THE FINAL RECENSION OF THE MAHABHARATA
We may take it then, for the sake of the argument, that the final recension of the Mahabharata was the literary magnum opus of the reign of Chandra Gupta II of Magadha, known as Vikramaditya of Ujjain (A.D. 375 to 413), and the source of his great fame in letters. We may also take it from the evidences seen there that he deliberately organised its promulgation by missions in the Dravida-desh, or country of the Madras. But, if all this be true, what may we suppose to have been the means employed by him for the execution of so vast an undertaking? .Undoubtedly the work of compilation must have been carried out in Benares by a council of scholars under the control of one supreme directing genius. If Professor Satis Chandra Vidyabhushan be correct (as I should imagine that he is) in his suggestion that the name of Devanagari, as applied to one particular form of Prakrit script, means of Devanagar or Benares,[1] the question then arises, Was the promulgation of the Mahabharata the occasion on which it gained its widespread fame and application? The possible date of the Ramayana suggests itself at this point as a subject for examination and decision. For my own part, trying the question on grounds other than that of language, I would suggest that the first part of this work was written before the Mahabharata was finally edited, and that it opens up a long vista of years during which Ayodhya had already been the principal Indian capital. The hypothesis is thus that the Asokan capital of Pataliputra was succeeded by Ayodhya, and this again succeeded, under the Guptas by Pataliputra. I am assuming that the Uttarakanda portion of the Ramayana was written later, according to what is said to be the tradition of the islanders of Baly and Lombok, east of Java. The fact that a synopsis of the Ramayana as it then stood is given in the Mahabharata, even as Kalidas's Kumara Sambhava is epitomised in the Ramayana, points possibly to some literary convention of an age when books were necessarily few. One cannot help feeling that it is the political greatness of Ayodhya and Pataliputra, each in its own period, that leads it to preach a new religion in the form of a definite incarnation of Vishnu—in the one case Rama, in the other Krishna. And if this be true, it lends an added interest to the fact that the worship of Sita-Rama has now its greatest following in the Dravida-desh. We may take it perhaps as a law that a religion is likely to survive longest and with greatest power, not in the region of its birth. but in the land to which it is sent or given. An exception is found in the worship of Shiva, which is still dominant in Benares.
If the date I have suggested as that of the final compilation of the Mahabharata be correct, it would follow that the great work must in the doing have trained a vast number of scholars and critics. It must also have called together in one place (doubtless Benares) an enormous mass of tradition, folk-lore, old records, and persons representing various kinds of ancient knowledge. All this would constitute that city an informal university of a most real and living type, and it might well be that the learning and research of which to this day it is the home was the result of the revival thus created under Vikramaditya of Ujjain.
Of the Gupta age as a whole (A.D. 326 to 500), we find Vincent Smith saying:—
"To the same age probably should be assigned the principal Puranas in their present form; the metrical legal treatises, of which the so-called Code of Manu is the most familiar example; and, in short, the mass of the *'classical' Sanskrit literature. The patronage of the great Gupta emperors gave, as Professor Bhandarkar observes, 'a general literary impulse,' which extended to every department, and gradually raised Sanskrit to the position which it long retained as the sole literary language of Northern India. . . . The golden age of the Guptas, glorious in literary, as in political, history, comprised a period of a century and a quarter (330 to 455 A.D.), and was covered by three reigns of exceptional length. The death of Kumâra, early in 455, marks the beginning of the decline and fall of the empire."[2]
And again:—
"The principal Puranas seem to have been edited in their present form during the Gupta period, when a great extension and revival of Sanskrit Brahmanical literature took place."[3]
The revision and re-editing of records thus described would be an inevitable result of the royal recension of the Mahabharata, supposing that to have taken place, nor is it necessary, in my own opinion, to mass the writings in question together as "the principal Puranas," for it is possible to trace a serial development of the Hindu idea, which makes it easy enough to distinguish chronological periods in Puranic literature, with a considerable approach to definiteness.
