The Days Of The Epics
ABOUT B.C. 1400 TO ABOUT B.C. 1000
The area of India which has now to be considered is much larger. Oudh,
Northern Behar, and the country about Benares are comprised in it; but
Southern India remains as ever, unknown, even if existent.
The sources of information concerning this period of six hundred years
are also much larger, though in a measure less trustworthy; for the
two g
eat epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are
avowedly imaginative, and not--as are the hymns of the Rig-Veda--the
outcome of the daily life of a people, which, like the accretions of a
coral reef, remain to show what manner of creature once lived in them.
Even the remaining Vedas, the Yajur, the Sama and the Atharva, partake
of the same purely literary spirit, although the first and second of
these were probably in existence towards the end of the Vedic period.
The last named is--at least in its recognition as a Sacred Text--of
far later date. All three consist largely of transcripts from
the Rig-Veda, and around each of them, as indeed around the
Rig-Veda-Sanhita itself, there grew up a subsidiary literature called
Brahmanas, the object of which was to explain, consolidate, and
elaborate both the ritual and teaching of the Vedic age, as it became
archaic under the pressure of a greater complexity in life.
It is to the epics and to the Brahmanas, then, that we must look for
what sparse information is to be gleaned concerning India during this
six hundred years or so. It should be remembered that even these books
were to remain truly the "spoken word" for at least two centuries
longer, until the art of writing became known about B.C. 800. As
against this, however, we may set the undoubted fact that such was the
marvellous memory of those early days, that by the close of the Epic
period every syllable of the Rig-Veda had been counted with accuracy,
and the whole carefully compiled, arranged, analysed as it now stands.
To tell the honest truth, the Brahmanas are but a barren field. Full
of elaborate hair-splitting, cumbered with elaborate regulations for
the performance of every rite; prolix, prosy, they reflect only a
religion which was fast breaking down into canonical pomposity. It is
true that towards the end of the Epic period matters improved a
little, and in the teachings of the Upanishads--last of the so-called
"revealed Scriptures" of India--we find a very different note; but as
these seem to belong, by right of birth, more to the Philosophical
period which follows on the Epic, we will reserve them for subsequent
consideration.
It is, then, to the Mahabharata and to the Ramayana that we must look.
Not, however, for history as history; for the personages, the
incidents in these two great poems are purely mythical.
But that a strong tribe called Bharatas or Kurus who had settled near
Delhi did for long years struggle with another strong tribe called the
Panchalas, who had settled near Kanauj, is more than likely. With this
background, then, of truth, the story of the Mahabharata is a fine
romance, and throws incidentally many a side-light on Hindu society in
these remote ages. But it is prodigiously long. In the only full
English translation which exists it runs to over 7,500 pages of small
type. Anything more discursive cannot be imagined. The introduction of
a single proper name is sufficient to start an entirely new story
concerning every one who was ever connected with it in the most remote
degree. But it is a treasure house of folk-lore and folk tales,
interspersed, quaintly, by keen intellectual reasonings on
philosophical subjects, and still more remarkable efforts to pierce
the great Riddle of the World by mystical speculations. It is,
emphatically, in every line of it, fresh to the uttermost. It is the
outcome of minds--for it is evidently an accretion of many men's
imaginations--that still felt the first stimulus of wonder concerning
all things, to whom nothing was common, nothing impossible.
A redaction even in brief of the Great Epic is beyond the power of any
writer. To begin with, many of the side-issues are to the full as
worthy transcription as those of the main thread of the story; and
then it is almost impossible to make out what the latter really was in
the beginning, before the endless additions and interpolations came to
obscure the original idea.
To most critics this main thread presents itself as a prolonged war
between the Kauravas and their first cousins the Pandavas--in other
words, between the hundred sons of Dhritarashta, the blind king, and
the five sons of his brother Pandu--but to the writer the leit motif
is the story of Bhishma. It is a curious one; in many ways well worthy
of a wider knowledge than it has at present in the West.
