The Difficulty of Being Good and Mahabharat

Just finished the book, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurucharan Das.I am a big fan of the Author and My Sunday morning starts with his Article in Times of India. When I picked the book from the gallery I was fully aware of the context but could not stop reading till I finish.

It was my grandmother who introduced me to the Mahabharata in my childhood, then I read a book by R.K. Narayaran, and found the story is most enthralling ever I have come across, even Mario Puzo's The Godfather does not hold a chance with it. Now Gurcharan Das has taken on the difficult task of reading the Mahabharata and interpreting its many messages in light of contemporary circumstances.

Classics like the Mahabharata, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid have a timeless appeal. But one should guard against reading too much into their relevance to understand our times. Gurcharan poses a simple question. How do we understand and interpret the word and the concept of ‘dharma’ in our lives? In seeking an answer he turns to the Mahabharata, and reads its versions in Sanskrit and English translations, and the many interpretations.

Gurcharan explores the idea of dharma in all its dimensions, while examining the frailties of human existence—envy, jealousy, greed, revenge, resentment, lust—and the many uplifting qualities of a righteous person, namely courage, valour, loyalty, selflessness, remorse, compassion, forgiveness and altruism.

Each of the major heroes have their failings. Dhritarashtra is blind to his eldest son’s faults. Duryodhana’s monumental envy is the driving force of calamity in the epic. Arjuna despairs over killing his kinsmen. The virtuous Yudhishthira has a weakness for gambling. The flaws of epic heroes show how difficult it is to be good in a world of moral haziness.

This tale of a family in crisis is a metaphor, in Gurcharan’s book, for the economic upheavals that have engulfed the world. Capitalism may be a mode of production but it also shapes the nature of social relations between human beings who buy and sell goods in the market.

There are similar parallels throughout the book. Investment bankers on Wall Street suffered from similar moral infirmities as the heroes in the Mahabharata; they exposed the flaws in the global capitalist system. Duryodhana’s envy and greed that makes him want to annex the Pandavas’ kingdom is in tune with what big fishes do to smaller ones.

In other words, the narrative fleshes out through a tale of sibling rivalry the brutal competition of ‘interests and passions’ that is the characterestic of a ‘free market’.

The best chapter in my view is the one that concerns Draupadi. Gurcharan has read the Bhandarkar Institute’s Critical Edition carefully and tells us that Krishna’s rescue of Draupadi is not in the original But that apart, Draupadi raises the question whether Yudhishthira had the right to stake her in a gamble when he had already staked and lost himself and his brothers. Whose property was she if Yudhishthira was not his own master? It is a question which hangs over the assembled men but few can give the answer. The epic itself resolves the rape scene by mentioning the miracle of many layers of garments. But the burning question of dharma and even of property rights remain.

Yet Gurcharan does not pursue the question of how much of the Mahabharata is a padding upon the original core Jaya and even the Bharata, which then became the Mahabharata. My own unscholarly hunch is that Jaya was a simple tale of the battle which raged over eighteen days in which Pandavas won. It was not clear that they deserved to win. But then as victors they invented the grievances which justified the dirty tricks employed with Krishna’s help. The gambling match and Yudhishthira’s behaviour defy belief unless he and his brothers were drugged as well. It is probably a later interpolation.

What is truly appealing about Gurcharan’s contemporaneous reading of the Mahabharata is his reinforcement of liberal values. The epic’s wisdom empowers the individual and shows us the way forward in dealing with daily challenges. It is not a ‘moral’ text, because the epic is characterised by moral ambiguity. It does not take a categorical position in the classic debate on ‘ends and means’, often interpreting ‘ends’ in a manner that would justify the ‘means’. Despite its moral ambiguity, it shows how one can act righteously in an amoral world.

At one stage, Gurcharan gives the example of the Ambani brothers to illustrate how such quarrels can get lethal. He pits Mukesh as Yudhishthira against Anil as Duryodhana. But surely we do not know yet. We need to wait till the end to see who wins. The winner will be Yudhishthira by definition and the loser will be Duryodhana. It is too early to say who will be which.

Are lessons from the Mahabharata enough to save capitalism? Gurcharan, certainly, thinks that a healthy dose of Dharma may restore trust in the system. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that this epic, like all classics, enriches one’s concept of Man. The Mahabharata is seven times as long as The Iliad and The Odyssey combined but it has not been translated in as many languages. It has had no Fagles.