MANTRA MUKIM - The Word and the World: Bimal Krishna Matilal on the epics
Bimal Krishna Matilal was a leading Indian
philosopher and commentator of the twentieth century. Matilal does not treat
the epics as the work of “seers” and his assessment largely concerns itself
with the ethical tumult at the heart of these classical narratives. Besides
commenting on specific episodes from the epics, there is an impulse in
Matilal’s essays, as in commentaries from the more distant past, to restate
these epics. Even when not transcribing them in their entirety, Matilal and his
predecessors extensively quote and paraphrase the stories from them. This is to
present evidence for the arguments being made, but this restating also brings
back attention to certain aspects that might have been lost from public
memory.
Indian commentaries on
the classical epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, tend to use a comparable
critical language, one that combines close assessment of the epic with a
creative recasting. The long tradition of commentaries by Sanskrit
authors on the whole or part of the epics began in the eleventh century. These
commentaries were tailored to the interests of the commentator, or the school
of thought to which she belonged. Devabodha’s Jnanadipika, an
eleventh-century commentary on the Mahabharata, is one of the earliest examples
of writings on the epic, along with Abhinavagupta’s
early-eleventh-century Gitartha Samgraha, a commentary on the
Bhagavad Gita that reads this episode of the Mahabharata as
prevailing over the dichotomy of the self and the other.
Before Devabodha’s
commentary, the epics were often treated as textbooks of ethical principles,
as dharmashastras. For scholars such as the eighth-century
Kumarila Bhatta, they were indistinguishable from texts of systematic
philosophy. On the other hand, aesthetes such as Anandavardhana and Kuntaka,
who wrote in the ninth and tenth century respectively, saw in the Mahabharata
the success of literary archetypes. Over time, just reading the epics was not
enough, and commentaries became the medium through which to approach, or
appropriate, them. These commentaries were also the basis of various
philosophical positions, with commentators from Karnataka, such as Vadiraja
Tirtha, using them to endorse devotional movements such as Vaishnavism. Some
Sanskrit scholars and commentators, such as Debi Misra and Chaturbhuja Misra,
were called to Akbar’s court from Bengal to assist with the Persian adaptation
of the Mahabharata, titled Razmnama... read more:
https://caravanmagazine.in/literature/bimal-krishna-matilal-epics
