CHAPTER 2
THE EPIC IN ANCIENT GREECE AND IN
ANCIENT INDIA Though the main focus of the present study is going to be characterization, it nnust be borne in mind that characterization in an epic narrative will not have the same complexion as characterization, say, in a novel or a play. It will be appropriate, therefore, to focus in this chapter on the nature of the epics under study.
Greece and India are blessed by the epic muse for they are the only ones who produced full-length oral epics that reflect the throbbing heart and soul of the people of ancient times. Other countries like
England, France, Germany, Norway and Finland have their epics of the medieval age such as Beowulf. Le Chanson de Roland.
Nibelunaenlied. the Edda and the Saga, and Kalevala respectively.
Epics belong to the 'heroic age' and their heroes fight bravely for fame and/or to save their people from some demon or other dangers.
Physical strength and valour are of supreme importance to these epics as they deal with warfare. The epics of Greece and India possess all these characteristics but they are different from the medieval epics because they go far beyond this and reveal nobility of character portrayal and a tragic awareness of life. The Iliad, the Odvssev. the
Vaimiki Ramavana. and the Mahabharata are in a class of their own owing to these rare qualities. Lascelles Abercrombie rightly says in his
The Epic that the reading of The Faerie Queene or Divina Commedia is not in the least like the experience of reading of Paradise lost or the
Iliad. He points out that a poem may have epical qualities without being an epic. Lokamanya Tilak wrote eight editorials about the Mahabharata 19 while reviewing C. V. Vaidya's book Mahabharatacha Uoasamhara. He has discussed the form of epic in one of these articles. He puts these epics in one category and calls them arsha. These epics have proved to be great monuments of the ancient civilizations of Greece and India.
Their contribution to the human heritage is immense because they put before us the core of those ancient civilizations, their raw vigor, aspirations and their efforts to define the meaning of life. So they are revered by the posterity. While making the reader aware of all-powerful destiny, they raise fundamental questions, questions that nobody has so far been able to answer. It is difficult to think of any other source, at once so comprehensive and intimate, to understand the heart of a civilization. The history they tell might have been much diluted but the poetic truth that they express is far more important. That is why
E.V.Rieu said,
"I would rather have the Iliad than the whole shelf of Bronze Age war reports, however accurate." ^
A) Similar origins :
These epics are a mighty culmination of traditional raw material in the form of odes to brave warriors, legends, and
stories from mythologies and contemporary lore. Nabaneeta Dev
Sen has shown in her essay "Thematic Structure of Epic Poems
in the East and in the West : A Comparative Study" how themes
like abductions, rescues, sieges of cities, long journeys, exiles, 20
special weapons, single connbats, mutilation of dead bodies, lamentations are common in most of the epics. She rightly states,
"The oral tradition all over the world shares a common style of composition, and therefore there are deeper affinities than obvious differences between the epics of the East and the West."^
Epos or oral folk narrative was shaped into the classical form of an epic poem in the epic dialect of Greek. Milman Parry, an American scholar, proved that Homer was a master and heir to a tradition of oral epic poetry that reached back over many generations, perhaps even centuries. Unlike ancient Greece, the Indian civilization presents its first flowering in the Veda. The Vedas consist of lyrics, dramatic lyrics, and philosophical discourses without any encompassing narrative sequence.
Epics in India evolved out of this material as if it were a second flowering. Bards sang before risis at the yajna or before kings to praise their feats or their ancestors' feats. Lava and Kusha sang about Rama's feats and bravery during his Ashvamedha ya)na and this became the
Ramavana. Rama was glorified as a god because he saved risis from demons and killed the demon king, Ravana. The Mahabharata has its
origin in the songs that were sung before King Janamejaya to narrate
the great deeds of his ancestors, the Pandavas. The epic poets shaped
these malleable rudiments with a strong hand. Sometimes bards or
minstrels sang songs of heroes to entertain the feasting nobles or at
other important occasions. So the main theme of the epics is feats of
warriors and how they brought glory to or saved their clan or their 21
community. Great adventures of heroes also became topics of epics.
The Odvssev has an obvious connection with Greek explorations of the
Mediterranean, perhaps with the commercial and colonial expeditions of the eighth century BC and the stories they brought back. Odysseus wades through all the difficulties and succeeds because of his ingenuity
and bravery. In this way one could say that epics are sophisticated, re-
woven productions based on archaic oral folk-tales of feats and
adventures. They are mixtures of history and legends. These epics do
not fail to convey ideas of lasting depth and significance. What Charles
H. Taylor says about the Greek epics is true about the Sanskrit epics,
too.
"Although we know today that the Iliad and the Odvssev
are the products of long oral traditions and may or may not have
been shaped in their final form by the same man, the impact of
each poem on our culture, as on Greek culture, has been as a "'
coherent and meaningful whole." ^
These epic poems have made a great and widespread
impact on both the eastern and the western cultures.
B) Importance of bards :
Bards were like "media", an institution and a force in
ancient times. The heroes craved for glory and honour. The
bards sang of this and made the heroes immortal in their songs. 22
So the heroes respected the bards very much. One of the odes quoted by Paul Merchant in his Epic says-
"Many heroes lived before Agamemnon
But all of them unknown, unmourned
Have slipped into dark oblivion
Because no poet praised them." '*
In the Odvssev. when Odysseus killed all the suitors of
Penelope, Phemius warned,
"You yourself will repent it afterwards if you kill a man like me, a
bard, singing for gods and men alike." ^
Odysseus did not kill him.
