Were there ever to be a grand literary prize for epics, few would argue that The Mahabharata would be shortlisted for it. Not just ancient literature - it would be well-nigh impossible to find anything in early, modern or contemporary literature from around the world that can match The Mahabharata for sheer imagination, ambition, risk-taking, characterisation, plot, psychology, description, philosophy or narrative complexity.
Think of any literary quality, and it exists in The Mahabharata.
Although a far paler work in comparison, The Ramayana is also replete with many of these qualities, even if it tends more towards blacks and whites and far less towards the greys that make The Mahabharata an outstanding work of fiction.
Yes, fiction.
Just like all epics from all over the world are.
Of course, there must be elements of history, fact, and real-life inspiration in these works. What great novel was not drawn from the realities of the human existence, after all?
India’s ancient epics are among the most soaring expressions of the human imagination in world literature. Why, then, must they be reduced to documents of supposed facts?
Yet, that is just what the entire spectrum of Hindutva thinkers on the arts, from Dinanath Batra at one end to Narendra Modi at the other, backed by cheering masses on social media and elsewhere, are trying to do.
When these stalwarts claim that ancient India must have seen air-travel, plastic surgery, nuclear capability and other advancements in science and technology because the epics have supposedly documented these, they are doing the greatest possible disservice to the creative mind of the artists of that period.
They are denying them the power of the imagination - the inventiveness and originality that can produce literature which is not limited to the here and now, but which can look beyond. Every time those seeking to revel in the supposed past glories of the civilisations that lived in what is now called India define classic literature as thinly-disguised journalism, they denigrate the literary excellence of those periods.
Is this just myopia? Is this merely an inability to grasp the true achievements of a people by, ironically, those who dream of a return to something like that golden age? Probably not.
What these champions of ‘high-tech-was-invented-by-our-ancestors’ are saying is that the progress of a civilisation is to be measured only by its achievements in technology. And that the ability to produce great literature is irrelevant.
This isn’t surprising. These views have emerged into the mainstream under the benign eye of the new government in New Delhi, a government which professes to follow the principles of neo-liberalism: accelerated economic liberalisation, reduced government spending, an enhanced role for the private sector, and economic growth - rather than human development - as the key indicator of progress.
As a result, one of the implications of neo-liberal thinking is that achievements are to be calibrated only on a scale that values the utilitarian. Are people earning more and spending more? Are corporations making more profits? Does the country dominate the global field of business - or is, at least, getting there?
Not surprisingly, the arts in general ‒ and literature in particular ‒ is not central to this zeitgeist. In fact, books are an added threat, for they make people think and question what they’re told. Indeed, The Mahabharata can easily be read as an artistic rendering of the conflicts within the constantly questioning mind.
So, if the epics and the literature surrounding them are to be considered valuable by this regime, it can only be in terms of their utilitarian value. Either as documents of scientific progress, or as moral prescriptions, or as propaganda.
But not as the magnificent works of imagination that they actually are.
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