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Introducing the Maha¯ bha¯ rata ¯ BHA JAYA: PERFORMANCE IN EPIC MAHA ¯ RATA enliven class discussion. That said, one would want to trust By Kevin McGrath that the author of the book selected were introducing the Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2011 Maha¯ bha¯ rata in an up-to-date manner, and one would wan...

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Introducing the Mahābhārata Alf Hiltebeitel

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Introducing the Maha¯ bha¯ rata ¯ BHA ¯ RATA JAYA: PERFORMANCE IN EPIC MAHA

enliven class discussion. That said, one would want to trust that the author of the book selected were introducing the Maha¯ bha¯ rata in an up-to-date manner, and one would want that discussion to be informed and critical. I will be taking as my yardstick to being up-to-date the monograph-length article by Thennilapuram Mahadevan (2008) that any of these authors could have accessed had they followed references in their own bibliographies, but which only one of them (Hegarty, 45 n. 102) cites, with the noncommittal remark that “the interesting speculations on Brahmin migration from north to south by T. P. Mahadevan . . . promise to open up interesting new lines of enquiry.” Hegarty did not engage with Mahadevan’s findings, or with subsequent discussions that have done so. It will be a point of this article to show that, were Mahadevan’s main findings considered, each of these books could have avoided unconvincing arguments. Mahadevan has proposed an intervention in South Asian studies that affects knowledge of the early Maha¯ bha¯ rata, and I have found his main arguments convincing and useful. As far as I know, although his study has provoked a favorable buzz, it remains unreviewed. It will be brought out soon, revised and re-titled, as the first book to be published in the new series titled “India’s Sanskrit Epics: Text and Tradition” by Motilal Banarsidass in Delhi. It is by no means introductory, but it is, I believe, a trustworthy account of the introduction of the Maha¯ bha¯ rata from north to south India. I will conclude that a trustworthy and up-to-date introductory book on the Maha¯ bha¯ rata remains a challenge and a desideratum. Where Mahadevan’s “On the Southern Recension of the Maha¯ bha¯ rata, Brahman Migrations, and Bra¯ hmı¯ Paleography” (2008) could have alerted these authors that new ground had been broken was in its presentation of new evidence regarding the writtenness and dating of both of the Maha¯ bha¯ rata’s Northern and Southern recensions.1 In Mahadevan’s words, Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ Brahmins “from the Antarvedi area of the Gan·ga¯ -Yamuna¯ doab” left the north2 “with a version of the epic resonant with the *S´a¯ rada text of the Maha¯ bha¯ rata,” and arrived “in the Tamil country in time to be attested in the Sangam poetry both as players in the poems and their composers”; they then fashioned “the *Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ version of the Southern Recension in the half millennium or so after their arrival, by the Kal·abhra Interregnum” (2008, 85).3 That is, during the Can·kam (Sangam) period, Brahmins from north India called Pu¯ rvas´ikhas (“those who wear their hair tuft in front”) must have brought a written Northern Maha¯ bha¯ rata manuscript with them when they went south that was close in content to the

By Kevin McGrath Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2011 Pp. 112. $14.95. ¯ ¯ HEROIC KR·S·N · A: FRIENDSHIP IN EPIC MAHABHARATA

By Kevin McGrath Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2013 Pp. 165. $19.95.

DISORIENTING DHARMA: ETHICS AND THE AESTHETICS ¯ BHA ¯ RATA OF SUFFERING IN THE MAHA

By Emily T. Hudson New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 Pp. 268. $44.95 paper, $115 hardcover. RELIGION, NARRATIVE AND PUBLIC IMAGINATION IN SOUTH ASIA: PAST AND PLACE IN THE SANSKRIT ¯ BHA ¯ RATA MAHA

By James Hegarty London: Routledge, 2012 Pp. 219. $54.95 paper, $145.90 hardcover. ¯ BHA ¯ RATA: A READER’S GUIDE TO BEGINNING THE MAHA THE FRAME STORIES

By James W. Earl Woodland Hills, CA: South Asian Studies Association, 2011 Pp. 132. $21.50. Reviewer: Alf Hiltebeitel The George Washington University 2106 G St. NW Washington, DC 20052 In the last few years, during which exploration of the Maha¯ bha¯ rata has burgeoned in monographs and articles and its importance grown in worldwide recognition, several authors have sought to respond to the need for a book that could introduce the epic to first readers, and not incidentally to the English-speaking college classroom where single courses devoted to the epic have begun to proliferate. These are probably the intentions of only one of the five books and one monograph-length article under review here, the book by Earl, but I approach all five books under an introductory rubric. Two of the others, by Hegarty and Hudson, also suggest such a usage, and any of the five could be used to introduce the Maha¯ bha¯ rata to a college course by its manner of bringing the epic under a manageable focus that could Religious Studies Review, Vol. 41 No. 4, December 2015 © 2015 Rice University.