Odysseus had become a theme of songs in his own lifetime as
he heard the story of his own adventures in the court of Alcinous
through the bard, Demodocus. Perhaps that is why Odysseus spared
the bard Phemius in his court. In the beginning the bards entertained
their masters by the recitation of heroic doings. Homer composed for
listeners and not for readers and his art is the art which grew in the
courts of the Greek conquerors and colonists of Ionia.
The charming boys. Lava and Kusha, who later turned out to be
his own sons, sang in praise of King Rama while his yajna was being
performed. Soota sang about the great deeds of the ancestors of 23
Janmejaya, during the yajna The sagas of the heroes became epic
poems when great bards added their wisdom and ripe contemplation of life to them even in that primitive state of civilization.
C) War as the central theme :
The Ramavana. the Mahabharata. and the Iliad have a great
war as the central theme and the Odyssey has a shadow of the Trojan war on it. The Ramavana and the Iliad are similar in that they describe
a clash of civilizations and also that one civilization (or its
representatives) attacked and destroyed the other (for whatever
reason!). All these wars are so terrible that they destroyed whole
dynasties and brought about what has rightly been called yuganta, the
end of an age. The kingdom of Lanka lost its glory and grandeur. It is
described that Maruti burnt a big part of Lanka even before the war. A
large number of warriors on the side of Ravana died in the war. The
Mahabharata is an internecine civil war: hence more destructive. (For
instance, more Americans died in their Civil War than in all the other
wars combined.) Rajesh Kochhar says in his The Vedic People: Their
History and Geoqraphv.
"It is difficult to look for archaeological evidence for the Bharata
battle itself. Maha in the Mahabharata refers to the embellishment of
the accounts of the battle rather than to the battle itself. In view of the
low level of technology available at the time and the fact that as many
as five generations from Bheeshma to Abhimanyu could physically 24
participate in it, it is likely that the war was merely a skirmish and not an "earth-shaking" event, as it was later made out to be." ®
It is difficult to agree with this remark because the loss of life in the Mahabharata war seems to be terrible. All the hundred Kauravas except Vikarna, the elders like Bheeshma, Drona along with their armies died and even on the Pandavas' side very few men were spared. It made Yudhishithira say that his victory was more like defeat.
In Kama Parvan after the death of Kama, Sanjaya relates a long list of warriors on the sides of the Pandavas and the Kauravas who died in the war. The list contains the names of young warriors like Abhimanyu and old ones like Virata, Drupada, Bheeshma and Drona.
In the Trojan War, too, the valiant warriors like Achilles, Hector
and Sarpedon lost their life. The city of Troy was burnt to ashes. The
excavations of the sight at Hissarlik hills make this clear.
Apparently a woman is taken to be the cause of each of these
wars. This will be discussed in the next chapter.
D) Digressions in the Narrative :
Digressions is a prominent aspect of the epics. Many times a
narrative contains another narrative. All the epics are dotted with
numerous flashbacks and stories in miniature and episodes isolated
from one another. Auerbach has discussed one episode in his famous
essay "Odysseus' Scar" in his Mimesis. In the Odvssev Odysseus has
returned to Ithaca but is in disguise of a beggar. He does not want to 25
disclose his identity to Penelope. She has ordered Euryclea to wash
his feet, which she is following. While washing the feet Euryclea
notices the scar on his leg and recognizes him. Odysseus sternly
checks her lest Penelope should know it. Here Homer relates the
whole story of how Odysseus got the scar in his boyhood during a
visit to his grandfather Autolycus. This minute description is an
effective digression. The narration of the scar is a deliberate device
for provoking suspense but suspense is not very important. The
audience of oral epics always knew what was to follow. They already
knew that Hector would die and Achilles also had a short life to live.
So suspense lies outside the canon of Greek literature. Auerbach
rightly points out that Homer did not use such digressions for
suspense. They are meant to relax the tension. The situation was
tense here as there were reckless suitors in the palace and Odysseus
did not have many faithful people to serve him. Even if the audience
knew what was going to happen, they became one with the
characters and did feel their sorrows and tensions. This tension could
be removed by the digression.
The real suspense in these epics was about the reaction of the
heroes in the particular situations. Events may be predetermined but
not the human reactions. Homer has also used this digression to bring
the character of Odysseus fully before our eyes, not only as a brave
warrior but also as a brave boy. 26
Another instance of digression is found in Book Twenty-four of the Odyssey. King Priam has approached Achilles to pray for the dead body of his son. The tension of the scene can be easily innagined. As Achilles himself points out, Priam's life is in danger under the roof of his starl< enemy. In such a situation Achilles requests Priam to accept food. Then he narrates how Apollo killed the sons and Artemis killed the daughters of Niobe. This was a punishment for Niobe because she boasted that she bore twelye children and Leto bore only two. Niobe's children lay in the blood for nine days with no one to bury him or her. On the tenth day 'Niobe with her lustrous hair' remembered food though she saw a dozen children killed in her halls. Achilles relates that episode in twenty lines and asks the old king to think of food.
Vyasa also uses digressions and they are subsidiary tales that increased the size of the original epic of Vyasa containing twenty six thousand verses, to one lakh yerses of the present epic. But it is difficult to decide which digressions are used by Vyasa himself and which are added by later poets or are interpolations. V.S.Sukthankar rightly mentions in his On The Meaning Of The Mahabharata .
"Owing to these digressions, which seem to have grown like a
malignant parasite on the original heroic story and which do in a
sense hamper the free movement of the great drama, the poem
appears not only to lose in artistic value but to be even lacking in bare
unity."'' 27
He has quoted other critics who think similarly. Hermann
Oldenberg, a German scholar called it epic chaos or chaotic epic.
