kabeerspeakz2u: September 2010

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1. Aims and Objectives of the Study

This study of The Mahabharata focuses on Socio-Political Ethics of the epic based on its religious teachings and philosophical doctrines. The investigator does not intend to pursue the numerous questions they raise. The task of this research is a study of the text in the light of the postmodern literary theories in order to show that The Mahabharata is readable in the light of Postmodernism. The most interesting aspect of the study is that the epic continues to be highly relevant in the world even today because of the issues it discusses and the way they are treated. This makes it fit for a Postmodern study. It tries to study the epic by topic rather than reviewing portions of the text in succession. The investigator believes that the epic’s teachings are subtle and inconclusive as the Indian Philosophy, which has a unique approach to complex issues. No one-dimensional creed or ideology can resolve such issues. A detailed study shows that there is a concept of ‘Dharma’ as the underlying thread in the epic. It is always relevant. Moreover, the treatment of this concept in The Mahabharata makes a Postmodern study of the text possible.

1.2. The Primary Sources

The investigator has chosen to use Kunjikuttan Tamburan’s Srimahabharatam and the English version

The Mahabharata, a modern rendering by Ramesh Menon as primary sources. The English translation of ‘Srimad Bhagavad Gita’ by Swami Tapasyananda, published by Ramakrishna Math, Madras is used in chapter 6 for translation of The Gita. Sanskrit quotations are sparingly used when it has a particular significance and when it allows more than one interpretation or when the translation cannot do full justice to the meaning.

The Mahabharata is telling the story of a family quarrel ending in a war in simple verse form. The important characters are princes who ruled a city called Hastinapura. The most important king among their ancestors was Bharata. From his name, the word ‘bharata’ is derived. The epic had a shorter and simpler version called ‘Jaya’ (victory). The story was sung by a group of bards. They were counsellors, charioteers and friends of kings. They told stories of ancient kings and princes.

The Mahabharata is one such story that later on went from ‘sutas’ to a Brahman clan named Bhrigu. They presumably had added their own stories into it. At present The Mahabharata has eighteen chapters called ‘parva’. Each ‘parva’ is subdivided into chapters made up of verses in ‘sloka’ form. The Mahabharata is an inexhaustible subject of study. Readers of the epic know that no single study can encompass it completely. This is a humble attempt to analyse the epic from a different angle. Postmodernism is a literary theory of recent origin. The present investigation is done to analyse the epic based on the following ideas of Postmodern Literary Theory: 1) Moral dilemmas and conflicts in the epic due to the open-ended nature of the text, anti-foundational nature of story telling method in the epic. 2) Language games and problems of representation in the epic and Krishna as Simulacrum. 3) The philosophy of ‘Dharma’ and Postmodern Philosophy of Relativism in The Mahabharata. 4) Poetics of sublime or the transcendental self in The Gita is an attempt to interpret The Gita based on the Postmodern idea of sublime.

1.3. Postmodernism

The idea of Postmodernity had been around since the 1940s. Postmodern philosophy originated primarily in France during the mid-20th century as a rejection of the Hegelianism of the ageThe most influential early Postmodern philosophers were Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. Michel Foucault is also often cited as an early Postmodernist, arguably moving beyond structuralism by re-historicizing and destabilizing the philosophical structures of Western thought.Following Nietzsche, he argued that knowledge is produced through the operations of power, and changes fundamentally in different historical periods.
Postmodernism is indefinable. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as the simulacrum, and hyperreality and language games to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the unquestionable nature of meaning. The term Postmodernism first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Postmodernism is not an attack upon modernity or a complete departure from it. It is a continuation of modern thinking in another mode. Postmodern Philosophy is a trend of thought. It was heavily influenced by phenomenology, structuralism and existentialism, including writings of Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. It was also influenced by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein's criticisms of traditional Philosophy, including earlier analytic philosophy. Postmodern Philosophy is skeptical of many of the values and bases of Analytic Philosophy; for instance a Postmodernist might disagree that the complex system of meanings embodied in a normal or philosophical language could be represented in logical annotation.Postmodern Philosophy is often skeptical about simple binary oppositions, such as knowledge and ignorance, social progress and reversion, dominance and submission, and presence and absence. Structuralism emphasised this aspect.

The writings of Lyotard were largely concerned with the role of narratives in human culture, and particularly how that role has changed as the new age has left modernity and entered a "Postindustrial" or Postmodern condition. He argued that modern philosophies legitimized their truth-claims not on logical or empirical grounds, but rather on the grounds of accepted stories about knowledge and the world. He further argued that in the Postmodern condition, these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth-claims. He suggested that in the wake of the collapse of modern metanarratives, people are developing a new ‘language game’ - a language game that does not make claims to any absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever-changing relationships,among people and between people and the world.

1.4. Socio-political Ethics

The Mhabharata portrays the forces of good and evil in narrative form. There is a struggle between them in a socio-political context. The nature of power is a central theme in the epic. The concept of ‘Dharma’ deals with the proper use of this power. Wickedness of Duryodhana and weakness of Dhrtarastra are the misuse of power. Modern political systems are not essentially different from the acient systems with respect to the use and misuse of power. The Mahabharata represents the major clashes found in the world. It highlights the conflict between moral integrity and the need for survival. Eventhough the Kauravas reportedly lack moral integrity, they had their own pride. The Pandavas are said to be virtuous but they violated the code of moral integrity on many occasions.

The epic discusses the gender issue of women’s place in society.The gambling episode in the epic is a very important social issue. It raises the the moot question, can a woman treated as a property? Moreover Draupadi’s marriage to five husbands also is another issue for social debate. The epic is supposed to be a great story of heroism and victory. But the readers find it to be a great tragedy. Nobody is happy and nobody achieves any glory. Therefore, the readers are left with more questions than anwers at the end of the day after reading the epic. The Mahabharata discusses some of the most profound questions of socio-political ethics. The investigator tries to discuss these in the light of Postmodernism.

1.5. Related Literature

There are various studies on The Mahabharata made by writers in India and abroad. Most of the studies discuss the ethical,political and religious aspects of the epic. Some of the prominent studies are the following:

G. Baily has made a study about the sufferings of characters in the epic entitled, Sufferings: the Indian Perspective. One of the western studies done on the epic is by J. Fitzgerald. He has done an extensive study of the epic with special reference to the religious life in it. His work is entitled, The Great Epic of India as Religious Rhetoric: A Fresh Look at The Mahabharata . E.w. Hawpkins’ The Great Epic of India is another important study of the epic by a western author. Studies done by Indian authors include;The Mahabharata: An Epic of Universality and Deep Human Concern by K.R.S Iyengar.Yuganta: the End of an Epoch by Irawati Karve is another contribution. There is a collection of essays entitled, Moral Dilemmas in The Mahabharata edited by Bimal Krishna Matilal.Ethical Elements of Mahabharata by Manju Ravi Varma is another monumental work on the epic. A Critical study of the political ideas in the epic has been done by Brajdeo Prasad Roy entitled, Political Ideas and Institutions in The Mahabharata.

1.6. Conclusion

In the light of the above studies done by others, the investigator is trying to prove that The Mahabharata is readable based on the Postmodern literary theory.

The first chapter states the objectives and hypothesis of the study. A brief review of the Related Literature is also given. In the second chapter Postmodernism is explained in detail.The second chapter consists of is a detailed description of Postmodernism as a Literary Theory and Philosophical thought.Here the following concepts of Postmdernism are explained. Postmodernism, Socio-political Ethics in Postmodernism, Postmodernist Representation, Postmodenism and the Study of a Text of the Past,Postmodern Philosophy of Relativism, Postmodernism and Totality,Postmodern Literary Theory and Anti-foundationalism,Poetics of Sublime and Hyperreality, and the Art of the Unrepresentable are explained.In this chapter Postmodernism and Socio-political ethics are also explained.The third chapter explains how the principles of Postmodernism are applied in the study of The Mahabharata. The fourth chapter discusses the problems of representation and the use of Language Games in The Mahabharata. It is an attempt to prove that there are lots of occasions which use Language Games and hence the epic is a negative representaion. The fifth chapter deals with the concept of ‘dharma’ in Indian Philosophy and Postmodern Philosophy of Relativism in the epic. It is tried to establish that the Postmodern Philosophy of Relativism has a lot of commonalities with the Philosophy of ‘dharma’ in the epic. In the sixth chapter there is the application of the Postmodern idea of the Poetics of Sublime in reading The Gita as part of the epic.

Chapter 2

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a late flowering of Romanticism. The aesthetic impulse of Postmodernism has influenced the sphere of cognitive or scientific investigations, on the one hand and the practical and moral on the other side. Postmodernism is not a school of thought. It is not even an intellectual movement with a particular goal and it does not have a dogma or a theory. Postmodernism is not an object or an observable human condition. It is something that is assumed to exist. Postmodern theorists argue that it does not have an objective by identifiable features. There is not even an objectively existing truth about it. When a work is referred to as Postmodern, an idea is brought into the study of it and finally the work is examined in the light of a set of ideas about the world and its relationship to the world. Postmodernism argues that what we call knowledge is a special kind of story, a text or discourse that puts together words and images in ways that seem pleasing or useful to a particular culture. It denies that we can have objective knowledge, because what we call knowledge has to be made with the linguistic and other meaning-making resources of a particular culture, and different cultures can see the world in very different ways, all of which "work" in their own terms. It argues that the belief that one particular culture's view of the world is universally "true" is a politically convenient assumption but it has no firm intellectual basis.

The term Postmodernism appeared in literary criticism to describe some aesthetic practices that moved beyond modernism. In early eighties, the term Postmodernism had undergone a shift in meaning from the description of aesthetic practices involving playful irony, parody, parataxis and self-consciousness to a use with a general shift in thought. It is notable that there has been a pervasive cynicism about the new cultural epoch in which critical and functional knowledge break down.1

Though there are many forms of Postmodernism, they all express the same idea that all inherited forms of knowledge and representation are undergoing a radical shift. Firstly, there is recognition that the grand narratives have broken down and hence history and sociological relationships become a plurality of islands of discourse. Foucault said, in effect, that it was chimerical to imagine that historians could reconstruct a real past. Historical discourse is a discourse of the present, serving present ends, making sense for us today out of the archeological traces of past human activity. Foucault undertook to show, to many people's pleasure, that the very objects of modernist scientific investigation were specific historical constructions. The very notions of self, nation, language, mind, sex, crime, normality are the products and not the objects of human discourse and inquiry. He refocused attention from the so-called `phenomena' science sought to investigate, to show how science (read philosophy, psychology, law, common culture) produced meaningful phenomena through its discourses.2

The essential step away from Modernism was the new focus on meaning. Critics started asking the following questions; How does a text mean what it intends to convey? How does a graph or diagram tell us something? How do marks on paper convey to readers a complex conceptual meaning? A landscape is a text for a geologist. An apparatus and its readout is a text in the same sense for a physicist. The principles, and the problems of meaning, are the same. If the meaning of any text depends on how the readers interpret it in relation to other texts, how can either data or explanation be fixed and stable in its own meaning? How can interpretations be the basis for objective knowledge of an objective world? Why should people believe that scientific texts are not subject to the same principles of interpretation as literary texts? Why should they believe that primary data can be read from the book of nature without the same problems, or arbitrary conventions, of interpretation that beset the reading of any other sort of "book"? Why should the people believe that the practical effects of technologies are legitimate warrant for the objective truth of theories, when the only possible links between them are yet more texts, more discourses? Foucault had shown how the disciplines created their objects through discourse, and created them very differently in different historical periods. Derrida sought, in his disruptive readings of classic texts, to show how imperfectly any discourse makes its objects and the world they are supposed to inhabit. Whether a literary, philosophical, or scientific text, Derrida "deconstructed" their constructions of "real objects" of study or narration. Deconstruction is far more important to Postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on text. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. In Derrida’s view a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified", which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text. The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to the contradictions between the intent and surface of a work and the assumptions about it. A work then "deconstructs" assumptions when it places them in context. For example, someone who can pass as the opposite sex may be said to "deconstruct" gender identity, because there is a conflict between the superficial appearance and the reality of the person's gender. He took hold of the key structuralist notion of transformation (A -> B), and showed how unstable any discursive construction of "difference" (A - B) must be. With a rather Zen-like sensibility, he focused on the absence (B is not A) that all presence presupposes, and on the gaps that must be made to separate things we wish to construe as different. He attacked not just positivism (the naive epistemology of turn-of-the-century science, and still of most contemporary curricula), but "positivities", the notion that things are to be defined by what they are, when in fact discourse can only define something as what it is not. (All categories are based on sets of contrasting alternatives; to be of type Y means not being X or Z.)3

Another notable feature of Postmodernism is that there is a wide range of metaphors that cannot be separated from the institutions that produce the languages. In other words, there is a network of language games. Here the criterion is not truth but performance. It means truth cannot be distinguished from fiction. Aesthetics has incorporated everything into itself. According to the philosopher, Richard Rorty, the world is reshaped by abandoning the rhetoric of metaphysical truth4. So knowledge has become a matter of conversation and social practice rather than a mirror of external truths. Poets and novelists may be philosophers of future because they deal with contingencies of style and human truths rather than universal absolutes of systematic truth. Their modes of irony and contingency may provide the imaginative expansion of human sympathy and the basis of social and political solidarity.

Postmodern theory is an attempt to address the social and political issues through an aestheticised view of the world. Therefore, the aesthetics has entered the hard core of human sciences, viz. Philosophy, Political Theory and Social science.

It was Arnold Toynbee, the historian, who used the term Postmodernism for the first time outside the specific literary critical sense. He announced that the Western world was entering Postmodern Age and that it was the final phase of Western History that was terminated by irrationalism and helplessness.5 In this world, as the self and consciousness are adrift, it becomes increasingly difficult to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason and it is decentred. It is without agent, origin or an author and it is a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect. Postmodernism has no firm rules that can define the limits, purpose and status of art. No attempt has been made to create a universal authoritative standard to measure artistic quality. Some critics have lamented this as a decline in values.

Postmodern theorists state the end of reading and they raise doubts about the relationship between reality and representation. It means that there is no simple, direct relationship between reality and its expression in words and pictures.

According to Baudrillard, the media talk among themselves and there is a virtual collage of free-floating images, which represent nothing other than themselves. Representation operates without any solid ground of facts, reality or history6. Here Baudrillard sees a situation in which representation is no longer determined by an essential connection to reality, which it is supposed to represent. A sense of transition is powerful in Postmodernism. There is a feeling that the world is at the end of an era. The old values are breaking down without any other to replace them. A new world is possible if there is a destruction of the old. The enlightenment belief in progress does not provide any notion of certainity, and the possibility of a new world looks like a projection of desire that provides an aesthetic play or a form of psychological compensation.

Postmodernism and Romanticism share a crisis mentality connected to a sense of the fragmentariness of the world. Here aesthetics is the only possible means of redemption. In Postmodernism, an artist is no longer a legislator of humankind. There is no distinction between truth and fiction but there is a fundamental sense of the aesthetics as form of knowing and expression which is an alternative to conceptual knowledge. The aesthetics is an epistemology and ontology.

The way by which modern societies create “order” or disorder is an effort to achieve stability. Francois Lyotard equates stability with the idea of totality, or a totalised system7. Totality, stability, and order are maintained in modern societies through the means of “grand narratives” which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. “A grand narrative” in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its “grand narratives”. For Marxism the “grand narrative” is the idea that capitalism will collapse on itself, and a Utopian socialist world will evolve. In other words, “grand narrative” is a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology that is an ideology that explains an ideology, or a story that is told to explain the belief systems that exist.

Postmodernism is the critique of “grand narratives” and it is the awareness that such narratives serve only to mask the contradiction and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every attempt to create order always demands the creation of an equal amount of disorder, but a “grand narrative” masks the constructiveness of these categories by explaining that disorder is chaotic and bad, and that order is rational and good. So Postmodernism rejects “grand narratives’ or large scale universal or global concepts. It makes no claims to universal or global concepts; instead, it favours stories that explain small practices, local events that are situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary.

Postmodernism faces the problem of separating the object to be observed or studied from the critical discourse that constructs it. It is whether Postmodernism is a phenomenon in the world or a theoretical construction projected on the world for some pragmatic, psychological or institutional reasons. Postmodernism, in this respect is another “grand narrative” but one about the end of “grand narratives”. It is impossibly tied up with performative contradictions. It may be so because in a world that offers less space for speculative idealism, the impetus for Postmodern thought comes from the diminishing speculators themselves. In Postmodernism, there are only signifiers, the idea of any stable or permanent reality disappears. In a Postmodern society, there are only surfaces, without depth and only signifiers with nothing signified.
Socio-political Ethics in Postmodernism

Postmodernism is the belief that direction, evolution and progression have ended in Social History, and a society is based upon the decline of absolute truths, and the rise of relativity. Postmodernity is based upon a relativistic theory of knowledge. It has the belief that there are no certain, absolute truths about the world. Every question has an infinite number of answers, and each one of them is equally valid as any other. In a Postmodern society, there is no single, universally agreed principle of knowledge and organization.

Postmodernism accepts the idea that all totalizing narratives have been partial and biased language games in history. It endorses power relations that tend the readers to look for those languages that have been suppressed in these narratives. So Postmodernism looks for that which remained unspoken because its, material conditions made it unnecessary in totalizing, power narratives. This leads to cultural studies of social and political ethics. The job of a Postmodern rhetorician is the study of social codes and the way they are negotiated. As a result, Postmodernism does away with the idea of a passive reader and active writer and makes the teaching of writing central through its open discussion of humanly made social structures.

Scientific rationality is one perspective in Postmodernism. In Postmodernism, there is a constant exposure to ambivalence, in other words there is a situation without any decidable solution, or foolproof choice of the knowledge of how to go on.

Postmodernity has its own destructive features, which are self contained and self-reproducing which is constructed within a cognitive space. One of the most important questions asked about Postmodernism is about the political ambivalence in it. Is it a movement towards fragmentation, provisionality, performance and instability? Another one is, ‘Is it good or bad?’ There are multiple answers to these questions.

Postmodernism maintains that philosophical validation of ideas by way of truth is intrinsically linked to the legitimation of power. In a political context there are many questions related to this such as, how is truth validated? And why does it matter politically?. Is it a claim to authority by those who possess truth? Is truth, therefore, power? Is a foundationalist notion of truth anti-democratic? Is a contextualist notion democratic as the postmodernists?

A pragmatic test for truth is a way of going beyond the philosophical controversies over whether truth means, “corresponding to events in the natural universe” or in agreement with the body of widely accepted beliefs”. But the view of truth as warranted assertability makes sense only in a distinctly modern context.
Postmodernist Representation

In an article entitled “The Procession of Simulacra” Baudrilard argues that mass media have neutralized reality.8 The mass media produce a simulacrum’ of the reality. It is obvious that it is never possible to have access to reality. Nothing is known except through representations. The real is enabled to mean through systems of signs organized into discourses on the world. So ideology is a production of representations. The ‘real’ depends on how that ‘real’ is described, put into discourse and interpreted. There is nothing natural about the ‘real’ and there never existed any such thing even before the existence of the mass media.

Postmodern theory suggests that everything is cultural, and is known only through representation. The theory suggests that notions of truth, reference and the known cultural real have not ceased to exist. However, the real is problematic, and it is no longer self evident and self-justifying. Postmodernism questions what reality can mean and how it can be known. It is not that representation dominates or effaces the referent, but rather that it acknowledges its existence as representation.

It is only possible to interpret the referent and not offer a direct and immediate access to it. In ‘The Politics of Reflexivity’, Robert Siegle expresses it in the following manner:

The codes, by which we organize, the means by which we organize words about it into a narrative, the implications of the linguistic medium we use to do so, the means by which readers are drawn into narrative, etc. determine the nature of our relation to actual states of reality”. (Siegh 1986:3).9 Jameson has acknowledged this in the following words:

In the form of the logic of the image or the spectacle of the simulacrum, everything has become ‘cultural’ in a sense. “A whole new bands of mirrors of visual replication and of textual reproduction has replaced the older stable reality of reference and of the non -cultural real.”10

Language Games in Postmodernism

Wittgenstein, in his study of language, focuses on the efforts of different modes of discourse. He calls the various types of utterances as language games. It means that the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they are used.11

It is useful to make the following three observations about language games: The first is that their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation. They are the object of a contract between the players. The second is, if there are no rules, there is no game, that even a slight modification of one rule changes the nature of the game. The third remark is that every utterance should be thought of as a move in a game.