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shortest extant Northern manuscript in S´a¯ rada¯ script. And there, within a few centuries, a subsequent southern generation of that same community remade that Northern Maha¯ bha¯ rata into the Southern Recension.4 What Mahadevan names here the “*Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ version of the Southern Recension” was a thoroughgoing and erudite Southern makeover of a custodial nature,5 which was copied in at least two versions, because at least two of them must have been kept by separate branches of Pu¯ rvas´ikhas when the community bifurcated during the Kal·abhra Interregnum, c. 300 CE.6 One group departed for Kerala where they eventually become the well-known Kerala Brahmin community known as Nambudiris, and the other remained in Tamilnadu to become known as Co¯ ḻiya Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ s. Says Mahadevan:

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alterations by M, σ, T, and G, and thus earlier than M, since M, no less than the others, clearly modifies S.9 Mahadevan would thus no longer be able to say, as he did in 2008, that it “is legitimate to assume that the *Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ text and the Malayalam version must be one and the same” (2008, 33); or that the Malayalam version arises “directly from the template of the S´a¯ rada text” (34). Indeed, as just cited, the text of which he said in 2008 that “It is also concrete evidence that the *Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ version had risen in the Sangam country before the Kal·abhra Interregnum as a text of the entire Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ group” would be precisely Sukthankar’s S prior to the sequestration of any future M to Kerala (cf. Mahadevan 2008, 114 n. 106). S thus affords a reconstruction of a Southern Recension archetype completed by 300 CE before the Pu¯ rvas´ikhas bifurcated. It is a thoroughgoing written makeover of the “baseline” text that the CE reconstitutes, likewise written, as its N “archetype.” Nonetheless, M—as Mahadevan 2008 emphasizes10—does preserve the shortest extant manuscript version of the Southern Recension and bears important affinities to the S´a¯ rada¯ codex. Based on the improbability that two distant manuscript traditions, one from Kashmir and the other sequestered in Kerala, would be so similar unless they had a genetic relationship, this closeness between M and the S´a¯ rada¯ text as the two shortest scripted versions allowed Sukthankar to reconstruct the basic contents and contours of the PCE and provided Mahadevan’s chief clue to his historical validation of Sukthankar’s full stemma. It is thus not that Mahadevan’s 2008 article had everything figured out. Nor can all our differences be ironed out. Mahadevan speaks favorably of my proposition that the Maha¯ bha¯ rata was composed by out-of-sorts Brahmins during a short period of at most two generations between 150 BCE and the turn of the millennium (Hiltebeitel 2001, 19–21, 27–28, 169), but favors a “Hiltebeitel-Witzel model.” This is problematic for me, since the “Witzel” part includes Michael Witzel’s implausible idea (Witzel 2005) of “the epic deriving from a Vedic event, the Ten Kings Battle referred to at ŖV 7.18.5–10; 33.3, 5” (Mahadevan 2008, 7; cf. 20–21). For Mahadevan, N would originate not as what I understand to have been a new poetic composition, but as a “redaction” (7–8, 11, 19, 89, 109 n. 31) and “textualization” (8, 21, 86, 102 n. 10: “first textualization”) of something like Witzel’s protean oral epic.11 That is why I include reference to the ongoing discussion, mainly with me, that has followed Mahadevan 2008.12 Mahadevan is also aware that the Southern Recension poets must have had the Harivam · s´a within their purview as part of the 100,000-verse Mahabharata they refashioned, since their interpolations included material adapted from it.13 Yet I believe he underestimates the likelihood that the Northern Recension—his *S´a¯ rada¯ text— likewise was aware of an earlier-than-usually-thought

It is of the utmost importance to note that a *Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ text remains behind in the Tamil country . . . in the hands of the future S´o¯ ḻiya [Co¯ ḻiya] Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ s. It stands to reason that it would; it is unlikely that all traces of the epic would have left for the Malabar country with the future Nambudiri Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ s at the time of the Kal·abhra Interregnum. It is also concrete evidence that the *Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ version had risen in the Sangam country before the Kal·abhra Interregnum as a text of the entire Pu¯ rvas´kha¯ group: we see the text in the hands of its two branches, otherwise linked by the pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ tuft and rare Vedic s´akha¯ s.” (2008, 40; cf. 56–57)

