Mythic Landscapes and Argumentative Trails in Sanskrit Epic Literature (Dubrovnik International Conference on The Sanskrit Epics and Puranas)

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The sixth volume of the DICSEP publications contains eleven papers. Seven of them are concerned with the Mahabharata, three with the Puranas, and one with both.

Mahabharata

Yaroslav Vassilkov discusses the question whether the Mahabharata has ever been a "secular" epic like the Iliad. He refers to the research of Alf Hiltebeitel on the Draupadi cult performances in Tamil Nadu and that of William Sax on the Pandav lila in Uttarakhand as representing vernacular versions of the oral epic tradition of the Mahabharata stories. He questions the Western approach since William Jones and Charles Wilkins up to J.A.B. van Buitenen, which saw the change in the great epic from baronial-bardic (ksatriya) poetry to poetry transmitted by priests (brahmans) with mythological and religious overtones. Vassilkov proposes a different scheme in the sense proposed by Pavel Grintser and the Russian school of comparative epic studies, which takes into consideration many living oral epic traditions, especially from Siberia and Central Asia, and distinguishes between "archaic" epics, imbued with mythology, where heroes are demigods, and "classical" epics, like the Iliad, where heroes are prominent, but mortal men. In such a scheme the mythic and religious stage precedes the classical heroic stage of epic poetry. The author cites some passages from the Greek epic tradition documenting the cases of the perception of a hero as a demigod (hemitheos), and from the Indian tradition showing a hero as a son of a god (devaputra). He adduces the passages from the Rksamhita (4,42) where the king Trasadasyu is called ardhadeva (demi-god), a term not found in the epic. He claims: "In the early Indian culture it was the pattern of the Indra-Vrtra (devasurasamgrama) myth, which was repeatedly actualized in mythic narratives, various rituals, the structure and dynamics of social organization and among other things, in the structure of epic stories." Another link with the Vedic worldview is the understanding of the battle as sacrifice in the Mahabharata (ranayajna), which D. Feller has elaborated in a research paper. Vassilkov also argues, following A. Couture, that the verb ava-tr "to descend, to become incarnated", which is used five times in the Mahabharata in the sense "to appear somewhere (as on a stage)" for the Pandavas and Krsna exclusively, implies their celestial origin in the epic, and their appearance in the story, like in a divine (mystery) play (lila), although he admits that it is used mostly in the late books. In the anthropological and ethnological interpretative approach which he adopts, Vassilkov cites examples of heroes who are supernatural beings from the living vernacular Southern and North-Eastern Indian traditions (e.g. incarnations of Virabhadra or of Krsna). He concludes that the comparative study of Indian and Greek epics, considered against the background of the Indian living epic traditions which are predominantly archaic, can help us trace the transition from archaic to classical, and from "divine" to "secular" heroic poetry. This interesting approach is certainly stimulating and thought-provoking, and should be further checked against the evidence of philology and cultural history.

Johannes Bronkhorst reviews in his paper some cases in which the imminent battle between the .Dhartarastras and the Pandavas is compared with sacrifice. In that respect, this paper elaborates one topic mentioned already in Vassilkov's paper. In book V of the Mahabharata (5,57.10-18), Duryodhana announces to his father that he has "laid out the sacrifice of war (ranayajna) ... with Yudhisthira as victim (pasu)". In the same book further on (5,139.29-51) Karna describes the imminent battle to Krsna as a sacrifice in which Duryodhana will be in the same way the sacrificer, but Krsna will be the adhvaryu, Arjuna will be the hotar, Bhima will be the udgatar and prastotar, etc., and therefore the final victim will be Duryodhana himself, and all his warriors will be killed. Bronkhorst concludes that the Mahabharata recognizes two kinds of sacrifice: one, in which the sacrificer sacrifices himself or a substitute for himself, and the other, in which he sacrifices his enemy or a substitute for his enemy. The epic examples of self-sacrifice of the sacrificer are the cases of Amba and of Asvatthaman. The examples of the snake sacrifice of Janamejaya and the story of the intended sacrifice of defeated kings by Jarasamdha to honour Siva Pasupati, would be the cases of sacrificing the enemy. Bronkhorst mentions some scholars who recognized the first type of Vedic sacrifices (H. Hubert, M. Mauss), but estimates that the other type remained ignored, and that in that respect the Vedologists should learn from the Mahabharata what they failed to understand in Vedic rituals. The possible difficulty is that at least the first three Vedas themselves seem to offer the interpretation of the first kind of sacrifices, but not of the other. The paper is a continuation of some previous work of Bronkhorst on ritual topics. It illustrates its theses on very interesting passages showing that sacrificial speculations, analogies and metaphors in such passages in the epic betray the composers who knew the Vedic sacrificial ritual in much greater detail than the epic narrators who did not pay much attention to the rituals of the installation of a king or the horse sacrifice they included in the story.

**Contents and Sample Pages**