In a society, each ‘self’ exists in a fabric of very complicated relations. A person is always located at ‘modal points’ of specific communication circuits. No one is entirely powerless over the message that traverses and positions him at the post of a sender. One’s mobility in relation to these language game effects is tolerable within certain limits. There are regulatory mechanisms, which solicit some self-adjustments in order to improve its performance. It is said that the system must encourage such movements to the extend that it combats its own entropy, the novelty of an unexpected move. This move displaces a partner or group of partners that can supply the system an increased ability to perform what it demands and conserves.

It should now be clear about the perspective from which the idea of language game is applied here as a general methodological approach. It does not mean that the entire social relationship is of this nature. However, it is obvious that language games are the minimum relation required for a society to exist. In a society, the course of a person’s life is charted even before the child is born because he is going to live in a society that is already a structure and has its myths and grand narratives. However, Postmodernism is a social condition in which individuals have lost faith in such universal belief systems or ‘grand narratives’.

Postmodernism and the Study of a Text of the Past

The past is ontologically alien to the modern reader. Therefore, every age understands the text of the past differently. The cultural force of an epoch determines its own cultural entities that have genuine immediacy for the people concerned. Thus, the reader is the determiner of the meaning. It is a pure romantic idea to assume that the author means the same as what the text means. The text is an independent piece of language that has an existence of its own. Each reading of the text is the reader engaging in conversation with the text because the text is not considered as recorded speech. It is an independent piece of language that has an existence and space of its own.

The indeterminacy of textual meaning has the following two ideas as its basic assumption:

1.

Authors are not successful in conveying their meaning sometimes. Therefore, some texts do not express what the author intended to communicate.
2.

Authors are chronologically and culturally distanced from their readers. Therefore, it is the reader’s responsibility to decode the meaning of the text. A reader cannot contact the mind of the author.12

A text cannot possess a meaning of its own because meaning is a product of human consciousness. Meaning is a quality of thinking and a text cannot think. Many theories of interpretation have gained the central insight into the actuality of the historical and cultural distance from the classics. Each reader understands and interprets the meaning of a text differently from others. This ‘difference’ is one of the central issues in Derrida’s literary approach.

It is a premise that a word gains its meaning not from its presumed identity with an idea or thing but from its difference from other words in its linguistic system. Therefore, one understands the meaning of the text only when one does not understand it. The meaning intended by the author is lost and the meaning of the text of the past is alien to the modern reader. Thus, each reader will interpret the meaning of a text differently as he or she interacts with the text. This process brings the text to speech in a contemporary manner. Consequently, the alien text speaks to the modern readers through the process of explication. The concept that each culture is unique and people outside that culture are not able to understand it is a fallacy because interpretation is not a science that seeks to understand a different genius. Hermeneutics is a methodology that endeavours to understand what a person intents to convey by using sharable symbols. Each generation must seek to reapply the meaning of the author in a classical text to its own milieu. However, this does not imply that the author’s meaning has changed. The meaning never changes but the significance of the meaning undergoes historical and cultural changes.

The confusion of the concept of meaning and significance is an essential problem of the paradigm shift. Therefore, as it is presented in the analysis above, the issue of hermeneutics must be assessed on a much broader scale. This becomes evident in the light of the following conclusions:

1.

In the new paradigm, it is impossible to take an objective approach to the facts of experience.
2.

Postmodern hermeneutical theories radically deny the objectivity involved in foundationalism, which claims that there are some absolute tenets up on which knowledge must be developed.
3.

Language is understood not as referring to objective objects because words only point to other words.
4.

Meaning is found in the free play of associations of words.
5.

How can one discover the author’s intended meaning in a classic in Postmodern milieu? One cannot do it. Postmodernism denies this possibility.

The Postmodern Philosophy of Relativism

Relativism is the view that meaning and value of human beliefs and behaviours are not absolute but relative. It can be understood and evaluated only in terms of their historical and cultural context. The postmodern belief is that the discovery of reality is impossible. Karl Poper asserts with extreme skepticism that:

1.

All truth is limited, approximate and is constantly evolving.
2.

No theory can ever be proved true.
3.

No theory can explain all things.
4.

The absolute and certain truth that explains all things is unobtainable .13

The quest for certainty has played a considerable part in the history of Philosophy. It has been assumed that without a basis of certainity all claims to knowledge must be suspected. It is very important to erect a firm and sound system of real knowledge. It is of no use to dispute the real existence of things because it is difficult to fix the meaning of the word reality.

Postmodernism leaves no absolute foundations and it encourages individual sense of self and gives too much power to one’s imagination and how one may choose to live.

Postmodernists claim that as modernity is characterized by a monolithic mindset, it is impossible to maintain its relevance in the culturally diverse and fragmented postmodern condition. Postmodernism embraces some fluid and multiple perspectives. It refuses to make any one ‘truth claim’ over another. Utopian ideals of universally applicable truths give way to the provisional, decentred and local which can refer to some underlying universal ‘truth’ that points only to other ideas and cultural artifacts which are subject to interpretation and reinterpretation.

In a Postmodern society, the role of individuals and their actions are emphasized over standardized or canonical forms of knowledge. Knowledge is interpreted according to one’s own local experiences, rather than measured in an all-encompassing universal structure. In this sense, Postmodernity owes much to its allied school of thought, Post-structuralism (deconstruction) which sought to destabilize the relationship between language and the objects to which it was referred.

Postmodernists express a profound skepticism regarding the enlightenment quest to uncover the nature of truth and reality. Perhaps the most striking examples of this can be found in the works of Baudrillard. In his book ‘Simulations’, he argues that social reality does not exist in the conventional sense, but has been supplanted by an endless procession of simulacra.14

It is also found in the writings of Lyotard. He argues that modern philosophies legitimize their truth claims not on logical or empirical grounds but on grounds of accepted stories (or“metanarratives”) about knowledge and the world. The writings of Lyotard are concerned with the role of narratives in human culture and how that role has changed in a Postindustrial or Postmodern condition. He argues that in the wake of the collapse of modern meta-narratives, people are developing – what Wittgenstein calls – a new “language game” – one that does not make claims to the absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever changing relationships (Among people and between people and the world).

Ethics is a general term, which is often described as the ‘Science of Morality’. In Ethical Philosophy, ethical behaviour is that which is ‘good’. This is one of the major areas of philosophical investigation.

The goal of a theory of Ethics is to determine what is good both for individuals and for society as a whole. Philosophers have taken different positions in defining what is good, how to deal with conflicting priorities of individual versus the whole. The universality of ethical principles versus situational ethics, in which what is right, depends upon the circumstances rather than on some general law, and over whether goodness is determined by the results of the action or means by which results are achieved.

Situational ethics refers to a particular view of ethics, in which absolute standards are considered less important than the requirements of a particular situation.

The standards used may vary from one situation to another, and may even contradict one another. This view of Ethics is Moral Relativism and is contradictory to moral universalism and moral absolutism. The term situational has been broadened to include numerous situations in which code of ethics is designed to suit the needs of the situation. Knowing facts may be just a matter of being disposed to behave in certain appropriate ways. It need not involve any conscious process of judging.

In short, moral relativism is the view that moral standards are not absolute but instead emerge from social customs and other sources. One consequence of this view is the principle that any judgment of society as a whole is invalid. It is called Cultural Relativism. Individuals are judged against the standards of their society, but society itself has not larger context in which judgment is even meaningful. This is often a source of conflict between moral relativists and moral absolutists. A moral absolutist would argue that society as a whole can be judged for its acceptance of “immoral” practices such as slavery or some other social evils. Such judgments are inconsistent with Relativism, although, in practice, relativists often make such judgments anyway. (For eg: A Relativist is unlikely to defend slave owners on Relativistic principles)

Postmodernism and Totality

One of the most important and distinguishing features of Postmodernism is its indeterminacies, paradoxes,refusals of Meta-narratives and Anti-foundationalism. Postmodernists proclaim the need to wage a war on totality. There is a paradox here that Postmodernism is often totalized through its concept of sublime. Lyotard strenuously defends the sublime as an autonomous realm of Aesthetics.15 The aesthetics becomes the most authentic form of representation because even if it pretends to be a universal truth, it does so in a non-conceptual mode that must always undo its own assertion of universality.

The first lesson of Postmodernism is that it is impossible to step outside that which one contests. In other words, one is always implicated in the values one chooses to challenge. Even if other values exist (the sublime), they cannot be translated into available historical forms of representation, because it cannot function as the basis for epistemological critique. Any theoretical system is a provisional, working fiction to be used for practical purposes and abandoned when it is no longer useful. What is valid just now or true in one context may not be so in another. The universal principles give way to the local and to recognition of situatedness or of a radically fictional sense of truth. The notion of autonomy in any practical sense becomes non-existent. Art and Philosophy cannot stand outside the implications of the economic and ideological dominants of the historical moment in which they exist.

All systematic theories, which claim to account for all features of human societies or behaviours, are always disguised enactments of a will to power and it functions through unjust or even violent and dangerous exclusions. This is why a Postmodernist, Lyotard says that all attempts to translate the sublime into a political system produces terror.16

Totalizing systems create the universal through exclusion of ‘the other’. Postmodernism is a romance of the marginal or the other. All theories function by creating similarities and producing unities of some kind. Concepts are in effect theories but the world cannot function without them. If the world were experienced as a continuous flux of radically contingent detail, it would lead to chaos and disintegration. It is in fact a state of schizophrenia, which, according to Jameson, is characteristic of postmodernity in its loss of meta–narratives.17 Postmodernism, recognizes the need for provisionality and proliferation of grand narratives.

Postmodern theories subvert knowledge as mirror or reflection of a truth which precedes it and which determines the form of its representation. Postmodern literary theory is based on the problematisation of its base itself. In other words, there is problematisation of representation as the absolute or truth. Fictionality is central to it. Lyotard expresses this idea when he says that knowledge is ‘just gaming’.18

Postmodern Literary Theory and Anti- foundationalism

Postmodern fiction is observed to have a few salient features. It is in the use of a few frequently used techniques. Some of them are the following:

1.

Insertion of the situation of writing itself into the text in order to evoke the image of a space outside the text.
2.

Narrative is an imposition of the order of a writer and the writer is constituted through the conventions of the narrative.
3.

Structures of infinite regress undermine the possibility of ground or foundation.

The distinguishing characteristic strategy of Postmodernism is the ontological problematisation. Postmodernism raises the question like, ‘which world is this?’ And it leads to meditations upon the possible existence of multiple worlds. This is not a radically new idea.

William James, for example, writes in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902):

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through like without suspecting their existence but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation…. They all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The key note of this is invariably reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles melted into unity.19

The experience of multiplicity is simply a consciousness of the diverse forms of this expressed in an organist metaphor. The passage from William James can be read as empirical language of sensory experience: Stimulus and ‘touch’ are connected to this metaphysical realm.

In Donald Bartholomew’s novel Snow White (1967), for eg., there is a reference to ‘the different universes’ of discourse.20 The recognition of alternative universes of discourse renders the possibility of a genuine recognition of otherness, an awareness of other worlds and experiences of others. This may reflect a situation of competing language games where performance establishes validity. Here the strongest win and gain temporary legitimation through the persuasiveness of their particular discursive formation. In this sense everyone presides over empty plenums, assemblies filled with projections of ones own desire. In James, this fictionalizing imagination is a reflection of absolute mind21 Postmodern theory always involves a critique of philosophical ‘mirror’ theories of truth in its anti-foundationalism. One can see Postmodern Literature engaged in the same process through its reexamination of the epistemological grounds of realism and its linguistic forms. This is another way of perceiving the connections between Postmodern Theory and Literature and of approaching the complex issue of value.

Postmodern literary theorists have often been drawn to the works of Mikhail Bakhting. According to Mikhail Bakhting it is dialogism that sees knowledge of world, self and other, as always historically situated, rational, open ended and perspectival. It is a process shifting through time and space and it is a rational process anchored in provisional and continuous authorships.22 Bakhtin draws the idea of dialogism from the perspectivist implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It is aesthetics that arises out of a commitment to Perspectivism and Relationship. Reality is always an experience of exchange, fluidity and process, which calls for a situated and particular response from each individual in it. The self and identity are experienced as open ended. One should strive to experience the other as well as the self as a fluid and rational process that require constant redefinitions and as ever open semantically.

Poetics of Sublime

Kant outlined his theory of the sublime in the third Critique (Critique Judgment). He divides the human mind into three faculties viz. Understanding, Reason and Judgment. He calls them prior laws of understanding. These laws influence the phenomenal experience of the world. Imagination has the capacity to form images. This capacity is applied in understanding the sensory world and all knowledge is determined by concepts formed by means of this understanding. Set against this concept is ‘idea’, which is the result of the highest faculty of mind and reason. It is removed from the phenomenal world and that it cannot find conceptual or sensory embodiment for it. It is an idea that can never be experienced or conceptualized. It is connected to the sphere of pure ideas and it is the sublime.

Sublimity is that experience of an object which invokes an idea of reason but it is one which is necessarily and radically indeterminate. One cannot formulate, know or judge it.

It is observed that the natural beauty conveys finality in its form, making the object appear as it were pre-adapted to the human power of judgment, so that it forms itself as an object of delight. On the other hand, the appreciation of beauty delights or excites those who appreciate. The feeling of the sublime may appear a form to contravene the ends of the human power of judgement. It is ill adapted to the faculty of presentation and it is an outrage on the imagination, and yet when it is judged, it is all the more sublime on that account.23

It means that imagination can invoke ideas that cannot be realized or represented in sensory forms. This experience may cause a sense of elevation, which the power of imagination is incapable of understanding or conceptualizing. This experience is one of glimpsed plenitude and liberation.

Lyotard, in the essay ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” acknowledges the idea of sublime. He states that there is such ‘a space’, an ‘outside’, or ‘real’, which is independent and this ‘space’ remains ‘sublime.’24 In using this term, he confirms the Kantian notion of sublime and the ultimate incommensurability of reality as pure idea. The sublime transcends every faculty of sense, and gives glimpses of inaccessible plenitude.

Postmodernism in Art and Philosophy asserts the unrepresentable in presentation itself. In other words, the only authentic mode of expression is that of sublime. Postmodernism has renounced the need of correspondence between the work of art and the world. It is an aesthetics that exists as a form of subjective fictionality and it offers multiple perspectives that do not coalesce or resolve into any transcendent or profound whole.

Hyperreality and the Art of the Unpresentable

The most important Postmodern slogan comes at the end of Lyotard’s essay. It is his definition of Postmodernism as an aesthetics of sublime:

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and communicable experience under the general demand of slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is, Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honour of the name. 25

Lyotard says that it is dangerous to pursue an ideal of social integration, which uses the aesthetics as a facilitation vehicle. This is so because it is an age where the foundations of knowledge are challenged and there is no consensus about anything.

In this context, the value of aesthetics is as a form of non-utilitarian autonomous entity. In other words, it is resistant to any form of conceptualization and is, therefore, unpresentable. The art of sublime must remain in a sphere resistant to conceptual understanding. It must remain separate not only for resisting commodification but also for preventing the attempt to graft the ideal into the real, in a coercive attempt to produce cultural unity. To experience the sublime is to recognize the inadequacy of the values produced in conceptual thought or experienced through sensory modes, to be disturbed into an acknowledgement of the existence of that which cannot be thought, analysed, and presented through any determinate form.

Lyotard sees in Postmodernism the expressions of the sublime as a form of resistance to the banal and automatising effects of modern life.26 However, the attempt to realize the sublime as a blue print for political or historical action will conflate the different language games of the spheres of the speculative or ideal and those of the cognitive and practical. The language games of the aesthetics are valuable as models of disagreements, motivating us with a desire to pass beyond the analytic and the conceptual, offering a continuing sense of the ‘as if’. This can only be valuable if the sublime remains a never to be realized beyond.

NOTES
1 Ihab Hassan, “The Postmodern Turn”, Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbia :University Press, 1987) 45.

2 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York :Random House 1972) 56.

3 Derrida, Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, trans. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1989)67.

4 Richard Rorty, “Emphasis in Original” Consequences of Pragmatist (New York: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)68.

5 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press 1947) 8-10.

6 Jean Baudrilard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext 1983) 43-48.

7 Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Massumi Minneapolis:Manchester University Press1985)56-62.

8 Jean Baudrilard, 52-58.

9 RobertSiegle, The Politics of Reflexivity(Columbia: University Press, 1988) 45-48.
10 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.)53-62.

11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978)56-61.

12 Derrida, 67-68.
13 Karl Popper, “The Growth of Scientific Knowledge”, Conjectures and Refutations (NewYork: Basic Books,1962)87-92.

14 Jean Baudrilard, 87-93.

15 Jean Francois Lyotard, 45-50.

16 Jean Francois Lyotard, 53-54.

17 Fredric Jameson, 48-52.

18 Jean Francois Lyotard,52-58.

19 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Harmondsworth:Penguin 1985)
20 Donald Bartholomew, Snow White (London:Methuen,1967)

21 William James,54-58.

22 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

( Texas: Texas University Press,1981) 45-51.

23 Emanuel Kant, Critique Of Judgment, trans.

J .C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952)

245-249.
24 Jean- Francois Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”, The Lyotard Reader (London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1989) 72-73.
25 Jean- Francois Lyotard, 82-84.

26 Jean- Francois Lyotard, 58-62.

Chapter - 3

The Mahabharata – A Postmodern Reading

The Mahabharata is a huge monument of the Indian Literature. It contains many passages and situations that are inexplicable and enigmatic. The text has a wider and larger scope in Indian Philosophy than its epic or ascribed grand narrative framework.

The centre of the epic is the rivalry for the throne of Hastinapura. Pandu, the second son of Santanu becomes the king because his elder brother, Dhritarastra, was born blind and was considered unfit to rule. However, he proceeds to reign after Pandu’s death. He had already proven that he is an able administrator during Pandu’s absence at times. The line of succession becomes a cause of disagreement in the family. Yudhishthira, the eldest of the pandava brothers is the heir-apparent but Duryodhana, the eldest son of Dhritarashtra also wanted to be the king. Gandhari, Duryodhana’s mother had a gambler brother named Sakuni living at the court. He inflames the jealousy in Duryodhana for the five Pandavas. The Kauravas try many ways to eliminate the Pandavas. Dhritarastra and Gandhari fail to control this family feud. Finally, the people of Hastinapura are inexorably forced to go into a war.

The Gita contains a discussion between Krishna and Arjuna at the battlefield. Arjuna asks Krishna the justification and need for a war of such magnitude. Krishna who has sworn not to fight himself but steer Arjuna’s chariot in the battle explains to him about his duty to fight.

One may read the epic as an excellent tale because it has all the elements of a good story telling. Yet it also includes the psychological dilemmas inherent in human life. The readers are left free to interpret the meaning of many episodes in the epic in their own way. Like a diamond that sparkles in the sun light, many passages and episodes in the epic give varied nuances of meaning when it is read repeatedly.

Postmodern reading of The Mahabharata is an attempt to examine the epic text in the light of a set of ideas in Postmodernism. The Mahabharata is primarily treated as a religious text with the status of a scripture in Hindu tradition. It portrays behaviours of the righteous and wicked in different social, political and religious life, and it contains numerous didactic passages. In short, the text is an authoritative Religious Literature in the Hindu tradition. In course of time, the text has gained all the attributes of a ‘grand narrative’ in the Indian culture. It became a grand narrative about its practices and beliefs. Many useful discourses in the epic took deep roots in Indian cultural and social life. Power, Stability and order in social and political organizations in the country are maintained by of this epic. It started to serve as a meta-theory or meta-ideology to explain socio-political ethics. Sometimes it is a story that explains the belief systems.

