Yuganta - Irawati Karve

A friend posted on facebook that she was giving off her books. Of the list only this one caught my fancy enough to make me look it up. 'Yuganta' was a treatise on Mahabharata, an epic that had captured my imagination to the hilt in my childhood. So I rode half way across the city to her "small" going away party, realised that it was a too big a gathering of unknowns for me to feel in place, wished her luck and got the book with a warning that I was not to expect much of it. Since then it was stowed away in my shelf and came up at last when I was running out of options.

I had picked up the book idly to flip through the introductory pages of the book. It was interesting enough to make me keep it on the desk as the primary read. Karve had compiled together a bunch of essays on Mahabharata in this book, so the structure of short independent pieces was appealing to my current taste in books. As I read on, I gradually came to like the way the author had approached the entire subject. Karve warns the reader in the very beginning that what follows is her interpretation of the Mahabharata and its characters; an interpretation that she is wholly entitled to and which she does not presume the reader to agree with. Karve then picks up a few of the main characters of the story and scans them in an analytical light, trying to identify their wisdom and follies. In her belief that the Mahabharata (or the original form of it : Jaya) is a recording of actual history, she tries to pry out the most realistic meaning and interpretation of events.

The book starts with a short piece on Gandhari, one of the lost characters of the epic poem. Karve tries to put life into the character and tries to tell her story; her pains and sufferings. Then she goes on to pick out other characters from the story, Kunti, Bhishma, Karna, Draupadi, etc. and tries to tell the story from their point of view. She tries to draw connections and relations between the characters that are rather lost in the grandeur of the current Mahabharata. She also treats various events and themes from the epic in a similar manner. The book ends with a tone of regret of how the 'bhakti' movement had led to the loss of the objectivity and self confidence that was shown in our great civilization at the time of Mahabharata war; the end of which marked the end of an age.

I have mixed feelings about Karve's writing. While I was wholly in awe of her attitude and the way she had treated the epic, I found the writing style too heavily lined with feminist themes. The entire book also had a didactic undertone that puts one off. And then there was the raving about "our grand ancestors" towards the end. I liked the content, I did not like the presentation. But the one thing that Karve left me with was 'Jaya'. I think Devdutt Pattanaik has a book by that name. It definitely goes on my list.