The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata. By Nikhil Govind

Abstract

The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata is an important contribution to the study of Indic epics. Since the Mahabharata’s conception, commentaries and performative retellings, vernacular formulations, modern and contemporary dramatizations, cultural histories, philological and religious scholarship, and popular visual media like children’s books, films, and television have explored how and why this epic continues to capture the Indic world’s imagination. Nikhil Govind’s work stands out. He offers a fundamental methodological contribution to a crowded academic table where historians, literary critics, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars of pre-modern South Asia have been seated. Today, if you are ready to pay keen attention to how the Mahabharata imagines itself and its moral ethos, you are welcome to the table. The organisation of this book into four neat, seemingly thematic, chapters—dharma, artha, kama, and moksha—is undone as the main thesis develops. Through a detailed analysis of the affect-laden and rarely discussed narrative intricacies of the Mahabharata, Govind argues that neither one of the four themes can be said to over-determine the conceptual schema of the epic. The overarching plot of the Pandava–Kaurava war throws open many ethical questions: What does dharma mean in the face of great violence? Does the martial ethic preclude reflections on peace? What is divinity? And does the divine play a necessary role in human life and social organisation, to name a few? Govind suggests that straight-forwardly didactic answers offered by the many human and divine voices of the Mahabharata are best understood as invitations to conduct ‘a detailed enquiry of the value arrived at through varied narrative situations’ (p. 112) because of what he observes to be the ‘unpredictable worldliness of events, the messy twining of emotion and politics’ (p. 15) throughout the epic. Affect moves, carrying these contingent values, and thereby giving the Mahabharata an inter-relational texture. As the first two chapters demonstrate, concerns of moksha do not always trump those of artha and kama, concerns of artha do not always trump those of moksha and dharma, and most importantly, the rhetoric of destiny complicates any superficial reading of dharma as the sole determining force of human action and its moral legitimacy.