This made The Mahabharata a grand narrative over time, but it is a uni-dimensional reading. There are many conflicting and contradicting ideas found in the epic. Therefore, there is scope for Postmodern reading. A closer study of the epic shows that it denies all objective knowledge. What we often call knowledge of truth is knowledge about the glimpses of truth. The real knowledge of truth is intuitive and sublime. The Mahabharata encapsulates this idea in a supreme poetic language in The Gita. A Postmodern reading of The Mahabharata reveals that all attempts to confine or define ‘truth’ in a particular cultural, social, or political context have no intellectual basis. A deconstruction of The Mahabharata as a Postmodern text enables the reader to reach the “signified” and the sublime that exists beyond the text.

The Mahabharata denounces all forms of grand narrative frames and the text is a critique of grand narratives. The Mahabharata recognizes that such narratives mask the contradictions and instabilities in social organizations. The ‘kurushetra’ war shows that the attempts to create order creates an equal amount of disorder, but a grand narrative conceals it by explaining that disorder is chaotic and bad and that order is rational and good. The Mahabharata makes no such attempt to create social or political order. Iravati Karve writes in Yuganta: The End of an Epoch:

All human effort is fruitless, all human life ends in frustration – was The Mahabharata written to drive home this lesson? Human toil, expectations, hates, friendships- all seem puny and without substance, like withered leaves eddying in the summer wind. 1

Here an attempt is made to study the epic by topic rather than by reviewing the text in succession, asking a question in the form of, “What does the epic mean here?” The investigator’s primary concern is to establish the fact that a Postmodern reading of the epic is possible and a critical understanding of the text reveals that it can be read beyond the grand narrative framework.

It can be found that there are apparent contradictions at different levels in the text but the fact is that the Indian thought recognizes a subtle approach to such complex issues that cannot be solved by a uni-dimensional ideology. Even Western scholars have recognized this and this is precisely what Van Buitenen means when he writes;

The epic is a series of precisely stated problems imprecisely and therefore inconclusively resolved, every inconclusive solution raising a new problem, until the very end, when the question remains whose is heaven and whose is hell?”2

The Gita teaches that the notions of self, crime and other forms of attachments are products of situations or discourses meaningful only in their relative frames of reference. A notable feature of the Postmodernism in The Mahabharata is the use of a wide range of metaphors that cannot be separated from the institutions that produced them and there is a network of language games.

Moral Dilemmas and Socio-political Ethics in The Mahabharata

Postmodernism postulates that it is difficult to establish a universal ground of justice, truth or reason. Impersonal forces act and intersect through a function or a process. The question of the relation between the mythopoetic and moral in the context of The Mahabharata has to be explored in detail to find that the unresolvable situations and dilemmas prove that there is not a single ground of justice, truth or dharma in the epic. In The Mahabharata, there is a portrayal of bondage and transfiguration of it. There is a recognition that suffering continues without any end. The heroes are tough-minded who fear neither life nor death. In the end, victory for the Pandavas in the battle is futile and hollow. The aesthetics of the epic incorporates everything into itself.

Postmodern reading of The Mahabharata is an attempt to interpret the social and political issues in the epic through an aetheticised view of the world. In other words, Postmodern aesthetics is the hard core of The Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is a story of extreme complexity. The characters are unforgettable and there is a cosmic context in which gods and men alike grapple with destiny. The obligations of kinship and friendship jostle with each other. There are predicaments at every turn. At times, these predicaments seem to be aggravated by social structure. Philosophical tangles tied up with ‘karma’ and ‘dharma’, are interwoven within the mythopoetic material. The Mahabharata leaves the irresolvable in it to suggest that contradictions and instabilities are inherent in any social organization or practice.

It is not possible to assign any precise date for the composition of The Mahabharata but it is assumed a post-Budhistic work in its philosophical, ethical and didactic approach. The Mahabharata itself suggests that it passed through three recitations by three different people; Vyasa, Vaisampayana and Sauti Ugraasrava before it reached the present form. The three phases of the epic were those of ‘Jaya’, ‘The Bharata’, and The Mahabharata. Therefore, it is clear that the epic passed through at least three editions to reach its present shape. The original event of The Mahabharata has been handed down in the form of lays and ballads and the versified traditions of the way sung by a group of people called ‘sutas’ and ‘Magathas’. These songs did not have any fixed form because they were orally handed down from generation to generation. It was Vyasa who collected and edited them to make The Mahabharata the best ever epic in the History of Literature.

Much of the philosophical and moral teachings arose for the sake of defending the traditional religion and creed. But there were many things in the ‘Brahmanical’ practices which could not be justified. The Mahabharata takes up such issues for discussion. Therefore, The Mahabharata represents the element of ‘Brahminical’ renaissance provoked and stimulated by moral, social, political, as well as religious crisis in the history of India.

In the epic there is a picture of conflicting views about morality, spiritual entities etc. Some say that ‘dharma’ is rewarded after this life while some others deny it. A few others say that ‘dharma’ is permanent and there are others who hold the view that it is not. In addition to this, there are agnostics, hedonists and materialists. In the ‘Santiparva’ the soul is said to be unnecessary and all life functions are explained as physical and physiological functions of the body. The Gita is very critical of the materialists and skeptics alike. The editors of The Mahabharata modified the ritualism of the ‘vedas’ and traditional views of morality by incorporating the metaphysical theories of the ‘Samkhya’ and ‘Vedanta’ to evolve a rational ethics in the epic. The Mahabharata favours neither asceticism nor materialism. It stands for self-control and ‘nishkama’, which suggests that the human life is to be lived, and not to be renounced. At same time, one should not attach oneself to material pleasures of the world. The Mahabharata discusses two parallel trends; the path of renunciation and the path of action. The epic suggests a life of action based on the insightful knowledge of ‘nishkamakarma’

In the ‘Mausala Parva’ the readers find that the ‘dwapara yuga’ was over on the tenth day of the war, for the next thirty years Kali reigned the world. The Yadavas, the Vrishnis, Andhakas,Kukuras, and the others are invincible. Krishna realizes that the time has come to destroy his powerful clan. There were evil omens everywhere in the world. One day Viswamithra, Kanva and Narada arrive in the city to offer prayers at Pindarika. The Yadava princes decide to poke fun at the holy men. They dress Krishna’s son, Samba, in clothes of a fisher woman and take him to the holy men. They prostrate themselves before the sages. One man says to them,

This doe-eyed beauty has something to ask you, Brahmans! She is too shy to ask herself and bids me to speak for her. She is Babhru’s wife.She is pregnant, and is anxious to have a son. Sages of vision, please tell her will she have a boy or girl?” One of the rishis, realizing the farce, curses them, “She will give birth to an iron club, and that club will destroy the arrogant Yadava clan”. Later Krishna himself is killed by the hunting arrow of Jara fixed with the metal from the Samba’s stomach.3

Krishna says in the Gita;

“Yada yada hi dharmasya

Glanir bhavathi bharata

Abhuthanam adharmasya

Tada tmanam srijamy aham

Parithranaya sadhunam

Vinasaya cha dhushkritham

Dharma samsthapanarthaya

Sambhavami yuge-yuge” 4

(Whenever there is decline of Dharma and ascendance of Adharma, O scion of Bharata race! I manifest (incarnate) Myself in a body for the protection of the good, for the destruction of the evil, and for the establishment of Dharma, I am born from age to age).

Does it confuse the readers to find Krishna, who is born to establish righteousness, himself is killed in a mean and wicked manner? Krishna remains an elusive personality in the epic. He works, he thinks intensely, he advises others. He is never found regretting for his actions. He dances in joy, he kills in anger his own kinsmen as the readers are told in Mausalaparva, but he is not found mourning even after the terrible end of his clan. He meets with his end nonchalantly after making arrangements for the safety of old people, women and children of his clan. This is the path of the ‘Nishkamakarma’. The elusive nature of Krishna may be the reason for deifying him. It is difficult to anchor any universal ground of justice, truth or reason in many such situations in the epic. The Mahabharata seems to defy any firm rules to define a limit or purpose to it. There is no attempt to create a universal authoritative standard in The Mahabharata. Does The Mahabharata assert that there is no universal authoritative standard to judge all situations in life?

For example in the ‘Kurushetra’ war, Yudhisthira flies from the battlefield when Karna humiliates him. This makes Yudhisthira lose his temper with Arjuna and he insults Arjuna and even the ‘Gandiva bow’. He has vowed that he will not spare anyone who spoke ill of ‘Gandiva’. This puts him in a difficult situation, as he has to kill his elder brother for this mean act. Krishna, however, is able to save him from the conflicting obligation. He tells the following story to prove his argument.

There was a hermit, Kausika by name. He had a vow of telling only the truth in life. One day he saw some bandits chasing travelers to rob and kill them. Kausika saw the travelers fleeing that way. The bandits approached the hermit and asked about the travelers. Kausika told the truth and the innocent travelers were killed. Krishna concludes the story telling that this hermit did not reach heaven because of his act of cruelty. The point is that he should have saved the life of travelers even by rejecting his vow of telling truth .5

The Mahabharata describes itself as a ‘dharmasastra’, an arthasastra, a ‘kamasastra’, and a ‘moksasastra’. Now the question is, is it ‘dharma’ to tell the truth? Will telling a lie in order to save a life be ‘adharma’? Similarly, is it ‘adharma’ to tell a lie in the battlefield to kill an enemy? Yudhisthira, for example, tells a lie to kill Dhronacharya. He knows that he is deceiving Dhrona and he justifies himself by saying that it means the death of an elephant called Asvatthama. Does it not suggest that justice cannot have an objective and universal existence for all times?

Duryodhana recounts the misdeeds of pandavas and Krishna in ‘Gadayudhaparva’ He says:

Wretch, son of a slave, was not your father, Vasudeva, Kamsa’s slave? You speak like a shameless wretch you asked Bhisma to aim his blow at my thigh. Do you think that I did not see you talking casually to Arjuna pointing at your thigh to indicate to Bhisma that he should strike me on the thighs, disregarding the laws of single combat? Until then, it was an equal battle. You have neither pity nor shame. Did you not cause the death of Bhishma through cunning? You advised Sikhandin to be placed in front when attacking Bhishma, knowing that the grandsire would scorn to fight a woman and would let himself be mortally wounded without résistance. You brought about the end of Dronacharya by making Dharmaputhra utter a falsehood. You were the father of that deadly lie that issued from Yudhisthira’s mouth and made Dhrona throw his bow away. Did you not look on without protest and rejoice when that wretch, Dhrstadyumna attacked and killed the ‘acharya’ who had stopped fighting, throwing away his weapons and settling down in a yoga posture for meditation on the supreme? Was it not you who wickedly contrived to make karna hurl the fatal spear of Ghatotkacha instead of reserving it for Arjuna as he had all along resolved to do? O great sinner, surely you asked Satyaki to kill Bhurisravas when his right arm had been deceptively cut off, stopped fighting, and spread his arrows for a seat for meditation. You killed Karna by inducing Arjuna to attack him in a cowardly manner when he was lifting his chariot wheel that had sunk and stuck in mud of the battlefield. O worthless man, sole cause of our destruction, the whole world has condemned your act when you made it look like sunset to make Jayadratha, the sindhu king, to believe that the day was over and he was safe, then you caused his death when he was off guard.”6

It is no wonder that Yudhisthira is taken aback on seeing Duryodhana in heaven and he questions the justification of his ascent to his heavenly abode. Now there arises a question, Is there a standard dharma in the epic? When one starts defining it, it leads to many more logical paradoxes. It is an instance of infinite regression in the epic.

The secret of ‘dharma’ is hidden in the epic. The Mahabharata says;

‘dharmasya tattvam nihitam guhayam

Mahajano yena gathah sa panthah’7

It means that the principles of ‘Dharma’ are secretive and the path noblemen take may be followed. Here ‘mahajono’ could mean the majority of people or the good and wise men. The well-known statement of Markandeya to Yudhisthira also points to the nature of ‘dharma’ and the subtle nature of it.

He says, “Nese balasyeti chared adharma”8

The meaning of this could be interpreted in the following ways;

1.

One should not resort to ‘adharma’, thinking that one is strong.
2.

Non-violence by the weak is not real dharma.
3.

If one refrains from violence, though one is strong, his act can be considered as ‘dharma’.

Bhisma’s statement regarding dharma in the gambling is another notable point. He says; whatever the strong man considers as dharma is taken to be dharma’. Here strength is not merely physical strength but intellectual strength. Another important problem about ‘dharma’ is discussed when Yudhisthira stakes Draupadi in the game after he had staked himself and lost. Vidura and Draupadi argued that Yudhisthira had no right to stake her as he had lost his independence. Bhisma states in this context that the path of ‘dharma’ is inscrutable, ‘dharmasya gahana gatih’. He states further, “Balavanstu yatha dharmam loke pasyati purusah

sa dharmo dharmavelayam bhavatya bhihitah pariah”9

It means that the world approves the actions of the powerful as righteous and the right action is determined by the context. Later it is found that Yudhisthira himself regrets about his passive stance on that occasion.

It suffices to say that despite the long attempts of philosophers and ideologists, the ‘epic nucleus’ has never been discovered, and it is suggested that there are multiple ‘cores’ to the epic. Search for the original epic nucleus is like the search for the virgin meaning of the text that never existed in a unified way even at the origin.

Conflicts in the Epic

The epic has conflicts at various levels. The conflicts discussed above highlight some of them. Apart from the above, there are conflicts between many ethical views. Primarily they fall into three categories such as conflict between Ritual and Moral Ethics, conflict between Ritual and Ascetic Ethics, and conflict between Moral and Ascetic Ethics.

Conflict between Ritual and Moral Ethics

Conflict between Ritual and Moral Ehics is central to the epic. Yudhishtira is a warrior and it is his duty to fight in a war, to be proud of his martial strength, to be a man of action, to be competitive and seek power. However, his insistence in giving priority to moral ethics, to ‘sva-dharma’, invokes criticism from his own family members. Numerous occasions in the epic indicate the fact:

In ‘Sabha parvan’, Bhima wishes to take revenge on Kauravas for their insults, but Yudhisthira tolerates all provocation and accepts the terms of exile imposed upon them. While living in exile in the forest, Bhima and Draupadi urge Yudhisthira to take up arms against the humiliations and insults against them but he rejects their arguments and values,the moral qualities of tolerance and truthfulness over ‘ksathriya dharma’. Similarly, the Gandharvas defeat Duryodhana and Karna. Bhima wants to take advantage of their enemies in the true spirit of a Kshathriya, but Yudhisthira shows compassion for them and he asks them to set them free.9

In ‘Virataparva, Kichaka harasses Draupadi and she condemns Yudhisthira for his lack of Ksathriya valour when he asks them to be tolerant in that situation and then she says, “You are right, O wise men, to call me an actress here. But it is only because my first husband is a gambler that my other husbands have to be cowards today.”10 Here again Bhima disagrees with his brother and wants to act as a true Ksathriya. This paradox is all the more evident in ‘Udhyogaparva’ when Krishna, Satyaki and all other warriors urge the Pandavas to wage a war and win back their kingdom, Yudhishtira is unwilling to take arms, regarding war as immoral and causing only distress. He further denounces war as the fight of dogs over a piece of meat. 11

On many occasions in the epic, Yudhisthira refuses to accept the concept of duty as a warrior. In ‘Santiparva’, for example, he is mortified by the death and sufferings caused by war, even when his brothers and wife argue that it is their swa-dharma. He says to Narada:

My lord, I am not destined to know happiness. What you say is true: by Krishna’s grace and my brothers’ valour we have victory. But ah, Muni, victory at what price? How many we loved like life perished in this war. What does it matter who wins or loses such a war? The only truth is that we fought, and millions died. This is the end of the world, as we know it. The war was not fought based on ‘dharma’; not by our enemies, and not by us. 12

All these incidents illustrate the conflict between morality and ‘ksathriyadharma’. The paradox becomes blatant in ‘Aswamedhaparva’. Here Yudhishthira after performing the Aswamedha yajna, learns from Dharma deva that the selfless act of the Brahmin family in giving away their food to a starving beggar is far more virtuous than his ostentatious Yajna.13 Finally, Yudhishtira is confounded to see his rival Duryodhana being bestowed with heavenly abode in after-life for living the true life of a warrior. He voices his objections over this apparent injustice. The epic here seems to explore the subtleties of the ‘dharma’. The principles of ‘dharma’ are subtle. The more it is discussed, the more complex it becomes. The epic denounces any attempt to resolve such issues with any simplistic dogmas.

All the above instances from different portions of the text expose the tensions between the ethics of Morality and Ritual action. The Mahabharata does not seem to give any definitive decision. It can mean that both aspects of the issues are equally valid. The text does not give any definitive judgments to overcome such conflicts.

Conflict between Ritual and Ascetic Ethics

The ritual practices are in conflict with the ascetic principles in many places in the epic. The ritualistic practices are carried out for prosperity and peace in this world and heavenly rewards in the life after death. The ascetic principles, on the other hand, consider rituals as the symptoms of ignorance of the true nature of self. The ascetic tradition holds that the ritual practices are worldly and they pertain to this world only, where as according to ascetic ethics this world is to be transcended. The question of violence is central to such ideological differences. The teachers of ‘samkhya’ and ‘yoga’ argued that many religious practices are based on the misunderstanding of the true meaning of the ‘Vedas’.

The teachers of ‘Samkhya’ criticize many passages in ‘Mokshadharma’ that deal with the performance of ‘yagna’. In ‘Santiparva’, there is a discussion between Jajali, a Yogi, and Tuladhara, a shopkeeper.Tuladhara argues that non-violence is central to ‘dharma’. Therefore, meat eating and animal husbandry must be given up. Jajali replies that animal husbandry provides food and animals for sacrifice. Jajali calls Tuladhara a ‘nastika’ and says, “Yata yajnah prabhavati nastikyam api jalpasi.” In chapters 260 to 262 also there is a debate between Kapila and Syumarismi who had taken the form of a cow for sacrifice. Kapila condemns sacrifice of animals and the debate that follows focuses on whether ascetic life style is superior to ritual life style. In chapter 264, Narada tells the story of a ‘brahmana’ called Satya who lives an austere life and performs ‘yagnas’. Once a sage named Parnada takes the form of a deer and offers himself to be sacrificed at Satya’s ‘yagna’. He believes that he would be rewarded in heaven for the sacrifice. He gets ready for the sacrifice. At this point god of ‘dharma’ appears and tells him that sacrifice without sacrifice of animals is superior to animal sacrifice. 14

In chapter 28 of ‘Awamedhikaparva’ Krishna recounts the conversation between a priest, Adhavaryu, and a yogi,Yati. Here Yati condemns the sacrifice of a goat in a ‘yagna’ as an act of violence. The priest replies that the goat will not cease to exist and that it will be rewarded for being offered as a sacrificial animal. The ascetic rejects this argument pointing out the fact that the goat’s kith and kin does not want it to be sacrificed and that it is not done for the benefit of the goat. He asserts that non-violence is the highest form of ‘dharma’ and expostulates the philosophy of Samkhya. 15

The rejection of violence in the epic stands in sharp contrast to the recourse to battle and ‘yagna’ by two classes of people for power and wealth.

Conflict between Moral and Ascetic Ethics

The Moral Ethics is concerned with the welfare of the people in the world and Ascetic Ethics is concerned with renunciation of the worldly pleasures. There are many instances of conflict between these two ethics in the epic. In the debate after the battle, Yudhisthira denounces warfare and expresses his abject remorse of homicide in the battle but his brothers and Draupadi argue that there is no reason for regret because it was their duty as ‘Kshatriya’. The epic does not make any of the two arguments superior to the other. Warfare is righteous for a Kshatrya. Yudhishira’s repugnance for war is criticized on that ground. In Moksa-dharma, the sage urges his disciple to abandon even compassion, which is an essential feature of moral ethics, because it is an attachment to this world.

Arjuna’s dilemma in the battlefield represents a moral stance. Krishna criticizes his stance based on the perspective of other ethical schools. Krishna argues that renouncing violence is contrary to Ksatrya-Dharma. Krishna’s arguments are based on ‘Samkhya’ Philosophy. According to Samkhya Philosophy, the self is beyond this world, and it must be indifferent to the bodily concerns. It must never lament for the suffering.16

These types of ethical conflicts are significant for a Postmodern appreciation of the epic. In short, The Mahabharata does not establish a totality or stable social order. It is rather a critique of such belief systems. In other words, The Mahabharata is a critique of social and political grand narratives.

