Thus It Was

In a clearing called the Naimisha forest, the tradition says, a company of sages once gathered for a sacrifice that was to last twelve years. Into that long rite walked a bard, a suta, a man of the storytelling caste named Ugrashravas, fresh from the snake-sacrifice of a king where he had heard a certain enormous poem recited from beginning to end. The sages asked him to tell it. He began, and what he began to tell was the Mahabharata.

That scene is not history. It is the frame the Mahabharata builds around itself, a story about the telling of the story, and it is the first thing the epics teach about themselves: that they arrive already spoken, already being passed from a voice to an ear, already old when we meet them. The previous two volumes of this work followed the Veda and the Upanishads, the revealed core the tradition calls shruti, that which was heard from beyond the human. This volume turns to the two texts that millions of Hindus have actually lived inside, the ones a child meets first and an old person knows by heart. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And before they are stories, they are a claim about what kind of thing a story can be.

The word for what happened

The tradition does not file the epics under fiction, and it does not quite file them under what we mean by history either. It has its own word. Itihasa.

Break the word open and it is almost a sentence. Iti, thus. Ha, indeed. Asa, it was. Iti-ha-asa. So it indeed was. The name is a verdict pronounced in advance. To call the Ramayana an itihasa is to say, before a single event is narrated, that this happened, that we are in the territory of the real and the remembered rather than the invented. The epics are the great itihasas, paired together, and they stand beside the other huge body of traditional narrative, the Puranas, the “ancient” tellings of gods and kings and the ages of the world.

Where in the order of scripture do they sit? One clear step below the summit. The tradition draws its sharpest line between shruti and smriti. Shruti, the heard, is the Veda, revelation, held to be without human author. Smriti, the remembered, is everything composed by a named human sage in the light of that revelation, and it is to smriti that the epics belong. The law book of Manu states the division plainly, in Georg Bühler’s translation: the Veda is to be known as shruti, and the law treatises as smriti. The epics are remembered, not revealed. They have authors. They rank below the Veda.

And yet.

A fifth Veda

The epics, and especially the Mahabharata, are not content to stay one rank down, and the claim they make for themselves is audacious.

The idea has an old root. The Chandogya Upanishad, met in the previous volume, contains a scene in which the sage Narada lists everything he has studied, and after naming the four Vedas he names a fifth body of knowledge: itihasa-purana, in Max Müller’s rendering, “as the fifth the Itihasa-purana.” A fifth Veda, in other words, was a category the tradition had reached for long before the epics existed in the form we have them. There was a shelf marked “the fifth,” and it was waiting.

The Mahabharata climbs onto that shelf and then, characteristically, goes further. In its opening book it tells a small, astonishing story about its own worth. The gods, it says, once placed the four Vedas on one pan of a balance and the Bharata on the other, and weighed them. In Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s public-domain translation, “as the latter weighed heavier than the four Vedas with their mysteries, from that period it hath been called in the world Mahabharata,” the great Bharata, great by weight. The same opening claims that by the aid of itihasa the Veda itself may be expounded, and that the Veda fears the man of little learning who might mishandle it.

It is worth being exact about what this is. It is the epic praising itself, in its own pages, in the highest terms it can find. The scholar Alf Hiltebeitel has argued that the “fifth Veda” title is a deliberate literary strategy, a bid for Vedic authority made by the Brahmins who shaped the text, rather than a status the Vedic canon ever conferred from outside. The line between shruti and smriti does not actually move. The epics remain remembered. What the claim records is something truer than a ranking. It records how completely the tradition came to depend on these two poems, until a civilization that held the Veda to be the highest thing it had would say, of a story, that the story weighed more.

What the epic knows that the Veda does not

There is one more boast, and it is the one that explains the others. Near the start of the Mahabharata, and again at its very end, the text makes a claim about its own completeness. In Ganguli’s rendering of the closing book: “That which occurs here occurs elsewhere. That which does not occur here occurs nowhere else.” On the four aims of human life, on right action and wealth and desire and liberation, whatever is anywhere is in here, and whatever is not in here is nowhere at all.

This is the encyclopedic ambition of the epic stated without modesty. The Veda is the higher revelation, but it is narrow and fierce and hard to enter. The epic is the whole human world, all of it, the battlefield and the gambling hall and the forest exile and the deathbed, with the teaching folded into the lives of people making terrible choices. That is the difference the epics are claiming. The Veda tells you the eternal order. The epic shows you a man standing in the wreckage of his family, asking what the order requires of him now, when every choice is wrong.

Thus it was, and thus it grew

The honest historian has to stand a little apart from the word itihasa, and this volume will, while taking the tradition’s claim seriously rather than dismissing it.

What the record shows is a growth rather than a chronicle. The epics were not written once. They accreted, over centuries, out of the oral repertoire of the suta bards, the very caste the Mahabharata puts at its own frame in the person of Ugrashravas. Scholars including John Brockington and Romila Thapar describe a long process: an older core of heroic narrative, carried by reciters, gradually fixed, expanded, and overlaid with religious and didactic material by the Brahmin redactors who gave the texts their final enormous shape. Thapar’s careful formulation is that the epics carry a deep consciousness of the past without making the modern claim to be verifiable history. No spade has turned up an agreed Kurukshetra, no inscription dates the reign of Rama. The events may rest on some remembered kernel. We do not know which parts, and we cannot say.

So the two accounts sit side by side, and this volume will keep them there. The tradition says: thus it was. The historian says: thus it grew. Both are reporting something real. The tradition is reporting how these texts are held, as true in the deepest sense, the carriers of a people’s memory of itself. The historian is reporting how they came to be, slowly, in many hands, across a span of time longer than most religions have existed.

The rest of this volume goes inside the two poems. The next chapter takes up the elder of them, the one the tradition calls more than an itihasa, the first poem ever made, and tells the strange story the Ramayana tells about how poetry itself was born, out of a hunter, a bird, and a cry of grief.