Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation

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The Mahabharata has exerted a profound influence on millions of lives in the subcontinent since its inception. In India, kingdoms and dynasties have come and gone, religious sects have emerged and declined, schools of philosophy have formed and been replaced, and art forms have emerged and later been overshadowed by others. However, the Mahabharata has never ceased to excite its audiences and viewers.
What is the reason for this epic's lasting hold on the Indian imagination? In Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation, renowned linguist and scholar G. N. Devy answers this and many other questions about the Mahabharata as he attempts to shine a light on why it remains one of India's national epics.

Former Professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information Technology, G. N. DEVY writes in English, Marathi, and Gujarati. He is the founder of the Bhasha Research Centre, Baroda, and Adivasi Academy, Tejgadh, and has worked extensively with the Adivasi and nomadic communities in India. He led the People's Linguisitic Survey of India (PLSI), a comprehensive documentation of all living Indian languages in fifty volumes. He has received several awards for his writing as well as for his community work, including the Padma Shri, Prince Claus Award, and the Linguapax Award.
Among his better-known works are After Amnesia, Of Many Heroes, Painted Words, Nomad Called Thief, Vanaprastha (in Marathi), and Adivasi Jaane Chhe (in Gujarati). He has co-edited a series of six volumes on indigenous cultures and knowledge. As an activist, he played a leading role in the movement for the rights of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes and, more recently, has initiated the Dakshinayan Movement of Writers and Artists. The author is based in Dharwad.

I do not recall when I first heard the name Mahabharata and when I started recognizing the stories from the epic as being from it. It happened without my being conscious that the epic had started surrounding the space for the mythic construction of the cosmos for myself. Throughout the years of my growing up, literary works, plays, films, oral narratives, calendars, paintings, and motifs drawn in the public space in my village kept bringing to me various episodes of the Mahabharata story. A lot of the language that was spoken around me and the language that I spoke, without my knowing, reinforced the deep connection between the epic and me. Later, I went to colleges and universities to study literature. There, an unwritten convention about what could be, and what could not be, studied as literature signalled to me that the Mahabharata was not to be, or could not be, part of that study. As a teacher of literature, though I did some experimentation with how and which literature was to be taught, I remained well within the invisible unwritten conventions and biases of 'discipline'. Then, I decided to shift track, to go out and work with members of the Adivasi community. There, I heard live performances of a different Mahabharata. That ignited my desire to revisit the epic. Life, by then, had become crowded for me.