Method of Story Telling as Anti-foundationalism in

The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata has a complex structure with a series of stories and narratives nested one within another. It opens with the first frame of the story in which there are two frames. The readers first come across the tale of ‘Suta’, a bard or story teller. He recounts what he heard of the story of The Mahabharata to the listeners in the forest. The ‘Suta’ heard the story from Vaisampayana. He, in turn, heard the story from his master Vyasa who is supposed to be the author of the epic. Therefore, Vaisampayana’s story is the second frame of the story telling. He recites most of the story at the snake sacrifice of king Janamejaya. There are several stories narrated by sages, or ‘Rishis within the main story. The storytellers include Markandeya and Vrihadaswa. These legends, folktales and popular stories illustrate a moral of theme. For example, great saints visit Yudhisthira in his exile. They narrate stories of ancient times and former kings. One of the beautiful stories narrated on such occasion, include the story of Nala and Damayanti. The other stories include the legend of Agastya who drained the ocean and the story of Parasurama who tried to exterminate the Ksatriyas from the earth. The story of Bhagiratha who brings the Ganges from the skies to the earth is another story. The story of Vishnu also finds a place in the epic framework. Story telling in The Mahabharata creates a situation of writing itself into the epic framework. It evokes a space outside the text or the epic is an open-ended text.

Author as a Character in The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is supposed to have been composed by sage Vyasa. He played a part in the story and he is an eyewitness to many events in the story. King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice was in progress. The King intended to sacrifice all snakes to avenge his father, King Parikshit who was killed by a snake. Sage Vyasa visited this place and persuaded him to give up the idea of revenge. Then Janamejaya expressed his wish to hear the story of his ancestors. Vyasa deputed his disciple Vaisampayana to tell the story. Vyasa is supposed to be a ‘Chiranjiva’,immortal. The word ‘Vyasa’ is a title, which means arranger. From the epic it is understood that his name was Krishna (the black) Dvaipayana( born in an island). Once Parashara arrived on the banks of Yamuna. He met a beautiful lady named Matsyaganhi. He was enamoured of her beauty. He made love to her. In return for this, he blessed her that she would be known as Satyavati and a son born of their love would become a magician. A son was born of this union. Soon after his birth, he became a full-grown man. He said to his mother that he would appear before her when she wanted by just thinking about him. He became the famous Veda Vyasa who composed The Mahabharata. Later he appears in many situations in the story. Here the storyteller himself is constituted through the narrative.

The Structure of The Mahabharata as an Infinite Ideological Regression

The epic presents different ideologies and there is an attempt to redefine traditional beliefs. The epic does not present any coherent system of thought but rather discusses all schools of thought and shows its limitations. There is the ascetic path of salvation called ‘nivrtti’, which seeks absolute release. The second is the path of ‘dharma’ which deals with values of Vedic beliefs and many other rituals. The third is the path of ‘Bhakti’ that deals with devotion to gods. These different beliefs and practices cause tensions and contradictions on many occasions in the epic. It is interesting to note that the epic dos not try to establish any clear-cut answer. It is the strength of the epic that it accepts such apparent contradictions. The Mahabharata always involves a critique of philosophical ‘mirror’ theories of truth in its anti-foundationalism. One can see the epic engaged in the same process through its re-examination of the epistemological grounds of realism and its linguistic forms. This is a way of perceiving the connections between Postmodern Theory and Literature and of approaching the complex issue of value. The experience of multiplicity is simply a consciousness of the diverse forms of the whole expressed in a metaphor of the epic.

NOTES

1 Iravati Karve, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch (Disha Books, Hydrabad, 1974)165.

2 J.A.B Van Buitenen, Studies in Indian Literature and Philosophy, ed.Ludo Rocher (Delhi:OrientLongman,1988)39.

3 Ramesh Menon, “Mausalaparva”, The Mahabharata-A Modern Rendering (New Delhi: Rupa.co 2004) 643-655.

4 Swami Tapasyananda, Srimad Bhagavad-Gita (Sri Ramakrishna Math Printing Press,Madras,1984) 119.

5 Ramesh Menon, “Santi Parva” The Mahabharata-A Modern Rendering (New Delhi: Rupa.co 2004) 573-575.

6 Ramesh Menon, “Gadayudhaparva ” 99-102.

7 Kuttikrishnamarar, Bharathaparyatanam- A Critical Study of Mahabharata, (Marar Sahithya Prakasam, Kallai, Kozhikode, 2002)194-198.

8 Kuttikrishnamarar 194-198.

9 Kuttikrishnamarar 194-198.

10 Ramesh Menon, “Sabhaparva”, 133-137.

11 Ramesh Menon , “Udyogaparva”,348-351

12 Ramesh Menon “Santiparva”, 598-602.

13 Ramesh Menon, “Aswamedhaparva”, 751-753.

14 Ramesh Menon, “Santiparva”, 598-602.

15 Nicholas Sutton, “The Mahabharata’s Teaching On Ethics” Religious Doctrines in The Mahabharata, (Motilal Banarsidas,New Delhi,2000) 317-320.

16 Nicholas Sutton 317-320.

Chapter 4

Problems of Representation and Language Games in

The Mahabharata and Problems of Representaion in Postmodernism

The philosophy of Postmodernism begins with Kant's “Copernican Revolution.”1 He assumes that we cannot know things in themselves and that objects of knowledge must conform to our faculties of representation . Ideas such as God, freedom, immortality, the world, first beginning, and final end have only a regulative function for knowledge, since they cannot find fulfilling instances among objects of experience. According to Hegel, the immediacy of the subject-object relation itself is illusory. As he states in The Phenomenology of Spirit, “we find that neither the one nor the other is only immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated,” 2 because subject and object are both instances of a “this” and a “now,” neither of which are immediately sensed. So-called immediate perception, therefore lacks the certainty of immediacy itself, a certainty that must be deferred to the working out of a complete system of experience.

The later nineteenth century is the age of modernity where science and technology, including networks of mass communication and transportation, reshape human perceptions. There is no clear distinction between the natural and the artificial in experience. A consequence of achieved modernism is de-realization. De-realization affects both the subject and the objects of experience, such that their sense of identity, constancy, and substance is upset or dissolved. Important precursors to this notion are found in Soren Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. Soren Kierkegaard, for example, describes modern society as a network of relations in which individuals are levelled into an abstract phantom known as “the public”3. The modern public is a creation of the press, which is the only instrument capable of holding together the mass of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization. In this sense, society has become a realization of abstract thought, held together by an artificial and all-pervasive medium speaking for everyone and for no one.

The readers also find suggestions of de-realization in Nietzsche, who speaks of being as “the last breath of a vaporizing reality” and remarks upon the dissolution of the distinction between the “real” and the “apparent” world4. In ‘Twilight of the Idols’, he traces the history of this distinction from Plato to his own time, where the “true world” becomes a useless and superfluous idea. However, with the notion of the true world, he says, the apparent one is also rejected. What is left is neither real nor apparent, but something in between, and, therefore, something akin to the virtual reality of more recent vintage.

The notion of a collapse between the real and the apparent is suggested in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy , where he presents Greek tragedy as a synthesis of natural art impulses represented by the gods, Apollo and Dionysus. Where Apollo is the god of beautiful forms and images, Dionysus is the god of frenzy and intoxication, under whose sway the spell of individuated existence is broken in a moment of undifferentiated oneness with nature. While tragic art is life-affirming in joining these two impulses, logic and science are built upon Apollonian representations that have become frozen and lifeless5. Hence, Nietzsche believes that only a return of the Dionysian art impulse can save modern society from sterility and nihilism. This interpretation posits Postmodern concepts of art and representation. Another important concept related to Postmodernism is Hyperreality.

Hyperreality

Hyperreality is closely related to the concept of the simulacrum: a copy or image without reference to an original. In Postmodernism, hyperreality is the result of the technological mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is representation itself. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) Jean Baudrillard uses Lacan's concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real to develop this concept while attacking orthodoxies of the political Left, beginning with the assumed reality of power, production, desire, society, and political legitimacy6. Baudrillard argues that all of these realities have become simulations, that is, ‘signs’ without any referent, because the real and the imaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic.

Baudrillard presents hyperreality as the terminal stage of simulation, where a sign or image has no relation to any reality whatsoever, but is “its own pure simulacrum.”7 The real, he says, has become an operational effect of symbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated and coded before we actually perceive them. This means that technological mediation has usurped the productive role of the Kantian subject,8 the locus of an original synthesis of concepts and intuitions, as well as the Marxian worker, the producer of capital through labour, and the Freudian unconscious, which is the mechanism of repression and desire. “From now on,” says Baudrillard, “signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real.”9 So production now means signs producing other signs.The system of symbolic exchange is therefore, no longer real but ‘hyperreal’. Where the real is “that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction,” the hyperreal, says Baudrillard, is “that which is always already reproduced” (Baudrillard 1993, 73).10 The hyperreal is a system of simulation simulating itself.

Story Telling as the Creation of Hyperreality in The Mahabharata

The mode of story telling creates hyperreality in the epic. There are stories within stories and the main story is connected after many such narrations. Each of them is complete in itself and form a simulacrum. A notable feature of the epic is that it is told by many narrators. The story commences in the Forest of Naimisha, where a yaga was in progress. It would continue for twelve years. There were many kinds of sacrifices and ritualistic performances from dawn to dusk. The evenings were free. There were many priests and a good number of helpers. Storytellers also had visited such Yagas. Lomaharsha was a famous Suta storyteller. Ugrashrava Lomaharshini was the son of Lomaharsha. He made a visit to the Yaga once. He was asked to describe his wanderings and tell a story. He told them about his visit to Hastinapura where king Janamejaya performed a sacrifice. Snakes were sacrificed in the Yaga to avenge his father, Parishit who was killed by snakebite. Astika cleverly stops this terrible disaster. Vyasa appears there and persuades Janamajaya to give up the ideas of revenge. Then Janamejaya wanted to hear the stories of his ancestors from him. Vyasa deputes his disciple Vaisampayana to tell the story. From this point, Vaishampayana narrates the epic to Janamejaya. In “Bhishmaparva”, King Dhritarashtra asks Sanjaya to give an eyewitness account of the happenings of the battlefield. This part of the story is the narration of Sanjaya11. Therefore, Ugrashrava is the narrator of the epic up to a point, then it is the narration of Vaishampayana and the narration of the battle is done by Sanjaya. In addition to these three narrators there are many more occasional stories told by others in the epic.

The authorship of the epic has been a subject of controversy. It is believed to be the work of Vyasa who is supposedly the incarnation of Visnu appearing to compile and arrange the Vedas and other sacred works. It is difficult to find an exact date of the composition of the epic. According to the internal evidence in the epic itself, it passed through three editions in the hands of Vyasa, Vaisampayana and Sauti Ugraasrava. Thus, it can be fairly assumed that the present text has passed through at least three editions. There are problems of representation in each turn in the epic because it has passed through various periods in the history of the Hindu tradition and thereby it embodies the ‘Vedic’ tradition of ‘yajna’, the duties of ‘dharmasastra’ and the ascetic traditions. In short, there are various strands of belief like the Vedic orthoxy, ‘non-aryan’ traditions and the later ideas of changing social structure in The Mahabharata. The story telling method used in the epic itself problematises representation of an original story. Vaisampayana first recited the epic before King Janamejaya at the snake sacrifice. Suta who had heard it recited, later recited it. He had heard it only once, thus it is apparent that later on the epic underwent many recessions in due course.

Postmodernism makes the existence of an objective reality problematic. It is never possible to know reality. There is access to representations or the simulacra only. The Mahabharata is an ideological representation of hyperreality. The real depends on how the reality is interpreted. The epic does not project a self evident or self-justifying reality.

The Mahabharata represents the unpresentable. The ethical power of The Mahabharata is inextricably woven to its texture and to what it does not say. The investigator assumes that it can be viewed as a form of Postmodern non-representation. The readers constantly encounter a deliberate effort to avoid representation. Non-representation in this sense is the most rhetorically convincing form of representation.
De-realization and Language Games in The Mahabharata

According to Lyotard the computer age has transformed knowledge into information, that is, coded messages within a system of transmission and communication. Analysis of this knowledge calls for a pragmatics of communication insofar as the phrasing of messages, their transmission and reception, must follow rules in order to be accepted by those who judge them. However, as Lyotard points out, the position of judge or legislator is also a position within a language game, and this raises the question of legitimation. As he insists, “there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics.”12

Lyotard points out that while Science has sought to distinguish itself from narrative knowledge in the form of tribal wisdom communicated through myths and legends, Modern Philosophy has sought to provide legitimating narratives for science in the form of the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. Science, however, plays the language game of denotation to the exclusion of all others, and in this respect, it displaces narrative knowledge, including the meta-narratives of Philosophy. This is due, in part, to the rapid growth of technologies and techniques in the second half of the twentieth century, where the emphasis of knowledge has shifted from the ends of human action to its means . This has eroded the speculative game of philosophy and set each science free to develop independently of philosophical grounding or systematic organisation. 13

The compartmentalization of knowledge and the dissolution of epistemic coherence is a concern for researchers and philosophers alike. As Lyotard notes, “Lamenting the ‘loss of meaning’ in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative”.14 Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the world means the disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within each game the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now as addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But as Lyotard points out, while the combinations experienced are not necessarily stable or communicable, people learn to move with a certain nimbleness among them.

Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative coherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolution of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose form of capital is information. Performative legitimation means maximizing the flow of information and minimizing static (non-functional moves) in the system. So whatever cannot be communicated as information must be eliminated. The performativity criterion threatens anything that does not meet its requirements, such as speculative narratives, with de-legitimation and exclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual re-invention of the “new” in the form of new language games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a certain paralogy is required by the system itself. In this regard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves under established rules gives way to the Postmodern paradigm of inventing new rules and changing the game.

Lyotard takes up the question of justice in Just Gaming15 and The Differend: Phrases in Dispute16 , where he combines the model of language games with Kant's division of the faculties (understanding, imagination, reason) and types of judgment (theoretical, practical, aesthetic) in order to explore the problem of justice set out in the Postmodern Condition. Without the formal unity of the subject, the faculties are set free to operate on their own. Where Kant insists that reason must assign domains and limits to the other faculties, its dependence upon the unity of the subject for the identity of concepts as laws or rules de-legitimizes its juridical authority in the Postmodern Age. Instead, because we are faced with an irreducible plurality of judgments and “phrase regimes,” the faculty of judgment itself is brought to the fore. Kant's Third Critique ,therefore, provides the conceptual materials for Lyotard's analysis, especially the analysis of aesthetic judgment.17

As Lyotard argues, aesthetic judgment is the appropriate model for the problem of justice in Postmodern experience because we are confronted with a plurality of games and rules without a concept under which to unify them. Judgement must, therefore, be reflective rather than determining. Furthermore, judgment must be aesthetic insofar as it does not produce denotative knowledge about a determinable state of affairs, but refers to the way one’s faculties interacts with one another as he/she moves from one mode of phrasing to another, viz. the denotative, the prescriptive, the performative, the political, the cognitive, the artistic, etc. In Kantian terms, this interaction registers as an aesthetic feeling. Where Kant emphasizes the feeling of the beautiful as a harmonious interaction between imagination and understanding, Lyotard stresses the mode in which faculties (imagination and reason,) are in disharmony, i.e. the feeling of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime occurs when our faculties of sensible presentation are overwhelmed by impressions of absolute power and magnitude, and reason is thrown back upon its own power to conceive ideas (such as the moral law) which surpass the sensible world. For Lyotard, however, the Postmodern sublime occurs when we are affected by a multitude of unpresentables without reference to reason as their unifying origin. Justice, then, would not be a definable rule, but an ability to move and judge among rules in their heterogeneity and multiplicity. In this respect, it would be more akin to the production of art than a moral judgment in Kant's sense.

Language game is the different modes of discourses. Speech can be defined in terms of rules and by its use. It is observable that social relation-ships are made of language games. The breaking up of grand narratives in terms of language games leads to the dissolution of social bond and disintegration of social fabric. This view amounts to representation of a loss of the paradise in an organic society. There are different modes of discourse in The Mahabharata and there are different rules for different discourses. The various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of different rules in a language game. Every utterance is a move in the game.

Each self exists in a fabric of relations, very complex and mobile. One’s, mobility in relation to these language game effects is tolerable, and it is even solicited by regulatory mechanisms, particularly by the self-adjustments the system undertakes in order to improve its performance. It is said that the system can and must encourage such movements to the extent that it combats its own entropy. The novelty of an unexpected ‘move’, with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with the increased capacity, which it demands, and consumes for its performance.

The idea of language game is applied here as a general methodological approach. Language is required for a society to exist. Even before a person is born, by virtue of the name he is given, the child is already positioned in a society. He understands himself as one referred to in the stories recounted by those around him. As an individual, he will shape his life in relation to this.

What is needed to understand is that social relations are not only a theory of communication but also a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle. In ordinary use of discourse, the interlocutors use any available ammunition, changing games from one utterance to the next. Questions, requests, assertions, and narratives are launched very quickly into the conversation. The war is not without rules, but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance.

The Mahabharata is an independent composition of language that has an existence of its own. Different people understand the language and meaning of the text differently. How can one determine whether the author has intended meaning in The Mahabharata in a Postmodern milieu? One cannot do it because postmodernism denies the possibility of an original meaning.

Lyotard suggests that as meta-narratives become obsolete, the institutions founded upon them, such as Metaphysical Philosophy, find themselves in a crisis of legitimating. In such a world, language becomes unstable and people find themselves at the intersection of many agonistic discourses. Truth effects are applicable to specific contexts with their own different sets of rules that collide in shifting and heterogeneous combinations. As the distinction between critical and functional knowledge break down, the criteria for value change from truth to performance.

The Mahabharata presents a vast world staging moral dilemmas at many levels. The epic has a network of proliferating and interacting language games. It rests upon multiple value systems. The problem of moral evaluation becomes difficult here. How can one talk of justice, if one cannot talk of truth. If truth is an effect of successful rhetorical performance, is universal ethics simply a rationalization of desire, an urge for power? Lyotard has consistently argued that one must give up the search for universal foundations of justice in a world of incommensurable language games. Ethical decisions are always decided based on specific contexts in which it is applied and what is just within the terms of one language game may be the worst sort of injustice within the terms of another.18

Yudhishthira shows a great capacity for self- conscious manipulation of language games. In the battlefield, he tells a lie in order to defeat Dronacharya. It is obvious that he is deceiving Drona and by dressing it up to mean the death of an elephant called Asvathama. Yuthishthira distorts the very meaning of morality. This displacement of language allows him to conceal from others and reveal to himself his freedom within the language game.

In “Sabhaaparva”, when Draupadi is disgraced in the court of Dhratarashta at the behest of Duryodhana, Yudhishtira, with the other wise men in the court, is unable to desist him from this act. Then Draupadi appeals to the whole court to give a proper justification for this kind of humiliation. Vikarna is astonished by the silence of the elders in the court and he questions this but Krishna asks him to be silent in the presence of the elders. Bhisma tells her that the issue cannot be resolved due to the subtle nature of ‘dharma’. He tries to convince her that the course of morality is subtle and that even the wise men in the world are unable to interpret it. He adds further that in this world what a strongman calls morality is regarded as such by others, whatever it may really be.19 It is a deft use of language game that problamatises the nature of dharma.

The Pandavas are sent in exile to the forest after their defeat in the gambling. One day the sage Markandeya visits them in the forest. Yudhishtira discerns a sarcastic smile on his face and asks him about it. The sage replies that he is not laughing at their pathetic plight and narrates the story of his meeting with Rama when he was in exile. In the midst of this narration he repeatedly says, ‘nese balasyeti charedadharmam.’20 The meaning literally is one should not resort to violence even if he is strong. Scholars have interpreted this in different ways which shows the subtle language game involved. The following are some of the popular interpretations;

1.

One should not resort to adharma, thinking that one is strong.
2.

Non- violence by the weak is not real dharma.
3.

