“You think you know Mahabharata, you should read Yuganta by Irawati Karve”. This was one of the ways the book was recommended to me. I do not claim to know all of Mahabharata, but having read the epic in multiple forms, I thought I knew it somewhat. So I read Yuganta: The end of an epoch.

It is an interesting way to look at the epic. Irawati Karve was a pioneering Indian anthropologist, sociologist, educationist and writer. She wrote multiple essays on characters from Mahabharata and those essays form the book. Her views are at times moving, impressive and at times made me ask the question –“is she talking about the same epic?” Specially, when she moves from her factual method to speculations. For majority of the book she has used the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata as the basis of her research, but at times her imagination takes flight and in some cases it is poignant and moving while in some it has huge logical gaps.

I liked her essay on Draupadi. It was a novel viewpoint to look at her life – the one with five husbands. Karve has started this chapter with listing similarities between Sita and Draupadi, the heroines of two great epics of India. The chapter then moves on to talk about pivotal moments in Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective. People who have known Mahabharata from popular sources of the epic will recall the incident of Draupadi getting married to the five sons of Pandu. Karve has brought out that incident in chapters on both Kunti and Draupadi and has been able to bring out its social and political significance. Kunti was able to see that Draupadi could be used as a bond to keep all the five brothers together. Later in the epic this gets spoken about between Duryodhana and Karna. In response to Duryodhana’s ask to separate the two sons of Madri from the sons of Kunti, Karna responds – “Now that Draupadi is wife of all the five brothers, they will never be separated.”

Karve has a very strong view on what she calls “foolishness” of Draupadi during the disrobing incident, when Darupadi asks about the legality of the situation. I think she is in error to call Draupadi foolish on the basis of the logical analysis of the situation. She says that it would’ve been better for Draupadi to beg for the decency and following the Kshatriya code rather than debating the finer legal points on whether she was in bondage. Karve contends that on legal principles of the day Draupadi’s question – “Ask Dharmaraja, whether he lost himself as a slave before staking me? And can a slave stake someone else?” puts her in a desperate situation. In Karve’s estimation, both the answers would’ve had terrible consequences for Draupadi. If Dharma was himself a slave, by Karve’s reckoning the slave doesn’t lose authority over his property which also includes a wife. And on the other hand, if Dharma did not have any authority over Draupadi – then she was giving up her husband and effectively becoming widowed by choice. Both terrible situations. And this dilemma is what made the gathering unable to act.

I think that given the desperate situation that Draupadi was in, her question raised at least some doubts in the mind of elders in that gathering. And by not begging at the start, Draupadi was able to get boons from Dhritrashtra to win freedom for her husbands. If it was not so, and she had begged for decency – she would’ve been most likely spared but the Pandavas would’ve remained slaves for the rest of their lives.

In ending the chapter on Draupadi, Karve lets her imagination guide her. For me, it was the most moving writing of the whole book. The thoughts of Draupadi as she thinks about the Pandava she loved the most – Arjuna. And then as she realizes who was the Pandava who loved her the most, Bhima.

“Draupadi smiled. Bringing Bhima’s face close to hers, she said with her last breath, ‘In our next birth, be the eldest, Bhima; under your shelter we can all live in safety and joy.”

Karve’s last essay, titled The end of an epoch, is a brilliant look at the Mahabharata from the anthropological and sociological perspective. Her knowledge and scholarship born of years of contribution in the field shines in this chapter. I have seen the huge disconnect in the current generation from the Mahabharata where majority considers the Mahabharata to be an epic based on someone’s imagination. The question – “Do you think it really happened?”, I’ve heard many times in different forms. For them, I’ll recommend just this one chapter of the book. It puts the core text of Mahabharata as presented in the critical edition on a relatable base where you can see how it is largely a historical account of things as they happened few thousand years ago in India.

In her introduction to the book, Karve says “I shall consider it a victory if they think my interpretation is wrong and read the Mahabharata merely to prove it wrong.” There is plenty of scope of disagreement with her “viewpoint”. She mentions that what is presented in this collection of essays is her viewpoint on Mahabharata and I have read it as such. However, there are sections where a reader is baffled by the inconsistency between her own views. As this book is a collection of essays written at a different points of time, some disconnect is expected. However, at times you see two characters in different chapters to have fundamental disconnects and then you wish that she would’ve taken time to reconcile her views from one chapter to next.

