Wendy Doniger's new book explores untold stories from the Mahabharata

The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals: Some Moral Tales from the Mahabharata

Author: Wendy Doniger

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Price: Rs 499   

Pages: 222

There are many ways to read the Mahabharata. Like an onion, it opens up in layered, concentric circles of stories, all nested within an invisible labyrinthine web. At its core is a story of a powerful kingdom hurtling towards its end, blown up by arrogance, hubris and greed. But the epic is much more than a bruising clan war.
 

It is a treatise on good and evil, it also serves as a guidebook for dharma and kingship or it could be read as a manual on destructive father-son relationships and such else. It is, as its composers boast at the very beginning, a text that has everything there is in the world and what it does not have, does not exist anywhere.
 

This collection of stories chosen and translated by Wendy Doniger slices open one part of the text to reveal some of the ideas that early Indian societies had about women, animals, friendship and other such issues. The stories reflect the concerns that many societies of the time had about adultery, sycophancy, chastity and other moral conditions.
 

The book contains 36 tales, all chosen from the 12th and 13th parva  of the Mahabharata that mostly focus on dharma. These stories are being told by Bheeshma to Yudhishthira as he waits for his death, lying on a bed of arrows on the battlefield. They usually begin with a question that Yudhisthira asks his grandfather, which he answers with a story and a moral. And in some ways, the stories are projected as the last words of a dying man and hence, gospel.
 

Doniger writes that the stories embody "the pressing questions" that the epic seeks to answer. In doing that they work somewhat like magic mirrors; reflecting the outer world by cracking open tiny shafts of light into the way early societies thought and at the same time turning the light inwards, forcing listeners and readers to examine their biases and prejudices on the issues at hand. They also help listeners and readers explore the, often contradictory, nature of the epic.
 

Doniger says the stories confer a complex interiority to the characters of the Mahabharata. The composers/writers of the epic were not just interested in delivering a moral lesson, they were keen to understand the human condition. The stories also reveal a dark sense of humour and a desire to look beyond the obvious.
 

In the story “How a tiger’s mother saved the pious jackal”, the goal is to warn the king-to-be (Yudhisthira) about the pitfalls of hypocrisy and sycophancy. The story has a tiger and jackal as protagonists and is revealed through the dialogue between the two. To drive home the point that one must never go by appearances, the story uses an otherwise unclean, carrion-eating jackal as its moral hero, while the typically courageous tiger is shown to be weak and gullible.
 

Many of the animal stories in the collection are about politics, some are about judgement and prejudice, and some about the taboos around consuming animals. The collection also has many stories about women and their role in society and in the family.
 

In these stories, Bhishma’s deep distrust of the feminine and the prevalent misogynistic attitudes dominate the narrative. Women are born evil, Bhishma tells his grandson, while narrating a story about how they were created thus, by Brahma the god of all creations. They are fickle and not to be trusted, the stories say and while there are those that do not fit the mould, their virtue, as Doniger writes, is mostly negative — that is, “they do not commit the sin that women are generally accused of in this text.” There are good women too, but those are the ones that fulfil their dharma as good wives and mothers.
 

Some stories reinforce caste equations that were being cast into stone at the time, while some question the arbitrary nature of such classifications. For instance, in a story about seven sages (Saptarishis) and a king, the typically harmonious relationship between Brahmins and Kshatriyas is put to the test.
 

The stories, Doniger writes, are funny and weird, and they generally do not find their way into the abridged versions or televised dramatisations of the epic. But that does not make them irrelevant. There is much to understand here, even if it has little to do with the war or with Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita.
 

They are also hugely entertaining. There are people flitting in and out of each other’s bodies, carrying out bizarre and improbable acts of bravery and foolishness and at times, going to extremely painful lengths to make a point.
 

The only quibble one has with the book is that the translations seem a bit hasty and laboured. Reading them is not as satisfying as many of Doniger’s other works are, which could limit readership to a community of fans and academics. That would be unfortunate.