If one refrains from violence, though one is strong, his act can be considered as ‘dharma’.

Bhisma’s statement in the hall of gambling that ‘whatever the strong man, considers as ‘dharma’ is taken to be ‘dharma’ is also significant. Here strength implies the intellectual strength and not merely the physical strength. According to the well-known scholar Kuttikrishnamarar this sentence suggests that it is an act of ‘adharma’ if one does not act in a critical situation thinking that one is weak or desist from an action thinking that one is not capable of it.21 Here great change in meaning is obtained by turning some phrases and words. But this depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of the accepted language or connotation.

During the exile in forest, Yudhishthira narrates many stories to Draupadi. Then Draupadi asks him about her doubts about ‘Dharma’. She asks him why dharma does not save them from the sufferings. The Pandavas suffer many hardships in spite of their strict observance of ‘dharma’. Therefore, she expresses her indignation and inability to understand the nature of ‘dharma’. When she finds that innocent people suffer when criminals and wicked people live in luxury and pomp. Yudhishthira tells her that one should not be motivated by worldly gains to observe dharma. But Bhima defends Draupadi and gets angry with Yudhishthira over his unjustifiable passivity. Here Yudhisthira fails to give a tenable answer to them. So, there arise many other questions like, Is Yudhishthira a coward to go in exile to the forest instead of taking up arms against the injustice? On the other hand, why is he not able to answer the question posed to him? The Mahabharata does not answer these questions. It answers questions with question and defers a final answer, implying that all answers are provisional. This becomes all the more clear when it states, “Dharmasya thatvam nihidam guhayam” (the principles of dharma reside in a cave) in the epic.22

Yudhishthira faces a greater battle after the battle at Kurushethra than the one he has won. i.e. the battle of destiny. The Aswamedhayagna (horse sacrifice) serves only to make him realize that it is not of a high order as far as the results are concerned. The mongoose shows that his sacrifice is not equal in merit even to the sacrifice of the poor family who go starving to feed a poor Brahmin guest.

According to Lyotard, there is a multiplicity of justice and each one of them is defined in relation to the rules specific to games. These rules prescribe what must be done. Justice in The Mahabharata does not consist in the observance of the rules but in working at the limits of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new rules and new games. Bhisma’s life is a classical example for fruitless sacrifice and observance of rules. Devavrata, son of Shantanu and Ganga could endear the people with his fine qualities. Shantanu fell in love with another beautiful woman named Satyavati,daughter of Dasharaja, the chieftain of the fisher folk.. Her father laid down a condition for his marriage with her. The condition was that her son should inherit the kingdom. The king could not accept this and he returned to his kingdom but he remained troubled at heart. Devavrata noticed this and found out the reason. He went to the forest with his minister and courtiers and asked for the hand of Satyavati on behalf of his father. Her father agreed based on the conditions and his vow to remain unmarried for the whole of his life. Thereafter Devavrata was known as Bhisma, ‘the terrible’. Satyavati gave birth to two sons. Shantanu died while they were still young. Though Bhisma was not the king, he ruled the kingdom for more than forty years. Satyavati’s elder son put on the throne but he died soon after in a quarrel. The second son Vichitravirya became the king though he was very young. He died soon after his marriage without leaving any issues. Satyavati’s hopes for her sons were ruined and the whole of Kuru line was threatened with extinction. She begged Bhisma to give up his vow to beget children in his brother’s wives. Bhisma refused to accept this. This is the first situation in his life where observation of certain principles or rules creates a sort of labyrinth for him and the family. At the very beginning of his life, Bhisma sacrificed everything for others. At the same time, he had to shoulder great responsibilities. He brought up the children of others and found brides for all. During the first part of his life, circumstances forced him to involve in many family affairs. However, later in life it looks as if he had deliberately sought out responsibilities. Bhisma wanted to be killed by the greatest warrior of his day in the battlefield at Kurushetra. Arjuna did not want to kill him. Finally, he had to use Shikandi and shower arrows on him. Is this what he deserves for a life of sacrifice and observance of rules? Even at the end, the futility of his actions pursued him. He fell down in the battlefield and had to use his father’s blessing to prolong his death for six months. He had to witness the carnage of the Kuru clan. He had to hear the laments of the widowed kuru women. The readers may be inclined to ask, ‘had he achieved anything in keeping with his vows?’

It is useful to make the following observations about language games in The Mahabharata. The first is that the rules of dharma do not carry within themselves their own legitimation. The same rules are the objects of contradiction and it is based on this difference of opinion originated between players. The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game. Even an infinitesimal modification of one rule changes the nature of the game. A move or utterance that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game they define. The third remark is that every utterance should be thought of as a move in a game.

When The Mahabharata is critically examined, the readers can see that the task for socio-political ethics should not be the search for a theory or principle that can survive rational scrutiny. It should not be a search that can satisfy objective cognitive standards of traditional logic. The orientation in such directions already means that ethics has been distorted from the start. One is already shaped by ethics, before one can reflect on it. The readers must attend to this prereflective ethical world to have a better understanding of how values function in one’s experience. In this way ethics is not simply a philosophical speciality but a social project that keeps the existential claim of morality alive as an issue that people must continuously engage in.

The principles of ‘dharma’ appear to be variable at every turn in the epic. The reader is placed in an immanent situation continuously in an ever-moving vantage point in relation to events, which acquire new shapes through language games that construct them. One is deprived of the basic rules of perspective laid down in The Mahabharata. The effect gathers force as the readers move further into the epic, and then only a perspective inside is possible. The epic creates a world of perspectives. That shows how one might preserve some ethical generality and consistency in the midst of epistemological relativism.

The socio-political ethics sketched in The Mahabharata raises some questions for the modes of reading the epic. The characteristic feature of the epic is the experience of plurality, radical surprise and the radical interruptions of the given horizons. The ethical significance of the work lies in its function not as a form of unitary cognition but as a form, which works to surpass and dissolve any given sort of cognitive horizons. There is no prior value or principles but one in which there is the movement onwards of the text or what Baktin calls the eternal unfinishedness. There is an unlimited multiplicity at work within it and this multiplicity may be regarded as a movement towards unity. The god incarnate representation of Krishna represents the problems of representing the sublime. Therefore, characterization of Krishna can be viewed as a simulacrum.

Krishna speaks about himself in ‘the Gita':

Neither the hosts of gods nor Maharsis (great sages) know my origin, for I am Myself the origin of all those gods and great sages. He who knows me as the beginningless, the unborn and the master of the worlds – he among mortals becomes undeluded,and he is freed from all sins.23

Krishna appears at the end of ‘Adiparva’ in the epic at the time of the marriage of Draupati. Krishna and Balarama attend the function not to win Draupati but to participate in an important Kshatriya gathering. Krishna recognizes the five brothers and Arjuna as he performs the difficult feat of archery. He goes to their house and greets Kunti. He later returns to them with rich presents for the marriage. After this first meeting, most of the major successes of the pandavas are achieved with the help of Krishna. There are many Yadava clans. One of the clans wants Krishna to be their king but there are many opponents too. In order to avoid internal conflicts, he crowns Balarama, the eldest son of his father, King. They have different views on many issues. When Arjuna abducts and marries Subhadra with Krishna’s knowledge and help, Balarama wants to bring her back. But Krishna succeeds in convincing him about the importance of an alliance with the Pandavas. Krishna is always in favour of the Pandavas but Balarama is rather neutral. When Bhima hits Duryodhana on the thigh with his mace,against the rules,Balarama wants to kill Bhima for the foul act but once again Krishna stops him. Krishna says in The Gita that he has no ambition or objective at all but he acts mostly in the interest of political goals and situational demands. He kills Kamsa to liberate his clan from a despot. He has to kill Jarasandha because he has imprisoned one hundred kings to sacrifice to god. When Krishna comes to know that Dharmaraja has gambled away the kingdom, he does not get angry with him. He consoles Pandavas’ and Draupadi. Later Krishna goes to Hastinapura to talk to Duryodhana to give back Pandavas’ share of the kingdom. Though he tries his best to avoid a conflict, he is not able to bring about reconciliation as war becomes inevitable.

Both sides start preparations for the war. To secure allies they visit neighbouring kings. Arjuna and Duryodhana reach Krishna’s house to seek his help at the same time. Krishna is sleeping. Arjuna sits at the foot of the bed and Duryodhana at the head. As he wakes up, both request for his help. Krishna agrees to help both sides. To one side he will send his army. On the other side, he himself will be present but he will not take up arms. Arjuna is given the option to make his choice first because Krishna sees him first on waking up. Arjuna obviously chooses Krishna. Krishna agrees to be his charioteer. Thereafter Krishna becomes his counselor and mentor. On the very first day of the war, Krishna has to persuade Arjuna to fight. From the first day of the war to the last, Krishna saves the Pandavas. He succeeds in securing peace for Yadvas and kingdom of Hastinapura for his friends. The next thirty-five years have been a tranquil period in Krishna’s life. Then the end comes suddenly and catastrophically. Gandhari curses him at the close of the war that the Yadava clan will be destroyed in the next thirty-five years. Krishna has died. He welcomes death, as all actions of his life, with conscious deliberation. Krishna in The Mahabharata is human but he has a kind of non-involvement even in the most intense actions in his life. This makes Krishna different. Irawati Karve says:

Krishna remains an elusive personality for this very reason. He worked, he thought intensely, he advised others, but we do not find him downcast or mourning because of his actions, thought or advice did not bear fruit. He danced in joy, he killed in anger his own kinsmen as we are told in ‘Mousalaparva’,but we do not find him mourning even after the terrible end of his clan. He arranged that the old, the very young and the women be taken care of, and then met with his death. This is what he would have called ‘Yoga’, this calm non-involvement. This is why Krishna remains a figure for thought and search.24

According to Baudrillard if god can be simulated or reduced to signs that attest to his existence, the whole system becomes weightless. It becomes a simulacrum. It is not unreal but a simulacrum that does not stand for anything outside it. Krishna as portrayed in The Mahabharata represents the problems of representing the sublime and suggests that the sublime cannot be represented. The representations signify only themselves and do not represent the sublime at all.

NOTES

1Mary Gregor, The Conflict of the Faculties

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1982) 19-25.
2 G.W.F.Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V Miller, (Delhi : Motilal Banarsidass Publishers,1998) 45-48.
3 Soren, Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 59.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House,1895).485-486.

5 Friedrich Nietzsche,The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music,trans.Douglas Smith (New York: Random House, 2000)68-69.
6Jean S Baudrillard,Symbolic Exchange and Death,trans. IanHamiltonGrant(London:SagePublications,1976)58-60.

7 Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 55-58.

8 Jean Baudrillard 65.

9 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Random House,1983)186.

10 Jean Baudrillard 190.

11 Ramesh Menon, “BhishmaParvan”,The Mahabharata-A Modern Rendering (Rupa.co,New Delhi,2004) 155-160.

12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,trans. Geoff BEnnington and Brian. (Massumi Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 85-86.

13 Jean-Francois Lyotard 92-95.

14 Jean-Francois Lyotard 98-100.
15 Jean-Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans.Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 45.

16 Jean-Lyotard,The Differend: Phrases in Dispute trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988)58.

17 Kant, Immanuel.Critique of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard. (London:Macmillan, 1951)155.

18 Jean-Francois Lyotard 49-52.
19 Ramesh Menon, “Sabhaparvan” 373.

20 Kuttikrishnamarar, Bharathaparyatanam -A Critical Study of Mahabharata (Marar Sahithya Prakasam, Kallai, Kozhikode, 2002),76.

21 Kuttikrishnamarar 79.

22 Kuttikrishnamarar 195.
23 Swami Tapasyananda, “Manifestation of Divine Glories”- verses 2&3, Srimad Bhagavad Gita
( Mylapore,Madras:Ramakrishna Math Printing Press,1984)264.

24 Karve,Irawati, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch ,

(Hyderabad :Disha Books,1991)85.

Chapter 5

The Philosophy of Dharma and the Postmodern Philosophy of Relativism in The Mahabharata

The meaning and value of human beliefs and behaviours are never absolute. Historical and cultural context determine their terms and it can be understood and evaluated only in the appropriate context. There is no absolute truth or reality. Therefore, Postmodernism has accepted multiple perspectives, making no truth claim for any perspective.

The term ‘dharma’ is untranslatable. It has no semantic equivalents in English. It has been variously translated as ‘duty’, ‘religion’, ‘justice’, ‘law’, ‘ethics’, ‘principle’, and ‘right’. ‘Dharma’ is particularly associated with the performance of ‘Vedic’ rituals by a group of people called ‘Brahmans’ (the highest caste of people according to caste system). ‘Dharma’ is an ideology, which includes both ritual and moral behaviour. ‘Dharma’ is an obligation, declared by The Vedas, to perform ritual action which brings of itself no reward other than its non-performance would be ‘adharma’ and result in retribution. The source of ‘dharma’ is The Vedas. There are three sources of ‘dharma’ according to the ‘dharma sutras: revelation, tradition and the customs of the virtuous or those learned in The Vedas.

At a universal level ‘dharma’ refers to a cosmic, eternal principle. Yet it relates to human transactions. Dharma applies to specific laws and contexts to which they are applied. This means that ‘dharma’ can be adapted to particular situations and particular applications. It is decided by an assembly of learned men. In short, ‘dharma’ is context specific. The religious obligations of men differ at different ages and vary according to caste, family and country. A king must judge according to the customs and particular duties of each region. This idea of ‘svadharma’ is important in understanding that ‘dharma’ is relative to different contexts.

The subject of ‘dharma’ deals with questions of right and wrong in a theoretical sense and the modes of conduct. The concept of ‘dharma’ is one that has been referred to on numerous occasions and is central to the teachings of The Mahabharata. The question frequently raised and discussed by the text is ‘what is ‘dharma’? It is very interesting to note that the question remains unanswered in the text and a final answer is never reached. A rigid definition of ‘dharma’ is problematic in that it excludes the broader meaning of the term.

There are several occasions in The Mahabharata when right and wrong actions are judged by the prevailing customs and traditions of the society. They are regarded as a standard of morality in the epic. Sometimes there are conflicting ideas of morality. For example, it is difficult to decide whether it is right on the part of the Pandavas to have married Draupadi by all the five of them according to the wish of their mother. King Drupada, father of Draupadi and her brother Dhrstadyumna were against such a marriage. But Yudhisthira justifies polyandry based on the traditional customs. He says that the nature of ‘dharma’ is subtle. Therefore, they do not know the right course of ‘dharma’ and they must follow their ancestors. He quotes an incident from the ‘Puranas’ that a girl named Jatila was married to seven saints at a time. Based on such an evidence their marriage to Draupadi was sanctioned by the tradition and custom.

The idea of social good is a very important concept in The Mahabharata. It is supposedly maintained by keeping a social equilibrium. Social stability is essential for physical, moral and spiritual growth of an individual. Very often social good is regarded as essential in determining right and wrong. Other standards like customs, traditions, law and duty are secondary to social good. In ‘Vanaparva’, it is stated that untruth sometimes leads to the triumph of truth and whichever act is conducive to the good of all is considered as truth. Narada tells that he regards welfare of the creatures as truth. Bhima says in ‘Santiparva’ that great sages and seers have established ‘dharma’ for the maintenance of society. In short, it is clear that morality changes according to different situations.

The word ‘dharma’ is used in different senses in The Mahabharata. When the ‘dharma is used in terms such as ‘Rajadharma’, ‘Prajadharma’, or ‘Mittradharma’. It means a code of conduct when used in terms such as ‘Desidharma’, ‘Kuladharma’ Jatidharma’, ‘Varnadharma’ and ‘Asramadharma’. Whatever be the meaning of the term, it is notable that the term always imposes certain principles in any particular context for human conduct. Therefore, the term ‘dharma’ endorses the postmodern view that the absolute reality and truth that explains all things is unobtainable.

Dr.Radhakrishnan says,

Dharma is the stable condition, which is capable of giving perfect satisfaction to man and/or helping him in the attainment of happiness and salvation .Its end, according to him, is the welfare of all creation. 1

There are three types of ‘dharma’ in The Mahabharata. The first of these is ‘sva-dharma’, it is the duties of an individual in terms of social status. The second is ‘sadharana -dharma’ which is a code of morality that every person is bound to do in a social system. The didactic sections of the epic present the third type of ‘dharma’, which is derived from the ascetic tradition. According to Wendy O ‘Flaherty it is morally neutral and forms a recognizable ethical code2. However, it has to be noted that the text itself never talks in terms of a three fold ethical division and it is no more than ideological tendencies.

Ethics and Morality

There is a distinction between ‘sva-dharma’ and morality. The Mahabharata has a notion of morality running alongside with the ‘dharma’. This idea is set down in a number of passages in the text, especially through the depiction of the major characters like Yudhisthira and Duryodhana. The text recognizes the distinction between ‘sva-dharma’ and morality, and explores the question at length as a doctrinal issue and as a literary device.

There is a recurring tension in the narrative between Yudhishtira’s moral sense and his ‘dharmic’ duties. The reader is constantly aware of the superiority of Yudhishtira’s character when compared to that of Duryodhana which is based on moral and not ritual ethics. However, in the executions of Kshatriya-dharma Duryodhana is superior to Yudhistira. Duryodhana does not hesitate to fight and give up his life in the battle as an ideal’ kshatriya’. Yudhishtira is often timid and does not want to fight.

In ‘Vanaparva’ Krishna describes Yudhishtira’s virtues as follows:

Dharma is greater than the winning of a kingdom and they describe the execution of it as a penance. By executing the duties of ‘sva-dharma’ with truth and honesty, you have conquered both this world and the next. In the beginning, you engaged in study, following various vows, and absorbed the complete science of warfare; having gained possessions and wealth through ‘kshatriya-dharma’, you have executed all the traditional sacrifices. You take no delight in licentious pleasures and you do not strive in anyway after the objects of enjoyment. You never abandon ‘dharma’ because of greed, and thus, because of your nature, you are the ‘dharma-raja’ having won lands, riches and objects of pleasure, your greatest delight is always in charity, truthfulness, austerity, faith, tranquillity, determination and tolerance. 3

Throughout the epic, Yudhishtira is portrayed as a person of gentle disposition with goodwill towards other living beings; he is kind and forgiving, tolerant and forbearing. His forgiveness is shown in his attitude to Dhrtarastra after the battle- He bears no ill will towards the old king. His truthfulness is likewise renowned. He does not violate the terms of their exile and that is the reason why Drona cannot doubt the truthfulness of his statement in the battlefield that Aswathama is slain. Though he wages a war to regain the kingdom, he does so only because he is persuaded that it is a matter of principle and duty.

The Mahabharata discusses different forms of ‘dharma’ namely, ‘Desadharma’, ‘Jatidharma’,and ‘Kuladharma’. Mitaksara gives a broader classification of ‘dharma’ in his commentary on Yajnavalkya Smriti.4 According to him, there are six forms of dharma: ‘Varnadharma’,’Asrama dharma,’ ‘Varnasramadharma’, ‘Gunadharma’ ‘Nimitadharma’, and ‘Sadharanadharma’. In short, it is obvious that the ancient ‘Dharma Sastra’ writers made it clear that the applicability of dharma varies in accordance with the circumstances, place and time.

The Ethics of ‘Sva-dharma’

The Mahabharata teachings on ‘sva-dharma’ offer a code of conduct by which each individual in society has to live. It has a moral dimension but it is not based on moral principles. In the ‘Vedic ritual of ‘Yajna’, (sacrifice) the priests and the king act together in the performance that is microcosmically in harmony with the ritual progress of the universe. The ideas of the epic point to the conduct of life of both the priest and the king. It has become a ritual, which is implied in the term ‘sva-dharma’. A person born into a royal family is presumed to have inherited the nature of a ruler, and by acting in accordance with those principles is his right conduct. The notion of a ritualized conduct of life is extended to all levels of society, so that each individual acts according to a ritual ethic. This ritual ethics is central in the teachings of Krishna in The Gita. In The Mahabharata, Vishnu has appeared on earth to establish laws which are threatened by the actions of several of the principal characters in the epic. Some of the important characters who violate such laws include Bhisma who has taken a vow of celibacy, Asvatthama who is a Brahman chooses to act as a warrior and Yudhisthira who hates war in spite of being a Kshatriya. Does it suggest that the wrong doers include not only the wicked in a moral sense but also people, whose actions contravene principles of the ‘Sva-dharma’? The goal of ‘sva-dharma’ system was preservation of social and moral balance but it is not an absolute ethical system. That is, it does not mean each individual has his own unique ethical code because ‘sva-dharma’ is shared with others of the same ‘Varna’. There is not a single standard of behaviour prescribed for all people in a society. For example, avarice and violence are wrong for ‘Brahmans, whereas for a king personal ambition and recourse to warfare are rather essential for effective governance.

