We should at this point mention the ‘tradition’ itself, both in its va-riety and in the secondary material which it generated.72 The edi-tors of the Critical Edition, overseen for the main part of their work by Sukthankar, relegated certain alternative manuscript variants from the text to the footnotes or the appendices, thereby bringing a western process of textual study to the native system. There exists a primary divide between the Northern and Southern manuscript tra-ditions, the latter being generally the textus ornatior, the more
pro-71 Contemporary analysts of the epic are fortunate in being able to draw evi-dence not only from the Sanskrit text but from the poem’s current varieties of per-formance throughout the sub-continent. Hiltebeitel, 1999, chapter two, has an ex-cellent theoretical overview of contemporary approaches to the differences be-tween Sanskrit and local epics. In chapter three, he describes the death of Karña in a south Indian epic (initially recorded by Beck). The context of these modern-day local or ‘oral’ epics is well detailed. See also, Pukalentippulavar, 1998. Looking at these contemporary recitals and performances is one way of approaching the
‘original’ epic.
72 One of the problems in dealing with epic concerns the phenomenon of diglossia. By the middle of the first millenium Sanskrit was no longer the spoken language and various Prakrits were already well established by the time of the Buddha. It was not only the case that songs about heroes were an attempt at the recall of a literary or poetic past but that the language in which these songs were performed was also an ‘artificial’ phenomenon; although epic, because of its ‘er-rors’, betrays a more natural air than say, later ‘classical’ Sanskrit. This accounts for much of what is called ‘epic Sanskrit’, that is, usage which is irregular in a strictly grammatical sense; it is âræa Sanskrit, the language of the ëæis who lived in another yuga. For instance, the use of the absolutive/gerund ya suffix when there are no prefixes to the stem, or the lack of augment for the imperfect, etc. See Jamison, in Holst-Warhaft and McCann, 1999, p.38, “What does a classical mo-ment mean in a culture when the classical language has been dead for approxi-mately a thousand years?”
fuse and hence slightly longer.73 There is not only this deep and original incision in textual arrangement, but, as Sukthankar noted, the text “was probably written down independently in different ep-ochs and under different circumstances.”74
The late eighteenth century pothî-form ‘Bombay’ edition usually has the mediaeval commentary of Nîlakañøha printed along with it at the bottom of each page.75 His work is in a long line of com-mentarial practice beginning with Devabodha and carried on by Arjunamiåra. The Bombay edition does not incorporate much of the material that is only to be found in the Southern Recensions.76 I have made frequent use of Nîlakañøha’s commentary especially where the poem deals with technical issues, such as ritual imple-ments, items of armour, et cetera. The ‘vulgate’, editio princeps, is the later Calcutta edition, which I have not referred to.77
Sukthankar was well aware of the problems in dealing with pre-literate poetry. Even in advance of the work of Parry and Lord he understood that there flourished a tradition of what he called “itin-erant raconteurs”, whose purpose in life was the performance of
73“The Southern recension impresses us thus by its precision, schematization, and thoroughly practical outlook. Compared with it, the Northern recension is distinctly vague, unsystematic, sometimes even inconsequent, more like a story rather na˚vely narrated, as we find in actual experience”, Sukthankar, 1944, p.48.
“The discrepancies between the two recensions, as already observed, are so nu-merous and so multifarious, that any attempt to enumerate and classify them must remain incomplete and unsatisfactory”, ibid., p.49.
74Sukthankar, op. cit., p.100.
75The actual text that he edited “is a smooth and eclectic but inferior text, of an inclusive rather than exclusive type ... Nîlakañøha’s guiding principle, on his own admission, was to make the Mahâbhârata a thesaurus of all excellencies (culled no matter from what source).” Sukthankar, op. cit., p.85.
76The Bombay edition, for long the standard edition of the epic until the pub-lication of the CE, was not used by Sukthankar and his fellow editors, as it did not represent a manuscript tradition but was compiled in the nineteenth century by pañèits. It contains “readings which have no manuscript support”, Sukthankar, op. cit., p.6.
