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An
Approach To Indian History
-Prof. Kittu Reddy |
The Great Epics
As we have seen in the previous chapters, the Veda is the spiritual and psychological seed of Indian culture; the Upanishads is the expression of the truth of the highest spiritual knowledge. However, in order to make this spiritual knowledge effective, it had to come down from the spiritual and intellectual to the practical level and intelligence of the average man. This work was done by the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
One of the elements of the Vedic teaching was the knowledge of a significant tradition, itihaasa. The Itihaasa was an ancient historical or legendary tradition creatively used as a tale which was expressive of some spiritual or religious or ethical or ideal meaning; it thus served as a formative agent of the mind of the people. These two tales were not merely intended to tell an ancient tale in a beautiful or noble manner; they were written with a sense of their function as architects and sculptors of life, creative exponents, fashioners of significant forms of national thought and religion and ethics and culture. The work of these epics was to popularise high philosophic and ethical idea and cultural practice; they threw out prominently and with great effect in a frame of poetry and poetic story the deeds of significant personalities; and these personalities became to the people of India abiding national memories and representative figures of all that was best in the soul and thought of Indian culture.
To sum up: That which was for the cultured classes contained in Veda and Upanishad, was put here into creative and living figures associated with familiar story and legend fused into a vivid representation of life and thus made a near and living power which all the people of India could readily assimilate.
The Ramayana
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are works of the same essential kind; the Ramayana differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. In this epic, there is less of philosophy and more of the poetic mind, more of the artist and less of the builder. Here the poet Valmiki has taken as his subject an Itihasa, an ancient tale or legend associated with an old Indian dynasty and filled it with detail from myth and folklore. Here too the subject is the same as in the Mahabharata, the strife of the divine with the titanic forces in the life of the earth; this is expressed in more purely ideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening of both the good and the evil in the human character. There is portrayed on one side, an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilisation founded on the Dharma and a raising of the moral ideal with a singularly appealing grace and harmony and sweetness. On the other side are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and violence. These two forces and ideas are brought into conflict and led to a decisive issue of the divine over the Rakshasa.
Both the epics may be said to illustrate the same theme: the victory of the divine forces and the forces of Dharma over the forces of egoism, self-will and division. This leads ultimately to the establishment of a unifying dharmarajya.
The Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is the reflection of the great Aryan civilisation. It brings out with great prominence and vividness the types, ideas, aims and passions of a heroic and pregnant period in the history of the Indian nation. It represents therefore a formative ethical and religious spirit which is absolutely corrective to the faults that have marred in the past and mar even to the present day, the Indian character and type of thought.
The Mahabharata is a story presented in a double form; there is first, the personal conflict between typical and representative personalities embodying on one side the greater ethical ideas of the Indian Dharma and on the other side, embodiments of Asuric egoism and misuse of the Dharma. Secondly, there is the political battle in which the personal culminates, an international clash ending in the establishment of a new rule of righteousness and justice, a kingdom or rather an empire of the Dharma uniting warring races and substituting for the ambitious arrogance of kings and aristocratic clans the supremacy, the calm and peace of a just and human empire.
In the Mahabharata, the ideas of the Upanishads and the great philosophers are brought in continually and even sometimes given new developments as in the Gita; the ethical ideals of the race are expressed or transmuted into the shape of tale and episode; political and social ideals and institutions are similarly developed or illustrated with vividness and clearness; even aesthetic suggestions connected with the life of the Indian people are woven into the epic.
The Mahabharata thus becomes a poetic expression unique in its power and fullness of the entire soul and thought of the Indian people.
These two epics became the means of creating a profound cultural and spiritual unity in the Indian people. It is also the first known attempt of converting this cultural and spiritual unity into a political unity.
The epics have therefore also a political message. The urge for unification of the whole nation under one rule is clearly portrayed in both epics. The beginnings of the centripetal tendency or political centralization are typified in the ideal of the Samrat or Chakravarti Raja and the military and political use of the Aswamedha and Rajasuya sacrifices. One might even be tempted to say that the two epics had been written to illustrate this theme of centralization and political unification. The Ramayana starts with an idealized description of a unifying dharmarajya as once existing in the ancient and sacred past of the country; the Mahabharata recounts the establishment of such a unifying dharmarajya or imperial reign of justice. This is ample proof that ancient India had a clear political perception – that of converting the already existing cultural and spiritual unity into a living and dynamic political unity.
