Foreword

Frank Stewart

Manoa, Volume 22, Number 1, 2010, pp. vii-ix (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by University Of Chicago Libraries at 11/04/10 11:33AM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/man/summary/v022/22.1.stewart.html

Foreword

F R A N K S T E W A R T

Written in 1953, Dharamvir Bharati’s play Andha Yug is a response to whattranslator Alok Bhalla calls “the genocidal days” of the 1947 Partition ofIndia and Pakistan. Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated, and humanshad unleashed—not for the first or last time—a level of evil (adharma) andatrocity (atyachar) that, as Bhalla puts it, “we may not go [beyond] withoutinviting the wrath of the sacred.”

The play reimagines a crucial event from the Mahabharata, the classicepic of India. The setting is the palace of the defeated Kaurava clan on thelast day of the Great War. A handful of Kaurava survivors huddle in griefand rage, blaming their adversaries, fate, deceit, divine capriciousness— anyone or anything except their own moral choices—for the destruction oftheir families and their kingdom. Beyond the walls, the once-beautiful cityof Hastina pur is burning and the battlefields are covered with millions ofdead warriors.

Even if viewed as no more than the retelling of a tragic battle scene froman ancient “myth,” Andha Yug makes for riveting drama and poetry. Wemay derive more meaning by viewing the play as parabolic commentary onthe hair-trigger tensions that have existed among nations, religions, andcultures in South Asia since 1947. But Andha Yug probes deeper yet—intothe human heart and the human condition—and the play’s moral complex-ities reach across time and place. For contemporary readers, Andha Yugmay be a mirror of the twenty-first century, with our urgent and perplexingproblems for survival. We see in the play a world sliding irrevocably towardself-destruction—violent, despairing, ethically confused, and lacking thewisdom to solve the crises that threaten to destroy all living things. Giventhe frailty of our imperfect human nature, how are we to lead moral, com-passionate lives in the perilous conditions we’ve created?

Andha Yug and the Mahabharata question the nurturing and orderlybasis of ethical relationships, which they refer to with the capacious termdharma. In Andha Yug, Alok Bhalla translates dharma as “honor,” “law,”“ethics,” “truth,” “righteousness,” et cetera, as is appropriate. The powerfulwisdom of the Mahabharata and Andha Yug rests partly on the recognitionthat dharma has many elusive meanings, and therefore requires us to look

vii

with considerable effort for its significance and application. The philosopherChaturvedi Badrinath writes:

What is dharma? What are those foundations upon which all human relation-ships everywhere are based? Who determines what those foundations shall be?Are they given as inherent in human life itself? Are they subject to the varyingconditions and circumstances of a person’s life, so that there is one dharma fornormal conditions, and another in times of distress, for example? Is there onedharma for the scholar devoted to learning and teaching; another dharma forthe householder; a different dharma for the king; and a separate dharma for onewho would maintain services? Is dharma a self-determining reality that givesdirection to a person’s life, and is to be discovered in a process of self-discoveryas to what one is meant to be ?1

Nowhere in the Mahabharata or in Andha Yug is the moral complexity ofour relations to others—and the difficulty of knowing ourselves—simpli-fied. Indeed, these works clearly demonstrate the difficulty of unravelingdharma’s many enigmas: whether the nature of goodness, tolerance, andjustice are knowable—and whether such categories even exist. The godsthemselves can mislead us. Nevertheless, the moral philosophy in these lit-erary works will not allow us to surrender to relativism, divine authority, ornihilism. Like the Mahabharata, Andha Yug charges us to persevere in seek-ing the true nature of goodness—particularly in our own time of unfath-omable atrocities—by warning us of the consequences of succumbing to thecruelty and cynicism of a blind, dispirited age.

As the play begins, trumpets sound and the curtains rise. We see twoguards walking among the ruins created by armed ambition, vengeance, andunrestrained cruelty. The defeated King Dhritarashtra weeps with remorse,blaming his physical blindness for his moral blindness. His wife, Gandhari,writhes with bitterness and cynicism and blames others for what has hap-pened. The surviving Kaurava warriors justify their actions as adherence toancient warrior codes of vengeance and as loyalty to family connections—conduct that for them takes precedence over the well-being of humanity as awhole. We’re reminded of the self-justifying slogan of Hitler’s SS, “Myhonor is my loyalty,” and the Third Reich’s seductive appeal to its benightedheroes of darkness: “We realize that what we are expecting from you is‘superhuman,’ to be ‘superhumanly inhuman.’”2

Countering this horrific, disordered logic is the kind of reasoning thattries to keep faith in humanity’s capacity—though finite and imperfect—toknow the Good and to refrain from cruelty. In times of atrocity, however,when all sides have committed wrongs, the way forward is difficult even forthe wise. “The axle is broken,” the sage Vidura says in Andha Yug, “and thewheel spins / without a center.” How is it possible to act decisively—to kill,to sacrifice oneself if necessary—without also weakening the ground thatsupports compassion, truthfulness, forgiveness, and nonviolence?

viii Stewart

Written in Hindi, Bharati’s play relies on the audience’s familiarity withthe characters and events in the Mahabharata. Some Western readers mayfeel daunted by the references to the great Indian epic; however, the lack ofdetailed background knowledge need not be a hindrance to experiencingthe play’s immediacy and nuances. When reading Homer or the Atheniantragedies of the fifth century b.c.e., readers may similarly wish they had abetter grasp of the ancient Greek worldview, the puzzling behavior of theOlympian deities, and the social customs and laws of Achaean warrior cul-ture. Yet with some effort (and a skillful translation), the moral concernsin those stories, as in Andha Yug, are recognizable as the inheritance ofevery human being: rage, suffering, fate, agency, love, death, and hope.

Readers with little knowledge of the events from the Mahabharata ref-erenced in the play may want to start by reading the brief summary at theback of this edition of Andha Yug.

The images on the cover and throughout this edition of Andha Yug werecreated to illustrate a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, commissionedby the Mughal emperor Akbar, ruler of the northern part of South Asiafrom 1556 to 1605. The history of Akbar’s interest in rendering the Hindusacred text into a language readable by the empire’s Muslim elites is summa-rized here in an essay by professor Yael Rice, assistant curator of Indian andHimalayan art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These elaborately illus-trated pages are as much an example of Hindu and Muslim cooperation asthe Mahabharata translation itself, titled in Persian the Razmnama (literally,“The Book of War”). Although Akbar may have had many political reasonsfor making the sacred texts of Hinduism available to his Muslim subjects, hesurely hoped that greater understanding between communities long at oddswith one another was possible, and might contribute to the lessening of vio-lence and intolerance—an issue central to Andha Yug.

We wish to thank Professor Rice and the Free Library of Philadelphia,where the paintings reproduced here are housed among the treasures of theJohn Frederick Lewis Collection.

notes

1. The Mahabharata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition (Hyderabad: OrientLongman, 2006), 4.

2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(New York: Penguin, 2006), 105.

Foreword ix

22-1 andha yug 4_Andha Yug 4/9/10 11:22 AM Page ix