we take the golden road to samarkand

"The special feature of the Rāmāyaṇa is that it has given a magnificent dimension to our homely affairs. It has ennobled us. The affectionate attachments and religious bonds that are there between father and son, between brothers, husband and wife are raised to such magnitude that these aspects have easily been transformed into worthy material of an epic. Victory over alien lands, annihilation of enemies, the fierce clashes between two formidable hostile forces-these happenings generally produce volatility and animation in epics. But the Rāmāyaṇa's greatness does not depend on the wars between Rāma and Rāvaṇa. On the other hand. these wars serve as devices to glorify the conjugal felicity in the relationship between Rama and Sita…" (‘Rāmāyaṇa’, Prācīn Sāhitya in Rabīndra Racanābalī).

Therefore, Vālmīki’s crane-parable lies at the heart of Tagore’s understanding of the Rāmāyaṇa:

“The legend prevalent about Vālmīki will not be considered history by anybody. But we consider that as the real history of the poet. The biography created by Vālmīki’s readers from Vālmīki’s poetry is truer than Vālmīki’s real life. Which impact made the source of poetry flow out of Vālmīki’s heart? The impact of compassion. The Rāmāyaṇa is a stream of the tears of compassion. The grief-stricken wailing of the separated crane is sounded in the core of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition… The parable of the crane-couple is a concise metaphor of the essence of the Rāmāyaṇa. Flatly saying, the people have no doubt discovered the truth that the pure stream of the great poet’s anuṣṭubh meter has flown, being melted by the very warmth of compassion. The untimely and permanent separation of conjugal love has churned out the poetry in the compassionate sage.” (‘Kabijībanī’, Sāhitya in Rabīndra Racanābalī)

This belief was so deeply-embedded in Tagore, that it became the theme of one of his earliest creations, Vālmīki Pratibhā.

Being so much sensitive to Vālmīki’s poetry, Tagore did not fail to recognize and criticize the ‘Uttarakāṇḍa’ which tampered with the essence of the epic:

“The poet of the Rāmāyaṇa has not constructed Rāma’s character with the logic of any normative coherence. Thus the character is natural and literary, not advocatory. But the Uttarakāṇḍa came with the message of its particular time; it killed the character just as a glassworm kills a cockroach. The serious concern of the social necessity occurred, i.e. the problem of that time. In that period of codifying the behaviours, it was no more feasible to accept Sītā back into the house without protest, after her long stay in Rāvaṇa’s house. That it would be wrong to do so, and that it was necessary to send her to the forest and (to ask for) a fire-ordeal at the end, giving priority to the public opinion — this ghost of a solution to the social problem possessed the character. The common audience of that time had appreciated the poet by considering the whole episode a high-quality production. By the power of that appreciation, this makeshift book is still attached to the living body of the original Rāmāyaṇa.” (‘Sāhityer Mātrā’, Sāhityer Svarūp in Rabīndra Racanābalī)

Elsewhere, Tagore condemns the ‘Uttarakāṇḍa’, saying that this single book ruthlessly destroyed the story of joy and sorrow completely developed over the first six books. Up to the war, everybody considered Rāvaṇa as the greatest enemy of Sītā. But when Sītā had been rescued from Rāvaṇa after a long struggle, it is shown that the ultimate enemy of Sītā is not the unrighteous Rāvaṇa, but Rāma and his righteousness. Tagore thinks that anybody with the slightest sensitivity to the story cannot tolerate this sudden torture. (Kādambarīcitra’, Prācīn Sāhitya in Rabīndra Racanābalī)

Naturally, the sensitive authors like Bhavabhūti, Kālidāsa and Tagore could not tolerate it. In his longest poem, Puraskār, Tagore echoes Bhavabhūti’s concern that Rāma’s life has been turned into one that only have registered pain:

“etek balia kṣaṇa pare kabi/

karuṇa kathāI prakāśila chabi/

puṇyakāhinī raghukūlarabi/

rāghaber itihās,/

asaha duḥkha sahi nirabadhi/

kemane janam giyeche dagadhi/

jībaner śeṣ dibas abadhi/

asīm nirāśvās.”

(The poet narrated in pitiful words that sacred lore – the tradition from the past about Rāghava, the best among the Raghus. (He stated) how his life was spent in unbearable agony and endless despair until the last day of his life.)

