Study Of Mahabharata

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

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##xt* (410) In the first forty years of the twentieth century relatively little attention was paid to the Indian epic by Western scholars. At the beginning of the century three leading scholars, Heinrich Lüders, Hermann Jacobi and Moriz Winternitz, advocated the undertaking of a critical edition of the text of the Mahābhārata, but without success. Winternitz published his account of the epic in 1906, and a posthumous book on the Mahābhārata by the great Vedic scholar Hermann Oldenberg (1854-1920) was published in 1922, but neither publication broke new ground. It was only in 1935 that a completely new interpretation of the epic was advanced in a doctoral thesis entitled: The Mahābhārata, an ethnological study. The author was a Dutch cultural anthropologist or ethnologist, as one used to say at that time, G. J. Held (1906-1955). In his introduction, Held gave a short survey of epic research and remarked that Mahābhārata studies had arrived at an impasse because the epic had been studied too much from the philological side. Held declared himself fundamentally opposed to the analytical method which tried to discover the "original epic", a nucleus of an essentially narrative nature, and to eliminate later interpolations. He writes: "the discriminating between a number of different elements in the composition of the Epic must be devoid of all sense unless the student gets to know how it was that the various elements thus discriminated could have been brought together and united so as to constitute such a uniform whole" (p. 176). According to Held: “The word 'Epic' called up in the mind of scholars ideas analogous to those connected with the heroic literature of mediaeval Europe or of ancient Greece in the Homeric poems" (p. 28). However, " to know what an Epic is, we must know what place it occupied in that culture” (p. 30). A culture must be studied in its entirety, and this demands our considering the religious, social and economic manifestations alongside one another as three aspects of that culture (pp. 34 and 35). Held was much inspired by the writings of French ethnologists such as Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), the author of Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris, 1912), and Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), author of Essai sur le don (Paris, 1923). The idea of culture as a structure in which myth, ritual and society were closely interrelated and connected was developed in his lectures in Leiden by J.P. B. de Josselin de Jong (1886-1964).82 Of special importance for Held's work were the studies on the Javanese theatre published by W. H. Rassers (1877-1973).88
In Held's conception the Indian epic is a myth, connected with a ritual, which reflects a social organization similar to the division of a tribe into two moieties or phratries. The mutual relationship between the two phratries is always fluctuating between friendship and enmity. Both groups together constitute a complete unity, seemingly divided but forming in effect a totality (p. 296). “There is a certain