The text that stays in Tamilnadu with today’s Co¯ ḻiyas becomes the matrix for the Southern Recension’s G (Grantha) and T (Telugu) adaptations, which were soon swelled, from the seventh century onwards, by additions introduced by a second migration from north to south of Brahmins called Aparas´ikha¯ s (“those who wear their tuft in back”).7 Mahadevan thus gives historical precision to the archetype that V. S. Sukthankar, the first editor-in-chief and architect of the stemma of the Poona Critical Edition (henceforth PCE), labels σ (sigma) to indicate the interaction with the Southern Recension of a Northern Recension text that begins to arrive in the peninsula with the Aparas´ikha¯ s.8 Meanwhile, the future Nambudiris, having recused to Kerala, had brought a copy with them that would be the basis of texts eventually written in Malayalam (M) script. Here, we come to a wrinkle that Mahadevan had not registered in 2008, which he and I cleared away in what I was amused to call our February 2011 “summit” in Middleburg, Virginia. Sukthankar, in a little noticed statement, had recognized what he named S as “the ultimate source from which all versions of the Southern Recension are, directly or indirectly, derived” (Sukthankar 1933, xxx). Sukthankar thereby substantiated the text with which σ interacted—which Mahadevan had unnecessarily renamed Σ and “the *Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ text” or “the *Pu¯ rvas´ikha¯ version” (2008, 99; 109 n. 66). Sukthankar’s S—the notation followed by all of the PCE’s editors—is thus the basis for subsequent

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pasts, but McGrath’s Heroic Kr·s·n·a plays this tune even more vividly. McGrath works from two questionable premises. The first is his idea of an “epic Maha¯ bha¯ rata,” a phrase he has worked not only into his two most recent book titles under review, but into the two titles (McGrath 2004, 2009) that preceded them. It is an expression whose legitimacy and usefulness were criticized in a review by Brodbeck of McGrath’s 2009 book, Strı¯: Women in Epic Maha¯ bha¯ rata. McGrath seems to have chosen to ignore Brodbeck’s important criticisms (Brodbeck 2010, 90) in his Jaya and Heroic Kr·s·n·a books, which abound in statements such as “the epic Maha¯ bha¯ rata can be considered an originally incidental text which depicted an idealized heroic Bronze Age culture during such an age of preliteracy” (McGrath 2011, 1); “I think of epic Maha¯ bha¯ rata as a poetry that is cast in an idealized and hypothetical Bronze Age, which is both preliterate and premonetary” (McGrath 2013, 8).21 In both books, one sees this premise play out in the epic’s war parvans, which

Harivam · s´a, since it self-consciously includes reference to the Harivam · s´a as its khila or “appendix” within its parvasam graha or table of contents.14 What is important for · this review, however, are the many solid ramifications of Mahadevan’s findings. Since what the PCE retrojects was uniformly reworked by S through all eighteen of the epic’s parvans or Books, this flattens out the archetypal N text as far its immense heterogeneity is concerned. Passages that the PCE includes are uniformly all there only because all are vouchsafed by S’s rewrite over them, which M, σ, G, and T all build upon.15 The PCE’s retrojected, basically N text has numerous relatively non-homogenized interests. Its heterogeneity is an indication that the first Maha¯ bha¯ rata poets felt no need to harmonize or eliminate what critics call contradictions and doubled passages. With heterogeneity as its trademark, doubled narrations and local overtures all count in a loose and relaxed or non-insistent larger picture. Even though Sukthankar had no sense of what Mahadevan would discover about the historical implications of his well-worked out stemma, Sukthankar found profoundly apt words to characterize the differences between S and N:

stand at the center and fore of epic Maha¯ bha¯ rata; . . . they are the nucleus of the poem and those early editor-poets appear to have left this vital part of the epic much as it must have been originally received, for the style of these Kuruks·etra texts is so unlike the rest of the epic. Thus the Kr·s·n·a-Kes´ava of these four books manifests a strongly archaic if not original tone and in these parts of the poem he is completely cast in the role of charioteer; and . . . his distinct amity with Arjuna is most active—in terms of the heroic—and his practical direction of much of the conflict is vividly depicted by the poet Sam · jaya. (McGrath 2013, 103)

The Southern recension impresses us thus by its precision, schematization, and thoroughly practical outlook. Compared with it, the Northern recension is distinctly vague, unsystematic, inconsequent, more like a story rather naively narrated, as we find in actual experience. (Sukthankar 1933, xxxvi; his italics).

