Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata , livre ebook

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607 pages

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A stunningly lyrical work, The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata reinterprets Vyasa's epic from Arjuna's point of view. As Arjuna relives the battle of Kurukshetra, he senses a profound change coming upon himself. He begins to understand the true meaning of surrender and sacrifice.The book comprises three parts, narrated principally by Arjuna. Part I takes us through the childhood and youth of the Pandavas and Kauravas, the game of dice, the Pandavas' exile, and ends with the armies arrayed for battle at Kurukshetra. Part II recounts the battle itself, and the teachings of the Bhagvad Gita. Part III presents a moving and brilliantly original take on the Mahabharata, as Lidchi-Grassi gives a voice to the forgotten victims of every war-the ordinary citizens who must pick themselves up, and resume the business of life. An old order has been swept away, but can the new age-the Kali Yuga-help lessen human strife and misery? Vastly ambitious in scope and epic in scale, The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata is an astonishing read.

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	20 novembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184002096
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2011
Copyright Maggi-Lidchi Grassi 2011
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B,
A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184002096
To Mother India
And to the embodiment of her Spirit,
Sri Aurobindo, who brought me to her:
To Her
Of whom Sri Aurobindo said
The Mother s consciousness and mine are the same ;
And to the Future
They envisaged for India and for mankind which even now is dawning.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
The Beginning

Part I The Battle of Kurukshetra
Part II The Legs of the Tortoise
Part III The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata

