Roberto Calasso - Ka

There is no story so complicated as the Mahābhārata . And not just because of its length: three times as long as the Bible, seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. But why did Vyāsa choose this of all ways to tell the tale of a war fought between cousins in a plain of northwest India? Why is the frame in which the narrative is set so complicated that it alone would be enough to generate a sense of vertigo? Was it an artifice to allude to the infinite complication of existence? That would be banal — and wouldn’t have required such an enormous effort. Even a tenth of the stories would be enough to generate the same impression. And the rest? Whatever happens in the Island of the Jambū, there’s always a residue, an excess, something that overflows, goes beyond. Never the sharp profile, carved in the air, but long friezes, strips of stone bursting with action. They could have gone on forever. They are crests on the waves of a “migration,” saṃsāra . The war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas is a “knot” (and the books that make up the Mahābhārata are called parvans , “knots”), just one of the innumerable stitches in the weave of everything with everything. Going back in time to what came before it, or forward a little, after it ended, we encounter a net that brushes against us on every side — and immediately we are struck by the conviction that we will never see the edges of that net, because there are no edges. And already this is a less obvious reflection: that end and beginning, terms the mind is ever toying with, don’t, in themselves, exist at all. When the seers speak of the beginning, and push as far back as they can to where the existent and the nonexistent hadn’t as yet been separated, even this point is not a beginning but a consequence. A residue. Something happened before — a whole other world happened before — in order to bring about that lump that drifts like flotsam on the waters. The beginning is a shipwreck. Such was the unspoken premise of the seers. And likewise of the Mahābhārata .

It was as if everybody were suddenly tired of doing things that had meaning. They wanted to sit down, in the grass or around a heap of smoldering logs, and listen to stories. And often the stories described the same rites the listeners were performing. But now those rites had become episodes inside long and bloody adventures, pretexts for skirmishes and treachery. The stories were no longer a breathing space within the ritual sequence, but the rite itself became an event within the stories, in the same way as a duel or a night of passion might be. So where did meaning lie? Did the rite give meaning to the stories? Or was it only the stories that meant something — using the rites as their material? And what if both rite and stories were meaningful — but their meanings opposed to each other? There was a back-and-forth between a clutter of too many meanings that canceled each other out, to the point of paralysis. The rites — it was well known — served to conquer the sky. And the stories? What were they for? After all, the whole tale of the Mahābhārata looked forward, as though to its final consequence, to the sacrifice of the snakes, the sacrifice that Janamejaya, the only surviving heir of the poem’s heroes, had so much desired. That sacrifice was a long act of madness, not so much a ceremony as an attempt to wipe out a race — the snakes — at once more ancient than men and quite likely destined to survive them, since what are men in the end if not the dream of a god as he drifts around on a snake’s coils? So was it that the meaning of the stories could only emerge within a meaningless sacrifice? But wasn’t the meaninglessness of that sacrifice precisely the secret meaning that only someone who had followed the whole story of the Mahābhārata could grasp? And how had it come about that the fullness of ritual meaning ended up by bubbling over into meaninglessness? Whatever the answers, there was something new to come to terms with: gesture was no longer enough on its own. Now it had to be recounted too, along with other gestures — not all of them ritual. Now, as the times grew dark, as everything was turned upside down and inside out, one would have to begin — and end — with the stories of one of the many dynastic quarrels, one of the many wars that had taken place in an area that was really quite small, albeit long frequented by the gods. It was precisely this reckless profusion of random events and adventures that formed the cocoon that allowed the preceding body of knowledge, no longer able to exist alone, to be saved. Thus the Mahābhārata was called the Fifth Veda — and at its outset one reads these proud words: “A brahman who knows the Four Vedas with their branches and likewise the Upaniṣads but who does not know this poem possesses no knowledge whatsoever.”

There came a day, as the times grew dark, when it became evident that the Four Vedas did not exhaust every form of knowledge. The hymns and ritual gestures went on, self-sufficient in their meaning. But, in the space between one ritual act and another, time was penetrated by the act of someone telling a story. Sitting in the ritual enclosure, people listened. For months and months, while the sacrificial horse wandered freely around, the king listened to stories. Then the horse was led back to him so that it could be killed, so that its lifeless body might lie a night with its hooves intertwined between the naked legs of the mahiṣī , the first queen. In the beginning, stories were no more than appendices to knowledge, but gradually the time given over to then grew in the gaps in that knowledge like grass between the bricks of the altar of fire, expanded and multiplied in stories that generated more stories, until they covered the whole construction of knowledge in which they had made their first furtive appearance as no more than an intermezzo. Thus literature began. Literature is what grows in the intervals of the sacrifice. First a grass, then a creeper that slips into the joints between the bricks and breaks them from within.

And there came another day when the bard Ugraśravas took advantage of a break in a twelve-year sacrifice celebrated in the Forest of Naimiṣa to begin the story of the war between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, a story he had heard Vaiśampāyana tell during a break in the sacrifice of the snakes celebrated by King Janamejaya, great-grandson of Arjuna and last descendant of the Pāṇḍavas, in the place later to be known as Taxila. And Vaiśampāyana had heard the story from Vyāsa, who had had an overall vision of the tale and was also involved in it himself, being grandfather to both the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas and likewise their counselor. Thus was the Mahābhārata told.

In the beginning the Āryas celebrated rites that were also hymns of praise that illuminated those rites. Then at a certain point they found themselves celebrating the same rites, but with their attention now concentrated on the intervals between the various phases of the rites, during which long stories of kings and warriors were told, stories in which the very rites that they were now celebrating played a part. The ancient hymns of praise were brought together in the Ṛg Veda, which is the knowledge of “praise,” ṛc . The stories told in the intervals within the rites made up the Mahābhārata , the longest epos the world has ever known. As to how and why they passed from the one form to another, never a word was said. But though dates slither back and forth across a range of hundreds and hundreds of years, one can safely say that the two forms were separated by at least a thousand years. What happened in that time? Why were the hymns established and settled once and for all? Why did the stories of kings and warriors go on multiplying?