Bhishma, then, was the heir of Shantanu, the King of Hastinapur. His
birth belongs to fairy tale, for he was the son of Ganga, the river
goddess, who consented to be the wife of the love-struck Shantanu on
condition that, no matter what he might see, or she might do, no
question should be asked, no remark made. There is therefore a
distinct flavour of the world-wide Undine myth in the tale. In this
case the lover-husband is of the most forbearing type. It is not until
he sees his eighth infant son being relentlessly consigned to the
river that he cries: "Hold! Enough! Who art thou, witch?" In
consequence of this, in truth, somewhat belated curiosity, the goddess
leaves him, after assuring him that her purpose is accomplished. Seven
Holy Ones condemned to fresh life by a venial fault have been released
by early death, and this last child is his to keep as being, indeed,
the pledge of mutual love.
So far good. Bhishma is brought up as the heir until he is adolescent.
Then his father falls in love with a fisherman's daughter who is
obdurate. She refuses to marry, except on the condition that her son,
if one is born, shall inherit the kingdom. Even a promise that this
shall be so is not sufficient for her. She claims that Bhishma must
not only swear to resign his own claim to the throne in favour of her
son, but must also take a solemn vow of perpetual celibacy, so closing
the door against future claims on the part of his children. Devoted to
his father, the boy, just entering on manhood, accedes to the
proposal; his father marries, and dies, leaving a young heir to whom
Bhishma becomes regent. An excellent one, too, as the following
extract concerning his regency will show:--
"In these days the Earth gave abundant harvest and the crops were of
good flavour. The clouds poured rain in season and the trees were full
of fruit and flowers. The draught cattle were all happy, and the birds
and other animals rejoiced exceedingly, while the flowers were
fragrant. The cities and towns were full of merchants and traders and
artists of all descriptions. And the people were brave, learned,
honest and happy. And there were no robbers, nor any one who was
sinful; but devoted to virtuous acts, sacrifices, truth, and regarding
each other with love and affection, the people grew up in prosperity,
rejoicing cheerfully in sports that were perfectly innocent on rivers,
lakes and tanks, in fine groves and charming woods.
"And the capital of the Kurus (Hastinapur), full as the ocean and
teeming with hundreds of palaces and mansions, and possessing gates
and arches dark as the clouds, looked like a second Amaravati
(celestial town). And over all the delightful country whose prosperity
was thus increased were no misers, nor any woman a widow, but the
wells and lakes were ever full, full were the groves of trees, the
houses with wealth, and the whole kingdom with festivities.
"So, the wheel of virtue being thus set in motion by Bhishma, the
subjects of other kingdoms, leaving their homes, came to dwell in the
golden age."
A golden age indeed! A millenium dating a thousand years before the
Christ. And for this, Bhishma the Brother Regent and Satyavati the
Queen-Mother were responsible. The Boy-King appears to have been
but a poor creature. Even Bhishma's famous exploit of carrying off the
three beautiful daughters of the King of Benares--Amva, Amvika and
Amvalika--as brides for the lad, does not seem to have kept him from
evil courses. True, the elder of these three "slender-waisted maidens,
of tapering hips and curling hair," cried off the match by bashfully
telling the softhearted Bhishma that she had set her affections on
some one else; whereupon he, holding that "a woman, whatever her
offence, always deserveth pardon," bid her follow her own
inclinations. Still the two remaining brides did not avail to prevent
the young bridegroom from succumbing to disease, leaving them
childless.
Here, then, was a situation. Bhishma and the Queen-Mother, both of an
age, left without an heir! After Eastern fashion she urges him to take
his half-brother's place, and raise up offspring to his father and to
herself. But Bhishma is firm to his oath. "Earth," he says, "may
renounce its scent, water its moisture, light its attribute of showing
form, yea! even the sun may renounce its glory, the comet its heat,
the moon its cool rays, and very space renounce its capacity for
generating sound; but I cannot renounce Truth." Pressed to the
uttermost he can only reiterate: "I will renounce the three worlds,
the empire of heaven, and anything which may be greater than this, but
Truth I will not renounce."