With regard to the Mahabharata itself, if the theory suggested as to the date of its last recension should be finally accepted, it will, I believe, prove not impossible so to determine its different strata as to be fairly sure what parts were added in the Gupta period, and by the Gupta poet. We must remember that Indian students might easily qualify themselves, as no alien could, to apply the tests of language and theological evolution. This and similar work might easily be undertaken by literary societies. And I would suggest — in accordance with a method already widespread in Biblical criticism—that students' editions of the texts might be printed, in which the ground of pages and paragraphs should be of various colours, according to their supposed periods. The paper of indeterminate passages might be white, for instance, the ancient yellow, the Saivite green or pink, and the additions of the Gupta period blue in tint. Or students might carry out this somewhat elaborate undertaking for themselves by means of washes of colour. In any case, such a device would prove a valuable mode of presenting to the eyes at a single glance the results of considerable time and labour.
Some points in the relative chronology are easy enough to determine. The story of Nala and Damaj'anti, for instance, by the exquisite prayer of Nala—"Thou blessed one, may the Adityas, and the Vasus, and the twin Ashwins, together with the Marutas, protect thee, thine own honour being thy best safeguard!"—betrays the fact of its origin in the Vedic or Upanishadic pre-Puranic period. The story of Nala and Damayanti is one of the oldest of Aryan memories, and the mention of the man's name first may be a token of this. The atmosphere of the story is that of the India in which Buddhism arose. The king cooks meat, and his wife eats it. The gods who accompany Nala to the Swayamvara are Vedic gods. There is no allusion throughout the story to Mahadeva or Krishna. There is, on the other hand, a serpent possessed of mysterious knowledge. And the Brahmans are represented as servants, not as governors, of kings. One of the next stories, in that wonderful Vana Parva in which Nala and Damayanti occurs, is the tale of Sita and Rama. And third and last of the series is Savitri. This sequence is undoubtedly true to the order of their evolution. Sita is the woman of sorrow, the Madonna of serenity. And Savitri, which is late Vedic, and referred to in the Ramayana—showing little or no trace of Saivite or Vaishnavite influence, save perhaps in the mention of Narada—is the fully Hinduised conception of the faithful wife. Her birth as the incarnation of the national prayer is an instance of the highest poetry. And the three heroines together—Damayanti, Sita, Savitri—constitute an idealisation of woman to which I doubt whether any other race can show a parallel.
That such tales as the Kirat-Arjuniya, again, belong to the Saivite recension, there can be no question. Equally certain is it, that some incidents, such as that of Draupadi's cry to Krishna for protection, and Bhishma's absorption in Krishna on his death-bed, must belong to the Gupta version. The rude vigour of the gambling scene, however, and the old warrior's death on the bed of arrows, as well as the marriage of five Pandavas to one queen, would appear to come straight out of the heroic age itself.
It would greatly aid us in our conception of the genius and personality of that unknown poet who presided over the deliberations of the Council of Recension, if we could say with certainty what touches in the great work were his. Was he responsible, for instance, for that supremely beautiful incident, according to which, up to a certain moment, the wheels of Yudhisthira's chariot had never touched the earth? If so, the world has seen few who for vigour and chastity of imagination could approach him. But not alone for the purpose of literary appreciation would one like to divide the great poem into its component strata. We are familiar with the remark that while the things stated by works of the imagination are usually false, what they mention is very likely to be true. It is the things mentioned in the Mahabharata that demand most careful analysis. Of this kind are the various referery:es to the cities of the period.
Although the centre of the events which the work chronicles is supposed to lie at Hastinapura or Indraprastha in the remote past, we are made constantly aware that the poet himself regards the kingdom of Magadha as the rival focus of power. Jarasandha may or may not have lived and reigned during the age of Krishna and the Pandavas. What is clear is that the last compilers of the Mahabharata could not imagine an India without the royal house of Rajgir. The same fact comes out with equal clearness in the Bhagavata Purana and possibly elsewhere. Now this is a glimpse into the political consciousness of the Gupta period. It shows us Northern India, then as now, dominated by two governing forces—one seated near Delhi, and one within the region to-day known as Bengal; and it shows unity to be a question mainly of a coalition between these two. Two hundred and fifty years later than Vikramaditya, India is again ruled by a strong hand, that of Harishchandra, But his capital is at Thaneswar, near Kurukshetra. Thus the shifting and re-shifting goes on, and the great problem of modern times, that of finding a common sentiment of nationality, is seen to be but a new inclusion of an age-old oscillation of centres, whose original cause may perhaps be deep-hidden in the geographical and ethnological conditions that gave birth to India.
