What Is Not Here Is Nowhere

The sage had the whole poem in his mind and no way to fix it. Vyasa, the tradition says, had composed the Mahabharata entire within himself, and needed a scribe equal to its size and speed. He asked the god Ganesha. Ganesha agreed, on one condition: his pen must never stop; if Vyasa paused, Ganesha would put the pen down and the work would end. Vyasa accepted, and set a condition of his own. The god must not write a single line he had not first understood. And so, whenever the sage needed time to think, he tied a knot in the verse, a passage so dense and difficult that even Ganesha had to halt and unravel it, and in that pause Vyasa composed ahead.

It is a story about the Mahabharata that is also a confession by the Mahabharata: that it is enormous, that it is knotted with difficulty on purpose, and that it was meant to be almost too much to take down. This chapter is about a poem that does not fit, and about the claim it makes that nothing of human life falls outside it.

The size of the thing

Begin with the plain scale, because the scale is part of the meaning.

In its received form the Mahabharata runs to roughly one hundred thousand verses, with a further twelve thousand in its appendix, the Harivamsa. That is on the order of 1.8 million words. It is, by a wide margin, the longest poem the human species has produced, several times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey set end to end. The hundred-thousand figure is not a modern estimate. It is the epic’s own count, and it was already in circulation by the sixth century of the Common Era, when a royal copper-plate grant of a king named Sharvanatha describes the Mahabharata as the shatasahasri samhita, the collection of a hundred thousand verses.

That number is also, the modern scholar must add, a round and somewhat aspirational one. When the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune set out across most of the twentieth century to reconstruct the oldest recoverable text from over a thousand manuscripts, the critical edition that resulted came to around eighty-nine thousand verses. The gap between that and the traditional hundred thousand is the visible trace of the poem’s growth, the later material that the manuscripts let scholars peel back.

The epic knows it is large, and it turns the size into a boast. In Ganguli’s translation of the closing book, the poem says of itself: “That which occurs here occurs elsewhere. That which does not occur here occurs nowhere else.” The same claim opens the work as well. On dharma, on wealth, on desire, on liberation, the four aims of a human life, whatever exists anywhere exists here, and whatever is missing here is missing from the world. It is the most confident sentence any book has written about itself, and the Mahabharata very nearly earns it.

The author inside the story

The tradition gives the poem an author, and then does something strange with him. Vyasa, also called Krishna Dvaipayana, is named as the composer of the Mahabharata. He is also a character in it, and not a minor one. He is the biological grandfather of both warring houses, present at the hinges of the plot, walking into the story he is supposedly telling, then stepping back out to tell it.

And the telling is layered like nested boxes. The third chapter of this volume’s frame is worth tracing, because it shapes how the poem reaches us. Vyasa teaches the epic to his pupil Vaishampayana. Vaishampayana recites it to King Janamejaya during a great snake-sacrifice, generations after the war. Present at that recitation is the bard Ugrashravas, who later carries it to the sages in the Naimisha forest, where the first chapter of this volume began. So the version we read is a recitation of a recitation of a teaching: a story being passed down through at least three voices, each named, each set in its own scene. The Mahabharata never lets us forget that it is being told.

The war at the centre

Strip away the immense gathered material and there is a hard, simple, terrible story at the core, a family that destroys itself.

Two sets of cousins share one royal line. On one side, the five sons of Pandu, the Pandavas, led by the eldest, Yudhishthira, a man almost incapacitated by his own commitment to truth, and including the great archer Arjuna and the giant Bhima. On the other, the hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas, led by the proud and grasping Duryodhana. Between them stands Krishna, kinsman and counsellor to the Pandavas, who is also, the tradition holds, God in human form. The dispute is over the throne of Hastinapura, and it is sharpened to a point by a rigged game of dice in which Yudhishthira gambles away his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and finally his wife Draupadi, a scene the next chapter will return to. The Pandavas are sent into exile for thirteen years. When they return and are refused even five villages, the war comes.

It lasts eighteen days on the field of Kurukshetra. The numbers in the poem are deliberately staggering: eighteen akshauhinis, vast divisions of chariots, elephants, horse and foot, eleven marshalled for the Kauravas and seven for the Pandavas. The grandfather Bhishma falls on the tenth day onto a bed of arrows. The teacher Drona, the tragic Karna, the boy Abhimanyu, almost every named warrior, die. When the dust settles, the Mahabharata counts the living, and the count is unbearable. In Ganguli’s words, on the Pandava side only seven men remain alive, the five brothers with Krishna and one ally, and on the Kaurava side three. A whole world of warriors is gone to win an empty throne. The epic does not celebrate the victory. It grieves it, at enormous length, in a whole book given over to the weeping of the women.

How the poem grew

The tradition has an account of the poem’s growth, and so does the historian, and for once they nearly rhyme.

The Mahabharata itself says it existed in more than one size. It speaks of a core of twenty-four thousand verses, “and so much only,” it says, “is called by the learned the Bharata,” before the full hundred thousand accreted around it. A traditional scheme names three stages: a Jaya, “Victory,” of about eight thousand eight hundred verses; a Bharata of twenty-four thousand; and the Mahabharata of a hundred thousand. The poem is telling us, in other words, that it expanded, that it was once much smaller.

Modern scholarship reads the same growth in the text’s own seams. The critical edition’s architect, V. S. Sukthankar, argued that beneath the additions lay a coherent design, a poem with a mind. Scholars since, Alf Hiltebeitel, John Brockington, James Fitzgerald, have mapped the layers differently but agree on the long process: an older heroic narrative carried by bards, expanded over roughly eight centuries, from about four hundred years before the Common Era to about four hundred after, with the great didactic books, the long teachings on law and liberation that Bhishma delivers from his bed of arrows, among the later additions. The famous episode of Ganesha taking dictation, fittingly, is itself one of those later additions, absent from the oldest manuscripts and set aside in the critical edition. The poem about a knotted, ever-growing text grew a new knot to explain itself.

What survives all the growth is the thing the epic is really for. Not the war as spectacle, but the war as a question. Every major figure in it is, at the decisive moment, forced to act against some duty in the name of another, and the poem refuses to let any of them off easily. That refusal, the deliberate trouble the Mahabharata makes out of right and wrong, is the subject of the next chapter.

The poem said that what is not in it is nowhere.

It made sure to put the hardest questions in.