The Mahabharata Trilogy: The Book of Killings

Amit Majmudar's Afterword to The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Trilogy, Volume 3 (forthcoming)

Ganesha Transcribing the Mahabharata (1878–1883) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

EMOTIONAL WARRIORS

Movie producers and publishers take it for granted that men prefer films and books about war, while women prefer books about interpersonal relationships. Breakdowns of ticket sales and book sales do bear this out, but the fact is that men and women both respond to literature about interpersonal relationships. It’s just that men like their interpersonal relationships explored against a backdrop of extreme violence and death, while women do not need aerial dogfights and bullets (or chariot-battles and arrows) to capture and hold their attention.

Take the Iliad, for example, which begins with an extended quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. Homer asks his Muse to focus, not on Achilles’s battle prowess, but on his emotion, specifically his anger. The scenes of battlefield slaughter serve that larger purpose, and Achilles, who has been sitting out the war in a sulk (much as Karna sits out the war on Kurukshetra), reenters the war after his friend Patroclus dies, out of grief and a wish for vengeance: Still more emotions, coming as the result of a close human relationship. Anger, grief, the wish for vengeance might find their way into a novel set in a peaceful rural community, or in a workplace, or in a school, with no loss of emotional intensity; there would simply be less blood.  

The Mahabharata, obviously, is a work of art closer to the Iliad than Jane Austen. An epic about India’s last “age of heroes,” it recounts the great civil war that preceded the onset of the Kali yuga, the final and darkening stage of history. It has more characters than Homer’s poem, and, accordingly, more relationships and more emotions.

Heroes cry loudly throughout the epic tradition, worldwide. The “stiff upper lip” is a late British innovation in the image of the man of action. Rama has periodic fits of weeping after his separation from Sita, and when he first discovers her kidnapping, he suffers an extended madness. Achilles cries for Patroclus, Odysseus cries when he thinks of home; Spain’s El Cid weeps to learn his daughters have been whipped; Roland weeps when he is wounded and knows he is dying; Beowulf weeps in his old age. The Mahabharata’s heroes and heroines have many occasions that call for the expression of violent emotion, either in words or tears, and they take them.    

Some emotions are direct reactions to events, like Panchali’s anguish at her violation; some are motivators to action, like Princess Amba’s vengeance-driven transformation into Prince Shikhandin; some are darkly irrational, like the fierce and murderous fixation on Bheem that makes Duryodhan endlessly batter an iron statue of his cousin, though years have passed since they have last met. There are also emotions that have no parallel anywhere in Homer or Virgil—most profoundly, Arjuna’s experience of loving awestruck terror upon seeing Krishna’s universal form, just before this book begins.

The preceding two books of this trilogy, The Book of Vows and the The Book of Discoveries, have accumulated the epic’s characters and networked them with lines of emotional force. In this third and culminating volume, the characters and their emotions undergo final, cathartic, violent expression, all at the same time, all at the same place: Kurukshetra. You can imagine why the book had to be titled The Book of Killings. Nothing else fit.

THE WAR ALWAYS WINS

One thing that both the Ramayana and Mahabharata have in common is that neither side ends up better off after a war. Even the “winning” side ends up losing eventually. The Indian epics think of war as a game for three: the two rival sides, and a dealer. The dealer is war, and the house always comes out ahead. 

In the Ramayana, this message is driven home twice. First, in the immediate aftermath of Rama’s triumph over Ravana: A war-warped, out-of-character Rama harangues Sita to the point that she requests a pyre be raised. She steps into the fire in despair and disappointment. The heavens tear open, and Brahma and the other Gods reproach Rama for his harsh, inhuman words. Rama, baffled at this vision and at his own actions, tells them that he has always believed himself to be Rama, son of Dasharatha. Brahma reveals to him his true nature as an avatar of Vishnu and tells him what a horrible thing he has done by repudiating Sita after freeing her.

Rama takes her back, but the epic refuses a pleasant old age for the royal couple. Years later, when she is pregnant with twins, public chatter about Sita leads Rama to send her into the wilderness to deliver. He never takes her back; at the very end of the epic, when his own twin sons sing Valmiki’s version of his story to him onstage, his remorse makes him beg her to come back, but Sita vanishes into a cleft in the earth, the mother Goddess returned to the lap of mother earth. He fought the war to win Sita back, but he loses her—twice—despite killing the kidnapper in battle and taking the city of Lanka. This is an epic poem, not a fairy tale; there is no “happily ever after.”

The Mahabharata, as you will see, has a worldview perfectly in keeping with the earlier Ramayana. The Kaurava line is wiped out to the last of one hundred brothers. The Pandava side, only five strong, survives...but extinction spreads like a plague bacillus even after the war ends, taking their sons. Krishna has to intervene, in a deus ex machina, to prevent the total end, saving an unborn child targeted in the womb. Krishna may be an avatar of Vishnu, but as with Rama, this does not spare him catastrophe: His entire extended family, the Yadavas, ends up dying years later, killing each other in a mass mutual slaughter. What sets them off? A dispute between two drunken, reminiscing war veterans.

