________________
238
NM KANSARA
SAMBODHI
THE BHARATA-SAMHITĀ, IE., THE UR-MAHABHARATA (THE OLDEST EPIC OF THE WORLD), Vols I-II redacted by MMU Brahma Prof (Dr) Keshayram K Shastree (Bambhania), Gujarat Research Society, Ahmedabad, 1998, (Vol 1 pp xxy +1- 344, (Vol II) pp IV + 345-670, Rs 600/- (of both volumes to be sold together) More than a quarter and half century back Oldenberg, the veteran German scholar, opined that the Mahābhārarta began its existence as a simple narrative, and became in course of centuries, the monstrous chaos, and that besides the main story there were veritable forests of small stones and besides, numberless and endless instructions about theology, philosophy, natural science, law, politics, practical and theological knowledge of life A poem full of deeply significant dreamings and surmisings, delicate poetry and school-masterly platitudes full of sparkling play, of oppressive and mutually jostling masses of images, of showers of arrows of endless battles, clash after clash of deathdespising heroes, of over-virtuous ideal men, of ravishing beautiful women, of ternble-tempered ascetics, of adventurous fabulous beings, of fantastic miracles - full of empty flood of words and wide, free peeps into the order of the course of the world This was the opinion of that learned scholar after reading carefully the vulgate edition of the Mahābhārata (MBH) And, Dr VS Sukthankar too felt that the MBH was a veritable chaos, containing some good and much useless matter, and that it was a great pity that a fine heroic poem, which may evenm be found to contain precious gems of ancient Indian history, should have been thus ruined by its careless custodians And, it was under his pioneership that a skillful surgical operation in the form of Higher Criticism could still disentangle the submerged "epic core" from the adventitious matter in the form of the "interpolations"
It is true that even after clearing off of the hundreds and thousands of interpolations in the Critical Edition of the BORI, Poona, we do not get a pure epic One cannot but agree with the opinions of Franz Bopp and Christan Lassen that in the MBH there are pieces belonging to very different periods and of very different colour and content A stnking attempt at reconstructing the onginal epic was made between 1883 and 1894 by the Scandinavian scholar Soren Sorenson Rejecting accordingly from the Vulgate text everything that appeared to him like an episode or a didactic digression, he obtained at first an edition of some 27,000 stanzas But even this extract, he thought, included materials belonging to different epochs