Poor Bhishma! One feels that he is a veritable Sir Galahad, beset by
loving women, for when another father for possible heirs is found,
Amvika, who had expected Bhishma, refuses to look at his successor,
the result being that her son Dhritarashta is born blind, and being
thus unfitted for kingship, Amvalika's son Pandu becomes heir to the
throne.
Hinc illae lachrymal! Bhishma's vow of celibacy produces the rivals,
and his part in the epic henceforward shows but dimly on the bloody
background of the long quarrel between the hundred God-given sons of
Dhritarashta, and the five God-begotten sons of Pandu.
Yet, overlaid as it is by diffuse divergencies, the story of
self-sacrifice, of a man whom all women love and none can gain, goes
on. Bhishma, on Pandu's death, installs the blind Dhritarashta as
Regent King, and continues, as ever, faithful to his trust. Once or
twice a ring of human pathos, human regret, is heard in the harmony of
his good counsels, his unswerving loyalty, his fast determination to
"pay the debt arising out of the food which has been given me."
Once when Arjuna, third of the five Pandus, climbs up on his knees,
all dust-laden from some boyish game, and, full of pride and glee,
claims him as father--"I am not thy father, O Bharata!" is the gentle
reply.
Again, when Amva, the eldest princess of the three maidens whom
Bhishma had carried off as brides for his brother, returns in tears
from seeking the lover he had allowed her to rejoin, saying that the
prince will have none of Bhishma's leavings, there is human regret in
the latter's refusal to accept the assertion that the carrying off was
equal to a betrothal, and that he is bound in honour to marry the
maiden himself! Yet of this refusal comes much. The injured girl calls
on High Heaven for requital, and though her champion Rama is unable to
conquer the invincible Bhishma, Fate intervenes finally.
Amva's penances, prayers, austerities, find fruit in revenge. She is
born again as Chikandini, the daughter of a great king whose wife
conceals the child's sex for twenty-one years, until, according to the
promise of the Gods, Chikandini becomes in reality Chikandin, the most
beautiful, the most valiant of princes, who is destined in time to
cause the death of Bhishma. For amongst the many confessions of a
soldier's faith which the latter here makes is this: "With one who
hath thrown away his sword, with one fallen, with one flying, with one
yielding, with woman or one bearing the name of woman, or with a low,
vulgar fellow--with all these I do not battle." So Chikandin is beyond
Bhishma's retaliation, and when in the final fight he "struck the
great Bharata full on the breast," the latter "only looked at him with
eyes blazing with wrath; remembering his womanhood, Bhishma struck him
not."
This, however, was not yet to come. Bhishma had as yet to bring up the
five Pandu princes and the hundred sons of Dhritarashta to be good
warriors and true, and in the process we come across many quaint
interludes. The story of Princess Draupadt's Self-choice is charming,
and the description of the ceremony worth giving as a picture of the
times.
"The amphitheatre," we read, "was erected on an auspicious and level
plain to the north-east of the town, surrounded on all sides by
beautiful mansions, enclosed with high walls and a moat with arched
doorways here and there. And the vast amphitheatre was also shaded by
a canopy of various colours, and resounded with the notes of a
thousand trumpets, and was scented with black aloes, and sprinkled
with sandal wood water and adorned with flowers. The high mansions
surrounding it, perfectly white, resembled the cloud-kissing peaks of
Himalaya. And the windows of these mansions were covered with lattice
of gold, and the walls thereof set with diamonds and precious stones.
The staircases were easy of ascent, while the floors were covered with
costly carpets and rugs. Now all these mansions were adorned with
wreaths of flowers and rendered fragrant with excellent aloes. They
were white and spotless as the necks of swans. And they were each
furnished with a hundred doors wide enough to admit a crowd of
persons. And in these seven-storied houses of various sizes, adorned
with costly beds and carpets, lived the monarchs who were invited to
the Self-choice, their persons adorned with every ornament, and
possessed with the hope of excelling each other. Thus the denizens of
the city and the surrounding country, taking their seats on the
platforms, beheld these things.
"And the concourse of princes, gay with the performances of actors and
dancers, increased daily, until on the sixteenth morning the daughter
of the King entered the arena, richly attired and bearing in her hand
a golden dish on which lay offerings to the gods, and a garland of
flowers.