77The ‘vulgate’ is, as S.K. De, the editor of the Udyoga parvan, describes it on p.xviii, “an uncritical conflation”. Sukthankar, op. cit., p.106, describes it as “a text which was made up, probably, also in great haste but with inadequate and in-sufficient materials, only in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.”
the poem.78 He realised that, unlike the brahmins, who in their schools preserved a detailed authenticity of inherited Vedic texts, with these poets something quite the converse was in operation and that their ‘text’ was “multiple and polygenous”.79 Nagy has written of how even when there is a literate tradition at play there is still plenty of room for textual shift and alteration, as exhibited by the phenomenon of “mouvance”.80
The editorial problems in dealing with a poem the size of the Mahâbhârata and with such historical, geographical, and social variance, are immense. Kosambi and Schlingloff have written about the nature of textual variation and have brought highly rele-vant material to bear on the question of how this was so.81 Kosambi analysed the parvasaägraha figures, the quantities of verse given in the description of ‘contents’, and matched these up with the ac-tual quantities. Schlinghoff, also working on the parvan list, from the basis of what had been preserved in fragmentary manuscripts from Qizil in Chinese Turkestan, was able to show how certain parts of the epic were not included in that corpus and hence could possibly be described as being ‘later’ additions to the whole.82 This assumes that the ‘whole’ was always the case; in fact, “There are very few MSS. of the entire work.”83
What we have in the Critical Edition is “a version of the epic as old as the extant manuscript material will permit us to reach”, and, which is “the most ancient one according to the direct line of transmission”.84 Sukthankar, great scholar that he was, accepts the fact that it is a “mosaic of old and new matter”, and admits that this
78Sukthankar, op. cit., p.1.
79Ibid. p.2; p.128, “[T]he Mahâbhârata is not and never was a fixed rigid text, but is a fluctuating epic tradition, a th`eme avec variations, not unlike a popular Indian melody.” Edgerton, in his introduction to the Sabhâ parvan, 1944, p.xxxvi, also discusses the problem, and comments on the CE, “I believe that it is ... approximately what the Alexandrian text of Homer is to the Homeric tradition.”
80Nagy, 1996a, p.9 et seq., discussing a term pioneered by Zumthor.
81Kosambi, 1946. Schlingloff, 1969.
82The Virâøa parvan and the Anuåâsana parvan, for instance.
83Edgerton, in his Sabhâ parvan intro, 1944, p.xxxvii.
84Sukthankar, op. cit., p.129.
in some instance renders a text that is not always smooth as, say, the vulgate is in places, and which even manifests occasional anacolu-thon: but which has been “inferred with a high degree of probabil-ity”.85 There has been criticism of the Poona edition, claiming that it is ‘artificial’ and divorced from any ‘actual’ and performative tradition.86 Nonetheless, it does represent a monument to long, ex-tremely dedicated, and assiduously detailed scholarship, and has provided the current researcher with virtually complete coverage of all the relevant manuscript traditions available today.
P.L. Vaidya, in his introduction to the Karña parvan makes the comment that, “The text of the Karña parvan, as it has come down to us, seems to have been in a fluid form from very early times.
This fluid state is responsible for the great divergence in the texts in the Northern and Southern recensions, particularly at the com-mencement and towards the end, like a rope automatically un-winding itself when left without the securing knots at the ends”.87 This would seem to indicate, from a modern point of view, a dy-namic level of activity in the oral tradition that surrounded or con-tained this section of the poem, but which did not seriously affect the thematic material of ‘Karña’s epic’.88
Needless to say I have made extensive use of the on-line CE text as recently made available by J.D. Smith of Cambridge University.
It is a re-ordering of the original electronic text provided by Mu-neo Tokunaga of Kyoto University.89 This has been of vital use in the search for words.
85Ibid. p.130.
86 Perhaps this approximates to the Kalevala model as compiled by Lönnrot (and then imitated by Longfellow). What one ends up with is a trompe l’oeil ver-sion of a poem representing the ‘whole’ of ancient India. Wagner’s composition of Der Ring Des Nibelungen, drawn from many epic sources, is also roughly analogous. The editors of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 1988, re-mark, in their General Introduction, that their editorial method arguably produces,
“a version that never existed in Shakespeare’s time.”