Thus, Tagore goes on to express his understanding of the Rāmāyaṇa in his poem Bhāṣā o Chanda.

In the poem, Vālmīki asks Nārada:

“bhagavan, tribhuvan tomāder pratyakṣe birāje

kaho more kār nāe amar bīṇār chanda bāje.

kaho more bīrya kār kṣamāre kare nā atikram

kāhār caritra gheri sukaṭhin dharmer niyam

dhareche sundar śobhā māṇkyer aṅgader moto,

mahaiśvarye thāke namra mahādainye ke hay na nata,

sampade ke thake bhaye, bipade ke ekānta nirbhīk,

ke peyeche sab ceye, ke diyeche tahar adhik,

ke niyeche nija śire rājbhāle mukuṭer sama

sabinaye sagourabe dharā mājhe duḥkha mahattama —

kaha more sarbadarśī he debarṣi tār puṇya nām.

nārad kahilā dhīre, ‘ayodhyār raghupati rām.’”

(My Lord, you have witnessed the three worlds. Tell me of a person whose name is echoed in the chords of eternal lute, whose might never transcends the limits of his mercy, whose character is graced by the uncompromising virtue of dharma. (Tell me) who stays modest in great affluence but is not overwhelmed by adversity, who remains restrained in wealth but is fearless in danger, who has received most and yet has given away more than what he has got, who has welcomed on his head in humility and glory -- like the crown of a king -- the greatest suffering in the world. Tell me, o all-witnessing divine sage, the holy name of a person such as this. Nārada said slowly, ‘Rāma, the Raghu king of Ayodhyā.’)

However, asked to compose the Rāmāyaṇa, Vālmīki gets apprehensive to compose Rāma’s history without knowing all the details. Nārada’s reassurance follows:

“nārad kahilā hāsi, ‘sei satya jā racibe tumi,

ghaṭe jā tā sab satya nahe. kabi taba manobhūmi

rāmer janamsthān ayodhyār ceye satya jeno.”

(Nārada chuckled, “Truth is for you to create.

Facts are not all True, but know, o poet,

Your mind is truer than the birthplace

That actually leads me to my next question. When you’re talking about what happens to us when we die, we know that there are myriads of ways or means of death that are described right through the Mahabharata, particularly all of the books that deal with the battle and many of them. This is something that you pointed out in earlier discussions and also in your writings, the heroes in particular, many of the main characters, die very gruesome, unheroic, tremendously violent deaths. Then there are the almost anticlimactic, if I may call it that, deaths of the four Pandavas and that of Draupadi right at the very end before Yudhishthira carries on with the dog following him. But across all of these deaths, is there a common construct? Is there a common thesis in the Mahabharata that emerges, which answers the most fundamental question, what happens to us when we die?

The Mahabharata has no single answer to anything at all in the Mahabharata. There are always several answers, sometimes contradictory. This is the complexity of the text. The Mahabharata, historically, is dealing with several different ideas about death. It looks back in many ways to the Indo-European period. It has Indra as king of the gods and it has a system of death, which is mentioned on numerous occasions and really comes in at the end too.

This is the old model of what we know best from Wagner’s Valhalla, which is the story of the good warrior – when he dies and goes up to heaven, the Valkyries carry him up. There he is in heaven with beautiful women and lots to eat and drink and he has a wonderful time. And there’s not too much said about people who go to hell. That’s sort of the glory. That’s what you want. You want to get to Valhalla. That’s part of the Vedic view also. Indra takes you up to heaven, with the funeral hymns. There are some beautiful hymns in the Rigveda. Agni carries you up through the smoke of the fire. You go to heaven and there are Apsaras in heaven, dancing girls. It’s kind of a man’s idea of heaven, if I may say so. Lots to drink, lots of cool water – this is India, after all. And that is still there in the Mahabharata, really. What you get later on, from the time of the Upanishads and right straight through, is the idea of transmigration of souls.

Depending on how you have behaved, depending on your karma...when you die, your soul leaves your body and does not go to heaven necessarily. But it may go to heaven, or may go to hell. There’s also a hell, Indo-European Hell, a fiery underground, all that kind of stuff. Not a good place. You may go to heaven, or you may be reborn as a Brahmin, as a man, as a woman, or as an animal. So the idea of reincarnation is widespread by this time. But you haven’t entirely ever, not throughout the mediaeval period in Hinduism, given the idea of heaven and hell.