Her view about the eldest Pandava, Dharma, is an example. He is righteousness personified, a person who exemplifies the moral code of the time, in the chapter called “Father and Son”; while he is a gambling addict in the chapter “Draupadi”. I wish Karve would’ve taken time to reconcile these two views – maybe as it is mentioned in Mahabharata, a king in those days was unable to refuse a gambling invitation and it was part of the Kshatriya code of decency.

Further, in her chapter on Kunti, she mentions the incident of Karna’s birth in a very sympathetic manner to Kunti’s position. Kunti was serving Durvasa for a year and “it is not very difficult to suppose that Karna was fathered by the sage”, it used to keep happening all the time. Even Satyavati had a son, Vyasa, before she married Shantanu. There is a logical disconnect between this speculation that Karve seems to believe completely (she doesn’t believe gods came and gave sons to Kunti, as we shall see further), and her understanding of Karna. For if this is true, then Karna is not a Kshatriya but a Brahmin and Karna’s entire life struggle is to be Kshatriya. The life of Karna as she has presented in the chapter on him doesn’t add up in this case. Vyasa was a seer, not a warrior.

Similarly, in the chapter titled “Father and Son”, Karve speculates in great detail that Vidur is the father of Dharma – the eldest Pandava. She starts with her doubts with “if Kunti could’ve called any god for a son, why she will start with Yamadharma as the first one”. But the first god that Kunti called was the Sun and not Yamadharma. This continues her speculation from Karna’s birth I suppose. However, as she has pointed out multiple times in the book, Mahabharata doesn’t hide secrets. It did not hide Karna’s birth so why hide Dharma’s birth? And then Karve presents her arguments, that maybe if Dharma was known to be son of Vidura, a Suta, he wouldn’t have been considered a prince and Duryodhana would’ve a better claim to the throne. This line of thinking is premised on a simple assumption. None of Kunti’s sons were the result of her use of the “Mantra” given by Durvasa, rather they were fathered by whosoever was convenient and suitable at that time. However, in her essay on Kunti, she also mentions that after the birth of Madri’s sons, Kunti refuses to share the “mantra” again for the fear that as she did the first time, Madri will use the mantra again to call forth a multitude of gods (as she called the Ashwini twins the first time to get two sons), and will have more sons than Kunti. If there is no “mantra” then this fear is unfounded. Anyone convenient and suitable could’ve been found by either of the queens while they were in the forest.

In one of the best essays of the book, The end of an epoch, she laments the loss of the clarity and factual representation of events as they are presented in Mahabharata from the later epics. She says that the later writings in India then got influenced by the Bhakti movement and lost their objectivity. While she talks about Puranas such as Harivamsa and poems of Kalidasa such as Vikramorvashiya and Shakuntalam to make her point, she completely discounts the later Upanishads. I don’t believe that the spirit of enquiry was lost in the Indian works post Mahabharata. The beauty of Indian tradition is that a new book doesn’t supplant the earlier books, there is no finality that is called “Truth”, at times revealed. We see this final truth syndrome in the Abrahamanic tradition where “the book” is the final truth. In Indian traditions, the truth is a matter of speculation and evolution. In my view it is a privilege that we do not consider any book to be the final truth and the spirit of enquiry is still alive.

Another way to look at the Yuganta is to see the book in the context of its time of publication. It was published in late nineteen sixties; India was yet to complete twenty years of its independence. A lot of traditional thought was being questioned and scholars of the time were either trying to find holes in the traditional thought or were trying to establish the traditions in the light of new fields of study. I believe Yuganta was an effort of the second type. As Karve relates in the preface of the book, after the publication of her essay on Gandhari, a young Indian friend asked her – “Who on earth was this Gandhari?” She says that the question made her sad and useless. She fought that sadness with publishing more essays and finally publishing a book on Mahabharata. I think she has been successful in her efforts to make people interested in the original text.

Each of the chapters raises questions which are difficult to answer, but will surely motivate the reader of the essays to become curious about the Mahabharata. She has essays on Bhishma, Gandhari, Drona and Aswatthama, Karna and Krisna Vasudeva. All of them are worth your time, read the book if only to disagree.

May we keep inspiring each other.