It’s as though a grassed-over mass grave were to rupture with a bleached-white skeleton arm, swinging a rusted sword. The Kurukshetra war reaches out from the past and continues killing, as far west as Dwaraka. It’s in these bloody post-war sequences that we realize why Krishna made such an effort to avert the war, whether offering to settle for just five villages, or making his trip to Hastinapur for a final appeal. He knew the war would not be satisfied winning only half the lives wagered. Two losers and one dealer: The game for three is winner-take-all, and the war always wins.    

The Greeks understood this, too. There is one example of an uncomplicated homecoming for the victorious warriors: Menelaus and Helen have cameos in the Odyssey as a comfortable, aging couple. Odysseus himself has years of wandering before he has to slaughter his way into his own home. (Even so, something in him has changed; years later, restless, he abandons Ithaca and his wife Penelope to set out on another adventure.) By contrast, Agamemnon was murdered by his wife as soon as he got home. His murder is the subject of the earliest extant Greek tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. The modern world has come to share antiquity’s suspicion of the unwinnability of wars. France and England, World War One’s “victors,” suffered catastrophically in World War Two. The victors of World War Two, the United States and the Soviet Union, almost immediately entered a decades-long nuclear standoff, often supporting opposite sides in proxy wars.

Neither our era nor antiquity has ever really learned the lesson, though epic poems and history books shout the identical message. This wise old warning is reliably forgotten every generation or so. We cannot get enough of games of chance, especially when the stakes are mortal.

THE IMPERISHABLE PARADOX 

There is a sublime paradox underlying the Mahabharata. As the American transcendentalist Emerson, paraphrasing the Gita 2:19, wrote in his poem “Brahma”:

                   If the red slayer thinks he slays,

                   Or if the slain think he is slain,

                   They know not well the subtle ways

                   I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Before the war starts, Krishna makes the truth clear to Arjuna: Death is unreal, and the body is no more a part of you than “a set of clothes.” These deeper conclusions on the nature of maya, or the illusory nature of the material world, had probably been reached by the time the earlier Ramayana was composed, but the ideas are not integrated into the epic. By the time the Mahabharata is composed, enough time has passed: Upanishadic philosophy has trivialized death, declared the physical body unreal, transient, nonself.

So why weep at all? Why bother experiencing anguish at all, when that anguish is spent on shadows cast by shadows, crackles of static electricity, brief clusters of cells? The Gita is merely Krishna’s direct statement of this, the drill sergeant’s exhortation to the trembling soldier: Fight for the sake of your immortal part; fight because your nerve-laced, blood-filled, bone-in body isn’t you at all.

My favorite scene in the entire epic reiterates this message, but with a different inflection: One of consolation. During the riverside funeral rites after the war, Vyasa appears and wades into the water. Over his submerged body, he turns the water into mist and creates a holographic portrayal of all the dead warriors. They have forgotten all their rivalries and feuds. They harbor no resentments. Vyasa shows both armies, enemies while they lived, hugging and laughing, reconciled in death.

This is the beautiful paradox at the heart of the tradition. Knowing the things of this world through and through means knowing they are nothing. Yet in the moment—on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, in the arena of history—we experience our sufferings and losses, our triumphs and glories as real. We the not-yet-enlightened, reborn endlessly, are not alone in taking the unreal for the real, brawling and bawling with gusto. Even avatars cry—Rama when he misses Sita, Krishna at the death of Arjuna’s son, Abhimanyu. No amount of godly insight into maya can persuade the stubbornly human heart.

 ILLUSORY LIVES

Art is one more layer of maya. The artist shapes maya to portray the maya of times past—the age of heroes, Kurukshetra’s inflection point between the Dvapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. Words and images are not the things themselves, but mixed together, they make a story. The story becomes a replica of what happened and stands in for it. The epic poem is a portrayal of illusion, fashioned of illusion, nested in illusion.

About those weeping epic heroes: In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan warrior Aeneas, future founder of Rome, flees the sack of Troy and ends up at Carthage, Rome’s future enemy. Carthage is newly founded; everything is still being built. A temple to Juno, though, is already established—Juno, the same Goddess who has been an enemy of Aeneas, responsible for his wanderings. In that temple, Aeneas sees bas-reliefs portraying a war and the sack of a city: The war he just survived, the city whose sack he just fled.

He lived through the real events, but he breaks down sobbing before the artistic representation of them—in a way he did not while he was living them. It may be that distance was the crucial element. Because he was not living the events, because the Priam he saw in marble was not the Priam he saw in the flesh, he was able to stand outside Troy’s tragedy and cry out of pity for himself and his own.

The original Sanskrit Mahabharata has a frame story. Vyasa, who took part in the events (both as the ancestor of both warring houses, and, at a crucial moment, in this final volume), is said to have composed it. But in the frame story, Vyasa has his pupil, Vaishampayana, recite the poem he has composed. Vyasa does not recite it himself; and in the text we have, Vyasa is always referred to in the third person, just like all the other characters.

