Week 6: Reading Notes, Mahabharata A

This week, we start reading a new Indian class, the Mahabharata, I chose to read the PDE (public domain edition) again, and this serves as notes for the first twenty stories within the epic. During the reading of the Ramayana, I would pre-read the plot on Wikipedia, this time, I will try to read only the PDE first, then the Wikipedia story if necessary.

One thing that immediately stuck out was the high character turnover, compared to the Ramayana. In the Ramayana, there were not too many different characters, and the plot seemed to revolve around the characters. In contrast, the Mahabharata seems to have the characters revolve around a different plot. This seems to highlight the role that karma and the Gods play in the fate of the other people as their wills are shaped to the God's destiny.

A second thing that stuck out was the role of curses in this story as well. In the ninth story of the PDE, "Pandu and His Wives", there is a similar role of a character killing something, that something being revered or holy, and a curse being attached to the character. The same thing happened to Rama's father in the Ramayana where he accidentally kills a homeless person, resulting in a curse on his life, and in this book, it happens to be a bhamin disguised as a deer.

On an off note, a continuing theme amongst these stories is some role of illogical nature to their plots, last story, I critiqued the role of a life saving herb that a monkey could travel thousands of miles to get, this time, I will critique the thirteenth story, "Bhima and the Nagas." In this story, he is poisoned by snakes. But it is revealed that he had already been poisoned, thus, reversing the role of the poison in his body. This again, is very hard to believe, as the poisons would have to neutralize each other if we were going off of some chemical reason, and being cured by poison does not seem to make any sense on a symbolic level.

Overall, this collection of stories exhibits many similarities to the Ramayana, but there is a more interesting role around the characters this time as they are churned in and out of the story more quickly. Instead of seeming to be a story about two people at war as in the Ramayana with Ravana and Rama, this time it appears to be two larger groups of people in a longer stretch of war.

The Mahabharata is an Indian Classic. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Bibliography: Mahabharata, Public Domain Edition, Link.

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