Copyright by Daniel Adam Rudmann 2015
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Copyright by Daniel Adam Rudmann 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Daniel Adam Rudmann Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Carried Meaning in the Mahābhārata Committee: Martha Selby, Co-Supervisor Joel Brereton, Co-Supervisor Oliver Freiberger Alf Hiltebeitel Cynthia Talbot Carried Meaning in the Mahābhārata by Daniel Adam Rudmann, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2015 Dedication for my father, Max Rudmann and Alf Hiltebeitel Carried Meaning in the Mahābhārata Daniel Adam Rudmann, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Co-Supervisor: Martha Selby Co-Supervisor: Joel Brereton The Mahābhārata describes itself as both a comprehensive and exhaustive text, incorporating a range of genres while presenting diverse perspectives through a matrix of interacting narratives. Its main story and subtales are the subject of productive contemporary studies that underscore the significance of the Sanskrit epic, though this scholarship is also famously criticized for overlooking literary inquiry. The following dissertation enacts a close reading of four subtales, Nala’s Tale, Rāma’s Tale, Sāvitrī’s Tale, and The Yakṣa’s Questions, in context with the larger work to uncover the implications of a literary study of the Mahābhārata. By conducting translations of passages from the epic, this dissertation builds sites of alliance among frame and subtale, literary and translation theory, critical analysis and contemporary scholarship, as well as the Mahābhārata and other works of literature in order to consider the ways in which meaning is generated throughout the text. Language, constituent parts, and operative principles are found to reverberate in the epic, eschewing didacticism and stasis for literary vitality. Themes of loss, love, disguise, and discovery veer throughout the v subtales as sideshadows that at once collaborate and contradict to continuously redefine one another. The Mahābhārata’s self-conscious and reiterative reinterpretation of its own constructs presents critical insights on translation as dialogical correspondence, occurring within utterances as well as between languages. The act of translation, utilized by the poem itself to develop and proliferate significance, reveals difference and bears legibility within the epic. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1 – Introduction ..........................................................................................1 What Is Here Is Found Elsewhere ..................................................................1 A Brief History of Recent Mahābhārata Scholarship .....................................4 The Monster and the Critics ..........................................................................20 On Translation ..............................................................................................35 Chapter 2 - Nala’s Tale ..........................................................................................43 A Love Story .................................................................................................43 Dice Plural ....................................................................................................52 On Separation ................................................................................................61 On Disguise ...................................................................................................70 To Be Discovered .........................................................................................78 Reduplications ...............................................................................................88 Chapter 3 - Rāma’s Tale ......................................................................................101 The Translated Storyteller ...........................................................................101 Reverberations ............................................................................................111 Listening .....................................................................................................118 Chapter 4 - Sāvitrī’s Tale .....................................................................................131 The Good Wife ...........................................................................................131 Following Death ..........................................................................................138 The Return of the King ...............................................................................147 Chapter 5 - The Yakṣa’s Questions .....................................................................155 Approach .....................................................................................................155 The Dharma King .......................................................................................163 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................183 How Far Is Far ............................................................................................183 On The Problem of Sameness .....................................................................190 vii Bibliography ........................................................................................................194 viii Chapter 1 – Introduction I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms. (Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher”) WHAT IS HERE IS FOUND ELSEWHERE Aftershocks from Alf Hiltebeitel’s 1999 claim that “the largest inadequacy of Mahabhā ratā scholarship is simply the failure to appreciate the epic as a work of literature” continue to be felt in the academic community to this day.1 The statement calls on scholars to reexamine those foundations upon which many contemporary inquiries reside. How, then, were these verses considered? What success might scholarship achieve in adopting a new perspective? If we are to occupy a more fitting space, each tectonic 1 For evidence of the anxiety that follows Hiltebeitel’s proclamation, see its frequent citation in Hudson 2013, Fraizer 2011, Brodbeck and Black 2007, Fitzgerald 2003. 1 movement that comes to bear upon our present understanding of the epic must be reexamined so that scholarship might veer toward an ethic that has come to characterize other literary scholars working in the humanities. And if our ground shakes, let it all fall apart. A study of the Mahabhā ratā as literature should cause us to interrogate the process of scholarship in this particular mode. What does it mean to study something as “literature?” Surely the Mahabhā ratā as presented in the critical edition is ink and page and plot and character. Should this allow us to presume that it is literature – and thereby deem any type of analysis sufficient? The study of literature should not only shed light on the Mahabhā ratā , but, inversely, the epic itself might be a productive voice in larger conversations on the state of the discipline. In light of Hiltebeitel’s work, some scholars of ancient South Asia are beginning to ask questions that hold paramount the literary nature of the text. Primacy is important here. We must take great care in what we choose to elevate in our study. I will argue throughout these pages that to consider a work as literature first demands that the scholar back away from a monolithic reading. Literature allows space for contradiction, change, multitudes, among other qualities. It veers and entangles itself, it speaks to ghosts. To develop our study of the Mahabhā ratā as literature first, and not dependent on historical theorization, is to place Sheldon Pollock’s horse back before the proverbial cart.2 Concurring with Pollock’s argument, we should utilize and build upon theory while conducting literary analysis, the literature itself cannot be shoehorned to fit a particular 2 See Pollock 2006, 33. 2 mode. We do not, then, hope to find a particular theory, or even type of theory, as panacea in grasping the whole of this literature. Instead, literary theories will serve as tools that open the text at the point at which a specific implement is needed most. My hope at the outset of this dissertation is to gain additional, and critical, entryways into the epic and better discern its design.3 To be clear, I agree with Hiltebeitel’s assertion that the Mahabhā ratā as we have it in the critical edition represents a whole and intentionally constructed narrative.4 Reasons for adopting this position will become more clear throughout this study, but for now it should suffice to say that I believe this perspective is necessary in attempting to gain any foothold in the Mahabhā ratā as it forces us as readers to take nothing in the text for granted. A slippery slope occurs in scholarship that cites sections