2. - ‘Epic’ Past, ‘Modern’ Present: The Mahabharata and Modern Nationalism in Colonial Western India

Summary

Introduction

Ancient epics have played a significant role in the growth of modern nationalism. At the time of their conception, epics possessed no notion of nationalism. However, over the past three centuries, they have been routinely invoked in many parts of the world for fulfilling modern nationalist claims and aspirations. Political and cultural unity, key features of modern nationalism, were found to be described in ancient epics. Therefore, epics were routinely invoked either as repositories of a nation's past frozen in time (as with Homer or Virgil) or as a genealogical exercise meant to reconstruct an unbroken national–cultural lineage (as with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). Both processes helped in nationalist revival.

The two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were used by Indian subcontinental nationalists during the colonial and post-colonial periods to imagine a politically and ethnically (Hindu) unified image of the country. The study of Indian epics was facilitated by modern European Indology and the ‘discovery’ of India's ancient (largely Hindu and Buddhist) heritage during the late eighteenth century. Therefore, unlike the absolute devotional reverence and eschatological infallibility accorded to the epics during pre-modernity, Indians were open to investigating their historical context and using them for didactic–political purposes. History, coming to the aid of religious reverence, produced a strange concoction of nationalist rectitude and a strong antidote to colonial cultural hegemony. The fratricide depicted in the Mahabharata was seen as an act of reclaiming the unjust seizure of territory, rendering the epic's moral lesson ‘analogous to the colonial occupation of India’.

Epic studies developing during the nineteenth century drove European Indologists’ primary interest – namely, determining the remote antiquity of the Mahabharata, deciphering the urtext from latter recensions, and granting it lesser value in comparison to the Greco-Roman classics. European Indological discourses posited India as the opposite of ‘the West’ and hence inferior in character. Indian thought was presented as mythical and symbolic and therefore unworthy of the cold rationality articulated through logical arguments.

Indians attached multifarious significance to its epics. If the Ramayana was the adi-kavya (the original poem), the Mahabharata was varyingly rendered as an itihasa (history) and the ‘fifth Veda’ and even garnered equivalency to a Dharmashastra text. The Mahabharata also carried a powerful moral sermon on righteous violence (the Bhagavadgita), delivered by Krishna, the personification of the Absolute.