I never met Prabhakar Shrotriya but his critical appreciation of Kalidasa’s immortal poem “Meghdootam” had impressed me a lot when I read it many years ago. Titled “Meghdoot: Ek Antaryatra” (Meghdoot: An Innter Journey), it was an exploration aimed at bringing out the hidden or not-too-obvious meanings and nuances woven into the fabric of the poem. It was also an exposition of the physical and aesthetic beauty of India as well as a celebration of the Yaksha’s love for his beloved. Therefore, when news came that Shrotriya had passed away on September 15 at the age of 78, I felt sad and, at the same time, inspired to read his other writings.
Published by Bharatiya Jnanpith, his magnum opus, "Bharat Main Mahabharata" (Mahabharata in India) is a critical study of the epic and offers a panoramic view of its presence and influence in India and abroad. The book’s vast canvas reminds us of Vasudev Sharan Agrawala’s classic "Bharat Savitri" that studies, analyses and interprets the epic from a cultural historian’s point of view.
Shrotriya’s book is different as it explores the amazingly great influence that the epic has exercised over the Indian mind during the past several millennia and has remained a treasure house of rich source material for a large number of philosophical and literary works in Sanskrit and other Indian languages. He very rightly defines an immortal work as one that inspires successive generations of writers and constantly goes on to renew itself in works that owe their origins to it. In this sense, the Mahabharata is truly immortal.
Shrotriya has expanded on this theme in another book titled "Shasvatoyam" (This is Eternal). Published by Vani Prakashan, the book offers a new interpretation as well as evaluation of 44 stories from the epic. Shrotriya also underscores the fact that the stories (upakhyans) of Mahabharata that have no real organic relationship with the main Kaurav-Pandav narrative happen to be the ones that have often been chosen by later writers to base their literary works on. "Shakuntalam" of Kalidasa is the prime example of this trend.
As Shrotriya is primarily a writer and critic – his oeuvre consists of nearly two dozen books of poetry, plays, essays, literary criticism and translation – he places considerable emphasis on feelings, sentiments, emotions and ideas that permeate and inform the great epic and he is not unduly concerned with determining its core or later interpolations. Although he admires the work done by scholars such as V. S. Sukthankar who was the main inspiration behind the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata brought out by Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, yet he maintains that the critical textual analysis of the text to determine and separate its various layers is immaterial to the task of understanding its meaning and import. For that, one has to treat the epic as an organic whole despite knowing full well that it has undergone many a redaction over several thousand years.
It is Prabhakar Shrotriya’s considered view that the Mahabharata is a work whose central message is humanism as Vyas, its putative creator, declares towards the end of the epic that there is no higher truth than the Man himself. He also views it essentially as an "anti-war" treatise. This is in fact the main reason why the epic continues to capture the Indian imagination and has been a source of important works of literary theory, ethics, history, poetry, plays and fiction in all the major Indian languages including Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apbhransha and Urdu. The epic did not remain confined to India and cast its net right up to Cambodia, Vietnam and China besides Indonesia, Bali, Thailand, Java, Malaya and Japan. All these countries have their own versions of the Mahabharata and its various stories.
Great Kannada poet Pampa, who was a Jain monk, made the first attempt to recreate the epic in a modern Indian language in the 10th Century and this version is known after his name as “Pampa Bharata”. Assamese and Telugu are the only two Indian languages in which the task of rendering the Mahabharata in the indigenous language was undertaken and completed by many poets over many centuries. The work began in the 11th Century in both the languages but was finished in Telugu by the 14th Century involving three poets. However, it took eight centuries and eighteen poets in Assamese to complete this vast enterprise. In the 14th Century, Tamil poet Villiputturar wrote “Villi Bharatham” although attempts to render the epic in Tamil had started as early as the fifth century.
In the 15th Century, Sarla Das re-created the Mahabharata in Oriya and turned it into an anti-feudal narrative that attempted to establish the centrality and importance of the Shudras. In Gujarati, “Bheelon Ka Bharatha” (The Bheel’s Bharatha) was an expression of the Bheel tribals’ imagination, sentiments and creativity. It placed Draupadi at the centre of the epic and turned it into a matriarchal narrative. In the 16th century, Ezhuthachan, who is considered to be the father of the Malayalam language, recast the epic into a new genre called Killipattu while making a parrot as its main narrator.
In our times, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Rabindranath Tagore, Subrahmanya Bharathi, Maithili Sharan Gupta, Jaishankar Prasad, Dharmvir Bharati, Vishnu Sakharam Binder, Girish Karnad, Buddhadev Basu, S. L. Bhairappa, Iravati Karve, K. M. Munshi, Madhusudan Ray, Fakir Mohan Senapati, C. Rajagopalachari and scores of other important writers have based their creative works on the Mahabharata. Until I read "Bharat Main Mahabharata", I had no idea that at least 36 books had so far been written on the great epic in Urdu since the late 19th century.