Romeshchandra Datta thought in the same way. Jan De Vries, Johan
Jakob Meyer also thought of a tropical forest when they read the
Mahabharata. Hundreds of stories from mythology, folklore and legends are incorporated in this epic. Many of them are used as pegs for religious and philosophical discourses. They can be easily excised from the story proper without affecting it. The Anushasana Parvan is full of such passages and interpolations. Even as regards the story,
Vyasa provides all the details of the life of the characters. He does not plunge in the middle of the story like Homer and does not seem to assume the knowledge of the audience. He describes the life of the character not only from his or her birth to death but also from the previous birth. This is due to the Hindu belief in the theory of the inevitable chain of births. An interesting story of the previous birth of
Draupadi is narrated to explain away her polyandrous marriage.
Shikhandi is narrated to be Amba of the last birth who is born now to fulfill her desire of revenge. The whole history of the Kuru dynasty is related starting from King Duhshanta and Bharata up to Janamejaya who is listening to the Mahabharata. One reason of the digressions in
all these epics is that their original listeners and certainly later ones
knew the main stories. The narrators must have added the "new"
digression stories to enhance their interest in their narration. Yet the
original heroic tale does not lose its fascination for the readers, mainly
because of characterization. E) Heroes of the epics :
The heroes are at the centre of the chare description of the hero of a tragedy is based on the heroe&
Honour and fame were the chief aims of the heroes and shame was more painful than death. Revenge was a sacred duty of the hero in an age when laws, courts and such other systems of justice did not exist.
The description of the wholesale slaughter of the suitors and the hanging of the concubines in the Odyssey is horrifying to us today, but it was obviously accepted as 'justice' by listeners or readers then. The ways of killing were usually very crude. To a greater or lesser degree all epic poetry, all genuine heroic poetry, has the same world-view. To deprive the dead enemy of burial was the extreme of heroic anger in
Homer's epics. Hector prays to Achilles-
"don't let the dogs devour me by the Argive ships!
Wait, take the princely ransom of bronze and gold,
but give my body to friends to carry home again,
so Trojan men and Trojan women can do me honour
with fitting rites of fire once I am dead." ^
Achilles roars in reply,
"The dogs and birds will rend you—blood and bone!" 29
But gods disapprove of the act of Achilles when he drags the dead body of Hector and they preserve it. Familial, social and political obligations are absolute. Laws of hospitality are binding and elaborate.
The society was patriarchal and the humble people needed the valiant heroes for protection from the frequent invasions they had to face.
Typically, women are supposed to be at the root of all the trouble. But women also reward the brave with pleasure and lament the dead.
Naturally women and humbler people depended upon the heroes in that heroic age. These exceptional men occupied a central place in their society, so also in the epic poems that sing of heroes and are a repository of that society's values.
F) Aristocratic world view :
By definition, an epic deals with the deeds of great persons. Ail these heroic figures of the epics belonged to royal families or
aristocracy. When the bards sang before the audience, they needed
exalted role models, persons who decided the fate of the whole state
and a conflict on a vast scale. In effect they are people who owned a
lot of land and were thus privileged with wealth and status and power.
This is easy to understand. A problem presupposes that the person
facing the problem is a free agent, able to act as he sees fit. In
traditional societies the only persons that had the fullest freedom to act
were persons from royalty and aristocracy. So tradition and
contemporary circumstances alike insisted that a bard who told about
the past must confine his attention to royal, aristocratic and noble 30
characters. Homer calls them godlike and in a way pays tribute to a generation of heroes and their high lineage that often included "gods".
The point of view in all these epics is aristocratic, and humble people are unimportant. They are kept firmly in their places, in fact hardly mentioned.
There is a great line between demos or the commoner and aristoi or the royal persons that was difficult to cross. We hear little of the common people here who were to become the nation of the future.
Book Two of the Iliad shows this clearly. Agamemnon asks his soldiers to embark to their homeland, as it is difficult to continue the war. They are overjoyed with the idea of returning home but Hera and Athena do not want this to happen because they desire to continue the war.
Athena comes down to Odysseus and advises him to stop this flight of the soldiers. Odysseus immediately starts to dissuade the soldiers from leaving the battlefield. He cajoles and argues with the officers among them with gentle words but he upbraids the demos harshly that they are weaklings, they are not counted either in battle or in council and they must follow their betters. He strikes with the sceptre in his hands those soldiers who shout. Thersites is a clownish soldier who is derided by Odysseus and other soldiers with contempt when he tries to express his opinion. Dolon is a common soldier and spy who is caught by
Odysseus and Diomedes. They extract information from him and make him kill himself ruthlessly. Twelve Trojan soldiers are burned on the pyre of Patroclus for no fault of theirs except that they are "common". 31
There are more common people in the Odvssev than in the Iliad, like
Eurycleia the nurse, Eumaeus the swineherd, nameless carvers of meat, sailors, slaves like Melanthius and Melantho, but they are important only in their relation to the principal figures. This can be seen everywhere in the story. The goddesses are angry with Paris and curse
Troy. Poseidon is wrathful against Odysseus and curses him. The anger of these gods and goddesses cause the death of common
Trojan citizens in the Iliad and of the common sailors in the Odvssev who are quite innocent. All oral or bardic poetry is in essence poetry about kings.
Vyasa also is concerned with royal families, and humble people are out of his ken. They are prajaah (subjects) but their typical grievances are not represented. Birth was a determining factor for status in society and for opportunities in life. Dhrutarashtra, Pandu and
Vidura were brothers but Vidura could not become the king because he was born of a dasi. Kunti abandoned Kama after his birth because she was unmarried then. A charioteer or Soota, named Adhiratha, adopted
him and so he was called Soota putra and looked down upon for that
reason during the whole of his life. Kama suffered much humiliation for
his supposed low birth even after Duryodhana made him a king by
giving him the kingdom of Anga. His inferiority complex about his birth
must have been at the root of his participation in the evil schemes of
Duryodhana. Ekalavya was denied instruction in archery by Drona on
account of his being a mere forest denizen, a "tribal" {aatavika). Still, he mastered archery by practising before a clay idol of Drona. Arjuna saw
his skill and complained to Drona jealously. Drona had promised
Arjuna that he would make Arjuna the greatest archer of his day.
