The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c22.19

v1.c22.19

A study of the interpolations in the so-called Southern text shows that thousands of verses of narrative and didactic material have been added to the epic text, and that the redaction comprises a shameless incorporation of material drawn from the Purāṇas and from the Harivaṃça, a sort of Purāṇa which was added to the Mahābhārata, as well as elaborations of the original text, sometimes by the insertion of a dozen or so verses, sometimes by the addition to a chapter of half a dozen new chapters narrating feats of the heroes or insisting on the godliness of a demi-god. Now there is no reason not to suppose that the same process has made the Mahābhārata what it is from the beginning. It contains at present a hundred thousand verses, with some prose admixture, but internal evidence shows that this is an accumulation; and the text itself admits that it was originally less than nine thousand verses in length. As we have seen above (p. 251) the Gṛihya Sūtra of Āçvalāyana mentions both a Bhārata and a Mahābhārata, no doubt a shorter and a longer version of the same poem. The theme of the epic as a story, the conflict between Kurus and Pāṇḍus, is at most not so long, about twenty thousand verses, as the whole Rāmāyaṇa, or twenty-four thousand verses. In short, in the great epic of India we have a combination of matter, partly epical, partly pedagogic, partly narrative or historical. The genealogies and the religious-didactic parts are not necessarily later in date, but they are later additions to the original material. Some of the additions may be as old as the original or even older, but this does not entitle us to maintain that the epic was originally didactic, nor is this the best explanation of the heterogeneous mass which we call the epic, and which in its present form resembles such a combination as, barring dialectal differences, might be effected by combining a few books of the Iliad with Hesiod, extracts from Euripides, Theocritus, Aristotle, and a few chapters of the New Testament. With this exception, most of the didactic material is not for the everyday man, but distinctly for the military caste. Even the philosophy is not for the philosopher, the priest, but for the king and his nobles. The predominative religion, too, is that of the kingly caste¹. Indra is their sovereign Lord: and the heaven of Indra, with his celestial nymphs, the Apsarasas, is the reward for kingly duty faithfully performed on earth. The lower castes, Vaiçya and Çūdra, the agriculturist, the trader, the slave, are scarcely recognised except adventitiously, as it becomes convenient to refer to them. The epic is thoroughly aristocratic, a work completed by priests for warriors, to recount the deeds of warriors and show them the need of priests, who convert to orthodoxy the service of popular gods dear to the local aristocracy. The epic has thus become what it calls itself, the 'fifth Veda,' and may be regarded either as a didactic storehouse (it calls itself a Dharma Çāstra) or as a magnified Itihāsa-Purāṇa, which even before the epic existed was regarded as supplementing the Vedas. Both elements are united, religious-didactic and legendary, in such parts as treat of the demons, gods, and seers of old. How ancient may have been collections of such material prior to our extant epic is uncertain; but the evidence for earlier collective works does not appear to be convincing. That a mass of legends existed and that this mass was used by Brāhmans and Buddhists alike as they needed them may be granted, just as the mass of fables known to the ancient world was utilised by the epic writers and by those who composed the Buddhist Jātakas, though India had no Aesop.