For all the religious teaching one finds in the encyclopedic Mahābhārata, the most compelling thing about the great epic is its portrayal of moral complexity. The good guys are not always so good, the bad guys not always so bad; dharma is subtle (sūkṣma). The pleasure in reading the text is thus to be found primarily in its literary capacity to puzzle, confound, and bewilder, rather than in its religious capacity to inspire, challenge, and uplift. Rather unlike the Rāmāyaṇa, this is not a text for preachers. This insight is what seems to drive the arguments of Emily Hudson in her ambitious study of the Mahābhārata.
Hudson's important contribution to the critical reading of the Mahābhārata is her use of classical Sanskrit literary theory, in particular the Locana (a.k.a. The Light on Suggestion) of Abhinavagupta (fl. tenth century) and the Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana (fl. ninth century). Reflecting on these sophisticated treatments of aesthetics in light of contemporary Western literary theory, Hudson employs the notion of “meaning without saying” to capture the literary flavor of the epic. “Meaning without saying” is the strategy of evoking a particular emotion in the sensitive reader, not by didactically preaching to him or her, but by creating a context that captures the flavor of a particular emotion. In the case of the Mahābhārata, the emotion to be evoked is, ultimately, serenity or peace (śānta-rasa), but that is reached only through the path of confronting grief. The reader experiences suffering by savoring this literary flavor, but at the same time has a sort of aesthetic detachment. While we try to avoid suffering in real life, we might cultivate a taste for the literary treatment of suffering and find pleasure in contemplating the literary treatment of this inescapable reality:
[A] work of literature conveys meaning less through what it says and more through what it does, and by “what it does” is meant the responses it evokes from its audiences. Just as Ānanda [vardhana] argued that works of literature convey meaning less through directly “saying” and more through “doing” or suggesting—through initiating a process through which meaning blossoms in the mind of the sensitive audience member…. [t]he Mahābhārata's aesthetics of suffering makes an implicit argument in this regard. It does so in those instances where the text directly states one thing and then down the road contradicts what it has said with no literal, explicit acknowledgement that it is doing so. In these instances meaning is created by the emotional disjuncture between the explicit saying and the implicit contradicting or “doing.” (p. 70)
Here we have the heart of Hudson's argument, and the basis for her illuminating reading of the entire epic from the point of view of its complex treatment of suffering, its theodicy, its refusal to offer simple answers and pious pronouncements (at least as the final word). From this basis, she goes on to do fairly traditional close readings of the text to explore such themes as the nature of dharma, the nature of time and fate, and the question of the fairness of the karmic law. While the scholarship behind these chapters is impeccable, the writing in these later chapters becomes pedantic, and passive constructions—“this section focuses on” and “it hopes to show” (pp. 156–57)—suggest the author is disappearing, and with her loss of voice, the theme of human suffering becomes something bloodless, a school exercise, and not a wrenching encounter with the terrible facts of human existence that the Mahābhārata poets want us to have.
But if not always artful, Disorienting Dharma is a serious work of scholarship. In bringing the dimension of classical Sanskrit aesthetics into conversation with the analysis of the epic text, Hudson has clearly advanced the critical study of the Mahābhārata. This book is not a work for undergraduates or general readers of Indian religion and literature, but for the serious student of Indian epic texts. For specialists, it represents a welcome advance in scholarly understanding.