Dronacharya demanded Ekalavya's thumb as his fees and ruined his
prowess and career completely.
A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. It was natural that the bards sang in praise of their
kings. Yet Homer and Vyasa were too great and wise to confine
themselves only to the aristocratic tradition. Because of their deep
human sympathy, both of them sometimes take note of the suffering of
humble people. Homer mentions the suffering of an unnamed, obscure
woman, a feeble, millstone worker, who could not finish her work until
midnight. This woman curses the suitors for whose sake she has worn
her knees away with the wretched drudgery of grinding.
" Father Zeus, ruler of gods and men alike, —Grant to me, too,
poor wretch that I am, accomplishment of the words I utter. May this
very day be the last time, the last of all, that the suitors eat their
sumptuous meal in Odysseus ' place, those men who have worn my
knees away with the wretched drudgery of this grinding; let them feast
today and never again!"
The aristocratic world and their affairs are felt by the common
people only through the added pressure of misery that is created by
them. This kind of misery is rarely mentioned in the Mahabharata. 33
In the Iliad Briseis mourns for Patroclus. Homer says,
"Her voice rang out in tears
and the women wailed in answer, grief for Patroclus
calling forth each woman's private sorrows."^^
The plight of the captive women is thus expressed in just two lines, but haunting ones. Sometimes Homer paints pictures of simple, common and quiet life away from the clamour of war in his similes and in the description of the pictures on the shield of Achilles. In Book Five he describes how the Achaean figures grew white in the dust cloud churned by horses' hooves. He compares them with straw piles that grow white all day long in bleaching sun when men toss up the trodden sheaves on ancient threshing-floors.
In the Mahabharata also we find moving scenes of poverty and its pangs. Ashwatthama, Drona's son, wanted milk when he was a child because he saw his playmates drinking it. His poor mother could not afford it and so gave him white flour mixed in water. Ashwatthama was innocently overjoyed to drink that flour like milk.
During the Rajasooya yajna of the Pandavas, a mongoose
(Nakula) tells of the generosity of a poor brahman family. The family was starving yet offered the only food remaining in their house to their atithi the guest. The guest ate all the food and left. When the mongoos sneaked in to eat leftovers, he tripped and half of his body rolled over 34 in the crumbs and became golden on account of the merit of that sacrifice. He rolled around in the crumbs left over from the feasts of the
Pandavas but this failed to make the rest of him golden. So he sadly said that the leftovers of the charity in the Rajasooya yajna were not potent enough. The poet has suggested that the sacrifice of the poor family was greater than the 'Rajasooya yaJna' of the Pandavas where they were "sacrificing" many valuable things. The ancient story seems closer to a modern concept of charity.
The characteristics mentioned above are common to all three epics under consideration, presumably because Greeks and Indians apparently descended from the Indo-European peoples and had a common tradition of heroic verse along with "sister" languages. The surviving representatives of this tradition are found in the ancient literature of India, in Germanic lays and in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf.
G) States of the civilizations :
In spite of these similarities the epics were not contemporary.
Probably the Greek epics were written in the ninth century B C and the
Sanskrit epics were created in the fifth century BO. The similarities
between the epics are not wholly due to the state of the civilizations
because the states of the civilizations that emerge out of the poetry are
different. Many customs displayed in the Greek epics are similar to
those of the Vedic Aryans between the eighteenth and the fifteenth
centuries BC when the Dasharadnya war like the Trojan war took
place. The concept of honour was similar among the warriors. The idea 35 of sacrificing to gods so as to propitiate tliem for prosperity seems to have ruled in both the traditions.
There are frequent references of sacrifice to gods in the Iliad.
Oxen and sheep are always offered and the favours of gods depend upon the amount of sacrifices men make. Zeus says in Book Twenty- three—
"-he (Hector) never stinted with gifts to please my heart.
Never once did my altar lack its share of victims,
winecups tipped and the deep smoky savor.These,
these are the gifts we claim-they are our rights." ^^
Krishna says in the Geeta
(You may propitiate gods through this yadnya and they will please you. You can please each other and achieve great merit.)
But this sacrifice was not to be human. Human sacrifice is not mentioned in the Mahabharata but in the Aitareva Brahmana ^* there is a story of a brahman, named Ajigarta. He was ready to sacrifice his own son, Shunahshepa under economic pressure. At the end of the story goddess Usha (Aurora) saves the boy by substituting a beast upon the altar and the human sacrifice does not take place. This 36
custom was not outdated in the times of the Iliad. Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to Artemis for smooth sailing of the fleet at the beginning of their expedition to Troy. There is one version of Iphigenia's story in which Artemis herself saves Iphigenia by substituting a hind upon the altar of sacrifice. Artemis candies Iphigenia to Tauris then. In Euripides' play Iphigenia in Tauris. and in his
Iphigenia in Aulis. too, the maiden was miraculously saved from the
sacrifice. In the Iliad, twelve Trojan soldiers were sacrificed on the pyre
of Patroclus. The stories suggest that the custom of human sacrifice
began to be opposed strongly, beasts were substituted for human
beings and then it must have stopped in the Vedic and the Greek
civilizations, too.