Ritual Dharma

The ‘Anusasana’ presents many details of specific ritual acts to be performed by the individual with the aim of obtaining salvation after death. Thus, the chapters 58 to 86 give lengthy description of doing charity, especially giving of cows, food and gold.5 There are similar discussions in the ‘Anusasana’ of the efficiency of penance, fasting, and the offerings of lamps and flowers to gods and ancestors.

It is important to note that even though The Mahabharata contains such teachings or ‘Anusasanas’, ritual acts are ignored. When ethical tensions arise in the epic, the focus falls on morality and varna duties.

Duties of Varnas

The epic offers brief descriptions of the occupations that each of the four ‘varnas’ may undertake. In his teachings, Hanuman explains the different occupations of the four ‘varnas’. Thus, ‘Brahmanas’ are priests and teachers, ‘kshatriyas’ are soldiers, ‘Vaisyas’ agriculturists, and ‘Sudras’ servants. He then speaks about ‘kshatriyadharma’.

The notion of good in the ethics of ‘svadharma’ is primarily adherence to ethical duties as dictated by ‘varna’. This is very apparent when Duryodhana is rewarded with an exalted position in heaven after his death in the battlefield. Even though he has been morally despicable, his death on the battlefield is an ideal enactment of ‘kshatriya sva-dharma’ and it enables him to attain that position.

The ritual nature of ‘sva-dharma is connected to the cosmic aspects of vedic ritual. The notion of ritual includes all the prescribed social duties in the epic. Therefore, the adherence to ‘sva-dharma’ not only brings life after death rewards but also sustains the gods and the harmony of creation. This understanding of sva-dharma is significant when Krishna tells Arjuna that he must face his enemies. In the beginning, Arjuna wants to abandon warfare but Krishna teaches him the doctrine of desireless action and detachment in worldly gains and asserts the ritual nature of sva-dharma.It is clear from the above discussion that moral standard varies with circumstances, places, time, social and status, ‘varna’, ‘asrama’ of the individual. The Mahabharata makes the following broad classification of ‘dharma’:

1.

‘Sadharanadharma’ or the universal code of morality.
2.

‘Visistadharma’ or specific moral code. They are classified as:
1.

‘Varnadharma’ or code of conduct for different classes.
2.

‘Asramadharma’ or the code of conduct for different ‘Asramas’.
3.

‘Gunadharma’ or code for different offices.
4.

Naimittikadharma or occasional duties.
5.

Apadharma or code for times of distress.

6. Yugadharma or Code for different ages.

Sadharanadharma

‘Sadharanadharma’ or ‘Nityadharma’ is the moral code applicable to all humanity. The Mahabharata has discourses on moral virtues throughout its epic framework. Some of the virtues that readers come across in The Mahabharata are given below:

Satya: The epic gives a metaphysical meaning to the term satya by identifying it with ‘sat’ (reality) In ‘santiparva’,Bhrugu expostulates the merits of satya and condemns asatya6 but there are occasions in the epic that refute this view where readers find that untruth is given preference over truth. The Mahabharata says that resort to falsehood is allowed when one’s life is in risk, or on the occasion of marriage ,or to protect the wealth for the cause of ‘dharma’ , or when wealth has been taken away, or with ladies or for the sake of the preceptor. Here the readers may find that the concept of ‘dharma’ discussed in the epic conforms to Postmodern concept of situational ethics. Postmodernism does not admit universality of ethical principles, it prefers situational ethics in which it is the situation or the circumstance that determines the right conduct.

Ahimsa: Ahimsa is a total abstinence from violence in word, deed and thought (‘manasa’, ‘vaca’, ‘karmana’) but the readers may find a lot of violence in the epic that shows the moral relativism and denial of moral absolutism in the epic.

Brahmacharya: Brahmacharya is total control of the senses, a life of self-discipline and continence, dedicated to higher pursuits. By doing this, one overcomes all difficulties. 7

Dama: The Mahabharata emphasizes the need of dama- self-control of the senses. Krishna tells Arjuna that sensory organs should be completely checked.8 Even attachments to objects of sense organs should be avoided. The Mahabharata discusses the attributes of ‘sthitaprajna’ in detail. It says that one should withdraw sense organs from their objects as a tortoise draws its limbs.9 Vidura compares the human body to a chariot, ‘sattva’ (the living principle) to its charioteer, sensory organs with horses and ‘Budhi’ with its reigns. He says that one who does not control his senses cannot be free from the bondage of birth and death.10 The Mahabharata, in short gives a lot of importance to ‘dama’.

Ksama: According to The Mahabharata, forgiveness is praiseworthy especially in people who are in power. But the epic categorically states to have discretion not to spare the wicked. In ‘Vanaparva’, Yudhisthira says:

Forgiveness is dharma, which is equal to sacrifice (yajna), knowledge in the Vedas, the ‘Brahman’, truth (satya), penance (tapas) and purity (sauca).The universe is held together because of forgiveness. He is indeed a wise man, who forgives even those, who insult, rebuke and beat him. One possessed of Ksama attains Brahman. He receives honour here and acquires a state of blessedness hereafter. Hence, it is the highest virtue.10

The epic gives great importance to respect for Mother, Father, and Preceptor and of elders. 12

Sila: The Mahabharata insists that one should possess good behaviour, which consists of abstention from animosity in thought, word and deed, compassion and devotion. ‘dharma’,’and satya’, are dependant upon it.13 The legend of Prahlada brings out this.

Madhuravacana: The agreeable speech is given a full chapter in ‘Santiparva’. It shows the importance given to agreeable speech.14

Saranagataraksa:The epic considers this as one of the greatest virtues. The story of Sibi is relevant in this connection. Sibi cuts away his own flesh to save a pigeon’s life. Sibi is said to have obtained ‘Samsiddi’ (great good) for this virtuous act of kindness. 15

Atithiseva: The Mahabharata lays down atithiseva that is respect for a guest as a sacred duty.

Visistadharma: ‘Visistadharma’ as the term indicates is laid down for different individuals or groups. It is classified under the heads of ‘varnadharma’ and ‘asramadharma’ ‘Varna- dharma’ deals with the duties laid down for each caste, and ‘asramadharma’ deals with four stages of a man’s life, such as ‘brahmacharya ashram’, ‘grahstha ashrama’, ‘vanaprastha ashrama’ and ‘sanyasa ashrama’. They are connected to the fourfold goals of life, ‘dharma’, ‘kama’, ‘moksa’ and ‘artha’. These are the stepping-stones to the attainment of Brahma-loka.

Gunadharma: It is the code prescribed for a person for holding a certain position or office. Rajadharma, for example states that all problems connected with the state are to be dealt with by the king.

Naimittikadharma: ‘Naimittikadharma’ is duties done with a special purpose such as the expiatory rites done to atone wrong doings. The epic gives a list of the expiatory rites like begging alms, observing penance and religious rites, sleeping on bare ground, reciting the vedas and performing sacrifices etc.16

Apadharma: The most important feature of the epic is that it does not propound a universal moral code. The applicability of the principles varies with persons, places, circumstances and other factors. The code applicable in a dangerous situation is an example for apadharma.17 According to The Mahabharata the abnormal times have ethics of their own. The ‘varnas’ can take up responsibilities of another ‘varna’. For example, the brahmanas take up arms and fight. The political duties and responsibilities also differ in such times. For instance, extra taxes can be collected from the people. In a war, the defeated party is permitted to suspend the rules of morality. According to the principles of ‘apadharma’, self-preservation becomes the highest law and all means used are justified. Bhisma reminds Yudhisthira on one occasion that the moral standard of apadharma is different from that of the ‘samanya’ or the ‘sadharanadharma’. Postmodern feature of The Mahabharata is evident here. It shows that any theoretical system is provisional, to be used for practical purposes and suspended when it is not useful and not applicable. Therefore, the universal principles give way to the local and to the recognition of situations. It implies that any theory that claims universality is disguised enactments of a will to wield power and it can be established only through violence and dangerous exclusions. This is why Lyotard says that all attempts to translate the sublime into a political system produces terror.18

Apadharma for Different Varnas

The Mahabharata strongly upholds the observance of svadharma specifically prescribed for each varna. But this was meant for ordinary times only and abnormal times have a different code of ethics. It permits alterations in ‘varnadharma’ under abnormal circumstances. In Udyogaparva, Yudhishtira says to Vidura:

Virtue and vice, which are both eternal and absolute, exchange their aspects during seasons of distress. One should follow without deviation the duties prescribed for the order to which one belongs by birth. Know, Oh, Sanjaya the duties in season of distress are otherwise, when his means of living are totally gone, the man (that) who is destitute should certainly desire those other means by which he may be able to discharge the sanctioned duties of order. One that is not destitute of his means of living as also one that is in distress, are O Sanjaya, both to be blamed if they act as if by mistake of each were otherwise. When the creator hath ordained expiation for those brahmanas, who without wishing for self-destruction, betake themselves to acts not sanctioned for them, this proves that people may in seasons of distress, betake to acts not ordained for the orders to which they belong and O Sanjaya, You should regard as worthy those (them) that censure to the practices of their own order in usual times as also those that do not adhere to them that act otherwise in usual times while adhering to their ordained practices during the times of distress.19

The Mahabharata says that a ‘brahmana’ can resort to ‘apadharma’ in the following circumstances:

1.

There is a degradation of righteousness.
2.

Kings and robbers oppress the people.
3.

Men of all the four classes in the caste system get confused in their duties and all acts lose their merit.
4.

Lawless men turn out to be the cause of fear everywhere in consequence of lust and covetousness and folly.
5.

All creatures crush one another.
6.

The ‘brahmins’ become exceedingly afflicted.
7.

The clouds do not pour a drop of rain.
8.

All the necessities of life are controlled and come under the power of robbers.

The Mahabharata has some non-kshatriya warriors who adopted ‘kshatriya-dharma’ willingly and not as their ‘apadharma’. The great warrior Dronacharya, who was a brahmina by birth, was one of the chief warriors of the kauravas during the war. A svathama and yuyutsu, son of a vaisya woman are some other such warriors in the epic. From this it is easy to infer that in extra-ordinary times, the ordinary rules of morality are thrown to the winds. So it becomes clearer that The Mahabharata does not suggest a uniform moral standard. According to it, every situation carries its own morals. Dharma varies according to ‘desa’ and ‘kala’. The same is the case with the Apattikala. Morality, prescribed for such time has been called apadharma in The Mahabharata.

Yugadharma: There are epochs in the history of mankind,viz ‘Satyayuga’, ‘Krtayuga’, ‘Tretayuga’, ‘Dwaparayuga’ and ‘Kaliyuga’. The moral code is varied in each of these different yugas. In Santiparva, Bhisma Tells Yudhisthira “of one kind is ‘dharma’ in Krta age, different it is in ‘treta’ age ,of one kind it is in ‘Dvapara’ age and different it is in the ‘Kali’ age. ‘Dharma’, in different ‘yugas’ is laid down according to the powers of human beings in the respective ages.20

The Mahabharata is not a totalizing narrative with a universal ethical standard. According to the epic, every situation carries its own morals. The code of conduct prescribed for the times of distress (apattikala) is ‘apadharma’ in The Mahabharata. The epic suggests that one can neglect ‘swadharma’ and adopt ‘paradharma’ (other’s profession), if unable to uphold oneself by the former. Therefore, a person who does not follow ‘swadharma in ordinary times, and a person who sticks to ‘swadharma’ in distress equally perpetrates wrong. It is notable that The Mahabharata recognizes that the world cannot function without the concepts because it would lead to chaos and disintegration. Therefore, The Mahabharata recognizes the need for provisionality even as it has a grand narrative framework. Therefore, in The Mahabharata there is problematisation of the base itself. In other words, there is problematisation of representation as the absolute or truth in the epic.

On several occasions The Mahabharata, delineates the application of these principles of ‘dharma’. In the ‘Santiparva’, Yudhisthira asks Bhisma whether non-kshatriya was justified in taking up arms to protect his people from the robbers. In reply to this Bhisma said:

Be he a Sudra or be he of any order, he who becomes a raft in a raftless current or a means of crossing where means there are none, certainly deserves respect in every way. That person, o king, relying upon whom the helpless men, oppressed and made miserable by robbers, live happily, deserves to be lovingly worshipped by all as if he were a near relative. The person, o thou of Kuru race, that dispels the fear of others, always deserves respect. What is the need of bulls that would not bear burdens or of a cow that would not yield milk, or of a wife that is barren? Similarly what need is there for a king that is not competent to grant protection? As an elephant made of wood, or a deer made of leather or a person without wealth, or that is as much or a field that is sterile, even so is a Brahmana that is void of vedic lore .That person who always protects the good and restrains the wicked, deserves to become a king and govern the world.21

In extraordinary times, the members of the ‘Brahmana’, ‘Kshatriya’, and ‘Vaisya varnas’ were allowed to eat the flesh of some animals. On one occasion in ‘Santiparva’, there is a dialogue between ‘Chandala’ and ‘Visvamitra’ regarding this issue. In the end of ‘Tretayuga’ and before the beginning of the ‘Dvaparayuga’, the rain did not pour for twelve years. Rivers, lakes, streams and other water resources dried up. There was a famine. Many people starved to death. The bands of robbers started to loot the people. There was complete disorder and chaos. Visvamitra and his family also had no food left with them. Visvamitra went in search of food. He reached a colony of chandalas. In one house, he saw a piece of recently slain dog’s thigh. He decided to steal it. The chandala found this and came to know that the thief was Viswamitra. The chandala asked him not to commit a sin by eating flesh, that too of dog’s flesh. The sage replied that in ‘apattikala’, self-preservation has the highest priority and he took away the flesh and offered the same to gods.22

In political ethics, the same moral code prescribed for the ordinary times is prescribed for the extraordinary times too but at times, it is contradictory. The duty of a king is to protect his kingdom, for this he is allowed to make use of all sorts of means. It is observed that if he is alive he can restore his kingdom and other possessions, whereas there would be no chance if he were killed.

In social morality also, during apattikala the rules are relaxed. In ordinary times, one should never give up ‘svadharma’. Failing to earn livelihood by doing one’s ‘svadharma’, members of one varna can adopt the duties of other ‘varnas’. In short it holds the view that social morality as well as the political morality is bound to change in accordance with the changing times and circumstances. This according to The Mahabharata is the idea that underlies ‘apadharma’. The state recognized ‘apadharma’ as the code of exceptional morality under special circumstances for maintaining the social order, which is its main duty.

In short, The Mahabharata holds the view that social morality as well as the political morality is bound to change in accordance with the changing times and circumstances. This is the idea of ‘Apadharma’ in the Mahabharata.

The Ethics of the Ascetic Tradition

There is the doctrine of the ‘Moksadharma’, in addition to the above ethics discussed which deals with the renunciation and world denial. The teachings of ‘sankhya’ and ‘yoga’ dictate a withdrawal from the world. The teachings of asvamedhika contain the manner in which an ascetic should conduct his life. Chapter 22 of ‘Santiparva’ provides more ideas of the teachings on the ascetic tradition. Here Yudhisthira asks Bhisma about the people who attain the position of ‘brahman’ Bhisma, in reply, recounts a discussion on this subject between Devala and Jaigisavya. He says that such people are said to have the following characteristics: They keep an equal disposition to those who praise or condemn them. They conceal their righteous acts and vows. They never seek pleasure in conversation or in arguments. They do not bother about the future of a past and act only with regard to the present situation. The mighty ones, who accept the religious vows, act at their own pleasure as the event arises. Those who have vast knowledge and mature wisdom and those who have conquered their anger and their senses never cause offence to others in speech, deed or thought. They are free from jealousy and they never speak in exaggerated manner in praise or condemnation of others. They are calm, contended, and find pleasure in others’ welfare. No one regards them as particular companions nor are they intimate to any one. They have no enemies.

This is the sum and substance of the ascetic tradition. The stress is clearly on withdrawal and non-involvement. Another significant feature of the ethics of ‘Moksadharma’ is it does not allow harming other living beings, as Vyasa says in Aswamedhika Yaga, “Na Kurute bhava Sarva-bhutesu papakam / Karmana mansasa vaca Bhima sampadyate tada.”23 (Do not do any sinful thing to any living beings physically, in thought, in word or deed O Bhima, (moksa) has to be attained thus).

The Ascetic Tradition teaches that he who causes no harm to any living thing by deed, word or thought has reached ‘Brahman’. Such an Ethical teaching stresses non-involvement, emotional withdrawal and world indifference corresponding to dualism and transcendentalism of the wider scheme of Samkhya thought. The teaching on salvation says that it is not only a path to ‘moksa’ but also a symptom of one who has reached that goal. Attachment in this world is caused by ‘ajnana’, (ignorance), the individual who misidentifies himself with the body, fails to comprehend the ‘atman’ as his actions are inevitably based on ignorance.

The Mahabharata does not suggest a universal moral standard. It varies in conformity with the change of time, place, circumstances and other factors. In short, every situation carries its own morals. Unusual circumstances justify resort to unusual methods. The code of conduct for the times of distress has been dealt as ‘apadharma’ in The Mahabharata. Bhisma tells Yudhishtira that the duties of those men, who are able and competent (under ordinary circumstances), are different from those who have fallen in distress. In accordance with this, ‘adharma’ becomes ‘dharma’ and vice versa. It suggests that neglecting ‘svadharma’ one can adopt ‘paradharma’, if one is unable to keep with the other. At the same time, it condemns those who do not follow ‘swadharma’ in ordinary times.

When the principles of ‘dharma’ are studied in detail, it can be found that it conforms to the philosophy of relativism in Postmodernism. In this context, it can be concluded that in Postmodern terms it is impossible, to find an ultimate ‘truth’ or ‘dharma’ and that it can be understood only with reference to the historic, cultural, social and situational context. The Mahabharata does not establish a totality. Many concepts and ideas presented in the text contradict when they are discussed without reference to the context or situation in the text.

NOTES

1 Dr.S.Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (Bombay:Nirnaya Sagar Press,1969)26-29.
2 O’ Flaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 95-97.
3 Ramesh Menon, “vanaparva ”, The Mahabharata-A Modern Rendering (New Delhi: Rupa.co 2004)497-504.
4 Mitaksara, Yajnavalkya Smriti (New York:Ramakrishna-Vivekenanda Centre,1980)28-32.
5 Ramesh Menon ,“Anusasana” 573-607.
6 Ramesh Menon , “santiparva”573-575.
7 Ramesh Menon, 577-579.
9 Ramesh Menon, 580-582.
10 Ramesh Menon, 583-584.
11 Ramesh Menon, “ vanaparva”,506-509.
12 Ramesh Menon, “streeparva”,555-558.
13 Ramesh Menon, 560-567.
14 Ramesh Menon, 585-587.
15 Ramesh Menon, 588-590.
16 Ramesh Menon, 591-593.
17 Ramesh Menon, 594-596.
18 Ramesh Menon, 598-600.
19 Ramesh Menon, “Udyogaparva”,55-58.
20 Nicholas Sutton, Religious Doctrines in
The Mahabharata, (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass Publisheers,
2000)293-302.
18 The Mahabharata, “Apadharma”.
21 Ramesh Menon, 601-602.
22 Ramesh Menon, 603-605.
23 Ramesh Menon, 606-607.