87P.L. Vaidya, fasc. 20, BORI ed., p.xxiv.
8 8‘Oral tradition’ incorporates composition, performance, and transmission.
89 http://bombay.oriental.cam.ac.uk/index.html
Much of the method followed in this work is that of explication de texte, ‘close reading’. In the next chapter I shall examine the name of Karña and attempt to show its relevance to the overall nar-rative. Then, I shall analyse the term kathâ, in an effort to come to some understanding of what ‘epic’ was for kæatriyas. Thirdly, I shall examine what heroes were ‘like’, in the organisation of simile that depicts them as well as in the crucial importance of vision as a medium for the original preliterate poets.
In Chapter III we shall look at Karña’s relationship with three of his peers looking in particular at structural arrangements in both plot and language. In the following chapter certain of his most im-portant speeches will be under scrutiny.
Chapter V inquires into the relationship between heroes and sons or heroes and fathers. In this study I shall indicate varieties of heroism that do not only concern Karña.
Finally, I shall briefly touch upon some of the cult aspects of epic heroes in the sub-continent and indicate sources for possible ritual as given in the text and in later material culture.
Given the enormous range of the poem, analysis focussed on in-dividual terms is not always fruitful. Unlike the Homeric corpus, which was ‘fixed’ quite early, the Mahâbhârata continued to flour-ish and still does continue to flourflour-ish in the sub-continent; the poem is recited even today by brahmins in villages on the occasion of certain festivals in the Hindu calendar — such is its ongoing vi-tality. Thus, to distinguish a meaning for individual words is often less inductively successful than it should be. A study of key words in Mahâbhârata heroism, such as vîra and åûra, or, yaåas and kîrti, does not often throw light upon the concept under investigation. I spent an enormous amount of time pursuing the instance and con-text of such terms, but eventually abandoned my inferences for want of resolute conclusion.
Conversely, due to the centripetal organisation of the poem, where various separate traditions were combined to effect a syn-thetic or ‘master’ epic, it is possible to speak of the large range of synonyms contained in the poem as a phenomenon in itself. This is an unusual aspect of the Mahâbhârata, compounded by the
artifici-ality of the language and the fact that Sanskrit was early on no longer a living tongue. In later classical poetry an extensive use of synonyms came to be considered to be a poetic virtue.90
90 When an non-vernacular and literary language that contains an enormous spectrum of vocabulary loses the distinctions that separate the meaning of differ-ent words, its frame of reference becomes closed and internal. This marks a secon-dary stage in its process of ‘artificiality’. It is not just that the language is no longer spoken, but that the nuance of specific words begins to vanish. As signifi-ers, words can at this point, become quite arbitrary, ‘meaningless’. See Staal, 1979. The word for ‘water’ is a good example: jala, salila, âpaï, vâri, toya, udaka; does this degree of synonymy represent a move away from ‘local’ litera-tures towards a more pan-Indian form perhaps? This would denote a procession away from individual significance towards greater fungibility of terms. Another good example can be observed in the large variety of words for ‘king’: râjâ, ma-hârâjâ, nëpati, nëpa, kæitipa, nareåvara, narâdhipa, to name a few. Normally one would imagine that a strict ranking occured with such a list of royal titles, but this is not the case within the poem. Again, it seems as if the impetus to uniform-ity derives from the suppression of what were local or lesser traditions of the poem. Our understanding of ‘local’ traditions can perhaps be refined down to refer to certain books of the epic or to certain heroes in the epic — but this is not the aim of the present work.
KARÑA KAUNTEYA
In this chapter I shall give a cursory outline of the major activities and occasions in the narrative or ‘epic’ of Karña. I would then like to focus upon the name of Karña as this encodes details of his make-up. Thirdly, I would like to offer an overview of how epic poetry amplifies and supports the world of kæatriyas and what the term for ‘epic’ is in this respect. Lastly, the question of metaphor and simile — as crucial tropes within this poetry — needs to be studied, as this will provide us with a poetics as to how epic func-tions.