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Epic India
By Willy | October 7, 2009
Strictly speaking, India does not have a written history before the Middle Ages, save for scattered monumental inscriptions. Ancient Indians, unlike their northern neighbors the Chinese, were never particularly interested in recording their past in a systematic fashion. Instead, bards worked India’s distant past into the Vedas and the great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
The first of many invaders to the Indian subcontinent were the Aryans, light-skinned horsemen who worshipped a pantheon of gods related to the Greeks’ and Persians’. The Aryan’s early conquests and battles figure into the Vedas, collections of hymns that may be humanity’s oldest surviving literary works. The Vedas, composed orally under the influence of soma, a drug whose identity is no longer known, spoke of the physical concerns of this life.
The Sanskrit epics are some of humanity’s longest literary works; the Mahabharata, the longer and more influential of the two, is eight times the length of the combined works of Homer. The Ramayana tells the story of the hero Rama, who rescues his wife Sita from the demon Ravana with the help of a monkey army led by Hanuman. The Mahabharata is the national epic of India. (”Bharat,” from a legendary line of kings, is an alternate name for the modern state of India.) Less a single literary work than a library of tales, the Mahabharata consists of a central narrative intertwined, like the trunks of a banyan, with literally thousands of other stories. The central narrative concerns five brothers, the Pandavas, as they fight to regain their inheritance lost to their wicked cousins, the Kauravas. An epochal battle results from this rivalry. The battle leads to great bloodshed on both sides and the beginning of the last of four ages of Earth’s history, the Kali Yuga.
The Mahabharata remains mostly unknown in the West, because of an inaccessibility of themes, a lack of modern translations, and its imposing length. In India, however, the Mahabharata and Ramayana are still very much alive. Indian television channels broadcast retellings of the epics, and Hindus celebrate Rama’s victory on the Dussehra holiday by blowing up papier-mache statues of Ravana and the other demons.
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