Chapter 6

The Poetics of Sublime and the Transcendental Self in

The Gita The Sublime in Ancient Philosophy

The first known study of the sublime is ascribed to Longinus’ Peri Hupsous/Hypsous or ‘On the Sublime.’1 This is thought to have been written in the 1st century AD though its origin and authorship are uncertain. For Longinus, the sublime is an adjective that describes great, elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric. As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration, with greater persuasive powers. This treatise was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, and its subsequent impact on aesthetics is usually attributed to its translation into French by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux done in 1674. Later the treatise was translated into English by John Pultney in 1680, Leonard Welsted in 1712, and William Smith in 1739 whose translation had its fifth edition in 1800.2

Eighteenth Century

The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the eighteenth century in the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, John Dennis later wrote, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his “The Spectator”, and later the “Pleasures of the Imagination” were the next contributions. All of them had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.3

John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as “Miscellanies” in 1693. It gives an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with horrors, and sometimes almost with despair."4

Joseph Addison embarked on the grand Tour in 1699 and commented in that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror."5 The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (sight rather than rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolute superlatives, e.g. "unbounded", "unlimited", as well as "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess. Addison’s notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime.

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime was developed in “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.”6 Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one of them can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.

Burke's concept of the sublime was an antithetical contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato in several of his dialogues and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instil feelings of intense emotion, ultimately creating a pleasurable experience. Beauty was, for St. Augustine, the consequence of the benevolence and goodness of God's creation and as a category had no opposite. The ugly, lacking any attributive value, was formlessness in its absence of beauty.

Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects for the sublime, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction noted by other writers. Burke describes the sensation attributed to the sublime as a 'negative pain' which he called delight, and which is distinct from positive pleasure. Delight is taken to result from the removal of pain (caused by confronting the sublime object) and is supposedly more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of the sublime experience (such as tension resulting from eye strain) were not taken seriously by later writers, his empiricist method of reporting from his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to Kant's analysis. Burke is also distinguished from Kant in his emphasis on the subject's realization of his physical limitations rather than any supposed sense of moral or spiritual transcendence.7

Immanuel Kant and the Concept of Sublime

In his Critique of Judgment, Kant investigates the sublime stating, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great". He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness". Kant then further divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations. The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create fearfulness "without being afraid of it.” He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense”. For Kant, one's inability to grasp the enormity of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to merely identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substratum," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.8

Schopenhauer and the Concept of Sublime

According to Schopenhauer, the feeling of a beautiful object is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer. In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime as follows:

A) Feeling of Beauty– It is the experience of light reflected off a flower. In this experience there is pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt the observer.

B) Weakest Feeling of Sublime– this experience can be compared to seeing light reflected off stones. This experience gives pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet they are devoid of life.

C) Weaker Feeling of Sublime– This experience can be described as the sight of an endless desert with no movement. It is rather a detached kind of pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer.

D) Sublime– There is sublime experience in turbulent nature. It is pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy the observer.

E) Full Feeling of Sublime– Then there is an overpowering turbulent nature. This experience gives pleasure in beholding very violent, destructive objects.

F) Fullest Feeling of Sublime– This feeling is one that transcends the worldly pleasures. It is like experiencing the immensity of the extent and the duration of the universe. This gives the observer the pleasure of the knowledge of his own nothingness and oneness with Nature.9

Post Romantic and Twentieth Century

The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The tragic consciousness is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the "forgiving generosity of deity" subsumed under "inexorable fate”. Thomas Weiskel re-examined Kant's aesthetics and the Romantic conception of the sublime through the prism of ‘semiotic theory’ and psychoanalysis. He argued that Kant's 'mathematical' sublime' could be seen in semiotic terms as the presence of an excess of signifiers, a monotonous infinity threatening to dissolve all oppositions and distinctions. The 'dynamic sublime', on the other hand, was an excess of signifieds. Here ‘meaning’ was always over determined.10

According to Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modern period. Lyotard argued that the modernists attempted to replace the beautiful with the release of the perceiver from the constraints of the human condition. For him, the significance of sublime's is in the way it points to an ‘aporia’ in human reason. It expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the Postmodern world.11

There has also been some resurgence of interest in the sublime in Analytic Philosophy in the last 15 years as in the Postmodern or critical theory tradition. Analytic philosophical studies often begin with accounts of Kant or other philosophers of the 18th or early 19th centuries.

Poetics of Sublime in the Study of The Bhagavad Gita

This section deals with the central idea of Postmodernism- ‘poetics of sublime and its application in the study of The Bhagavad Gita in The Mahabharata. According to Lyotard, there is space, an ‘outside’, or ‘real’ which is not dependent upon any constructions. This space will remain sublime.12 This idea is an affirmation of the Kantian idea of sublime as the ultimate incommensurability of reality as a pure idea. Kant divides the human mind into three faculties: understanding, reason and judgment. They are the priory laws of understanding which determine the experience of the world.13 In other words all knowledge is determined by the concepts. These concepts are applied to the sensory world through the imagination in its capacity to form images. The highest faculty of the mind is reason and idea is a product of this faculty. The sublime is connected to the sphere of pure ideas. Sublimity is the experience of an object which invokes an idea of reason which is radically indeterminate. One can not formulate, know or judge it. In short, imagination can excite ideas that cannot be realized or represented in any sensory form. The sublime transcends all the faculties of reason and it is a glimpse of the inaccessible plenitude that leaves an impossible self-conscious wrestle with words in the hopeless struggle to embody it. Postmodernism in art or Philosophy asserts the unpresentable in presentation itself. Therefore, Postmodern art exists as a radical subjective fictionality that refuses mimesis, organic unity and consensus. It offers multiple perspectives that refuse to resolve into some transcendent or more profound whole.

Postmodernism admits a notion of the value of the aesthetic as a form of non-utilitarian autonomy. It is resistant to any form of conceptualization and is, therefore, unrepresentable, it is a form of the Kantian realm of pure reason. The art of the sublime remain in a sphere resistant to conceptual understanding. To experience the sublime is to recognize the inadequacy of the values produced in conceptual thought or experienced through sensory modes. It is acknowledgement of the existence of that which can not be thought, analyzed, presented through any determinate form. Postmodernism is a form of resistance to the banal and automatising effects of modern life. Any attempt to realize the sublime as a blue print for political or historical action would dangerously conflate the different language games, the spheres of the speculative or ideal and those of the cognitive and practical. Existence may be aestheticised, but the aesthetics must not be used to underpin political ideologies which set out to produce new cultures through rationalized ideal frameworks. The language games of aesthetics are valuable as models of disagreements motivating the reader with a desire to go beyond the analytic and the conceptual, offering a continuing sense of the ‘as if’. Here the sublime remains a never to be realized beyond.

The sublime has many dimensions, not only aesthetic but also ethical, philosophical, psychological, political, linguistic, rhetorical and sociological. The sublime may also induce the readers to think specifically about the political motives of actions. The idea is that there is a mysterious affinity between abstraction and the sublime. Words have some advantages. They bear emotional associations and they can evoke what is spiritual without referring to what is visible. One can, by using words, create combinations impossible to make in some other way. Art inspired by the aesthetics of sublime, and aiming at powerful effects, can and must neglect imitation of beautiful models and should devote themselves to combinations that are astonishing, unusual and shocking.

According to Kant, the principal effect of the sublime might be rendered as a negative sign of inadequacy of imaginative power in relation to the ideas of reason. Something is presented in a subject which is ultimately unpresentable, though conceptually understood. Lyotard is spellbound by the formula-‘presenting the unpresentable’ and by the idea of negative presentation. According to him in painting artists want to make clear that there is something conceivable that is absolutely not to be seen and not to be made visible. He ponders over how it is possible to make visible that which is impossible to see and answers the question by referring to Kant who talks about ‘formlessness’ as a possible indication of the unpresentable. According to Lyotard, Kant discusses abstraction when describing imagination experiencing infinity. Infinity is a negative presentation. Following Kant’s view that experience of the sublime is the result of a subjective encounter with something which is absolutely great that one can theoretically reflect on the linguistic means which can be used by a subject who wants either to express the sublime or to evoke the sublime in a receiver. The subject is confronted with an overwhelming feeling.

The most basic way of representing the sublime is in representing sublime objects. The linguistic way of representing the sublime signals a desire to represent something and is an avowal of the failure of language. The sublime allows the readers to correlate miscellaneous linguistic phenomena and perceives them in a new light.

The sublime is not a genre. It is a fluid movement across generic boundaries. Nevertheless, the sublime has an effective structure and rhetoric. So it might be thought of as an extended mode. The investigator tries to study The Gita in The Mahabharata in the light of the idea of the sublime. Here words evoke the spiritual by creating an atmosphere that is impossible to make in some other way. Art inspired by the aesthetic of sublime creates powerful effects by combinations which are astonishing, unusual and shocking. In the Mahabharata, the concept of transcendental- self or Atman serves as an example of presenting the unpresentable in Postmodern terminology. Following Kant’s view that experience of the sublime is a result of the subjective encounter with something which is absolutely menacing. One can theoretically reflect on the linguistic means that can be used by a subject who wants either to express the sublime or to evoke the sublime in a receiver. Then he is confronted with something absolutely great or absolutely menacing and expressing an overwhelming feeling. Arjuna confronts such a situation in the battlefield. He is placed in a situation in which his whole way of life is challenged and the only way out of this situation is to opt for a course of action based on the strength of one’s intuitive perception of reasons to support them. Arjuna encounters such an experience in the battlefield when he beholds Krishna in his divine form. It is described in The Mahabharata in the following words:

And Krishna stood transformed before his bhakta speaking from many mouths, seeing with numberless eyes, carrying countless weapons, wearing divine raiment and garlands, heavenly perfumes, of endless visions and marvels irradiate, boundless. His face was turned everywhere, the nebulae were his ornaments. If a thousand suns rose together into the sky, their light might approach the splendour of that being.12

This gives Arjuna an absolutely overwhelming and menacing feeling. In other words he experiences the sublime, the formless-transcendental, imperishable which no words or form of art can express.

The Sublime in Samkhya Yoga

Arjuna is confused about his choice to fight .his mental agony and conflict of ideas is clear from his talks to Krishna. He says that nothing on earth or heaven can cure him of his conflicts. The effect of this sorrow on him is that it physically disables him. He is numbed or dazed intellectually. Krishna tries to arouse Arjuna from his inertia or lethargy. The verse 12 in Samkhya Yoga states, “Never was there a time when I did not exist, or you, or these rulers of men. Nor shall all of us cease to be hereafter.”13 It states that existence is never non-existent, including the individual and the whole humanity. Verse 16 in Samkhya Yoga says, “The unreal can never come into existence, and the real can never cease to be. The wise philosophers have known the truth about these categories (of the real and the unreal).”14

The idea of existence is made clearer in this verse .The terms ‘bhava’ and ‘abhava’ (becoming and non-becoming) are used in the Nyaya-Vaishesika Philosophy. In this system, the term ‘abhava’ (non-becoming) is the last of the seven ‘padarthas’. Even ‘sat’ existence (existence reality) is not different from the notion of ‘dravya’(substance),hence even the mind is a substance. Substance in this context and meaning is considered –‘paramanu’(basic building blocks of matter)Verse 20 of Samkhya Yoga states, “He (this self) has neither birth nor death. Nor does he cease to be, having been in existence before: unborn, eternal, permanent and primeval, he is never killed when the body is killed.”15

The sublime self is never born and never dies. It is sublime, not subject to any process of evolution. The sublime nature of the self is spoken of as having no materiality, it has a transcendental existence. Verse 25 of Samkhya Yoga states the nature of self,” Knowing Him (self) to be unmanifest,inconceivable,and unmodifiable,it is improper to mourn for him.”16 The eternal self is beyond thought. The same idea is dealt in the Upanishads as the fourth state-‘turiya’.

All forms of manifestations are real only in certain frames of reference. Such realities are referred to as ‘Maya’ in the ‘Vedanta’. The manifested is bounded on either side by the unmanifested, and both ends dissolve into ‘Purusha’,(pure spirit).According to Sankhya Philosophy the ‘Mulaprakriti’(root-nature avyakta) in the event of death or dissolution the three stages of beginning, middle and end merge without differentiation into the notion of ‘avyakta’ (ambiguity).

Karma Yoga- the Sublime Action

This chapter deals with the ‘karma yoga’ or sublime action. ‘karma’ and ‘yoga’ go naturally together. The sublime action in a man who is able to restrain the self by the self is to be understood as forces of life acting them out in him. What is necessary has to be permitted, as breathing is necessary for a living organism. The more fundamental the actions are, the less will be the choices left. Verse 4 in Karma Yoga states, “By non-performance of action a man does not gain the state of spiritual passivity (or the state of egoless, actionless called ‘naishkarmya’). By mere external abandonment (samnyasa).He does not attain to perfection.”17

The term ‘naishkarmya’ does not mean a physical non-performance of any action. It is a detachment of the mind in which the mind itself ceases to be and one becomes one with the ‘atman’. When the ego identifies itself with the body, he becomes an actor or one who involves in works. In the egoless state one becomes a pure witness. The two concepts dealt with in this section are; samnyasa (renunciation) and ‘sidhi’ (attainment). We are familiar with ‘sidhies’ in the context of ‘yoga’ and samnysa in the context of rituals. The central idea put forth in the verse is that one cannot have ends and means separate. They are organically and unitively linked. It is a state of the observer becoming the observed. Verse 5 in Karma Yoga states, “No man can ever remain even for a moment without performing any action. The impulses of nature deprive him of freedom in this respect and compel him to act.”18 In this verse it is clear in this verse that the motive drives for all actions are the natural propensity (guna) of the person.

The Gita takes action in its most comprehensive sense here as the binding of the entire humanity. ‘Karma’ or necessary actions arise out of a situational need for action. Such action is even deemed to be a form of worship. Therefore, Arjuna is called upon to act in response to a situational necessity. Verse 8 in Karma Yoga states, “Perform your prescribed duties. For, action is superior to inaction. If you are totally inactive, even the survival of the body would become impossible.”19 Here the necessity and inevitability of action are made clear. In the first line action is said to be ‘jyayah’(superior) to inaction. The word ‘nityam’ refers to actions where there is no option left. Even the body metabolism is a function and therefore action. ‘Karma’ has to be understood in a comprehensive sense in this chapter. Verses 42&43 in karma yoga make the sublime nature of ‘karma’ clearer. It is written, “The senses are great, they say. Superior to senses is the mind, and superior even to the mind is the intellect. What is superior even to the intellect is He, the Atman.”20 It is added, “Thus knowing Him who is superior even to the Buddhi and controlling the lower self with the higher, kill that tough enemy in the form of lust, O mighty-armed Arjuna!”21

Here sublime action is acting in response to a situational necessity, detached to both the means and ends. Communion with the spirit purifies the intellect, mind and senses. It liberates the senses from the dominance of its basic nature and gives an impersonal point of view. Non-attachment is possible only when the mind assumes the attitude a witness. This is possible only when the mind can shed its basic natural tendency to see the world as an object of instinctive satisfaction or sensual enjoyment. The experience of the sublime action involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and the doer of the action ceases to exist. There will be only the action, or a process or a state where the observer and the observed merge into a unified consciousness.

Jnana- Yoga as the Sublime Knowledge

This chapter deals with the elusive, subtle and sublime knowledge. Time and duration are discussed here as the fourth dimensional aspect of the subject of wisdom. Wisdom has a dynamic nature here. It is notable that after discussing all the ritual practices and social divisions in different chapters, it aptly concludes that wisdom like fire burns all dross of action and rituals in it. This chapter makes clear the concept of ‘samnyasa’ or renunciation. The idea of renunciation is to be understood as life lived with the insight of ‘yoga’ or unity of understanding and wisdom as the perennial way of life. Verse 6 of Jnana yoga tells, “Though birth less and deathless, and the lord of the all the beings as well, yet I (the eternal Being) take birth by My inherent mysterious power (Atma-mayaya) employing the pure or Sattva aspect of My material Nature (Prakrit).”22 Manifestations of the absolute are described here in terms of relativism. The ‘avatara’ of the divine or coming into existence of the unmanifest into existence, ’sambhavam’(becoming) is the subject matter discussed here. The word ‘maya’ has reference to the ‘Vedanta’ which means unreal, that is the world is unreal. ‘Prikriti’ (nature) is treated as a co-partner in the principle of ‘maya’. Manifestation of the absolute is like a transparent crystal placed on a red silk appears to be red, though it is only in appearance.

The Gita is not concerned with social obligations but it is concerned with the harmony between the inner and outer life of an individual which is the yoga to lead a person to know the Sublime. In verse 14 of Jnana yoga it is stated, “Actions do not affect Me. Nor have any desire for the fruits of action. Whoever knows Me to be so, is not bound by Karma.”23

This verse discusses the wisdom of the absolute or the knowledge of the sublime. The subject matter of discussion is the possible ways of activity open to a man who lives in the relativist society. Here it is made clear that the sublime remains untouched by all actions. There is no desire for any result of an action. It is in understanding such neutrality that the way to understand the absolute or the sublime is found. Here the action and doer of the action are free from the bondage of action. Therefore, the sublime knowledge liberates a man from all bondages.

A wise man always revalues his position in society because he is constantly aware of the sublime. His life is full of wonder and mystery .No text of the past has made it definite because it defies all predictions and representations. A wise man is simply aware of the knowledge of sublime. In verse 18 of Jnana Yoga Krishna says, “He who sees work in ‘no work’ and ‘no work’ in work, he is wise among men. Even while doing all work, he remains established in Yoga.”24 This verse epitomises the sublime knowledge. There is an obvious paradox in the verse. It is better to leave the paradox as such because the sublime knowledge cannot be expressed logically in language. It is the meeting ground of all paradoxes. Such paradoxes can be understood only with the knowledge of the sublime. The heightening of the mystery in The Gita enhances its glory. Mystery is inevitable in a text dealing with the knowledge of the sublime. It is only the wise who is clear about the non-duality that understands the sublime.

In the present context, it is stated that there are ambivalent, I-polar aspects to the soul of a man which are related as the instinct with intelligence. What instinct is convinced of may not be acceptable to intelligence. The soul or the absolute sublime is the meeting place of opposites. Wisdom is the knowledge of the sublime. The last phrase ‘Kritsnakarmakrit’ ( while still engaged in all possible kinds of action) shows that one set of actions has to be reduced in terms of the other and both cancelled out into a certain unitive neutrality, irrespective of whatever actual or virtual activities are implied in a situation. The doer of an action engages himself in the action in such a way that he does not depend on anything outside it. He is always a contented man, free from worries and expectations. This idea is made clear in verse 21 of Jnana Yoga Lord Krishna tells Arjuna, “One who is free from desires, whose mind is well-controlled, and who is without any sense of ownership, incurs no sin from works, as his actions are merely physical.”25 Here all the actions in which a person engages physically are in a nature of reflex actions. The phrases “yatachittatma” (one of subjugated relational self), “chitta” in the verse are the aspect of consciousness that is capable of attaching to an idea or object, and “aparigrahah” (without possessiveness) denote two additional requisites for a man of wisdom, giving a deeper qualification than just being free from attachments.

Knowledge of the sublime or wisdom is said to be superior to all other forms of sacrifice. All the sacrifices have their origin in some sort of action. They are necessarily dualistic in that respect. The knowledge of the sublime transcends such conditions.

Verse 33 of Jnana Yoga tells, “O scorcher of enemies sacrifice involving knowledge is superior to sacrifice with material objects: for, O son of partha, all works without exception culminate in knowlegde.”26 A priest pours butter or burns valuable objects in a Vedic sacrifice. The verse here categorically states that wisdom is far more important than all such practices. The expression ‘parisamapyate’ (comes to a supreme culmination) gives primary importance to wisdom or knowledge of the sublime. All actions are finally burnt away or discarded by the unitive wisdom of the ‘yogi’.

This idea is made clearer in the verse 37 of Jnana Yoga. Arjuna is told, “Just as well-kindled fire reduces a heap of fire-wood to ashes, so does the fire of divine knowledge reduce all sins (works) to ashes.”27 The relation between action and wisdom are not simply mechanically opposite but when there is wisdom or the knowledge of the sublime, action vanishes as darkness vanishes in the presence of light. Then there is only the pure intelligence without any duality.