No ancient civilization shows a society without the institution of
slaves. Slave women and dasi are found in both the Greek and the
Mahabharata society respectively. The code of hospitality also seems
to be similar. The importance of hospitality in that primitive stage of
civilization cannot be exaggerated. The same strict code of hospitality
existed in primitive Arabic civilization in the deserts. Paris violated the
code of hospitality when he insulted his host ungratefully by abducting
his wife and wealth. This was taken to be his grave offence. At the end
of the Iliad Achilles does not fail to show due hospitality to King Priam
who is in fact his enemy. In the Indian tradition guests are honoured as
gods. [3rf^2jt ^ ^ was a piece of advice.] The story of King Shibi is
well known. This king cut and offered his own flesh to a hawk in order 37
to save a dove that was his guest. In another story Shriyala and
Changuna kill their own son and offer his flesh to the guest who later turns out to be Shiva, a god. J. A. Symonds describes the Homeric epic phase of civilization rightly in his Studies of the Greek Poets.
"—the human spirit was emerging from the confused passions and sordid needs of barbarism into the higher emotions and more refined aspirations of civilization." ^^
He calls it a dawn or boyhood of humanity. Judging by the philosophical and moral discourses of the characters one can see that the Mahabharata shows a more refined and advanced state of civilization.
H) Tragic awareness :
All the epics of the world are woven around wars. There is no
glorification of war as such, but there is a fascination for it. Suffering
and despair are their keynotes. The Iliad has a prominent theme of the
fall of Troy. It involves the deaths of great warriors like Sarpedon,
Achilles, Ajax, Antilochus. Memnon and Patroclus. It ends on a tragic
note with the funeral of Hector, and the imminence of the death of
Achilles, the hero of the epic, is suggested there. The ending stresses
the tragic futility of war. The victors and the vanquished both suffer
enormously and this creates questions about meaning and purpose of
life. As it is clear from the Odvssev. misfortune attended the victorious
warriors even after the war was over on their way to their lands. 38
Menelaus, Lokrian Aias had a very difficult journey home. Agamemnon
reached home safely but was immediately killed by his wife,
Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Odysseus had to struggle for ten long years to reach his homeland, Ithaca; he lost all his sailors in
the journey, and then he had to fight against the greedy suitors who were devouring his household and he had to massacre them in his
palace. The Ramavana uses krauncha vadha s#cT cfsr (killing of a crane
bird) as a symbol. Rama is victorious in the war and yet Rama and
Seeta part as the kraunch birds are separated forever. The
Mahabharata , too, narrates the story of a war, which ruins the Kaurava
dynasty and brings a sense of dreary waste to the Pandavas as they
have lost their sons and all other relatives. In the Shalya Parvan the
Pandavas meet Duryodhana when he is dying on the battlefield. He
suggests that they would be ruling widows and children only.
Yudhishthira states twice in the Mahabharata that his victory is nothing
more than defeat.
Although the ending Parvan of the Mahabharata is
Svargarohana, it is full of supernatural machinery like the meeting of
Yudhishthira with gods and Indra, with dead Duryodhana and other
Kauravas, the scenes in the hell. It is difficult to believe that this is the
end of a realistic story like the Mahabharata. This is a figurative
description of the glorification of the Pandavas who were victorious in
the war and deserved heavenly abode by their righteousness
according to the poet. The purpose of this may be didactic, to teach the 39
listeners or the readers to follow the conduct of the Pandavas. The real ending of the epic is at the point where the Pandavas and Draupadi leave the kingdom and travel in the Himalayas.
Buddhadeva Bose also remarks in his The Book of Yudhishthir.
"Yudhishthir's achievement of so-called swarga-sukh (bliss of heaven) is just as imaginary as at the end of many Sanskrit plays, husband and wife arise from their funeral pyre and go happily to heaven. The latter we may regard as symptomatic of the ancient
Hindu's unwillingness to accept any conclusive parting. ...Truly speaking, the essential Mahabharat comes to an end in mahaprasthanik-parva. The ascent to heaven is nothing but a conventional utterance of comfort." ^^
The end of the Odvssev is happy only apparently because the
loss of all the sailors of Odysseus, the ten years of his desperate
efforts of homecoming and the slaughter of all the suitors of Penelope
hover over it and mar the happiness. The famous simile in the following
moving words of Homer in the Ujad gives a tragic awareness of the
transitory nature of human life.
"Like the generations of leaves,
the lives of mortal men."
All these epics present plenty of incidents that are memorable
because of their tragic potential. The meeting of Achilles and Thetis, 40
Achilles' mourning for Patroclus in the Iliad, the encounter of Odysseus and his mother in the Hades in the Odvssev. the meeting of Kunti and
Kama in the Mahabharata. the meeting of Gandhari and Draupadi after
ail the sons of Draupadi are killed, are only a few of the examples.
Tragic awareness is the keynote of all the great epics, as perhaps of all
literature. Helen says to Hector that their sad stories will make songs.
This reminds us of the Sanskrit playwright, Bhavabhooti who says in
his Uttara Rama Charita-
3T«ft "JTSTT >Hfc1dJ^cf f| doiH^WH || ^^
(Pathos is the only rasa or sentiment in literature. It is expressed in different forms in various contexts. Water assumes different conditions of eddies, bubbles and waves and it is all, nevertheless, but water.)
Even Shelley meant the same thing when he said,
., 19 "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought
The desolate figures of Achilles and Priam at the end of the Hiad
and similarly desolate figures of the five Pandavas and dignified
Draupadi trudging up in the Himalayas at the end of the Mahabharata
reveal one truth. The aggressions and warring urges die down and
desolate Man stands alone to face death. The darkness of this 41 desolation has the saving grace only of a little star, the little star of the humanity and nobility of character and perhaps that Is all that lives on!
