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The Difficulty of Being
Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma
Both will benefit from Das’ summary and discussion of key sections of the epic. Das devotes one chapter to a major character or a moment in the epic (and a long generous introduction to himself) as wrestling with a major issue in the conflict of dharma which he sees as the central theme of the poem. Each character has a major fault which conflicts with his ability to act according to dharma, is Das’ major discovery. Duryodhana’s envy, Yudhistar’s narrow concern with his own dharma; Karna’s status anxiety, Krishna’s guile (more an accomplishment than a liability one might suppose). Indeed, each of these flaws is a character trait and also each character’s strength: Duryodhana’s ambition and anger drive him, Yudhisthara’s excessive concern for doing his duty is at once his strength and his weakness. He stubbornly sticks with the dog at the very end of the epic (the advent of a Buddhist ideal of compassion, a virtue finally for renunciants rather than warriors). Das touches on all the major and familiar themes of the work, summarising and quoting from the text, then appending a detailed commentary that looks at contemporary issues through the text and back at the dilemmas of the text through familiar events of our time. If this two-way exercise is not always successful, it is certainly engaging and stimulating. Thus, he applies the rivalry between the two clans to the Ambani feud. The lesson: follow dharma or misfortune will swallow you, is too trite to be more than a general admonishment to any fraternal discord. Bhishma’s silence at Draupadi’s undraping he compares to Man Mohan Singh’s non-committal remark when Pratiba Patil, despite allegations of dubious financial doings, was nominated for the post of President. The comparison is farfetched, the cases quite disparate, the analogy forced, but Das’ attempt to use a category as general as that of dharma to specific cases is at one with the kind of model that traditional texts provide to the popular imagination (think of the fisherman’s wife in the Ramayana). If a critique of contemporary events needs categories developed in the third-century BCE, either no serious conceptual progress has been made since then (an unwarranted and unlikely assumption), or those categories themselves are so robust and well grounded that they have universal application, Das wavers between these two positions. Taking Yudhistara’s "I act because I must" as an indigenous version of Kant, he reads the entire development of Western ethics in the poem. Such claims are neither new nor accurate, but they make for a dizzy feeling of thinking deeply about important things. Das’ attempts to bring the discussion up to date by connecting it with debates about justice, war, women’s rights (unraveling Draupadi question), through the writings of classical and contemporary thinkers (from the Nasadia to Nagel), though often forced nevertheless attempts to get to a grip on philosophical issues raised by the text. In such cases it is far better to be interestingly wrong than boringly right. Hence, the book, for all its faults, is to be recommended. The editors, however, should have cut needless repetition. Long end-notes are unnecessary in a book meant for the general reader (quotes in Sanskrit useless both for those who know the language and those who don’t). I found the bibliographical addendum interesting but dispensable. Das has tried to sit on three stools at once mixing his personal search for dharma with a close textual study (in summary from his sources), retold for a newspaper column. He needn’t have done so. The book reduced by about a third could make excellent reading for a very wide audience. Does the book illuminate key themes in the text? It certainly makes a comprehensive review of much recent writings in English. Does it help make sense of the present? Does it make excuses for the misconduct of god? Is the book concerned with the difficulty or the impossibility of being good? Perhaps there are answers to these questions and someone knows them, or perhaps there are no answers and nobody does.
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DESPITE its many flaws, or
perhaps because of them, Gurcharan Das’ new book is a welcome addition
to the growing body of writing about the Mahabharata, boundless
source of both traditional wisdom and its deconstruction. Longer than
the Odyssey and the Iliad together, the Mahabharata
has not found as many translators, though several summarisers, in the
recent or even distant past. Yet, despite translations and studies
running into the hundreds, most people are hazy about Agamemnon or
Odysseus, while the Mahabharata’s stories have percolated into
the soil of this country becoming the diet and display of wise men and
fools.