Study Of Mahabharata

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

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THE STUDY OF THE MAHĀBHĀRATA Veselovsky in his lectures on the comparative history of the epic (1884-6).21 Grintser firmly believes that the Mahābhārata has a real historical basis and surmises that the battle on the Kuru field took place about 1000 B.C. Grintser draws attention to the fact that Troy really existed and that historical data are found in Beowulf, the Edda and the Chanson de Roland. He also believes in the existence of an Indian heroic age which lasted from the fourteenth to the tenth century B. C. This period witnessed the first centuries of the occupation of India by the invading Aryans and continued until the internecine war of the Bharatas. According to Grintser, there is usually a gap of several centuries, sometimes up to five or six, between the heroic age itself and its reflection in the epic.
In the first part of his book, Grintser studied the genesis of the Indian epic and showed the importance of the oral tradition in the creation and development of both · Indian epics. In the second part, “Typology of the ancient Indian Epic", he com
pares the Indian epic with other epics and with folktales which are also the products of oral tradition. Grintser begins by drawing attention to the fact that there is a remarkable uniformity in the motifs and plots of heroic epics. Viktor Zhirmunsky (1891-1971), who wrote extensively on the medieval European epics and on the epics of the peoples of central Asia, pointed out that the similarities between the heroic epics of different peoples have almost always a typological character and are based upon the existence of a similar social reality and of an identical level of development of the social conscience. Grintser adds that the typological correspondence between epics of different peoples has produced also a similarity in the organisation of the epic material as a whole. This similarity can be explained by the fact that their plots are constructed in similar ways and that they share the same principles and methods of composition.
G.S. Levy divides the ancient epics into three groups: the epic of creation, the epic of the quest and the epic of the heroic war.22 The Rāmāyaṇa, which describes the search of Rāma for his abducted wife Sitā, belongs to the second group; the Mahābhārata to the third group. However, according to Grintser, there is undoubtedly a similarity between both Indian epics with regard to many constituent elements. The same motif of the abduction of the wife of the hero also has an important compositional function in the Mahābhārata. When Yudhisthira lost the game of dice, Duhśāsana dragged Draupadi by her hair into the hall. This outrage inflicted on Draupadi plays a primal role among the causes of the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The outrage is a mitigated variant of the abduction and is characteristic for epics in which the non-human adversary is replaced by a human adversary. The motif of the abduction is duplicated many times in the epic. For instance, in the Fourth Book