H) Endings of the Epics :
Jasper Griffin has discussed the ending of the Iliad in his Homer.
This discussion applies to the Mahabharata too. The iljad and the
Mahabharata do not end at the point of victory of the heroes but at the point where great opponents meet and see with deep pathos but without bitterness the fundamental condition of the life of man. The endings enhance the beauty of the characterization. The Book Twenty- four of the Iliad narrates the meeting of Priam and Achilles. Zeus has ordered Achilles through Thetis that he must give Hector's dead body back to Priam. Achilles has accepted to do it and Priam has reached
Achilles' tent although he is not sure of the success of his mission. He has determined -
"Let Achilles cut me down straight way -
Once I've caught my son in my arms and wept my fill." ^°
Hermes guides Priam to the tent of Achilles safely and leaves, because it would offend them all for a mortal man to host an immortal face-to-face. The poet describes that the 'majestic king of Troy" kneels down beside Achilles, clasps his knees and kisses those hands, those terrible man-killing hands that had slaughtered Priam's many sons in
battle. Achilles marvels at that and his men also are surprised. 42
"But Priam prayed his heart out to Achilles." ^^
The very first words of Priam to Achilles are—
"Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles—
as old as / am, past the threshold of deadly old age!" ^^
He further narrates what the plight of that old father must be with no one to look after. Yet that father has the consolation that his son is alive and would return some day to him. But old Priam's fate is such that he has none of his fifty sons alive now and the greatest of them also is no more. The old majestic king then prays-
"Pity me in my own right,
remember your own father! I deserve more pity---
I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before—
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son." ^^
The situation is beautiful though it is sad. The majestic king of a wealthy city has become a pitiful beggar before the killer of his son. He has reconciled to the tragic circumstances and to the character of
Achilles, too. His words move the wrathful, headstrong warrior. A deep desire to grieve for his own father surges in the mind of Achilles. The sad memory of Patroclus is mixed in that grief. He takes the old man's hand and gently moves him back. Both men are overpowered by
memory and they weep. A young son weeps for his dear old father who 43
is far away from him and this son has a premonition that he is going to die soon and may never meet his father. In front of him, an old father weeps for the loss of his young son and begs for at least the
satisfaction of giving appropriate funeral to the son. Achilles raises the
old man by the hand. He is filled with pity now for Priam's gray head
and gray beard. He speaks out winging words—
"Poor man, how much you've
borne -pain to break the spirit!" ^'*
The daring of the old man who approached all alone an enemy
who has killed his brave sons amazes Achilles. He must have a heart
of iron, thinks Achilles. He says,
"Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts,
rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning." ^^
Melancholy of this scene overwhelms the poem. The echoes of
the same tragic mood can be heard in the poem of a twentieth century
war poet, Wilfred Owen. In his poem "Strange Meeting", two dead
soldiers meet in the hell and begin to speak. They mourn the waste of
young life and 'the undone years.' One has killed the other.
" I am the enemy you killed, my friend." ^^
But at last they accept the situation, are reconciled to death and
conclude. 44
"Let us sleep now.... 27
Achilles says, "Let us put our griefs to rest" and the modern soldier says, "Let us sleep now...". The war weariness in the expressions of both of them is of the same kind, and the acceptance of fate moves the reader. Achilles again and again addresses Priam as
'old man' or 'old king'. The king's enmity is forgotten and only his old age is seen because Achilles is trying to see his own dear father in
Priam.
Achilles offers food and drink to the guest. Priam has to accept it even though he has no mind for it. Then Homer describes how they looked.
"They reached out for the good things that lay at hand
and when they had put aside desire for food and drink.
Priam the son of Dardanus gazed at Achilles, marvelling
now at the man's beauty, his magnificent build-
face to face he seemed a deathless god....
And Achilles gazed and marvelled at Dardan Priam,
beholding his noble looks, listening to his words." ^^
It should be noted here that this is the first time Homer is
referring to Achilles' beauty. So far the references had been only to his 45
valour and the epithets were mainly 'proud' or 'swift'. The hunnanity and compassion cast a kind of beauty on both the men. The splendour of
Achilles is modified by the sheer pathos of the situation. The Greek
sensitivity to beauty does not fail even in this melancholy atmosphere.
Jasper Griffin very rightly points out,
"We see the poet give a concrete example of his conception that
it is out of suffering and disaster that beauty emerges. Achilles and
Priam are brought together by the terrible fact that Achilles has killed
Hector and the war will go on until Troy is destroyed; but their
encounter enables them to show a high civility, and to recognize in
each other both the splendour and the fragility which are united in the
nature of man." ^^
The heroes recognize their 'kinship in mortality and suffering'; to
use Jasper Griffin's expressive words. Achilles makes the enemy eat
with him. This is a universal symbol of union and high civility. Auerbach
says that Homer's characters do not develop and it is true to an extent,
but the sulking wrathful Achilles, who is called 'a spoilt child' by
Shakespeare in his Troilus and Cressida. does certainly show a kind of
maturity here. His passion has softened and it is a step towards
civilization. It is true that Zeus had ordered Achilles to return the body
of Hector to Priam as it was according to the code of the community,
which is dharma in the Sanskrit epics. But the conduct of Achilles is not
mere obedience to Zeus. This is his own spontaneous reaction when
he sees old Priam like his father. Zeus had not ordered him to allow 46
Priam to stop the war until Hector's funeral was over. Achilles grants
Priam's request in this matter, too. This is a part of his humanity and the realism in the epic. We may say that this is a step in the journey of the epic heroes towards the later tragic or intellectual heroes. We find the roots of the greatness of the Greek tragedies in such sublime moments in Homer and repeatedly become aware of his being 'the
Father of Tragedy'.
