80 The New York Review
The Widows’ Laments
David Shulman
Until the Lions :
Echoes from the Mahabharata
by Karthika Naïr.
Archipelago, 284 pp., $20.00 (paper)
The Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit
epic, is a fiery, dangerous book. One
is not supposed to keep a copy in the
house, lest it burn down. And it is dan-
gerous, perhaps fatal, to read it from
beginning to end, in linear sequence.
Similarly, translating it from Sanskrit
into another language, begin-
ning at the beginning, is not rec-
ommended. The classical Telugu
version from South India has
three authors; two died during its
composition.
The book has this reputation not
only because it is so long—about
100,000 Sanskrit couplets—but
because of the lethal properties in-
herent in its vision of the world. In
the southern state of Karnataka,
shadow puppet performances of
the text, or segments from it, al-
ways begin somewhere in the mid-
dle, in the section called Virata, an
extended carnivalesque moment
that precedes the catastrophic war
about to unfold. The beautiful
puppets are kept in big wooden
boxes, always with the clown figure
on top, to protect everyone from
the doomed, ferocious characters
below it. The Sanskrit philosopher
Abhinavagupta, at the beginning
of the eleventh century, recom-
mended reading the Mahabharata
because its dark picture of human-
ity can serve as an incentive to the
reader to renounce the world.
Yet this two-thousand-year-old
book is, in a way, a template for
Indian civilization; it remains as
vital and relevant today as it ever
was, and not only for South Asia.
The apocalypse it describes is
something all too human, driven
by greed, egotism, spite, and the
usual phoney fixation on the glo-
ries of dying in war. As the Turk-
ish novelist Ahmet Altan says
in his memoir, I Will Never See
the World Again (2019), a book
he smuggled out of prison, “Ev-
erything changes on earth, but mean-
ness and stupidity never change.” One
could take this as a motto for the Ma-
habharata, along with other statements
from the epic, such as “Whatever exists
here may also exist elsewhere; but what
is not mentioned here does not exist” or
“Time cooks us, and we die”—a more
succinct and repeated refrain for the
immense and tragic story.
This epic, undoubtedly mostly oral
in its original forms, has a putative au-
thor: the sage Vyasa, who also happens
to be the direct progenitor of nearly
all its major characters. Vyasa is thus
writing the story of his own family’s
self-destruction from the point of view
of a lonely, aged survivor. His children,
grandchildren, and great- grandchildren
split into two rival factions of cousins:
the Kaurava warriors, classed as the
antiheroes, and the five Pandava broth-
ers and their common wife, Draupadi,
who are seen as heroes despite their
all-too-evident moral flaws. The Pan-
davas eventually triumph, but none of
their descendants survives except for
a single child, stillborn and revived at
birth by the god Krishna, who was one
of the major instigators of the war but
who chose to side with the Pandavas.
Never was there so Pyrrhic a victory as
the one that concludes this book.
According to the tradition, Vyasa
dictated the huge text to a scribe, the
elephant- headed god Ganesha, who
broke off one of his tusks to use as a
stylus. But Ganesha agreed to record
it only on condition that Vyasa wouldnever pause for even a second in the
course of his improvised dictation.
Vyasa accepted this superhuman de-
mand but added a condition of his own:
Ganesha would not proceed to write
down the next couplet until he had un-
derstood the previous one. This bar-
gain worked more or less smoothly, but
at times even Vyasa became tired and
needed a moment to think about what
to say next. To gain time, he would
throw out a verse, in good metrical
form, that was nothing but gibberish.
We do find many such verses scattered
throughout the Sanskrit text, in its var-
ious recensions and regional variations.
Take this story as an accurate metapo-
etic model of the process of composing,
memorizing, and ultimately writing
down a text that was almost infinitely
capable of expansion, invention, and
radical expressive variation.The great poet and translator A. K.