In addition there are some great contributions which the Mahabharata has made to the ethical culture of India. There are three great contributions made by Vyasa to Indian ethics and thought, namely: nishkama Dharma, nishkama Karma and the difference between the God and the Asura. We shall take up each one of these in some detail now.
Let us first take up the concept of Dharma; this concept is unique to Indian culture and it will be difficult to find a word in any other language, which corresponds to the actual sense. The nearest one can come to it is to define it as “the inner law of one’s being”.
The Dharma may be described as the deepest law of our nature; it is not just a creed, cult or ethical and social rule. The tendency of man to seek after a just and perfect law of his living finds its truth and its justification in the Dharma. Dharma is fixed in its essence, but still it develops in our consciousness and evolves and has its stages. There are gradations of spiritual and ethical ascension in the search for the highest law of our nature. And this is so because all men cannot follow in all things one common and invariable rule.
Life is too complex to admit of the arbitrary ideal simplicity, which the moralising theorist loves. Natures differ, the position, the work we have to do has its own claims and standards; the aim and bent, the call of life and the call of the spirit is not the same for everyone. There is thus a dharma of age, of function, of temperament.
The concept of nishkama dharma will therefore mean that every individual must meet the duties to which his life calls him in a spirit of disinterestedness. Thus the Kshatriya must fulfil his duty as a warrior without letting any other call on him interfere in his work; in the same way the businessman, the philosopher and the ordinary worker must do their functions because that is their Dharma. This insistence on the class standpoint and the fulfilling of its functions in a spirit of disinterestedness is one of the three great contributions of Indian ethical thought.
The second contribution to ethical thought is the concept of nishkama karma. In this concept there is laid a great stress on action and not on quiescence. Although the ultimate goal of existence is to merge into the Divine, it is insisted that this can be attained through action and not the giving up of action. But this action must be followed by a stillness of the desire soul.
It is not by refraining from action nor by renunciation that man reaches his soul’s perfection. Thus it follows that merely to renounce action and flee from the world to a hermitage is but a vanity, and that those who rely on such a desertion of duty for attaining God lean on a broken reed. The professed renunciation of action is only a nominal renunciation, for they give up one set of actions to which they are called for another to which in most cases they have no call or fitness. If they have that fitness, they may certainly see God, but even then action is better than Sanyasa. Hence the great and pregnant paradox that in action is real actionlessness while inaction is merely another form of action itself.
“He who can see inaction in action and action in inaction, he is the wise among men, he does all action with a soul in union with God.” This is the second great contribution of Indian ethical thought.
Finally we come to the third and last contribution of Indian ethics, namely the distinction between the Deva and the Asura. This is one of the distinct and peculiar contributions to the ethical thought which India has to offer.
It is based on one of the fundamental legends of Indra and Virochana.
Both of them come to Brihaspati to know of God; he told them to go home and look in the mirror. Virochana saw himself there and concluding that he was God, asked no further; he gave full rein to the sense of his individuality in himself which he mistook for the deity. But Indra was not satisfied; feeling that there must be some mistake he returned to Brihaspati and received from him the true God-knowledge which taught him that he was God only because all things were God, since nothing existed but the One. If he was the One God so was his enemy, the very feelings of separateness and enmity were not permanent reality but transient phenomena. The Asura therefore is he who is profoundly conscious of his own separate individuality and yet would impose it on the world as the sole individuality; he is thus blown along on the hurricane of his desires and ambitions until he stumbles and is broken. The Deva on the contrary stands firm in the luminous heaven of self-knowledge; his actions flow not inwards towards himself but outwards towards the world. The distinction that Indra draws is not between altruism and egoism but between disinterestedness and desire.
These are the three great contributions of Indian ethical thought which Vyasa gave India through the Mahabharata.
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