"Then a priest of the Moon race ignited the sacrificial fires and
poured libations, uttering benedictions; and all the musical
instruments that were playing, stopped, and in the whole amphitheatre
was perfect stillness. Then the Princess' brother, taking his sister
by the hand, cried in a voice low and deep as the kettledrums of the
clouds: 'Hear all ye assembled Princes, hear! This is the bow, these
are the arrows, yonder is the mark! Given Beauty, Strength, Lineage,
he who achieveth the feat hath Princess Draupadi to wife.' Then, for
the sake of her unrivalled Beauty, the young Princes vied with each
other in jealousy, and rising in their royal seats each exclaiming:
'Princess Draupadi shall be mine!' began to exhibit their prowess."
It would take too long to give in extensor how one after the other
the Princes failed to string the mighty bow. How Karna, the
Disinherited Knight of the Romance--in reality uterine brother to the
five Pandu princes, but passing as their deadliest Kuru enemy--strung
it easily, but "turned aside with a laugh of vexation and a glance at
the Sun, his real father," when Princess Draupadi cried: "Hold! I will
have none of mixed blood to my lord!"
How the young Arjuna, second of the five Pandu princes, "first of
car-warriors and wielders of the bow," came disguised as a Brahman
youth and achieved the feat; rousing no remonstrance, it may be
remarked, as to admixture of race from the fair Princess Draupadi.
Then follows the incident of Draupadi marrying the whole five Pandu
brothers, in obedience to their mother's mistaken command. She, when
her five sons appeared in the dusk, "bringing their alms," bid them
share it as ever; so, despite much heart-questioning, the fivefold
wedding took place. It is an incident which is glozed over by ardent
admirers of the Mahabharata, and spoken of deprecatingly, as a mere
myth. Why, it would be difficult to say, since it is palpably held up
to honour as an instance of almost superhuman virtue. It is a
voluntary self-abnegation on the part of the Five Princes, who swear
to set aside jealousy for ever; an attempt on their part to right the
relations between the sexes, and to return to the purer teaching of
old times when, as we are distinctly told, "men and women followed
their own inclinations without shame or sin." Certainly the record of
this union of the Five Brothers to the devoted, almost divine
Draupadi, holds no suspicion of either the one or the other; surely,
therefore, it requires neither disguise nor apology.
Thereinafter, amid ever-recurring sweep of furious blasts and
counterblasts, ever-changing chances of fortune and misfortune, comes
the great gambling scene which, deprived of disagreeable details and
properly staged, should make the fortune of any dramatist who could
really touch it. A fine scene, truly! Yudishthira, eldest of the Pandu
princes, their ruling spirit, the brain, so to speak, of Bhima's
strength, Arjuna's skill, Nakula's devotion, Sahadeva's obedience, had
been challenged to a gambling bout by his chief enemy, Dhritarashta's
eldest son Duryodhana. To this, according to the soldier's code of
honour, there could be no refusal. But Yudishthira, gambler at heart,
would not acknowledge himself beaten. He stakes his riches, his
kingdom, his brothers, himself--last of all, his wife.
Losing her, she is sent for to the gambling saloon. She refuses to
come. Finally, dragged thither by force, she pleads that Yudishthira,
having first gambled away himself, was a slave, and so had no right to
stake a free woman. Then ensues a scene of conflicting passions and
protest which, once read of, lingers in the mind, rising superior to
the certain disagreeable details which undoubtedly disfigure it in the
original.
So the story sweeps on and on, ending really with Bhishma's death on
the field of battle after a final encounter in which Arjuna, realising
that victory is unattainable so long as "the Grandsire" lives, uses
Chikandin, the man-woman, as his shield, and so brings about the
defeat of the otherwise invincible Bhishma. The latter, "lying on his
bed of arrows," surrounded by all the princes, then proceeds to
discourse for long days ("until the sun, entering its northern
declension, permitted him to resign his life-breath") on the whole
duty of mankind, and especially on the duties of kingship.
