The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata Read online

  RANDOM HOUSE INDIA

  Published by Random House India in 2011

  Copyright © Maggi-Lidchi Grassi 2011

  Random House Publishers India Private Limited

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  EPUB ISBN 9788184002096

  To Mother India

  And to the embodiment of her Spirit,

  Sri Aurobindo, who brought me to her:

  To Her

  Of whom Sri Aurobindo said

  “The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same”;

  And to the Future

  They envisaged for India and for mankind which even now is dawning.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  The Beginning

  Part I The Battle of Kurukshetra

  Part II The Legs of the Tortoise

  Part III The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  One of the nicest things about finishing a book is that you can go back and remember with gratitude (which is one of my favourite emotions) the people who have, in one way or another, sustained you in your endeavour.

  The first volume came out in 1986 under the title, “The Battle of Kurukshetra”. There were times when the challenge of sorting out in this twelve-volume epic what I wanted to keep and what could be regarded as irrelevant to the story—as I wanted to tell it—seemed overwhelming. Mary Prem Boseman herself probably doesn’t realize how much I was upheld by our talks and her keen judgement, which helped me over a couple of hurdles. Thank you, my dear friend.

  Rosie Coyne and Nayana need to be remembered with love and gratitude for their enthusiastic efforts, which removed the drudgery from this precomputer production as well as P. Raja whose enthusiasm inspired me, and also my student Shashwati, who helped with the glossary. Brajkishore, my Sanskrit teacher, helped me to a deeper appreciation of Vyasa’s epic than I would otherwise have had.

  By the second volume, “The Legs of the Tortoise”, inspiration flowed but it was another friend, Jan Maslow, who added to the joy of creation of the book. Her sensitivity to what I was doing was such that it sometimes seemed the story was being written for her. By then there was a computer on which Jan is a wizard. With Arvind Habbu, an ex-student of mine at the Sri Aurobindo Centre of Education, there was the joy of rereading the second volume and discovering that there could still be improvement, with which Arvind gave me valuable help. I hope you can hear me from the other side, Arvind, as I thank you with all my heart.

  My Golconde friends, Sue and Suzanne, need to be affectionately acknowledged for their proofreading and Swadhin Panda for his technical assistance.

  For the last volume, written several years later, a blessing descended in the form of a new friend, Nitya Menon, whose vibrant interest and chanting of Vedic hymns sustained me as did our stimulating exchanges. Thank you, Nitya.

  For his help in this last volume Sundar Dhir needs to be acknowledged for his, as always, impeccable proofreading, and Michael Z. for his editing. I was again granted, after many years, the grace of Barbara’s collaboration when she entered several versions of my introduction to this one-volume edition and did the proofreading. It would not have been complete without you, Barbara.

  For all three volumes of the book, Priyanka Sarkar, my editor at Random House, came down all the way from Delhi to the Deep South to do the last rounds of the proofs with me. It was a great help and pleasure. Thank you Priyanka.

  Dulcis in fundo. To Surakshit, who is much more than a companion and inspiration—there is no way of expressing my gratitude and delight for the constant sharing and day-to-day reliving of the Great Golden Epic that has made its way into our lives. Events and quotations from some of our characters have become household bywords. One of our favourites, most useful when things don’t turn out, is Greatfather’s “Expectations make a fool of us.” It is enough to mutter, “As Greatfather says...”

  And, of course, to Island-born Greatfather, Ved Vyasa, who narrated the epic in the first place, our reverential pranams.

  And for Sri Aurobindo, who set me on the path, there is only silence, no words will serve.

  Preface

  Om Namo Bhagavate Naaraayanaaye…

  Om Namo Bhagavate Naaraayanaaye…

  I bow down to you, my Lord;

  I bow down to you, my Lord.

  A welcoming Namaste to the reader of this book whom I am about to introduce to the personal and historical elements that shaped it. A grateful Namaste to my editors at Random House India too, who invited me to do so.

  Originally, this work was published in three separate volumes, each with an introduction and preface by a different writer. The problem arising from the decision to publish the work as a single volume was swept aside by the editor’s suggestion that I write ‘a personalized introduction talking about texts that have influenced me, sources and philosophies that shaped my way of thinking and the core messages that I think the Mahabharata contains and which I have tried to embody in my work.’

  At the age of seventeen, after having spent the World War II years in South Africa, I found myself in Paris, the city of my birth. At that time, revelations about the concentration camps were destroying all previouslyheld conceptions of the limits to which human evil could extend. The horror of that time and place was not an abstraction for me: a cousin with whom I used to play as a child had come out of Auschwitz with her identity number tattooed on her arm and a burden of dreams from which she would wake up screaming, night after night.

