A scholar’s epic journey

Lakshmisha Tolpadi, who won the 2023 Sahitya Akademi Award, believes the archetypal characters in the Mahabharata can hold a mirror to who we are today, writes Vanamala Viswanatha.

Why should we read ancient epics today? How does a modern mind negotiate its way through the textured telling of the story and arrive at an understanding of right and wrong, and all that lies in between? Ask Lakshmisha Tolpadi, who won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2023, for Bharatayatre, his book of insightful readings of the Mahabharata. This book of short essays offers a complex reading of the epic in which the author illuminates the major characters with his vast and incisive scholarship, deploying Dharmaraja as the moral compass for his judgement.

In response to the relevance question, Tolpadi, much like the illustrious A K Ramanujan, believes that our epics are not so much read, as heard and internalised through cultural osmosis. Mahabharata with its rich archive of archetypes wields a powerful influence on our mental make-up, forming a part of the subconscious mind. The study of these archetypal characters can hold a mirror to who we are today. Thus, the study of the text gets transformed into a study of ourselves, svadhyaya, a haloed practice in Indian scholarly traditions. In a recent interview in Prajavani, Tolpadi elaborated on the larger purpose of his oeuvre, to say that his focus is not on re-telling the story, but on intensely exploring the epic as a text of cultural significance, reading it as myth, and as history. Hence, reading epics often results in svadhyaya, the study of one’s self, a journey into self-knowledge to know ourselves better.

Tolpadi is a scholar with a difference. Like any good scholar, he is widely read; but unlike most current scholars who are monolingual, he is widely read in three languages — Kannada, Sanskrit, and English. This kind of multilingual scholarship that marked an earlier mode of reading prevalent in the late 19th and 20th centuries is an extremely rare phenomenon in our times.

This sojourn in varied linguistic landscapes has afforded a unique advantage to the author of shining the light of diverse literary cultures on this foundational epic to draw out the essence of important moments, which presents alternative readings of the text. His interpretation is based on his thorough-going scholarship with arguments culled out from scholars, thinkers and philosophers ranging from Indologists like Suktankar, to Gandhi and Ambedkar, to a European philosopher such as Kierkegaard, not to speak of Kannada poets and thinkers such as Allama, Basava, Kuvempu, Govinda Pai, and D V Gundappa. Interspersed with telling quotes in three languages, his writing reads more like a lyrical montage of images. Juxtaposing this rich repertoire of work — a pivotal word from English, a telling metaphor from Sanskrit, a sparkling verse from Kannada — to illuminate a character or a situation, Tolpadi transmutes the scholarship into lustrous, lyrical reflections replete with startling insights.

Tolpadi’s contemplative writing leaves the reader deeply moved, with a sense of the profound, while retaining its spontaneity and freshness. Reading these nuanced essays is akin to enjoying a whiff of the subtly fragrant parijata flower.

Reading the body, reading the mind

Tradition has fervently believed that Vyasa is a Chiranjeevi, an immortal being. Even without such fervour, one can say that the Mahabharata as history is immortal. But how the notion of immortality gets enacted here is unique. There is Bhishma, associated with the concept of ichchaa marana, ‘dying-at-will’, who has the ‘boon’ of choosing the time and manner of his death. This amounts to saying, “Death is ineluctable, but even this ineluctable phenomenon is within one’s control.” In this scheme of things, something as final as death also supplicates itself to the will of the individual and performs its duty. While death is a part of nature, ‘dying-at-will’ is history! It is an account of what was! In a way, it is like conquering Death. In this sense, one could say that history is longing to become immortal.

That Bhishma should recline on a bed of arrows, broken and bruised, spending the last moments of his life waiting for death, hits at the very meaning of his father’s name ‘Shantanu’. ‘Sham-tanu’ means a body that is temperate; a body that is cool, a body in relaxation, a body secure in the lap of comfort. The boon of ‘dying-at-will’ given by a man such as Shantanu was enjoyed by Bhishma in a manner that no one, least of all Shantanu, could even imagine — resting his body on a bed of sharp arrows.

In doing this, he shows another possibility of the body. It is like going beyond his own body. By subjecting himself thus, he demonstrated to the world that he was beyond the body. But Bhishma is himself a Kshatriya. By lying on the bed of arrows, it was as if he was trying to say that this transcending of the body is necessarily the history of a Kshatriya. At the head of the bed on which this man reclined thus, there were three tall arrows! What a detail! The great patriarch rested his head on the edge of these arrows. For, he needed to see the world from his novel bed and the world had to see him with his head still held high!