The Mahabharata also could have ended at the triumph of the
Pandavas but it does not. 'Vyasa also brings Kunti, Gandhari and
Dhrutarashtra together to go to the forest. This is not vanavasa, but these old people have chosen to spend their last days in the forest away from the palace and city life. When the parents of the Kauravas proceed to the forest, Kunti, the mother of the victorious Pandavas joins them. She could well have lived on in the glorious palace as the king's mother but the same 'kinship in mortality and suffering' brings them together. Dhrutarashtra and Gandhari have lost all their sons. In
Stree Parvan Gandhari utters before Bheema like Priam,
ii30 cpaFpqilirf^fR^ yR^cbl ^ ^ff^ II (You have killed all the children of the parents who are old and have lost their kingdom. How pitiful it is that not a single staff is left to us for support! We are a blind couple.)
But even Kunti has witnessed the loss of her grandchildren while
they were sleeping. Her own injustice towards Kama and his death has 47
touched her to the quick. She must have shared Yudhishthira's feelings when he asserts that his triumph is just like defeat. So she not only joins the old couple but also sen/es them like a meek daughter-in-law in the forest. The three old persons surrender before a wildfire in the forest and die. Their sons come to know about it only afteoA/ards through Narada. The ending of the lives of the Pandavas while travelling in the Himalayas is similarly tragic.
As quoted by Griffin, Prof. Northrop Frye points out in Anatomy of Criticism the importance for the western literature of the Iliad's demonstration that the fall of an enemy no less than that of a friend or a leader, is tragic and not comic. The Mahabharata also demonstrates the same thing. The endings of the epics raise them far higher than mere war sagas. Suffering is the basic truth of life that brings all together.
I) Some points of contrast:
There are some points of contrast along with similarities among these epics. It is in the Greek tragedies that followed that women are found to be independent and powerful. Women like Clytemnestra,
Antigone, Electra in the tragedies of Aeschyles, Sophocles, Euripides
possess the grit and grandeur that are reserved for heroes in the epics.
They never tamely submit to men or even fate. In The Suppliant
Women of Aeschylus fifty women are pursued by men for marriage.
These women do not want to marry them. They resist and kill the men
as a punishment for their atrocity. In Sanskrit literature, however, the case is reversed. The plays that followed the Sanskrit epics many characters and themes from the same sources but none reaches the level of the grand and awful personalities in the epics.
Rather, the Mahabharata is the first and the last great tragedy in the form of an epic in the Indian literature. The later plays lack tragic spirit and are hardly tragedies in the Aristotelian sense. For example,
1) Bhavbhooti's Uttar Ramacharitam is based on the Valmiki
Ramayana but he shows reunion of Rama and Seeta in the seventh act. This change in the story of Rama does not help to elevate the sublimity of the character of Seeta.
2) Kalidasa's Abhijnana Shakuntalam presents the story of Shakuntala from the Mahabharata. Kalidasa's treatment of the heroine is different from that of Vyasa and is less effective. Romila Thapar has monitored the development of the story of Shakuntala in the Indian tradition in her
Shakuntala :Texts. Readings. Histories. She discusses in this book the
changes in the depiction of Shakuntala made by Kalidasa. She has
shown how the strong personality of Shakuntala in the Mahabharata
becomes shy and meek in the play of Kalidasa.
The Greek epics remained secular in the sense that the
characters were not taken to be divine and they were not related to
religion but the Sanskrit epics followed a different course. The heroes
of the Greek epics remained human characters and never became
deities. Not only that, but the gods also remained in the legends and
were never worshipped. Even Homer himself seems to laugh at them. 49
Demodocus in Book Eight of the Odyssey describes how Aphrodite is caught with Ares by the gods and they all laugh at the lovers. Homer shows gods being hit or wounded in the battle. Gods in the
Mahabharata are never treated in this way. They retain their dignity
and do not interfere very much in human affairs. Many things
happened to the original details in the intervening centuries. Indian epic
heroes became incarnations of the god, Vishnu and the epics that had essentially been bardic poetry, were now given the sanctity of divine
revelation. They had originally been secular and now began to be
revised as semi-religious literature, most probably by the brahmans
because it is they whose greatness and power are narrated and
praised in the revised form of the epics. They are shown to be greater
than even the gods. Many stories relate that the curses of brahmans
could defeat even the king of gods, Indra. It seems that Buddhists and
Jains also have inserted many verses. No revising or additions of this
kind were made in the Greek epics.
The Greek epics show no overtly didactic or moral purpose
behind them. Homer never advises directly. Plutarch shows in his "On
the Study of Poetry" how Homer instructs indirectly. But the purpose of
instruction is not important in Homer. The Mahabharata has plenty of
pieces of advice on several matters of life. It underwent many
interpolations and it is difficult to check whether the original poet
composed these pieces of advice or when and by whom they were
added. Yet the poet had an express moral purpose. At the end of the
epic he asserts - 50
(Raising my hands, I am asserting a truth but nobody is listening to me. Artha [material aims]and kama [satisfaction of desires] can be achieved by dharma [righteousness]. Then why isn't dharma followed by people?)
Some episodes in the Mahabharata seem to have been exaggerated or glamorized by later interpreters. The episode of
Draupadi's humiliation in the court of the Kauravas underwent this kind of change. M. A. Mehendale has shown in his book Pracheena Bharata how the whole episode was distorted by many critics. The humiliation was not a lesser evil and has to be condemned most strongly but the kirtanakars have been narrating this episode in glaring terms perhaps to entertain the audience, and the Kauravas are being painted in totally black colours which Vyasa never meant. The Greek epics were not interpreted in different ways by later readers or critics. The Greek epics have compositional layers. That is why Wilamovitz said that it is inadequate to throw everything Homeric into the same pot. But these layers were not so prominent as in case of the Mahabharata.
