Secondary Tales of the Two Great Epics

Author(s): Rajendra I Nanavati
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 19

Seconary Tales of the two:Great Epics Valmiki. And many portions of MBh which undoubtedly must have belonged to the original composition also reveal the hand of a literary genius. But it is obvious from this, that the epics of growth reveal the controlling power of the genius only in their final form. All the stages of their development prior to this final one belong to the folk-tradition only. This means that the development of our two great epics through all the stages but the last one has belonged to the folk-tradition. It is only in the final stage that the genius of Valmiki and Vyasa(?) shape them into epics.
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At this stage, we must correct, or rather modify, the observation of Western critics that the tales resulting into an epic through the intervention of a genius-poet cluster around a character. So far as RM is concerned, this is well corroborated since the tales in RM must have clustered together about its hero Rama. But in the case of MBh, there is no such single, central figure, around which the tales. can be shown gathering. Instead, we must point out that the ballads must have gathered here around the central episode of the fratricidal war. Therefore, the common element around which the folk-ballads cluster may either be a central character or a central event.
We can show this aspect of the process of evolution of the epics in this way. When the popular ballads cluster around one character or one central event, and are welded together by some genius into the shape of an epic, their epic form comes to stay and is not generally observed to admit any further popular material. But the case of our two indigenous epics seems to be different. Even after they were shaped into epics by Valmiki and Vyāsa Pārāśarya(?), further popular material kept coming in. In the case of RM, such fresh matter was added either in the beginning or in the end, thus keeping the original epic in the centre and almost intact. In the case of MBh, even this scruple was not cared about. Fresh matter kept on being added in the beginning, in the middle, in the end, in fact in every place where some pretext or the other could be found. Sometimes, when no such occasion to include a fresh tale was found, it was even introduced into the main story. Thus our epics, besides, being epics, became collection of tales. How this happened is shown very well by Romesh Chunder Dutt. Says he "The epic became so popular that it went on growing with the growth of centuries. Every generation of poets had something to add; every distant nation in Northern India was anxious to interpolate some account of its deeds in the old record of the international war; every preacher of a new creed desired to have in the old Epic some sanction for the new truths he inculcated... All the floating mass of tales, traditions, legends and myths... found a shelter under the expanding wings of this wonderful Epic; and as Krishna worship became the prevailing religion of India after the decay of Buddhism, the old Epic caught the complexion of the times... it is thus that the work went on growing for a thousand years after it was first compiled and put together in the form of an Epic; until the crystal rill of the epic itself was all but lost in an unending morass of religious and didactic episodes, legends,