The poet needed distance between himself and the character in the epic who bears his name. That was the only way he could access and express the deepest emotions in the story. He had to accept illusion as his tool, medium, and subject. He had to stand outside what he had lived through, as Aeneas did before the bas-reliefs, to experience the emotions in full and let them out. The poem flowed along channels carved by those twin rivers of grief. After the tears came the words.    

ILLUSORY DEATHS

Indian civilization has been around so long, with so much continuity and evolution and free speculation, that every variety of religious expression seems to have sprung up there: asceticism, devotionalism, dry intellectualism, focus on a single deity, focus on several deities, worship using sculptures and incense, worship using fire sacrifices, worship through solitary meditation, text-focused religion, ritual-focused religion.... The list goes on, and the only limits are the space on the page and the space in my memory. Only one form of religion has been conspicuously absent from India: the death cult, in which someone’s death is mythologized, given theological weight, used as a focus for contemplation, ritual, and high art. So for all of India’s native theological diversity, there is no equivalent of Christianity centering the crucifixion, or Shia Islam centering the martyrdom at Kerbala.

This relates, I suspect, to the doctrine of maya, and the general sense that death is only a waystation between successive states of being. The Buddha’s death after a dish of bad pork is incidental to his story; the moment of enlightenment under the Bo tree drew the attention of sculptors for centuries. In India, even Kali, with her necklace of skulls, dances and makes war, sword high, tongue out; in no other civilization has death shown such vigor.

So it is with the Indian epics. Sita sinks into the earth, and Rama wades into a river; Krishna, reclining in a garden, suffers a hunter’s accidental arrow and uses that as an excuse to exit the epic. This resembles Achilles getting shot at his one weak point—an example of crosstalk between the two epic mythologies. No telling where it originated, since the first Greek mention of the “Achilles’s heel” comes in the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, whose 3rd century B.C. epic dates roughly to the same time as the Spitzer Manuscript, the earliest written record of the Mahabharata. (This is the historian’s interpretation; the tradition itself places Vyasa’s poem well before conventionally recorded history.) Whatever the case, there is no grand dramatic death scene for either avatar, nor for the five victorious heroes: The Pandavas, after Krishna’s passing, go on a long walk, falling one by one. The Hindus of India, over their long history, have maintained an instinctive aversion to fetishizing death, granting deep religious significance to rivers, trees, stones, incense, flowers, people, animals—everything but that. 

 THE END OF THE STORY

So here, in this third volume of the trilogy, the end of the story is not the death of the story. A book can be buried or burned, ignored or forgotten. But the story in it can live on independently of the medium, whether that is language, stone, or music. After all, the ancient Greek epics of Homer have outlived the extermination of the ancient Greek religion. The Hindu epics, conjoined to a living religious tradition, have the twofold vigor of active storytelling and active worship. They are, in every sense, ongoing. Much as the same atman, or self, goes from body to body, the story is reborn from language to language, long ago in Sanskrit, today in English.

So this Trilogy, whatever its merits or demerits, has been one more example of the story’s cyclical renewal. The story takes advantage the artist’s directionless urge to make art, caring not at all whether that urge is born of piety, personal ambition, or both. The story commandeers the poet’s voice or the filmmaker’s camera, and it makes that mouth or lens its rebirth canal. Through the animator’s wish to animate, the story fulfils its own wish to be retold. The results may well baffle their maker. Many passages of this volume in particular—which I revisited years after their composition, during the proofreading process—seem alien to me, recognizable in style and tone but unrecognizable as individual paragraphs or sentences. They read like something written by a stranger and gifted to me—but I, ungrateful, had forgotten the gift and the giver. Now I realize the gift was the story, and the giver was the story. Yet it was a gift exchange, even then; what I gave the story in return was my retelling of it.

Already, as I finish this afterword to the third and last volume of my Mahabharata Trilogy, I sense myself longing to give myself this gift again. The epic is infinite, but not just because of its famous (or notorious) length. It offers the storyteller infinite points of entry, infinite perspectives from which to retell it. I can pick a character, even a minor or disregarded one, and tell it memoiristically, in the first person; I can pick a character with a bad reputation and write a version that justifies him, at least to himself; I can start somewhere in the middle, or even at the end, and proceed through flashbacks; I can zero in on one incident or interaction and develop it as a self-contained poem, or novella, or stage play, or screenplay....

And so can you, whether silently in your imagination, or out loud in your own storytelling—bedtime story or uploaded video or full-blown novel. Retelling gives rise to retelling; just as every retelling traces its ancestry back to Vyasa, every retelling has its own descendants, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, destined to populate screens and pages, regale eyes and ears for centuries to come. I would consider it the best possible fate for this work to be remembered, not for its own sake, but for the sake of future storytellers it inspired—our immortal epic finding, through the Book of Killings, new ways to be reborn.  

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Amit Majmudar is Marginalia's George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism, a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. Majmudar’s essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2018, the New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His most recent collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). He is most recently the author of The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024) Later Adventures of Hanuman (India Penguin, 2024), The Book of Vows: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 1 (Penguin India , 2023), and The Book of Discoveries: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 2 (Penguin India , 2024). The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 3 is forthcoming from Penguin India. Learn more at www.amitmajmudar.com. X@AmitMajmudar