  One day I came upon a French translation of Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita. In a world that had lost its bearings it was the only thing that made sense to me. In the Gita, there is a significant moment just before the battle between the powers of darkness and the powers of light when the destiny of the known world is about to be decided. The mighty warrior Arjuna, upon whom the outcome of the war depends, surveys the enemy’s ranks in which stand his kinsmen and guru. The code by which he lives declares it his duty to destroy the enemy. The same code regards the slaying of one’s kinsmen or teacher as the greatest of sins. Confronting this dilemma and, foreseeing the destruction that must follow upon either choice, Arjuna is paralysed with horror. What finally releases him is something from another dimension, a vision in which the terrifying ambiguities of morality are somehow resolved. I cannot begin to describe the catharsis this passage produced in me. Suffice it to say that I became convinced that the answers I sought could only come from another plane.

  In 1959, having found meaning in life after reading more of Sri Aurobindo, I headed for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of Pondicherry, India. It was at the Ashram that I first read, in twelve thick volumes, the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita comprises a single chapter.

  My relation to the Mahabharata was a vividly lived experience, its events not the happenings of a distant age, but one with the epic even
ts through which we had just lived. Over the years, greatly aided by Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita and other writings, as some quantum of the Mahabharata’s spiritual wealth became accessible to me, I knew that I wanted to present it in a way that would make its wisdom and beauty more easily accessible to others. The more I studied the Mahabharata, the more striking were the parallels I discovered between its story of the conflict culminating in the battle of Kurukshetra, and the events culminating in World War II. In both cases there was a tremendous clash between the forces of darkness and the forces of light such as takes place in a time of changing Dharma. It is this clash—between Asura and Deva, to use Vedic terminology—with its result of humanity either taking a step forward or sliding back into barbarism that is the theme of the Mahabharata. It seemed to me that this was also the central lesson learned from World War II.

  Sometimes in my vision, the figures and events of the Mahabharata slid in and out of the drama the world had so recently witnessed in the rise and fall of Nazism. The parallels were uncanny.

  Powerful and savage Jarasandha sought emperorship over Bharatavarsha, and in order to ensure his success, he was ready to offer Shiva the heads of a hundred captured kings as a sacrifice. At the war’s end, Hitler sealed and flooded the Berlin underground—the city’s faithful residents offered as a last desperate sacrifice to the dark power he worshipped.

  While in exile, the Pandavas were told by a sage that Drona, Ashwatthama, and Greatfather Bheeshma himself would be possessed by demonic powers. Writing to Nirodbaran—his disciple and later secretary—three years before the war, Sri Aurobindo said: “Hitler and his chief lieutenants Goering and Goebbels are certainly possessed by Vital Beings.” For Sri Aurobindo, “Vital Beings” were Asuras or forces adverse to the Light.

  Dhritarashtra’s message to the Pandavas in the face of war was, “It is better for the sons of Pandu to be dependents, beggars, and exiles all their lives than to enjoy the earth by the slaughter of their brothers, kinsmen, and spiritual guides: contemplation is purer and nobler than action and worldly desires.” “Peace in our time” was the watchword of Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister whose foreign policy sought infamously to appease Hitler.

  The parallels continue. After the war, Arjuna voices his confusion about a critical point: “In the forest you told us to wait out our exile for the full thirteen years, and then Dharma would be with us. But when Krishna came to the forest he said, ‘Fight now!’” Vyasa answers: “I gave you of my knowledge…I walk within my Dharma. Krishna is free of Dharma. It will not work to act as though you are free of Dharma when you are not.”

  Likewise Gandhiji wrote the following letter to the British members of the House of Parliament on the July 2, 1940 as he walked within his nonviolent Dharma:

  I appeal for cessation of all hostilities…because war is bad in essence…I want you to fight Nazism without arms or…with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity…Let them take possession of your beautiful islands with your many beautiful buildings…but not your souls or your minds.

  Gandhiji was a great being, a statesman and perhaps a saint. But he was not a seer. There are times when we have to rise and fight and only those beyond Dharma like Krishna can spur us on to do so.

  It is with the authority of being beyond Dharma that Krishna calls on the Pandava armies to fight at the beginning but calls on them to surrender when the Narayana Astra is unleashed on them. This of course is not merely an injunction to lie prone in the dust of the battlefield but to make an active surrender chanting the mantra and not protecting themselves. In both cases Krishna urges allegiance to a higher truth. There is no contradiction.