Why, again, is the scene of the telling of the Mahabharata laid, theoretically, at Taxila? This place, situated to the north-west of Rawal Pindi, would appear, from the age of Buddha onwards till the coming of the Huns more than a thousand years later, to have occupied much the same place in Indian parlance as the University of Cordova in mediaeval Europe, and for much the same reason. The city was a university in the time of Buddha, as witness the youth who went there from Rajgir to learn medicine. It lay on the highway of nations. Past its very doors streamed the nomadic hordes of invading Scythian and Tartar, both before and after the birth of the Christian era. Long before that it had given hostelry and submission to the Greek raid under Alexander. In mediaeval Europe, similarly, medicine could be learnt at Cordova, because there was the meeting-place of East and West. In the Moorish university African, Arab, Jew, and European all met, some to give, others to take, in the great exchange of culture. It was possible there to take as it were a bird's-eye view of the most widely separated races of men, each with its characteristic out-look. In the same fashion, Taxila in her day was one of the focal points, one of the great resonators, as it were, of Asiatic culture. Here, between 600 B.C. and a.d. 500, met Babylonian, Syrian, Egyptian, Arab, Phoenician, Ephesian, Chinese, and Indian. The Indian knowledge that was to go out of India must first be carried to Taxila, thence to radiate in all directions. Such must have been the actual position of the city in the Hindu consciousness of the Gupta period. Had this fact anything to do with its choice as the legendary setting for the first telling of the Mahabharata? Did Vikramaditya regard the poem, perhaps, as a kind of Purana of India herself, as the national contribution to world-letters? Or are we to look for the explanation to the name Takshasila only (=Takshakasila?), and to the part played in the first volume by the great serpent Takshaka?
Supposing the year A.D. 400 to be rightly chosen as that of the final compilation of the Mahabharata, and the city of Pataliputra as the scene of its commissioning, it follows that the poem may be taken as an epitome of the Bengali civilisation of that period. We do not often realise how ample are the materials now hi existence for a full and continuous narrative of Bengal. Sarat Chandra Das long ago pointed out that the city of Lhasa is a page taken out of mediaeval Bengal. In the influence of the Bengali architect, Vidyadhar, in laying out the city of Jaipur in the reign of Sewai Jey Singh in the first half of the eighteenth century, we have evidence of a later date as to the greatness and enlightenment of the Bengali mind throughout its history. Those streets of Jaipur forty yards wide, that regard for air and the needs of sanitation, that marvellous development of the civic sense, are not modern and foreign but pre-English and Bengali in their source and origin. But to my own mind the Mahabharata is in this matter the master-document. Taking Vikramaditya as the reigning sovereign, we see here a people thoroughly conversant with civic and regal splendour. How beautiful and full of life is the following description of a city rejoicing:—
"And the citizens decorated the city with flags and standards and garlands of flowers. And the streets were watered and decked with wreaths and other ornaments. And at their gateways the citizens piled flowers. And their temples and shrines were all adorned with flowers."
There is need here, it should be added, of a history of books in India. What were the first manuscripts of Mahabharata written on? When "the three Vedas" are referred to with such clearness and distinctness, how does the writer or speaker conceive of them ? Is the picture in his mind that of a book or a manuscript; and if so of what composed? Or is it a choir of Brahmans, having as many parts and divisions as the Vedas themselves?
Behind all the exuberance of prosperity and happiness, moreover, in this poem, stands the life of reverence and earnest aspiration ; the ideals of faith, purity, and courage, which pervade all classes of the people alike, and are the same to-day as they were under the empire of Pataliputra. As regards his ideal of learning, a young Bengali scholar of to-day belongs still to the culture of the Gupta period. A knowledge of Sanskrit from the ancient Vedic to fje fashionable literary language of the day ; an acquaintance with certain books; and the knowledge of a definite scheme of metaphysics, logic, and philosophy may be taken as the type of scholarship then. And very few are the Bengali minds that have yet reached a point in the assimilation and expression of a new form of thought and knowledge, which would make it possible to say that they are of another age than that of Vikramaditya. Of that new age Science is to be the pivot and centre, and there can be no doubt that the era of Science, with its collateral development of geography and history, will directly succeed that of the Guptas, with its Sanskrit Literature and logic in Bengal. In order to pass from one type so highly evolved, however, into another which shall give the people an equal place in Humanity, it is necessary that the moral and ethical standards of the race shall grow, rather than relax, in strength and stability. The meeting line of periods is a time of winnowing and of judgment in the history of nations, and many are the souls to be scattered like chaff.
