On the battlefield, as the Pandava and Kaurava armies lay arraigned against one another, letting out bloodthirsty roars from time to time, Yudhishthira stepped out of his coat of mail and armour and descended from his chariot. His army stood by shocked. His brothers ran after him in horror while the only god on that battlefield, Krishna, looked on bemused.
Yudhishthira walked over to Bhishma, then Drona and Kripa and Salya, his grandfathers and uncles but also enemies on the battlefield. From all of them he sought blessings and permission to go to battle against them. Was Yudhishthira seditious? He was engaging with the enemy after all; unthinkable and unpardonable it would seem for the times we live in.
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If not him, then Bhishma surely would have fallen foul of modern-day nationalists. When Yudhishthira went up to him, he replied in anguish, calling himself a eunuch because he had been bound by the wealth of the Kauravas and, hence, could not give Yudhishthira what he wanted. Even Drona, guru of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, told him that though he would fight for the Kauravas he would pray for the Pandavas’ victory. Yet, Duryodhana handed over command of his army to these men, without letting the petty objections of naysayers hinder of his faith in their leadership.
Draupadi, too, would have been in chains for her denouncement of the Pandavas and even Krishna. She called them weak, incapable of doing their duty and even called Yudhishthira, the king in waiting, a desperate gambler. None, she said, deserved her, for they had failed to protect her. She was speaking against her husband and prospective ruler of the nation and would surely have crossed every barrier that nationalists, especially women, are expected to hold.
Much like the factory-assembled lion that has been chosen as mascot of the ongoing “Make in India” initiative, the epics, Puranas and other such narratives are made of ideas, experiences and ideals that went into building the character and value systems of a people, a tribe and, ultimately, a nation state. They reveal a people’s insecurities and epiphanies in equal measure.
Scholars have chosen to interpret them through multiple lenses; linguists have used words, philosophers have dug for concepts and religion has sought meaning. Strangely, though, myth today has been reduced to jejune symbols and rituals that have become meaningless or irrelevant over time.
Take the popular image of “Mother India”; the country is shown in the image of a goddess who needs protection from anyone who even harbours doubts about the people who rule her. Ancient goddesses, however, were such that the people sought protection from them. Saraswati, as journalist Mrinal Pande writes in Scroll.in, “is a feminine force that creates intimate partnerships of the mind not through a macho display of power or feminine wiles, but through gender, creed and caste neutral sakhyatva or friendship.” She is “fearless, quick of tongue, and ever ready to give back as good as she gets.”
Goddesses get even more fearless if we step beyond the main Vedic pantheon. Manasa, goddess of the snakes, destroys those who refuse to worship her. She does not depend upon her worshippers to come to her rescue. In a well-known parable where she converts a die-hard Shiva devotee to her fold, she forces him to accept her divinity by killing his sons and destroying his home and family. She is even known to have poisoned a flock of sheep because the shepherd community resisted her worship. When they came around, she revived their sheep.
Interestingly, the image of this goddess is a far cry from the one that we see sprawled across posters where a benign goddess holds up the flag. It is in her name that, for two days in a row, a band of goons have beaten up people and shouted down a dissenting point of view. There seems to be little that these people have in common with the original character of the country they are fighting to uphold. But the political leaders (past and present, right and left and centre) bear a striking resemblance to another character from Mahabharata, Dhritarashtra, who stood by silently while his children killed each other.