There are stories about people going up to heaven, how they meet Indra and see the Apsaras, or going down to hell and meeting people down in hell. Those stories persist. So the idea of heaven and hell is still powerful, and the idea of incarnation is also powerful, and the Mahabharata plays with them.

So that there’s finally a compromise near the end where they say, when you die, if you have mostly good karma and just a little bit of bad karma, you go to hell. This may be counter-intuitive. You might think, “well, mostly good karma.” You go to hell for a little while, but you don’t mind it very much, because you know that after that, you go to heaven for a long time. And indeed, if you have mostly bad karma, you go to heaven, which is counterintuitive, for a little while, but you don’t really enjoy it all that much, because you know that after that, you’re going to go to hell for a long time. So the Mahabharata has those ideas in it as well.

Yudhishthira goes to heaven, and he doesn’t find his brothers there. He says, “I don’t want this.” And they tell him, “your brothers are in hell, actually.” So he says, “Okay, I want to go where my brothers are.”

That’s where he makes that wonderful speech – “To hell with kingship, to hell with power, to hell with heroism, to hell with the dharma of kshatriyas”. It’s a wonderful speech. He’s really mad. I’ve translated “to hell” from the Sanskrit which is “dik”, which used to be translated as “fie on it”. It means, you know, get it out of here. I hate it.

It’s hard to translate. That was the best I could do. So he goes down to hell, and he sees his brothers, and he says, “wow, what are you doing here?’ They say, “We’re suffering. But when you’re here, a cool and perfumed wind comes to us.” Hell stinks, one of its qualities is a horrible smell. So here we are in this horrible place, and this lovely smell comes from your body and cools us. Stay here, they say. Yudhishthira says, I’m going to stay here. So it’s a kind of generosity, a transfer of karma. This is also a post-Vedic, a later Hindu idea, the transfer of karma that comes in the Upanishads. So it’s in there. And then the gods say, Yudhishthira, you don’t belong here. You’re just visiting them. You really belong in heaven. And Yudhishthira says, as long as my brothers are here, I’m going to stay here. Abra-cadabra, it was a dream. There were no brothers in hell. Yudhishthira wasn’t in hell. It was just a vision. It vanishes. Your brothers are in heaven, so forth.

So what is this? It was just a dream. Then, they say that years ago Yudhishthira told one tiny lie. When they were trying to get a very powerful warrior not to fight, they said, Ashwatthaman is dead. His son’s name was Ashwatthaman. And that was a lie. Yudhishthira had to say it because everybody knew Yudhishthira didn’t lie. But he said Ashwatthaman is dead. And then this great warrior said, oh, my God. And he didn’t fight him. The good guys won the fight. Whereas actually there was an elephant named Ashwatthaman.

And what Yudhishthira really said was Ashwatthaman, the elephant, is dead. So he sort of lied and didn’t lie. So the Gods say at the ending, remember that thing with the elephant? Well, you sort of went to hell and sort of didn’t go to hell because you sort of lied and sort of didn’t lie. And really you’re in heaven. That’s a real mess of a plot. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. And it’s the Mahabharata trying to get everything in at once. You do go to hell, but Yudhishthira doesn’t go to hell, but he sort of went to hell. And really he’s in heaven because he goes to heaven. And actually he isn’t a human being at all. He’s really the god Dharma. So he never really was on earth. So at the end, all these screens, these curtains are pulled away. Pulled away metaphysically.

And what it is, is different scribes over the centuries adding their own two cents to the Mahabharata to try to make sense of everything. It’s not a single authored work. Vyasa did not actually write the whole of the Mahabharata. Hundreds of people did. So at the end, they try to get everything but the kitchen sink into it. And it’s a wonderful mess of an ending. Everything you could possibly think of to explain death is there at some point in Book 18 of the Mahabharata. And, narratively, it’s kind of a mess. But it’s great fun to read. And it’s also enormously rich. You could just see these guys had so many ideas, they could hardly get them onto paper fast enough. They didn’t get them onto paper. They were saying them orally. And later on, other guys wrote them down. So when you ask me what the Mahabharata thinks about death, I say, wait, how much time have you got?