Ramanujan used to say that no one in
India ever hears the Mahabharata (orits sister epic, the Ramayana) for the
first time. One grows up with these
texts as a deep part of the self, their
characters serving as models for all
kinds of human conduct, more often
than not self-destructive, and for a vast
range of emotion and sensation. In the
twentieth century—following medieval
precedents—there appeared several
penetrating psychological interpreta-
tions of these epic characters; the text
readily lends itself to such attempts atunderstanding by entering into their
minds.
By far the most powerful such inter-
pretation that I have read, Wandering
the Mahabharata, was written in the
South Indian language Malayalam
by a maverick scholar, Kuttikrishna
Marar; his book is being translated
into English by the historian M. G. S.
Narayanan. Another incisive study
along these lines, one better known
throughout India, is Yuganta : The
End of an Epoch by the Maharash-
trian anthropologist- sociologist Irawati
Karve. Many readers of these pages
will have seen Peter Brook’s truly
epic—that is, lengthy, daunting, all-
encompassing—version of the text
either on stage or on screen. We also
have a book-length cycle of astonishing
poems, Sarpa Satra (Serpent Rite), by
Arun Kolatkar, perhaps India’s finest
modern poet, about the lurid ritual
that, not by chance, forms the framing
story for the entire narrative: the om-
niscient storyteller, Vaisampayana, re-
counts the epic to Brahmin priests andsages while all the snakes in the uni-
verse are being drawn, as if by a mag-
net, into the sacrificial flames.
But surely the most lyrical of all
such attempts to see the Mahabharata
through the eyes of its characters is the
remarkable dramatic poem Until the
Lions by the Kerala-born, Paris-based
poet, dance producer, and librettist
Karthika Naïr.* She has given her book
an appropriate subtitle: “Echoes from
the Mahabharata.” The thirty haunt-
ing, heartrending chapters, in a
wide range of forms and styles,
resonate powerfully with one an-
other; together they offer a text
clearly meant for live performance,
in oral recitation—or rather incan-
tation—and in dance. The Akram
Khan Company in London has
been performing a version of this
work, scripted by Karthika, since- An opera based on the book,
scored by Thierry Pécou and di-
rected and choreographed by Sho-
bana Jeyasingh, was scheduled to
open in Strasbourg in March at the
Opéra National du Rhin but was
postponed because of Covid-19.
The poems of Until the Lions
are graphically typeset on the
page so that they seem to be
dancing, a celebration of visible
sound. Karthika plays with met-
rical modes—canzone, rima dis-
soluta, the Panjabi Sufi acrostic
form known as Si Harfi, and the
Ta m i l andadi, in which each new
verse begins with the final sylla-
bles of the previous one. Some of
the chapters are rhythmic prose
poems—a dancer’s prose.
Nearly all the chapters are first-
person dramatic monologues ut-
tered by female characters known
from the Mahabharata (with the
exception of one newly invented
voice, that of the clairvoyant ca-
nine Shunaka, who reembodies the
speaking dog Sarama mentioned
at the very beginning, or one of
the beginnings, of the epic). The
female voices are, almost without
exception, tormented, ravaged,
grief-stricken, bitterly lamenting
the irrevocable, unthinkable losses
that their fathers, husbands, broth-
ers, brothers-in-law, lovers, and sons
have inflicted on them. I don’t think I
have ever seen a description of rape as
unflinching as Sauvali’s rage at King
Dhritarashtra and the configuration of
sycophantic politicians and courtiers
who force her to submit to him. Sau-
vali exemplifies a prominent pattern in
these chapters: women whose names
are known from the Sanskrit epic but
whose character and inner experience
are muted there suddenly come to life
as full-blooded people caught up in the
destruction endemic to a male world
(well, maybe to any human world).
The most moving of the laments, for
me, is that of the young widow Uttaraa,
‘Draupadi and Her Attendants’; illustration by Yusuf Ali from the Razmnama,
a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, 1616 –1617Christie’s Images*Karthika has also published several
other volumes of English poetry as well
as one of the most beautiful children’s
books ever written, The Honey Hunter
(Le Tigre de Miel), with illustrations by
Joëlle Jolivet (2013), which has been
published in English, French, German,
and Bengali.