  Likewise, Sri Aurobindo, who had fought so fiercely for independence from the British alarmed and astonished the nation and even his disciples by championing the British war effort, declaring: “Those who fight for this cause are fighting for the Divine and against the threatened reign of the Asura.” In another letter, he said:

  You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance.

  And to another disciple:

  We made it plain in a letter which has been made public that we did not consider the war as a fight between nations and governments (still less between good people and bad people) but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric. What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once make themselves instruments of the Divine purpose…

  He is thus Krishna-like looking at a future of peace only through resolution by action.

  Perhaps something more needs to be said about the various entities I have referred to—the “Asuras”, “vital Beings”, and their counterparts, the “Devas”. We tend to use these terms only metaphorically today, but in Vedic times and to seers of all times, they are very real indeed.

  What are vital Beings? They are the embodied forces which seek to obstruct (Asuras), or aid (Devas) the evolutionary advance of the Light. In crucial moments such as those marking humanity’s attempt to make a transition to a new dharma, when the pressure of evolution threatens to dislodge the obsolete past, such beings appear on either side to lead the battle.

  In the Mahabharata we can easily recognize Jarasandha and Dhritarashtra as Asuric figures; Krishna as the embodiment of the Light and Arjuna, his instrument, as the champion of the Light.

  During World War II, Hitler was clearly the Asura’s agent. But who in that battle was the champion of the Light? And where did the Light come from?

  It is universally recognized that it was Winston Churchill, whose inspiring speeches roused his listeners to implacable defiance in the face of what for long seemed the inevitability of defeat. But Churchill was aware of being guided by something beyond, far beyond his own scope. In a statement to the House of Commons on 13 October 1942, he declared:

  … I have a feeling, in fact I have it very strongly, a feeling of interference. I want to stress that I have a feeling sometimes that some guiding hand has interfered. I have the feeling that we have a guardian because we serve a great cause, and that we shall have that guardian so long as we serve that cause faithfully. And what a cause it is!

  If Arjuna was the hero fighting with weapons against overwhelming odds in the war Sri Krishna conducted from another dimension with his light and inspiration, then Churchill was the hero of an unarmed, unprepared Britain fighting against overwhelming odds, with the only weapons she had—his speeches.

  Here is what Sri Aurobindo said of the action of his spiritual force during World War II:

  Certainly, my force is not limited to the Ashram and its conditions. As you know, it is being largely used for helping the right development of the war and of change in the human world.

  Right from the beginning when the first air raid sirens sounded over Britain, Churchill’s words to the House on 13 October 1942 were hardly those of a politician, and instead had the unmistakable ring of an inspired mystic:

  I felt a serenity of mind and was conscious of a kind of uplifted detachment from human and personal affairs. The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation. I tried to convey some of this mood to the House when I spoke, not without acceptance.

  Churchill himself understood the evolutionary significance of the present age, which Sri Aurobindo emphasized in his writings, and in which Churchill himself played so critical a role:

  The destiny of mankind is not decided by m
aterial computation. When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men’s souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

  And again:

  A wonderful story is unfolding before our eyes. How it will end we are not allowed to know. But on both sides of the Atlantic we all feel, I repeat, all feel, that we are part of it, that our future and that of many generations is at stake. We are sure that the character of human society will be shaped by the resolves we take and the deeds we do. We need not bewail the fact that we have been called upon to face such solemn responsibilities. We may be proud, and even rejoice amid our tribulations, that we have been born at this cardinal time for so great an age and so splendid an opportunity of service here.

  And yet again:

  I have absolutely no doubt that we shall win a complete and decisive victory over the forces of evil, and that victory itself will be only a stimulus to further efforts to conquer ourselves.

  It was in this historical and philosophical context that I began to understand the Vedic ideas of sacrifice and surrender, and the joy experienced at the moment of acceptance. There are numerous examples of this joy in the Vedic hymns and in the Vedic concept of sacrifice, with which the Mahabharata abounds.

  It is through Arjuna, my protagonist, that I personify a changing Dharma after Kurukshetra. It is through him that Krishna has been able to reveal the mystery of the Cosmos, and it is now through him that one sees a new model of a man grown wise. In his post-war Ashwamedha campaign we find the Kshatriya hero discovering and developing his feminine, intuitive, and compassionate side in his encounters with those he must challenge.