When you’re talking about that part, particularly when, you know, the abracadabra moment happens and it was all really a dream. It was all really an illusion. It was all really a game. It was play. Some of the texts that came to mind are not the Mahabharata, but the texts written between the 1940s and 50s.

..............

So let’s talk about animals in the Mahabharata. The dog is central to it. Do you want to tell the story of the dog and Yudhishtira as they go up to heaven and then deconstruct it?

I’ll tell you briefly. And mind you, it is another example of the Mahabharata being inconsistent when it can’t solve a problem in the history of religions. So the Pandavas are going to heaven and, basically, one by one they fall behind and only Yudhishtira is there. Yudhishtira is alone except for a dog that’s been following them up the mountain all this time.

He gets to the gates of heaven and Indra says, Yudhishtira, welcome, come into heaven. Yudhishtira says, thank you very much and I’ll just bring this dog with me. Indra says, there are no dogs allowed in heaven. Dogs are unclean. He’s speaking now like a Hindu. They lick the sacrificial elements. Dogs are unclean and so forth. You can’t bring the dog in. Yudhishtira says, this dog is my bhakta. That didn’t yet mean what it came to mean in Hinduism. It simply meant he’s been following him, it’s what dogs do. He’s devoted to me.

Then, there are rules and he quotes the rules in law books, laws of Manu and so forth – that if you turn away someone who is your bhakta, it’s the equivalent of killing a Brahmin. I won’t go to heaven without this dog. And it’s a whole philosophy of Bhakti really. It’s not Bhakti yet like Krishna and Radha, but it is the idea of personal devotion. As opposed to the idea of ritual purity, which is Vedic, something which Indra is going by. No dogs. And Yudhishtira finally says, well, that’s it then. I’m not going to go to heaven. He turns away. And the dog turns out to be Dharma. Yudhishtira’s father incarnated as a dog. This is like saying, for a Jew that Jehovah was incarnated in a pig. It’s an extraordinary thing to say that Dharma became a dog.

And Dharma says this was just a test. It was the last of several tests. You’re a good guy. You can go to heaven. So, on the one hand, you have the philosophy of Vedic ritualism, which is no dogs. On the other hand, you have a new philosophy coming up now, this idea of bhakti. And you can’t put them together. Either you do or don’t have dogs in heaven.

Since the Mahabharata cannot solve that problem, it was a dream. There was really no dog. No problem. You can go to heaven, Yudhishtira, without betraying a bhakta. Because there was no bhakta. So you can see the Mahabharata posing itself this moral problem of the clash of two religions, incarnated in the idea of a dog. However, it then basically is copping out and saying we can’t solve this. We’re going to say it’s a dream. Just as they really couldn’t solve what Yudhishtira was doing in hell. And so they said that was a dream. It’s a wonderful idea of the Mahabharata trying to grow, trying to change, and being unable yet to make the jumps that the later religious text would make which is indeed the dog goes to heaven and Vedic ritualism doesn’t count. So that’s a wonderful moral moment. It’s a wonderful animal moment as well, Yudhishtira and his dog.

But it still leaves the basic question, doesn’t it? Why, in the formulation, is it this form? Why is it the shape of a dog that Dharma has to inhabit? After all, we’re talking about the very cold upper reaches of the mountains of the Himalayas. Surely a snow leopard would not be out of place. I’m speculating...why a dog? In the Hindu canon, a horse...or the horse of the Ashwamedha would probably be admitted into heaven.

The horse is the Kshatriya animal. The dog is an untouchable. The untouchables are often called Swapakas, people who cook and eat dogs. So the dog is dealing with...This is the beginning of caste revolution. This is the beginning of challenges to caste. And the Mahabharata begins with a dog. Janamejaya is beginning to give a big sacrifice. And Sarameya, these are the dogs that are the children of the bitch Sarama.

So in the story of Sarama, we’re not in the caste system yet in the Rigveda. Sarama is the bitch of Indra. She’s his hunting dog and she saves his life on several occasions. Dogs are just fine in the Rigveda. In the Mahabharata, you’re already getting into caste system. And Sarama’s sons, the Sarameyas, come to Janamajeya’s sacrifice. She drives them out with stones. And the dogs go back to their mother and say what happened. And she curses Janamejaya to have serious problems with animals. And that’s when Janamejaya’s problem with snakes begins.