J) An Evolution of views :
It is almost unanimously accepted that the Uiad and the Odvssev
were composed by one poet. Homer. Still the Odvssev shows a kind of
evolution of attitudes in some respects. The Uiad is more of a martial
nature than the Odvssev. Achilles is out and out a warrior and fights for 51 the sake of honour. He refrains from war only when he thinks that
Agamemnon has insulted him but the journey of the protagonist of the
Odvssev is from the battlefield towards his homeland, from war towards peace. Even gods do not want war. Gods on the Olympic decide that Odysseus should be helped to return to his land. Hera and
Athena incited the Trojan War. It was decided that a duel between
Menelaus and Paris would decide who would win Helen. On the contrary Athena chides Odysseus in the Odvssev for his readiness for fighting. There is a change in the values of honour. Achilles in the Iliad preferred glorious short life to safe long life. Now the same Achilles tells Odysseus in the land of Hades-
"Odysseus, do not gloss over death to me. I would rather be above ground still and labouring for some poor portionless man than to be a lord over all the lifeless dead." ^^
Odysseus fights only when his life is in danger, as with
Polyphemus, the Cyclops. The nature of this war also has changed.
Achilles fought mainly with physical prowess. Cunning Odysseus uses
his brain, becomes a Noman and kills the Cyclops. This is a step
lowards the rise of the intellectual hero. The views about common
people have undergone changes though they are not prominent. The
lumber of common people is larger, also they take a more active part
n the central action of the Odvssev than in the Hjad. The swineherd
Eumaeus, nurse Eurycleia can be quoted as examples. Agamemnon
and Odysseus in the Ijlad vehemently deride Dolon and Thersites.
George de F Lord, in his essay "The Odvssev and the Western World" 52
in Essays on the Odvssev has shown how the personality of the hero has been evolving from Achilles who was possessed with ate or personal honour to Aeneas who fights for the future. The people in the
Odvssev seem to be slightly more civilized than the primitive people in the Iliad are. It is true that the slaughter of the suitors is merciless and shows a lack of the sense of civilization but then, man has witnessed more cruel mayhem in the wars in the modern age. In the Iliad, the warriors rejoice over the death of enemies but in the Odvssev
Odysseus restrains Eurycleia when she rejoices over the killing of the suitors. As regards the views about women also the Odvssev shows an improvement over the Iliad. The number of women is larger and their role in the main action is significant. Odysseus could not have reached his land but for the help of Calypso, Nausicaa and Arete, and in Ithaca itself Eurycleia helps him and Telemachus in regaining their power.
The Mahabharata alone shows a more tremendous variety of views about innumerable aspects of life than is found in the two
Homeric epics. The same is true about the views about women because the views are ambivalent. This is natural, as composition of this epic was a continuous process, different centuries rub shoulders in it and it has a larger number of interpolations.
This consideration of the background and prominent aspects of the epics can help the comparison of the women characters in them
but before that it is also necessary to take into account features Of
characterization in general in these epics. The third chapter deals with
this aspect of the epics. 5?
NOTES
1. E. V. Rieu, "Introduction", The Iliad ed. E. V. Rieu
( 1950; Middlesex : Penguin Books, 1951 ) xii.
2. Nabaneeta Dev Sen, "Thematic Structure of Epic poems in the East and in the West : A Comparative Study", Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature. 12 (1974) :31.
3. Charles H. Taylor, Jr., Essavs on the Odvssev : Selected Modern Criticism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana U.P.,1963 ) vii.
Hereafter cited as Essavs on the Odvssev.
4. Paul Merchant, The Epic { 1971; London : Methuen, 1984 )4.
Hereafter cited as Merchant, Epic.
5. Homer, The Odvssev. trans. Walter Shewring (Oxford : Oxford U. P., 1980)273.
Hereafter cited as Odvssev.
6. Rajesh Kochhar, The Vedic People : Their Historv and Geoqraphv (1997: Hyderabad : Orient Longman, 2000 ) 218, 219.
7. V. S. Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata ( Bombay : The Asiatic Society of Bombay, 1957 ) 2.
8. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (1991; New York : Penguin Books, 1998 ) 552.
Hereafter cited as Iliad.
9. Iliad 553.
10. Odvssev 246.
11. Iliad 498.
12. Ibid. 590.
13. Mahabharata 1163.
14. Aitareya Brahmana (Pune ; Anandashrama, 1931) 835.
15. J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (London : Smith, Elder, 1879)59. 54
Hereafter cited as Studies of the Greek Poets.
16. Buddhadeva Bose, The Book of Yudhishthir. trans. Sujit
Mukherjee (Hyderabad : Sangam Books, 1986)196.
17. Iliad 200.
18. Bhavabhooti. Uttar Rama Charita. ed. G. K. Bhat
( Surat: The Popular Book Store, 1953 ) 106.
19. Shelley, Shelley and Keats, ed. Guy Boas (1925;
London : Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1947 ) 203.
Hereafter cited as Shelley and Keats.
20. Iliad 596.
21. Ibid. 604.
22. Ibid. 604.
23. Ibid. 605.
24. Ibid. 605.
25. Ibid. 605.
26. Wilfred Owen, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis ( London : Chatto and Windus, 1968 ) 36.
27. Ibid. 36.
28. Iliad 609.
29. Griffin, Homer 40.
30. Mahabharata 1972.
31. Ibid. 2926.
32. Odyssey 139.
*****