Karma -Samnyasa-Yoga – the Poetics of Sublime

There are six systems in Indian Philosophy:

1) Nyaya-Vaiseshika (School of Philosophy that deals with life as a bondage, suffering and liberation of the soul) 2) Samkhya-yoga (One of the oldest systems of Indian Philosophy that maintains clear-cut dualism between ‘purusha’ and ‘prakriti’)3) Purva Mimamsa (School of Philosophy that regards The Veda as eternal and authorless) 4) Uttara Mimamsa( The last part of the Vedas which consists of the Upanishads).

There are two sides to each of the four systems; one side is rational, while the other deals with practices. However, the final doctrinal aspects which belong to The Vedanta are restated by sages like Vyasa. There are opposing tendencies and altering movement from orthodoxy to heterodoxy or from reason to faith in the growth of the spiritual and philosophical thought of India. ‘Nyaya’ is rational, logical and orthodox in origin, while ‘Vaiseshika’ is heterodox and religious in origin. Samkhya is rational and heterodox while Yoga is theistic and permits an ‘Isvara’ as an alternative for its discipline. There is interplay of atheism and theism between these two schools. ‘Purvamimamsa’ represents the orthodoxy which is primarily concerned with ‘Vedic ‘rituals. The ‘Uttaramimamsa’ is neither heterodox nor orthodox as it is found in ‘the Gita’. The complete meaning of the wisdom or the poetics of sublime in The Gita is one that the reader has to formulate for himself. Verse 4 & 5 of chapter 5 in ‘Communion Through Renunciation’ (the karma-samnyasa-yoga) it is stated, “It is only the childish and not the wise that speak of samkhya (or knowledge accompanied by abandonment of work) and Yoga (or communion through detached and dedicated work) as different. A person well established, even one of these, attains the end that is the common goal of both (That is, in the means they employ, they look different, but their end or ultimate purpose is identical).”28 It is added, “The state which one attains by Samkhya, the same state is attained by Yoga too. He, who sees both ‘samkhya’ and ‘yoga’ as one, sees indeed.”29 This verse is an attempt to look upon pure and practical aspects of life unitively. Here ‘samnyasa’ is not rejection of action purposefully or wilfully but it is seeing action through inaction and vice versa. There is a disowning of attachment in a doer of the action. The Gita is emphatic about abolishing the distinction between samkhya and yoga.

The self or Atma’ is pure, transparent and untainted. Lower instinctive aspects of the self are transcended. The self has its movements in a plane which is independent of the worldly mundane activities. It is in this sense it says that the usual activities of the life does not affect the self or ‘Atma’. Verses 8 &9 of karma-samnyasa-yoga state, “I (the self) do naught: only the senses are occupied with their objects –this should be the conviction of one who is detached in action and established in the truth ( that he is the Atman), even while seeing, hearing touching ,smelling, eating, conversing, holding, walking, giving up, winking and even sleeping.”30

These verses make clear the vital, automatic and reflex functions which are incidental to physical existence. All such actions take place on a plane of biological order involving no attachment or identification. They are treated as incidental to social life in general by a man of wisdom. In other words, a man of wisdom dissociates himself and maintains detached neutrality.

The self is an active or passive non-agency. The self is characterized by perfect neutrality. It is well expressed in the verses 14&15 of Karma-samnyasa-yoga, “In regard to all beings in this world, the sovereign soul is not the cause of the sense of agency, nor of actions, nor of the fruition of actions. It is nature that does all this.”31 Lord Krishna adds, “The all-pervading Being does not accept the sins or merits of any one. Knowledge of the Divine Spirit is veiled in ignorance, and therefore, beings are duluded.”32 This verse refers to the sublime as the supreme in the phrase ‘prabhu’ (supreme). A ‘yogi’ who is untouched by his mundane existence is aware of the sublime. He is aware of the self or soul as the sublime and this sublime is ‘vibhu’ (the pervading one). The sublime is innocent and free from all limitations. There is a total ruling out of all forms of attachments in action in the verse here, it is clear in the line, “na karmaphalasmyogam”(non-attachment to actions) emphasising the non-duality of the sublime.

Jnana-vijnana Yoga as the Poetics of Sublime

This chapter is an attempt to understand the absolute nature of reality or the sublime not in terms of philosophy but through intuition and contemplative synthesis. Contemplation is possible from an identity of subject and object through intuition. Sublime is revealed in its own light. There is a bi-polar relation between the ‘yogi’ and the absolute or sublime. Knowledge of the sublime results from such a relationship which refers to the immanent and transcendental, subjective and objective, pure and practical aspects of reality at the same time.

Verse 5 of Jnana-vijnana Yoga tells, “This O mighty armed, is My lower nature. Know that, as different from it, is My higher nature forming the source of all Jivas and support of the whole universe.”33 The two aspects of the absolute or the sublime are referred to here by the terms ‘apara’(immanent) and ‘para’ (transcendent). These dual aspects are treated as the nature of the absolute unitively. The phrase ‘dharyate’(sustains) derive from the same root ‘dharma’ but it does not suggest physical support of the world by the absolute, but it is the principle of existence or life force running through the phenomenal world.

Raja-Vidya Raja-Guhya Yoga as the Poetics of Sublime

The nature of the subject matter of this chapter is clear from the title itself. It is made clear that the absolute or sublime is detached to both good and bad alike. This neutrality is the highest level of the sublime. The importance of knowing the absolute as the sublime principle is made clear in this chapter.

Verse 4 of Raja-Vidya Raja-Guhya Yoga states, “All the world is pervaded by Me, the Unmanifested Being. All objects subsist in Me, but I in them.”34 The sublime nature of the absolute is brought out in this verse. It is insisted that the absolute is sublime without form, it is unmanifest. It says that beings exist in the absolute but the absolute does not exist in them. The relation between absolute and existence is a wonder and mystery. This sublime nature of the absolute is heightened in the next verse 5 of Raja-Vidya Raja-Guhya Yoga,” And yet objects do not abide in Me! Behold My mysterious Divine Power! Source and support of all objects, and yet not abiding in (i.e. limited by) them!”35 Manifested beings do not have existence in the absolute. The phrase ‘mamatma’ (self of the absolute) makes the relation subtler still, as this self which is said to be the vital urge is the emanation of all beings.

Kshetra-kshetrajna-Vibhaga Yoga as the Poetics of Sublime

This chapter is concerned with the most subtle aspect of the sublime. Arjuna puts the question in three couples of concepts; one concept is based on the idea of ‘prakriti(nature) and ‘purusha’(spirit),another pair is based on the concept of ‘kshetra’(the field) and the ‘kshetrajna’(knower of the field). The third pair is subtler that is ‘jneyam’ (that which is to be known) and ‘jnanam’(knowledge or wisdom). It can be seen that concepts belonging to different branches of knowledge are brought together for highlighting the idea of the sublime.

Verse 1 of Kshetra-kshetrajna-Vibhaga Yoga states, “This body O son of Kunti, is called the Kshetra, the field (because the fruits of action are reaped in it). He who knows it (as his property) is the Kshetrajna or the spirit who knows the field. So say those versed in this subject.”36 The two definitions here, one of the field and the other as the knower of the field are the different aspects of the self or the sublime. The duality here is not to emphasize their distctness but for the purpose of discussion. In the next verse, the field and the knower of the field are treated unitively. In verse 2 of Kshetra-kshetrajna-Vibhaga Yoga it is said, “Know Me, O scion of the Bharata race, to be the Kshtrajna(the Spirit) in all Kshetras (bodies). The knowledge of the distinction between Kshetra and Kshetrajna alone is real knowledge according to me.”37

This verse highlights the nature of wisdom or sublime. Knowing the sublime is to understand the relation between the field and knower of the field. Lack of understanding this leads to many errors of judgement. It is the field that evolves and not the knower of the field. While the ‘samkhya’ philosophers thought of the field and the knower of the field as separate, here it is presented as belonging to one unified cetralised value. The knower of the field suggests unity but when it is said that he is in every field, it may suggest multiplicity. Thus, unity and multiplicity are counter poised, or set against each other to cancel out both in favour of the absolute sublime. The sublime is the only subject matter of wisdom.

The poetics of the sublime reaches its height in the verses 14, 15&16 of Kshetra-kshetrajna-Vibhaga Yoga. It says, “By His power the faculties of the senses function, but sense organs He has none. He is the support of all things, but they do not affect him. He transcends Nature and its functions, but these constitute the objects for His enjoyment.”38

The sublime is explained in paradoxical statements in this verse. It says that it is in the senses but it does not have senses. It is possible to experience the sense of sight in dreaming without the use of sense organs. In the second instance, it says that it is unattached but it supports all. The idea will be clear. The space is understood as the supporter of all things to exist. The third paradox is that it says that it has no qualities but perceives all qualities. This idea becomes clear when it is understood that the absolute is sublime. It has no modalities of nature called ‘gunas’. Arjuna is told, “He is within and without all beings. Though unmoving, He looks like one moving (because He is everywhere). He is both far and near- far to the ignorant and near to the knowing ones. Owing to subtlety, He cannot be known like gross objects.”39

Here again there are three paradoxes. The absolute is said to be the sublime principle which can only be known but never explained in language. Therefore it is said, “He (the Brahman) whom aspirants seek to know, is the impartial whole, yet does He seem to dwell in all beings as if divided into many. He is the generator and supporter of all beings, and their destroyer too.”40

Here also the first paradox is the undivided becoming divided. It suggests that all divisions are only in appearance. The second paradox is between ‘bhutabhartri’(supporter of existence) and ‘jneyam’(what is to be known). The third pair of paradox is between that which holds back and release for expansion. It is the centrifugal and centripetal principle in science. All the examples in this verse are meant to bring out the underlying idea of equalisation, neutralisation and cancelling out of counterparts into the central idea of the sublime.

The idea of the sublime is concluded in this chapter in verses-31& 32 of Kshetra-kshetrajna-VibhagaYoga. Verse 31 is, “That highest Self, being the immutable and unoriginated Spirit beyond Nature, is free from all action and stain, though dwelling in the body.”41 Verse 32 tells,” Just as the all-pervading Akasa, because of its subtlety, is not stained by anything, so this Atman, though abiding in all bodies, is never affected by any impurity.”42

Conclusion

The self or ‘I’ feeling of an individual is the individualised ‘I’ ness of egocentricity. It is a socially conditioned state and all conditioned states are non-existent. Therefore, ego has no existence. The ego and experience of it are founded on ignorance. Most of the people are engaged in activities to obtain self-gratification. A wise man realizes that the physical organism and mind are integral parts of the phenomenal universe. Changing and becoming are part of the universal system. A wise man will also manifest these factors. He will act like any other person in the worldly affairs, as it is a physical necessity of existence. A ‘yogi’ maintains an inner serenity even in the midst of such activities. He will keep himself a neutral hero.

The self is equated with the meaning or value (‘ananda’) of existence that operates within the wide field of consciousness (‘chit’).It ranges from the infinitude of the unconscious to the finitude of conscious awareness which is called the pure consciousness (‘turiya’). In this quality of awareness no duality or possibility of duality exists. The dichotomy of subjects and objects is not present in it. In addition to that there is a vast area of subjective awareness which includes the dream state. Finally, there is awareness of the division between the known and knowledge. Knowledge can be subtle or concrete. The concrete aspect refers to the empirical experience of the physical world. Only when all of the above aspects of consciousness are included in a unified notion of the self, there is awareness of the self. One who experiences the self as being comprised of the concrete, the subjective, the unconscious and the transcendental has no difficulty to understand that the concreteness of one’s own entity is one with the concreteness of the physical universe. In the same way he is aware that consciousness of the objective world and the meaning of the cosmos are not different from the consciousness experienced within his own personal self. This awareness is obtained only through meditation to realize the non-differentiation between personal and universal self. A wise man having this insight will be able to see all actions as part of the flux of becoming which is natural to the phenomenal aspect of the universal self.

In the process of becoming, there are various movements that include contraction to a point, expansion into wide dimensions and motion upwards, downward and horizontally. In all these natural functions and their outcome, there is no agency that wills. The varieties are constituted in such a way that physical and chemical properties are produced without intervention of any personal will. People attribute personification to natural events like the ‘sun shine’. In fact it is the nature of the sun to shine. There is no ‘will’ that directs it. The sunshine and biological process belong to the same order of physical events. Man is an integral part of the universe.

The mind is capable of feeling, reasoning and willing. Feeling, for example, is a response to an experience as pleasure or pain. Mostly people seek pleasurable experiences and try to avoid pain. Usually experiences are self-related. One says, “I am happy”, “I am angry” and so on. In all cases, there is an unmistakable identification with the ‘I’ consciousness. Therefore, almost all transactions in life are structured and modified by three aspects of the mind; feeling, reasoning and willing. The ‘I’ consciousness assumes the role of an agency as the enjoyer, knower and actor but the Gita says that such identifications are mistaken identities of the self. The true self is pure consciousness. When consciousness is mentioned, it does not suggest the awareness of knowing things, people, events, or ideas. Knowledge is not supposedly available without the dichotomy of the knower and the known. The Gita rejects this view and suggests that all effects are the modulations of the consciousness. Pure knowledge is a state of the observer becoming the observed, when there is only observation without the knower, knowledge and the known.

The self can be compared to the sky and the sun. The sky is the universal concept of the void. The Budhist School of Nihilism compares ‘nirvana’ (emancipation) to the great void of ‘sunyata’ (nothingness), it agrees with the non-qualitative absolute-‘nirguna’(free from all attributes). It has no function. The second analogy given is of the sun. The sun has no particular motive. It simply radiates its effulgence. Yet so many things are caused by the sheer presence of the sun, such as the motion of the planets, the earth becoming hospitable, the solar energy getting into various kinds of alchemy to life of all sorts on this planet. In the same way in the mere presence of the self, many actions take place but the self does not involve in them as the agent of the action. According to the Gita a man of wisdom attains a state of transcending all actions and the urge to act. In a state of absorption, the witnessing consciousness has nothing to witness except itself which is called ‘atmajnana’ (knowledge of self realization).The pure existence of the self is seen manifested in and as the existence of individual entities. Such entities come and go. Differentiations of the undifferentiated may occur in time and space and fade into the unknown.

In terms of pure duration, the existence of things is to be treated as relative reality. Only the self has absolute existence. The self is the source of all awareness and nothing can illuminate the self that is not its own pure awareness. All items of awareness at the individual level originate at a certain point in time within the consciousness. They dissolve into the same consciousness after the relative existence. The individual self awareness is relative, though it may seem to be ones own. All individual entities of awareness are illuminated by the absolute or sublime.

This introduces the readers to the holistic vision of total awareness of the self. A clear understanding of thise will enable one to discover the relevance of individualised existence. These forms emerge as the result of individual notions that imply a number of specific values. Such values range from joy, satisfaction, sense of fulfilment or peace. There is a division of awareness of the self as the unconditioned and conditioned.It is called ‘nirupadikam’(unconditional) and ‘sopadikam’(conditional) respectively. When a man observes a pot and comments “this is a pot”, the pot becomes a means (upadi) which modulates his awareness into the specific features of it.

Therefore, the world is being and non-being together. Its beingness belongs to pure knowledge and its non-beingness to ignorance. In order to reach at the notion of the unconditioned self, one has to be able to think of the immanence of a consciousness that has the quality of transcendence. When the pure consciousness is confined to a limit, it produces the central locus and a boundary. The central locus produces the notion of individualisation and that notion is recognized as the ‘I’ in the case of human beings. Repeated recourse to such confinement and recurrence of the idea of ‘I’ makes one egotistically oriented. Thereafter the ego alone becomes real and the experience is considered valid only when it is an affectation and expression of the ego. In other words, a person becomes a conditioned consciousness and a stranger to the unconditioned consciousness from which his individuation is derived. In fact the unconditioned state of awareness is the reality and it is always the present.

The self can be compared to a light that can see and is always witnessing whatever it illuminates. Its experience of such illumination ranges from the witnessing of empirical transactions with gross objects in the wakeful state. In and all through experiences runs a golden thread of pure consciousness. This is not affected by the changing modes of consciousness that occur in the shifting of interest from one item of experience to another. Comprehension of this pure consciousness is obliterated in the minds of most of the people because people are so much engrossed by things illuminated by the self.

‘I’ consciousness in notions such as “I am happy”, the term ‘I’ stands for the ego. Although its epistemological status is that of the non-self, the ego is neither the non-self nor the self. It is a negative shadow of the self. Therefore consciousness neither refers to the cognizing agency of the ego nor to any factor of the non-self made specifically interesting by any particular value. Such a state may be described as awareness of an awareness that does not necessitate the dichotomy of the seer and the seen. The non-differentiated consciousness of the self prevails at all times. It is like the ocean that though seems to take many forms of waves never in fact changes its fundamental nature as water. The non-differentiated state of consciousness can be identified as self-realization by recapturing. Intellectually the nature of the self can be said to mean the pure existence that neither originates nor does cease to exist over time. What one perceives through the action of the senses and conceives by the action of the mind comes into existence at a certain point in time. It follows that the existence of such perceptions and conceptions are ,in terms of pure existence, things of relative validity. Knowledge of the existence of such entities originates from the stream of consciousness and vanishes after presenting the idea of the objects. From the above it is evident that most items of our consciousness are only relative notions and not an ever-abiding awareness.

A wise man has an understanding of the transactions in the world of objectivity. He is no less sharp in worldly affairs. He may have a better sensibility to appreciate but he is cognizant of the fact that it is only an ego dealing with non-self entities. Actual knowledge is to see the rope as a rope. It is called ‘yatharthajnana’ (the real knowledge). It is the beingness of knowledge. It is not necessary for a great teacher to come and inform that the right knowledge is to see the rope as rope. Knowledge of the sublime is calling one’s attention to what one misses in the endless pursuit of details and precision in the empirical world of search. Knowledge of the sublime enables the individual to transcend the empirical and transactional those are the fixations in which it is riveted. This is the most basic way of representing the sublime in language that invokes the feeling of sublime in the reader. The sublime allows the readers to correlate miscellaneous linguistic phenomena and perceive them in a different light. But the most interesting aspect of the sublime is the fact that it seems to embody a very particular theory of language and a complete mode of relationships between the participants in the process of communication. In this model of language, notion such as identification, imagination, emotions, and communication play the main role.

NOTES
1 Monroe C Beardsley, "History of Aesthetics". Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Vol. 1, (London: Macmillan, 1973.) 27.
2 - - - 30-32.
3 - - - 35-38.
4 - - - 39-41.
5 - - - 49.
6 - - - 53.
7 - - - 59.
8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard
(London:Macmillan, 1951) 18- 32.
9 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1975)39.
10 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 58.
11 Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. (Stanford University Press, 1994)19.
12 20-22.
13 Swami Tapsyananda, Srimad Bagavad Gita, (Sriramakrishna Math,Madras,1984)46.
14 Swami Tapsyananda,46.
15 Swami Tapsyananda,47.
16 Swami Tapsyananda, 49.
17 Swami Tapsyananda, 51.
18 Swami Tapsyananda,Swami Tapsyananda, 87.
19 Swami Tapsyananda,88.
20 Swami Tapsyananda,89.
21 Swami Tapsyananda,103.
22 Swami Tapsyananda,103.
23 Swami Tapsyananda, 119.
24 1 Swami Tapsyananda,22.
25 Swami Tapsyananda,124.
26 Swami Tapsyananda,125.
27 Swami Tapsyananda,130.
28 Swami Tapsyananda, 132.
29 Swami Tapsyananda,149.
30 Swami Tapsyananda,149.
31 Swami Tapsyananda,151.
32 Swami Tapsyananda,153.
33 Swami Tapsyananda,153.
34 Swami Tapsyananda,195.
35 Swami Tapsyananda,236.
36 Swami Tapsyananda,237.
37 Swami Tapsyananda,237.
38 Swami Tapsyananda,337.
39 Swami Tapsyananda,337.
40 Swami Tapsyananda, 342.
41 Swami Tapsyananda,343.
41 Swami Tapsyananda,350.
42 Swami Tapsyananda, 350.

kabeerspeakz2u

jk

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

osho

osho

link

Friday, September 17, 2010

you and me

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

POSTMODERNISM AND THE MAHABHARATA-A STUDY IN SOCIO-POLITICAL ETHICS

Pages