Thanks to Sukthankar’s groundwork and Mahadevan’s intervention, the PCE’s identification of a S archetype allows us to appreciate the wilder “primary process” text close to what the earliest Maha¯ bha¯ rata must once have really been,16 and what S in its genuine custodial interests sought both to preserve and tame by secondary revision.17 Let us then identify two orientations to the text: one to its transmission and development after it was written, and the other toward its prehistory prior to its first writing.18 As we have seen, Mahadevan’s most significant findings are evidence-based, and apply to the early transmission over about three centuries only of a very large text, whose first traceable development consisted in a custodial makeover that kept most things largely as they were. Yet although Mahadevan makes it only a sidelight in his 2008 article, he joins those, most of whom seek to trace tribal pre-“histories” behind the epic,19 who imagine its “growth” through ancient centuries as a bardic oral epic with a Ks·atriya core. Attempts to account for some such kernel in a para-Vedic, Vedic, or Indo-European past will never be disproven, but, since there is no evidence for it, all they can do is offer different ways of whistling Dixie.20 In an earlier article (Hiltebeitel 2012–13), I have already included McGrath’s Jaya and Witzel (2005) among studies that tailor the Maha¯ bha¯ rata to dearly held but implausible

Since no one has yet found such a Bronze Age text, it would make more sense to speculate about it following some evidence of its existence. Much of what McGrath writes concerns a text that exists nowhere outside his head. The second premise, however, begins outside his head, for it devolves upon McGrath from one of the “two intellectual and methodological traditions” (2011, 10–11) he follows. In McGrath’s words, his work “follows in the intellectual style of the Parry-Lord-Nagy school of epic poetics, particularly in the line of thought developed by Mary Carroll Smith, who assembled what she considered to be an ‘archaic, Aryan, warrior song imbedded in the vast brahmanical or hieratic redaction of the Maha¯ bha¯ rata.’ ”22 In claiming a “stylistic” lineage in oral theory, McGrath lays himself open to the charge of superficiality, since Smith’s argument—which he actually seems to disavow, saying, “I do not proceed in the technical manner which she developed” (McGrath 2011, 11)—was based on the notion that the core of the old “Aryan, warrior song” could be identified by verses found in the tris·t·ubh meter (rather than the workhorse s´loka meter), some of which are located in the Bhagavad Gı¯ta¯ , which by no one else’s reckoning was deemed one of the epic’s early parts.

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cian at times—is vividly and beautifully demarcated” (2013, 149). With such claims, however, McGrath brings IndoEuropean studies to a precipitous point where it no longer need rely on the comparative method. If there are no IndoEuropean parallels, why call it Indo-European?26 Again, can one just will Indo-European epic song into being as solo performance?27 Here we come to problems that McGrath could have avoided had he read Mahadevan 2008. First of all, the whole isolation of a Bronze Age “heroic Kr·s·n·a” who was not yet “divinized” would have to go out the window with the recognition that Kr·s·n·a bhakti is one of those usually non-insistent but still defining components of a heterogeneous Maha¯ bha¯ rata. McGrath states categorically that “mortals are not friends with deities” (2013, 4). That perhaps ethnocentric statement may apply to his preferred Bronze Age world; it does not apply to the Maha¯ bha¯ rata.28 McGrath thinks the epic moves “from a closed poetics of heroic culture to a less exclusive standard of devotional and didactic poetry, one open to all varn·as” (2013, 26).29 McGrath could also have avoided the remark, “I personally would like to think of the epic as being transcribed into written form—in a fashion that is presently indeterminate—during the time of Samudragupta, who flourished between 353 and 373 of the Common Era” (2013, 100 n. 1). McGrath is agreeing with the received wisdom that the commission of the epic to writing would have needed grand royal patronage, but that would not be so if it were composed by out-of-sorts Brahmans.30 Moreover, Gupta dates are too late not only for N but for S (which certainly did not have Gupta patronage). Had McGrath looked further into conversations that have included Mahadevan,31 he would also have been able to avoid misguided comments on the PCE. Several of McGrath’s assertions betray a tenuous grasp of epic scholarship and textual criticism. The Maha¯ bha¯ rata’s PCE does not “combine manuscripts of both the Northern Recension and the Southern Recension traditions” (2011, 8 n. 28); it painstakingly reconstructs the text of their source, the mainly N archetype, through a mechanical, scientific process. Another example is the equation of Nı¯lakan·t·ha’s and Sukthankar’s editorial praxis in the comment that they “both assembled textual variants in their effort to arrive at a more certain text of the poem, or a more precise poetic truth” (98 n. 11; italics McGrath’s). Is the PCE, the product of a philological method, a “poe...