The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c22.21

v1.c22.21

Many of the characters of the Mahābhārata appear to be real, historical figures. Others are mythical, in that they represent a personality evolved from a divine name or a local hero-god. Thus the name Arjuna is first a title of Indra, whose son the epic Arjuna is; but his cousin Kṛishṇa is a local demi-god hero, and there is no reason to doubt the historical character of the king of Magadha who was a foe of this pair and a Çivaite, though what is said about him in the epic may be merely the exaggeration of legend, as sung by the bards who made expeditions with the army and sang the exploits they themselves had seen¹. The stories of historical characters, like king Janaka, also reflect history through the mists of legend. The complete anthropomorphisation of heavenly beings, which some scholars are reluctant to admit as a possible phenomenon in the best of cases², is found in the Hindu epic, especially in the inserted tales of the gods; but it does not appear at all certain that any epic hero represents a heavenly being in either of the Hindu epics. Kṛishṇa in the Mahābhārata and Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa are forms of the sun-god only as being identified with Vishṇu as All-god; and in the case of the Rāmāyaṇa this is a palpably late procedure, while it is doubtful whether Kṛishṇa was ever a form of the sun. Both Rāma and Kṛishṇa appear to have been tribal heroes, mythical perhaps but not products of divine mythology. But, as no attempt has ever been made to separate myth from history in India, it is impossible to say whether Kṛishṇa, the divine hero of the Mahābhārata, ever really existed, though this is probable. Kṛishṇa served as the charioteer of Arjuna, the chief Pāṇḍu and epic hero; and though he promised not to fight in person he did all he could to keep up and intensify the enmity between the Pāṇḍus and their related foes, the Kurus, not avoiding even tricks opposed to knightly honour. It is not likely that such shameful acts as those recorded of him by his own followers would have been invented of a god, but rather that the tricks belonged to him as a hero, and that no amount of excuse, of which there is enough offered, could do away with the crude facts of tradition, which represented the man-god Kṛishṇa as a clever but unscrupulous fighter. A later age exonerated him by offering various excuses, the higher morality of imperative need¹, the tit-for-tat rule (one sin to offset another), etc., just as it offered various explanatory excuses for the polyandry of the Pāṇḍus, who, however, as a northern hill-tribe or family, probably were really polyandrous and needed no excuse².