‘The Mahabharata is an intellectual project developed by generations of poets… as Itihasa, does the possible mention of true facts give the narrative its consistency? A mere transcription of historical data as an arbitrary fantasy would not produce such a well-organized construction…
The epic is related to history in a deeper sense than registering concrete facts about what happened in definite points of the space and time where our everyday experience also takes place. … The possible concordance between archeological findings and certain elements of the text cannot help us… the question really answered by the epic might ask under which conditions our actions can overcome the absurdity of the human condition. How can mortal action not be vain, soon swallowed by nothingness? The epic answers: by embodying an archetypal myth in the earthly present.’
Alexis Pinchard. Mahabharata Manthan: a Critical Revisit to Tangible and Intangible Heritage, 19th-21st July 2017, New Delhi.
True - and to add to Mr. Pinchard’s observation.
The five Pandava heroes are born from divine conceptions. The epic invokes parallels from the human heroes as avatars to divine beings. It is not just the Pandava ‘good guys’ that are incarnations of Gods, but everyone. Some are drawn to demons. Here are the lines linking characters to divine avatars drawn in Sambhava Parva text -
Yikes. What a squirrel’s nest! But that is the point. The human characters are all on the left in columns. The Kauravas are flagged with red shapes. The Pandavas with blue. The divine lineages and beings are depicted to the right and the dotted lines attach the human character to the Gods the Vedic storytellers divined they represented. For example - Shalya and Bhishma are both said to be Rudras - forms of Shiva. Shikhandi was the incarnation of a rakshasa and in a previous life was the woman Amba - a woman whose life Bhishma ruined. Others like Dhrishtaketu or Bhagadatta are linked as avatars to lesser demons, such as Bashkala, Anuhrada, Krodha, or Krodhahanta. Duryodhana is tied to Kali. Shishupala is an incarnation of Hiranyakashipu - the demon king whose slaying by the Narasinha incarnation of Vishnu signaled the turn of the first yuga. As Hiranyakashipu was slain by an incarnation of Vishnu, Shishupala is slain by Krishna, who is a later incarnation of Vishnu. Draupadi is an avatar to Lakshmi - (in a bit of levity Draupadi’s fate to have five husbands linked to karma of a previous life wherein she asked the Gods for an ideal husband - and it took the combined merits of five great men for the Gods to deliver all she asked for.) We could go on but the point is to underline that the Pandavas are not exceptional in their divine incarnation or identification of avatar.
Consider the epic as ethnographic study in the process of human myth making. The box of ‘Adityas’ are twelve old Vedic Gods all said to be brothers - the offspring of Kashyapa and Daksha’s daughter Aditiya - including Indra, Varuna, Vishnu. Like the Kauravas, the Adityas are opposed by their cousins, the Dityas - asuras and danavas, under Hiranyakashipu’s lineage. Speculate that similar to the Pandavas and Kauravas, there were stories of humans that correlated to these deities. Between these figures and the Mahabharata lay the Ramayana - which has the character of a hybrid human divine myth that lays somewhere between the brutal all too human Mahabharata and ethereal Aditiyas. The storytellers may have first started with human events. Then they suss out the links of underlying meaning from the humans to the divine. In turn the human are etched away by time until all that is left is the divine heritage. What is described is a process over time by which humans may claim to indirectly know or understand the Gods by walking back their expression through the messy medium of freewheeling human realities.
The epic’s answer is part of a larger syncretic process. Itihasa is a process through which story-tellers divine the meaning spiritual conciousness as they manifest on our physical plane. Over time they may have worked out what the meaning of events and persons were within the context of their religious worldview and weaved those elements into the story. I suggest the above spider web of narrative storytelling did not emerge fully formed from Vyasa’s pen - at first brush there were likely foundational ‘Aha! Arjuna was Indra’s son and Bhima Vayu - and when a properly motivated Arjuna and Bhima poured it on the battlefield together the other kshatriyas felt more like they were fighting a monsoon shooting lightning bolts at them than two men’ moments of ‘it adds up’ clarity. In the larger Hindu structure the many incarnations and deities are interwoven through many such syncretic movements. Such is the basic work of a shaman or brahman story-teller in any society.
“For reasons that remain unclear, General John Nicholson inspired an entire religious sect, the Nikal Seyn, who regarded him as an incarnation of Vishnu. Nicholson tolerated his devotees as long as they kept quiet; but if ‘they prostrated themselves or began chanting they were taken away and whipped.’ The punishment never varied: ‘three dozen lashes with the cat-o’-nine tails.’”
William Dalrymple. The Last Mughal The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857. Vintage Books. New York.
An illustrative example of the process of revision and editing. Given that John Nicholson is a relatively obscure figure of history today - and not widely recognized by Hindus as a major incarnation of the deity as he was by some in his lifetime - left on the cutting room floor - may we understand the process of Itihasa as one that separates the major human events from recency bias? Sort the riff raff? Sift the wheat from the chaff? So some drew the line from Nicholson to Vishnu - and this association was ultimately rejected by not being widely accepted. Many other such localized examples of persons believed or recognized by some to be minor incarnations of Vishnu are to be found. Mr. Nicholson’s legendary violence and wrath did not last.
The process suggested here of retrofitting reality by mapping its facets to divine parallel may seem alien to the post-modern materialist enlightenment. Consider the following from The New York Times Long Covid. January 30, 2022 -
What does Mr. Gillotte’s visionary experience that took place in a modern industrial medical scientific context look like in a divine narrative? Imagine for a moment that in the world we live in such associations were accepted as perceptual-reflections of shared reality as opposed to hallucinations of the individual mind. In that world ‘Covid’ may be recognized as the manifestation of a demonic energy - substantiated by experiences such as the above (wiw which is a spot-on depiction of the imposing demon Kali that is said to dominate the Kali Yuga). In that world, the physical virus would be understood as the incarnation of a demon. The above news article may be met with a ‘yup, not surprised’ nonchalance. The juicy bit about food tasting like ash would make the linkage of this encounter to the world of hell even more obvious. The point of such narrative reality for people living in it is to provide a reasonably predictive understanding of what they are up against - especially in cases of many headed phenomena by placing it within a contextual meaning. That’s it. A placement does not serve as proof or substantiate the unseen metaphysical entities that are believed/suspected to manifest on the physical plane! This is a key point that materialists stick on because the opposite is the starting point of their thinking that reality is established on the physical plane.
So how do we know or trust that some parts of the epic’s fantastic action really happened with scant archeological evidence to substantiate? Such as the Pandavas Digvijaya conquest - or the scale of the fighting and death in the 18-day war. Over time the pretenders, also-rans - like Mr. Nichols - and fakers - like whichever space cadet aspirational cult leader on the scene who calls themselves Bhagavan Kalki this week - have been left. Forgotten. Ashes to ashes. Rust to dust. We may partake this faith because we trust if it were any other way, it would have been forgotten like millions of other inconsequential so-called once in a millennial events. Truths remain. Humans breed bareback. Generations come and generations go. Classics are not bound by hard fact. Only the Gods will be remembered by those who look back.