At these words, the darkness lifted, the filth and the stench disappeared. Yudhishtir’s brow was cooled by a gentle breeze and his senses calmed by a fragrant aroma of freshly flowering blossoms, as his eyes opened to a refulgent assembly of personages from our story.
Yes, Ganapathi, they were all there in my dream: gentle Draupadi and genteel Drewpad, boisterous Bhim and blustery Sir Richard, grim Gandhari and grimacing Shikhandin; the Karnistanis and the Kauravas; the British and the brutish; pale Pandu embracing his wives; blind Dhritarashtra and blond Georgina. And they were smiling, and laughing, and clapping. ‘You have passed your last test, Yudhishtir!’ Dharma proclaimed. ‘It was all an illusion, my son. You will no more be condemned to an eternity of misery than Duryodhani will enjoy perpetual contentment. Everyone must have at least a glimpse of the other world; the fortunate man samples hell first, the better to enjoy the taste of paradise that follows. All those you see around you have passed through these portals before; tomorrow you will stand amongst them to greet a new entrant as he comes in. And the illusions will go on.’
‘The tests you put me through,’ Yudhishtir asked, frowning. ‘Has everyone here gone through them?’
‘Yes, but very few have passed them as you have,’ Dharma said.
‘And what were they meant to prove?’
‘Prove?’ Dharma seemed vaguely puzzled. ‘Only the eternal importance of dharma.’
‘To what end? If it makes no difference to all these people, who all have their place here. .’
‘Everyone,’ Dharma said, ‘finds his place in history, even those who have failed to observe dharma. But it is essential to recognize virtue and righteousness, and to praise him who, like yourself, has consistently upheld dharma.’
‘Why?’ Yudhishtir asked.
‘What do you mean,’ Dharma replied irritably, ‘ “why”?’
‘I mean why?’ Yudhishtir replied, addressing everyone gathered before him. ‘What purpose has it served? Has my righteousness helped either me, my wife, my family or my country? Does justice prevail in India, or in its history? What has adherence to dharma achieved in our own story?’
‘This is sacrilege,’ his preceptor breathed. ‘If there is one great Indian principle that has been handed down through the ages, it is that of the paramount importance of practising dharma at any price. Life itself is worthless without dharma. Only dharma is eternal.’
‘India is eternal,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘But the dharma appropriate for it at different stages of its evolution has varied. I am sorry, but if there is one thing that is true today, it is that there are no classical verities valid for all time. I believed differently, and have paid the price of being defeated, humiliated, and reduced to irrelevance. It is too late for me to do anything about it: I have had my turn. But for too many generations now we have allowed ourselves to believe India had all the answers, if only it applied them correctly. Now I realize that we don’t even know all the questions.’
‘What are you saying?’ Dharma asked, and Yudhishtir saw to his astonishment that the resplendent deva beside him was changing slowly back into a dog.
‘No more certitudes,’ he called out desperately to the receding figure. ‘Accept doubt and diversity. Let each man live by his own code of conduct, so long as he has one. Derive your standards from the world around you and not from a heritage whose relevance must be constantly tested. Reject equally the sterility of ideologies and the passionate prescriptions of those who think themselves infallible. Uphold decency, worship humanity, affirm the basic values of our people — those which do not change — and leave the rest alone. Admit that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma. .’
I woke up to the echo of a vain and frantic barking.
I woke up, Ganapathi, to today’s India. To our land of computers and corruption, of myths and politicians and box-wallahs with moulded plastic briefcases. To an India beset with uncertainties, muddling chaotically through to the twenty-first century.
Your eyebrows and nose, Ganapathi, twist themselves into an elephantine question-mark. Have I, you seem to be asking, come to the end of my story? How forgetful you are: it was just the other day that I told you stories never end, they just continue somewhere else. In the hills and the plains, the hearths and the hearts, of India.
But my last dream, Ganapathi, leaves me with a far more severe problem. If it means anything, anything at all, it means that I have told my story so far from a completely mistaken perspective. I have thought about it, Ganapathi, and I realize I have no choice. I must retell it.
I see the look of dismay on your face. I am sorry, Ganapathi. I shall have a word with my friend Brahm tomorrow. In the meantime, let us begin again.
They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. .
Afterword
Many of the characters, incidents and issues in this novel are based on people and events described in the great epic the Mahabharata, a work which remains a perennial source of delight and inspiration to millions in India. I am no Sanskrit scholar and have therefore relied only on a highly subjective reading of a variety of English translations of the epic. I should like to acknowledge, in particular, my debt to the versions of C. Rajagopalachari and P. Lal, respectively the most readable renderings of what scholars call the southern and northern rescensions of the work. The two differ sufficiently in approach, style and narrative content to be complementary, even though they both deal with essential aspects of the same story. I have relied greatly on both of them.
While some scenes in The Great Indian Novel are recastings of situations described in translations of the Mahabharata, I have taken far too many liberties with the epic to associate any of its translators with my sins. Those readers who wish to delve into the Mahabharata itself in search of the sources of my inspiration need look no further than Lal’s ‘transcreation’, Rajagopalach-ari’s episodic saga or Prof. J. A. B. Van Buitenen’s scholarly, thorough but incomplete translation for the University of Chicago Press. While this novel was with the publishers I also discovered Jean-Claude Carriere’s stage script of the Mahabharata in Peter Brooke’s most readable translation, and recommend it highly. The responsibility for this entirely fictional version is, of course, mine alone.
A Note on Dharma
Of the many Indian words and expressions in this book, the meanings of most of which are readily apparent from their context (or from the glossary), the one term it may be necessary to elucidate is ‘dharma’.
Dharma is perhaps unique in being an untranslatable Sanskrit term that is, none the less, cheerfully defined as a normal, unitalicized entry in an English dictionary. The definition offered in Chambers Twentieth-Century Dictionary is ‘the righteousness that underlies the law; the law’. While this is a definite improvement on the one-word translation offered in many an Indian Sanskrit primer (‘religion’), it still does not convey the full range of meaning implicit in the term. ‘English has no equivalent for dharma,’ writes P. Lal in the Glossary to his ‘transcreation’ of the Mahabharata, in which he defines dharma as ‘code of good conduct, pattern of noble living, religious rules and observance’.
My friend Ansar Hussain Khan suggests that dharma is most simply defined as ‘that by which we live’. Yes — but ‘that’ embraces a great deal. An idea of the immensity and complexity of the concept of dharma may be conveyed by the fact that, in his superb analytical study of Indian culture and society, The Speaking Tree, Richard Lannoy defines dharma in at least nine different ways depending on the context in which he uses the term. The nine (with page references to the Oxford University Press paperback edition in brackets): Moral Law (xvi), spiritual order (142), sacred law (160), salvation ethic (213), totality of social, ethical and spiritual harmony (217), righteousness (218, 325), universal order (229), magico-religious cycle (233), moral, idealistic, spiritual force (294). Lannoy also quotes Betty Heimann’s excellent version in her 1937 work Indian and Western Philosophy: A Study in Contrasts: ‘Dharma is total cosmic responsibility, including God’s, a universal justice far more inclusive, wider and profounder than any Western equivalent, such as “duty”.’