A summary of the report/thesis of Mahabharata,
the great epic of India

By Samim Ahmed

In this project I have tried to find out the Philosophical aspect of Mahabharata. my methodology was the ‘nirvacana’ --- a semantic theory of Acharyya Yaska. According to him, every word has a functional character even the word may designate a name or a place. There are many inconsistent events, situations and stories in the Mahabharata. My objective was to find out the consistency of this epic.
Chronologically speaking, Mahabharata is the second epic of India. Dharma, artha, kama and moksa are its principal objective of discussion. Great minds like Acharyya Anandabardhana, Rabindranath Tagore etc. have interpreted Mahabharata not as a mere description of human enmity or conflict of theories but as a great persuasion for peace. So the santiparva of Mahabharata holds the essence of this epic. The mode of analysis I would apply to interpret the Mahabharata, is that of Acharyya Yaska’s used in his book Nirukta. According to Yaska, the meaning of a word is extracted from its Dhatu. So the core meaning of any word lies in its Kriya. This kind of semantic understanding is completely from modern semantic theories. Modern theories describe the relation of word with it’s meaning as conventional and arbitrary, whereas thinkers like Acharyya Yaska feels word-meaning relationship as natural. My philosophical investigation of the said epic will follow the way of Yaska’s semantic methodology.
The epic Mahabharata starts with the story of king Janamejaya’s sacrificial rite of snakes, named as sarpasatra. I have interpreted that ‘Janamejaya’ designates the person who leads the people in revolution, thus janamejaya’ is an agitator. the snake represents three defining characteristics i.e., it’s swiftness, tendency to bite and camouflaging. The sacrificial rite of snakes by king Janamejaya signifies destruction of these snake-like people in the hand of revolutionaries. Then there is another significant story we find in that of rsi Vasistha and Arundhati.
Vasistha designates the one who is under the control of it’s own senses. While Arundhati means who can not be conquered by any means. Another meaning of Arundhati is tongue. The unification of these two cont
radictory ideas bring the concept of power or ‘Saktri’ in Sanskrit. For this reason the name of Vasistha and Arundhati’s child is ‘Saktri’ which means nothing but power. Saktri married Adrisyanti or invisibility and thus their union brings the invisible power named as ‘Parasar’.
Parasar is the one who lives upon the fruits of other’s labours and it points at the intelligentsia class.
Matsyagandha is another significant character in the Mahabharata. It is a female who has fishy smell and is despicable in society. ‘Matsya’ means ‘of one’s own’ and to my understanding, it says of private ownership. In the age of Mahabharata, private ownership was not accepted and there existed a primitive form of egalitarian society. The class in which Matsyagandha belonged, made alliance with the intelligentsia to get hold of a status in society and gradually gained reputation. Thus Matsyagandha becomes the fragrant Padmagandha. In the stories of Mahabharata, we find that the character Matsyagandha, mated with muni Parasara in an island at Yamuna, when there was dense fog around, i.e., away from the public eye. Their son has been named as Vyasa and identified as the central character and the author of the Mahabharata. The literal meaning of the Vyasa is the straight line from the centre to the periphery of a circle. So ‘vyasa’ signifies the media that connects the centre to the border and vice versa.
Kauravas are the biological son of king Dhritarasra, while Pandavas are the ksetraja son of king Pandu. The kauravas recognized themselves as the successor of suryavansa and the Pandavas for not being the biological son of Pandu, identified the as the Chandravansi. The sun is illuminated by its own light and the moon is not. The chandravansis can be understood as the spiritualists, who seek enlightenment from knowledge coming from other than their own. Thus the suryavansis could be the materialists who are satisfied with the light of their own (material) world. Here another analogy of the opposition of Capitalism and Socialism seems very relevant. Lord Krsna, the prime strength of Pandavas, was described by Marx as a capitalistic character which is also derived from our analysis.
Thus the meaning of whole Mahabharata is deduced through semantic analysis.

(Contact: shamim.phil@gmail.com [1])