Pampa, the 10th-century primal poet of Kannada, who had reached the height of his poetic powers in his unparalleled epic Vikramarjuna Vijaya, a Kannada retelling of the Mahabharata, must have lingered at this point for a while… to describe Bhishma’s bed of arrows. The consummate poet offers this graphic image:

Clusters of arrows holding his body high, not touching the earth,

Open gashes and sores glistening like sculpted letters on the body,

Bhishma, son of the eternal Ganga lay there

Like an open book on a bookrest urging one to read,

Like an edict that decrees intrepid Kshatriya mores

As the mandate for the valiant!

In this extraordinary verse, Pampa’s phrase, “not touching the earth”, takes off and flies expansively in the sky without getting grounded, echoing the special charge of the phrase, over and over again. Perhaps poetic talent, propelled by the inner spirit, is much like an arrow from somewhere lodged inside. Once it lodges inside, even when you are on the ground, you could be unbound, untouched by earthly matters. Keeping the image of ‘not touching the earth’, Pampa has written a companion verse to this, in which he says: Why did Bhishma not touch the earth? Isn’t the earth woman? And Bhishma is known particularly for his purist ways, his bachelorhood. He was one who kept up the vow of bachelorhood all his life.

I am still soaked in the aura of the first verse… those words! Those sores on Bhishma’s body are like shining letters! These words are true not only of Bhishma but also of the itihasa called Mahabharata, a history stained with blood and gore. Ramayana comes to mind… the tragedy of the twin kraunchas, herons. The hunter’s arrow hits the male bird and he falls down dead. His female companion wails in shock and grief. Witnessing this, karuna rasa, compassion, courses through the poet’s being, suffusing the entire story of Rama with a new fecundity. Since he could hear the agony of bereavement, poetry was born. From shoka to shloka… from pain to poetry. As Kalidasa says, “A poet is one who follows grief.” And Pampa describes the wounds as aksharas, letters sculpted by arrows. The word ‘a-kshara’ also means ‘that which does not wane’. It also refers to the ‘unhealing’ wounds. It could also be saying — here’s the raw material of history that future poets could draw from.

Aren’t wounds being described as radiant letters? So, they are shining bright, aren’t they? Aren’t things that shine always wet or raw? When we say here’s material for future cultural production, doesn’t it suggest that history is immortal? In Pampa’s hands, Bhishma’s body, his life, becomes an open book. When we recall that Pampa was himself a commander-in-chief in the army, he must have been reading the raw wounds on his own body, like a tiger licking its own wounds. The wise ones should be reading only the body of the valiant!

The lines, “Bhishma, son of the eternal Ganga lay there… Like an open book on a bookrest urging one to study, Like an edict that decrees intrepid Kshatriya mores, As the mandate of the valiant!” assume greater meaning in The Mahabharata’s Shanti Parva, The Book of Peace, that comes after the war: Bhishma, still reposing on the bed of arrows, offers thorough-going advice to Dharmaraja on the dharma of kings. This aspect is absent in Pampa; it does not serve his poetic purpose. But Pampa’s words gesture toward the context of the important chapter, Book of Peace. Here, Bhishma staunchly defends the Kshatriya code of valour. But at this point in the Mahabharata, Dharmaraja is utterly disillusioned with Rajadharma!

Post-war despair has enveloped Dharmaraja. He is grieving as though he is himself resting on an invisible bed of arrows; he is distraught. The throne itself is a bed of arrows for him. No counsel from any of the elders can offer him succour. At this point, on Krishna’s suggestion, Bhishma, the patriarch of the Kuru dynasty, showers his deep and vast understanding of life in this poignant encounter. On one side, there is Bhishma — reposing on arrows, with his body covered with wounds all over, awaiting death, in the eerie silence of the battlefield, just days after the great war, in the same Kurukshetra — still defending the code of valour, still talking of conquest, still exuding joy de vivre in ample measure!

On the other side, there is Dharmaja — who, having won the war, feels that this triumph is more painful than a defeat in battle; who is bewildered deep down thinking about the meaning of all this; who has the vision of renouncing everything in the haunting isolation that ensued after losing his children, friends, and family! With the whole edifice collapsing around him, feeling disoriented amid the ruins, hallucinating beds of arrows all around him, unable to fathom this talk of re-construction, grandson Dharmaja, sighing, hopes his revered grandfather would, for once, read his mind deeply! Bhishma insists on reading the body of the Kshatriya! Dharmaja insists on reading the mind of the Kshatriya! This encounter between the two readings defines the depth and vastness of the Book of Peace.

This is an abridged translation of the essay ‘Mai-Managala Odu’ from Bharatayatre by Tolpadi.

(Translated by Vanamala Viswanatha)

(The translator-author is a bilingual scholar writing in Kannada and English on matters of language, literature, teaching, and translation. The Life of Harishchandra (Harvard University Press, 2017) is her noted translation of a medieval Kannada poetic classic in the Murty Classical Library of India series.)