It is clear from many of the allusions in the life of Krishna, as told both in the Mahabharata and in the Puranas, that He directly, in most places, supersedes the Vedic gods. In the moment of his Ascension it is Indra who hymns Him. And already at Brindaban He has successfully preached the Law of Karma in opposition to Vedic sacrifice, and has succeeded in bringing Indra low in the ensuing contest. This new religion of Vishnu, indeed, like that of Shiva, belongs to a different class from that of the old nature-gods. The more modern are subjective. Their sphere is in the soul, and their power that of the highest ideals. Indra, Agni, Yama, and Varuna represented external forces, cosmic some of them, irresistible in their might by puny man, glorious, lovable, but not of the within. They were supremely objective.
The story of Nala and Damayanti, coming as it does out of the earlier Vedic period, has nevertheless had its conclusion modified by the Gupta poets, in accordance with that amelioration of taste and manners which is inseparable from a great and long-established civilisation, and also doubtless with that high development of religious ideals which will always take place in India in periods of prosperity and power. We feel it artistically wrong that Koli (कलि) should be allowed to depart, and Pushkara should be forgiven. But the subjects of the Gupta emperors had been for ages accustomed to peace and wealth, and in the general refinement of the period reconciliation was desired as the dramatic climax, not revenge. The story of Savitri shows the same trend of popular taste in somewhat different fashion. She triumphs over death—not by the heroic methods of the earlier maiden, who could appeal to the honour of the gods and meet with jovial and thoroughly benevolent treatment in return, but by sheer force of the spiritual ideal. Born of prayer itself, prepared for the supreme encounter by vigil and fast, Savitri is no Vedic princess, but a tender, modern, Hindu woman. She belongs almost unconsciously to the coming era of subjective soul-staying faiths. The boisterous days of storm and fire and forest worships are now far behind.
Between these two ages, however, of the Vedic gods on the one hand, and the theological systems of Vishnu and Shiva on the other, there is in the Mahabharata and also in the Puranas to a less extent one anomalous figure. It is that of Brahma the Creator, the benevolent four-headed Grandsire. Who was this Brahma? What is his exact significance? It might almost be stated as a law that in India there has never been a deity or a religious idea without some social formation behind it. What traces have we, then, of a Brahma-worshipping sect? At what period, and where, are we to look for it? Is there any connection between him and the story of Dattatreya ? What is the history of his one temple and one image near Pushkar at Ajmir? Already, in the Mahabharata, He seems to be half-forgotten; yet if that work had been produced in the present age he would have received less mention still.
An important date to settle is that of Kalidas. If Chandragupta II of Pataliputra (A.D. 375 to 413) be really the famous Vikramaditya of Ujjain, it is difficult to see how Kalidas can have been one of the jewels of hi's court. Hinduism would seem first to have formulated the idea of Shiva, then that of Vishnu (as Lakshmi-Narayana), next that of Rama, and lastly that of Krishna. Between the theological conception of Lakshmi-Narayana and the concreted conception of Rama, Kalidas appears to have lived. His imagination was greatly touched by the conception of the Trinity, which must have been newly completed in his time. Personally he was overshadowed by the idea of Shiva, and he was not without foresight of the deification of Rama. Hindu scholars should be able from these considerations to fix his date. The glimpses which the Mahabharata every now and again affords us of the worship ot Surya, or the sun, would suggest this rather as a royal than as a popular devotion. And the hypothesis is more or less borne out by the traces of his worship which remain in various parts of India. In Kashmir, in Orissa, and here and there in unexpected places, we meet with architectural and sculptural remains of it. But amongst the people it seems to have left few or no traces. Surya is counted academically amongst the Five Manifestations of the Supreme Being according to Hinduism, but devotionally, of what account is He?
These are questions that call for study and reply. Personally I believe that as our understanding of India progresses, we shall more and more be led to recognise the importance of place and history in accounting for those differentiations which certain common ideas have gradually undergone. It has not been opposition of opinion, but mere diversity of situation, which has been the source of the existing variety of sects and schools.