in fact, a Mahabharata with a more Western slant. It uses very few Sanskrit terms, and those that it does become clear in the context. I think Western readers in particular should be reading the Mahabharata. It belongs in the annals of world literature, and every educated person should be familiar with it. Its message is timeless, and especially relevant in these turbulent times. I'd like to recommend it to everyone I know, beg them to read it. But then comes the question: which version?
Now that it is possible to self-publish on Kindle, I decided to just go ahead. Now I can say, this version!
Isn't it presumptuous for you, a virtual nobody in the academic world, to think you could rewrite such a classic?
I'm sure many Vedic scholars are going to tear out their hair in horror; after all, I don't know Sanskrit and I haven't read the Ganguli Mahabharata from beginning to end, not even in translation, and I haven't got a PhD in Sanskrit Literature. And I have taken great liberties with the story, putting words into the mouths of the protagonists. I've always felt that presumption, been intimidated by it; asked myself who gave me the right to tackle such a powerful subject.
On the other hand (and this is the answer that always gives me courage): the Mahabharata belongs to everyone. The original versions - despite the Scribe Ganesh's efforts! - were not written but spoken. It was passed on quite literally by word of mouth. I can well imagine storytellers in ancient India with a group of rapt villagers gathered around, listening to this story. I can see mothers and fathers telling the stories to their children, passing the story along from generation to generation in their own words, and each according to his or her own understanding. These storytellers were not Sanskrit scholars. They did not keep to an official text: the best of those narrators would have embellished and dramatised to their heart's content, using their imagination to bring the scenes to life for the pleasure of their listeners. They made it their own. I worked in that oral tradition, that of the storyteller. For that, the only qualification is the ability to tell a good story. And if a story appears with the immediacy and urgency of how this one came to me, that is a call to write.
I do not claim to have written a scholarly version, and of course it is not a translation. Academics are most certainly going to raise objections. But I think I have made a good story out of it, and that is what counts in the eyes of readers. Readers, especially first-time readers, don't care about how close it is to the Ganguli or the Valmiki version. All they care about is loving the story and identifying with the characters.
What was your main source?
I first referred to the Van Buitenan three-volume version to get the basic narrative right, names and so on, though that only covers part of the story. Later, I was able to refer to the Ganguli Mahabharata which is online. Mostly, though, I already knew the essential story by heart and simply pulled it out of my own memory.
Have you made any essential changes to the traditional written versions?
I've given myself a certain amount of artistic licence by dramatising throughout, which means putting words into the mouths of characters which aren't there in the traditional written versions. Here and there I have embellished the story, for instance in the case of the Bhishma/Sikhandin/Amba sub-plot. I've also made a few minor amendments where they serve the inner logic of the story. For instance, it doesn't makes sense for Arjuna to abduct Subhadra after he has won her affection with his sadhu disguise. So I have her choose him at a Swayamvara, which incidentally is also more politically correct. But I did not make this change for the sake of political correctness; I made it primarily because it improves the story.
But these are not essential changes. They were made entirely for narrative purposes, and do not change the main thrust of the story.
You've omitted most of the stories-within-stories. Why?
My first priority in writing this version was to distil it to its vital essence, and a positive side-effect of that is getting it down to a reasonable length. The first things that had to go was a pruning of the stories-within-stories, charming as many of these may be. I kept only those that actually add depth and understanding to the main plot, such as the killing of Ganga's babies, and the story of the demon twins. In some cases I've given brief backgrounds of some of the characters, which had to suffice: Sisupala, Jarasandha, Jayadraha.
What are your own favourite parts of the story; favourite characters?
By far, my favourite is Karna. And it is Karna's story above all that I wanted to tell. Again, I'd like to refer to Subramaniam's Mahabharata, because for all its literary shortcomings it does tell Karna's story beautifully. And I think that it was Karna's story I was always looking for in my hunt for the Mahabharata. In every other English version I've read to date, Karna was just one of a myriad other characters; an important one, true enough, but still not given the weight that he deserves. Always, Krishna and Arjuna are at the centrepiece of these stories.
For me, Karna is the lynchpin of the entire story. Without him there would be no Mahabharata. Without Karna, Duryodhana would never have challenged the Pandavas; he would not have dared. Karna is a tragic, great character, the true hero of this story. I love the fact that he is not black-and-white; he is torn in two by the agonising choice he must make when he learns the truth of his parentage. He is the most complex of all the characters, a solid mixture of weakness and strength, and I have given him place of honour in this version, even bringing forward the story of his conception to make it the prologue. In terms of modern storytelling, Karna's story is the essential "hook", the twist in the tale.
I also love the story of Amba and Bhishma, and have embellished it out a little more than you'll find in traditional versions.
...and favourite scenes?
There are many. Bhishma taking his vow of chastity, Karna's conception, the winning of Draupadi, Arjuna and Uttara in battle together after the thirteenth year, Kunti revealing herself to Karna, Indra asking Karna for a gift, Abhimanyu defending himself against the veterans. And countless scenes involving Krishna: the miracle of Draupadi's sari; Arjuna choosing him to be his charioteer; Krishna showing his true form to the assembled court at Hastinapura; the telling of the Bhagavad Gita; the slaying of Bhishma; the bowing of the army to the Astra of Narayana; the saving of Parikshit. Krishna is the incarnation of Vishnu. The reader should have no doubt whatsoever of the divine power behind him. For me, any version of the Mahabharata MUST have all these scenes in it, dramatised to come over in full force.
And that, finally, is why I wrote this version and sent it out into the world. It wanted to be written.