These discourses, which in the English translation run to over 2000
pages, are marvellously illuminating. When we read in them doctrines
of kingly science which long centuries later were to be re-enunciated
by Machiavelli, when we find in them many a theory of modern science
forestalled by some bold, theoretical plunge into the Infinite, that
Infinite to which "it is impossible to set limits since it is
limitless," we may well pause to ask ourselves how much nearer we are
to discovering the Great Secret than those were who, nearly three
thousand years ago, puzzled themselves over the problem of
consciousness, and why, "when the mind is otherwise engaged, the
life-agent in the body heareth not."
Have we, even in science, gone much further than the assertion that
"Space, which even the Gods cannot measure, is full of blazing and
self-luminous worlds?"
Perhaps we have; but of a certainty we cannot outclass the Mahabharata
in the imagination with which it treats the Insoluble.
"In the Beginning," we read, "was infinite Space motionless,
immoveable. Without Sun, Moon, or Stars, it seemed to be asleep. Then
a darkness grew within the darkness, and water sprang to life."
So, gaining force as it goes like some giant wave, the vast epic
sweeps on, gathering worthless pebbles and hopeless wreckage, with its
thousand facets of bright bold sea, to leave us, after it has crashed
over us, bewildered, storm-shaken on the shore, our heads whirling
with wild memories of flashing, jewel-set cuirasses, "beautiful like
the firmament of night bespangled with stars," of floating veils "like
wind-tossed clouds," of celestial voices, "deep as the kettledrums of
the skies," of "sparkling showers of keen arrows like the rays of the
sun," of "tender, small-waisted maidens," and "mighty, high-souled
car-warriors."
It is a marvellous dream, and as one reads it the ceaseless fall of
seas upon a shore seems to fill the ear with the eternal message of
indestructible life.
The Ramayana, great though the epic is, and, in a way, more poetical,
has none of this storm and stress. As R. C. Dutt, in his "Ancient
India," says:--
"On reading it one feels that the real heroic age of India had passed.
We miss the rude and sturdy manners and incidents which mark the
Mahabharata. The heroes of the Ramayana are somewhat tame and
commonplace personages, very respectful to priests, very anxious to
conform to all the rules of decorum and duty, doing a vast amount of
fighting work mechanically, but without the determination, the
persistence of real fighters. A change has come over the spirit of the
nation. It is more polished, more law-abiding, less sturdy, less
heroic. In brief, the two epics give us the change which Hindu life
and society underwent from the commencement to the close of the Epic
age."
Griffiths, in the introduction to his metrical version of the
Ramayana, remarks that one of its most salient features is the
complete absence of any mention of "that mystical devotion which
absorbs all the faculties," to which we have constant reference in the
Mahabharata. The remark is full of critical acumen, and at once
differentiates the varying planes on which the two dramas move.
That of Rama and his long-suffering wife Sita, is, doubtless, the more
human of the two; but there is a grandeur about the story of Bhishma
before which the former crumbles to commonplace. Still, as R. C. Dutt
asserts:--
"There is not a Hindu woman in the length and breadth of India to whom
the story of Sita is not known, and to whom her character is not a
model to strive after and to emulate. Rama, also, though scarcely
equal to Sita in the worth of character, has been a model to man for
his truth, his obedience, his piety. Thus the epic has been for the
millions of India a means of moral education, the value of which can
hardly be over-estimated."
Historically, there is little to be gleaned from it beyond the
conquest of Southern India and Ceylon. Socially, it shows the
accretion of custom, the consolidation of dogma, and the passing of
power from the soldier to the priestly caste. Yet even here it is but
a very modified Brahmanism of which we catch glimpses, and even caste
itself is not as yet crystallised into hard and fast form.
So, with the Ramayana and some few Puranas which, however, will be
better considered in the next chapter, the Epic period closes.
Some few points in it may lay claims to distinct historical basis. The
existence of Janaka, King of Kosala, the father of Sita, the
befriender of wisdom, is so far attested by later writings and by
legend, that his personality gains reality; but it is in the crashing,
confused welter of the Mahabharata that we must look for a just
estimate of what India was like a thousand years before Christ.