Glossary
Acknowledgements
O ne of the nicest things about finishing a book is that you can go back and remember with gratitude (which is one of my favourite emotions) the people who have, in one way or another, sustained you in your endeavour.
The first volume came out in 1986 under the title, The Battle of Kurukshetra . There were times when the challenge of sorting out in this twelve-volume epic what I wanted to keep and what could be regarded as irrelevant to the story-as I wanted to tell it-seemed overwhelming. Mary Prem Boseman herself probably doesn t realize how much I was upheld by our talks and her keen judgement, which helped me over a couple of hurdles. Thank you, my dear friend.
Rosie Coyne and Nayana need to be remembered with love and gratitude for their enthusiastic efforts, which removed the drudgery from this precomputer production as well as P. Raja whose enthusiasm inspired me, and also my student Shashwati, who helped with the glossary. Brajkishore, my Sanskrit teacher, helped me to a deeper appreciation of Vyasa s epic than I would otherwise have had.
By the second volume, The Legs of the Tortoise , inspiration flowed but it was another friend, Jan Maslow, who added to the joy of creation of the book. Her sensitivity to what I was doing was such that it sometimes seemed the story was being written for her. By then there was a computer on which Jan is a wizard. With Arvind Habbu, an ex-student of mine at the Sri Aurobindo Centre of Education, there was the joy of rereading the second volume and discovering that there could still be improvement, with which Arvind gave me valuable help. I hope you can hear me from the other side, Arvind, as I thank you with all my heart.
My Golconde friends, Sue and Suzanne, need to be affectionately acknowledged for their proofreading and Swadhin Panda for his technical assistance.
For the last volume, written several years later, a blessing descended in the form of a new friend, Nitya Menon, whose vibrant interest and chanting of Vedic hymns sustained me as did our stimulating exchanges. Thank you, Nitya.
For his help in this last volume Sundar Dhir needs to be acknowledged for his, as always, impeccable proofreading, and Michael Z. for his editing. I was again granted, after many years, the grace of Barbara s collaboration when she entered several versions of my introduction to this one-volume edition and did the proofreading. It would not have been complete without you, Barbara.
For all three volumes of the book, Priyanka Sarkar, my editor at Random House, came down all the way from Delhi to the Deep South to do the last rounds of the proofs with me. It was a great help and pleasure. Thank you Priyanka.
Dulcis in fundo. To Surakshit, who is much more than a companion and inspiration-there is no way of expressing my gratitude and delight for the constant sharing and day-to-day reliving of the Great Golden Epic that has made its way into our lives. Events and quotations from some of our characters have become household bywords. One of our favourites, most useful when things don t turn out, is Greatfather s Expectations make a fool of us. It is enough to mutter, As Greatfather says...
And, of course, to Island-born Greatfather, Ved Vyasa, who narrated the epic in the first place, our reverential pranams.
And for Sri Aurobindo, who set me on the path, there is only silence, no words will serve.
Preface
Om Namo Bhagavate Naaraayanaaye Om Namo Bhagavate Naaraayanaaye I bow down to you, my Lord; I bow down to you, my Lord.
A welcoming Namaste to the reader of this book whom I am about to introduce to the personal and historical elements that shaped it. A grateful Namaste to my editors at Random House India too, who invited me to do so.
Originally, this work was published in three separate volumes, each with an introduction and preface by a different writer. The problem arising from the decision to publish the work as a single volume was swept aside by the editor s suggestion that I write a personalized introduction talking about texts that have influenced me, sources and philosophies that shaped my way of thinking and the core messages that I think the Mahabharata contains and which I have tried to embody in my work.
At the age of seventeen, after having spent the World War II years in South Africa, I found myself in Paris, the city of my birth. At that time, revelations about the concentration camps were destroying all previouslyheld conceptions of the limits to which human evil could extend. The horror of that time and place was not an abstraction for me: a cousin with whom I used to play as a child had come out of Auschwitz with her identity number tattooed on her arm and a burden of dreams from which she would wake up screaming, night after night.
One day I came upon a French translation of Sri Aurobindo s Essays on the Gita . In a world that had lost its bearings it was the only thing that made sense to me. In the Gita , there is a significant moment just before the battle between the powers of darkness and the powers of light when the destiny of the known world is about to be decided. The mighty warrior Arjuna, upon whom the outcome of the war depends, surveys the enemy s ranks in which stand his kinsmen and guru. The code by which he lives declares it his duty to destroy the enemy. The same code regards the slaying of one s kinsmen or teacher as the greatest of sins. Confronting this dilemma and, foreseeing the destruction that must follow upon either choice, Arjuna is paralysed with horror. What finally releases him is something from another dimension, a vision in which the terrifying ambiguities of morality are somehow resolved. I cannot begin to describe the catharsis this passage produced in me. Suffice it to say that I became convinced that the answers I sought could only come from another plane.
In 1959, having found meaning in life after reading more of Sri Aurobindo, I headed for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of Pondicherry, India. It was at the Ashram that I first read, in twelve thick volumes, the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata , of which the Bhagavad Gita comprises a single chapter.
My relation to the Mahabharata was a vividly lived experience, its events not the happenings of a distant age, but one with the epic events through which we had just lived. Over the years, greatly aided by Sri Aurobindo s Essays on the Gita and other writings, as some quantum of the Mahabharata s spiritual wealth became accessible to me, I knew that I wanted to present it in a way that would make its wisdom and beauty more easily accessible to others. The more I studied the Mahabharata , the more striking were the parallels I discovered between its story of the conflict culminating in the battle of Kurukshetra, and the events culminating in World War II. In both cases there was a tremendous clash between the forces of darkness and the forces of light such as takes place in a time of changing Dharma. It is this clash-between Asura and Deva, to use Vedic terminology-with its result of humanity either taking a step forward or sliding back into barbarism that is the theme of the Mahabharata . It seemed to me that this was also the central lesson learned from World War II.
Sometimes in my vision, the figures and events of the Mahabharata slid in and out of the drama the world had so recently witnessed in the rise and fall of Nazism. The parallels were uncanny.
Powerful and savage Jarasandha sought emperorship over Bharatavarsha, and in order to ensure his success, he was ready to offer Shiva the heads of a hundred captured kings as a sacrifice. At the war s end, Hitler sealed and flooded the Berlin underground-the city s faithful residents offered as a last desperate sacrifice to the dark power he worshipped.
While in exile, the Pandavas were told by a sage that Drona, Ashwatthama, and Greatfather Bheeshma himself would be possessed by demonic powers. Writing to Nirodbaran-his disciple and later secretary-three years before the war, Sri Aurobindo said: Hitler and his chief lieutenants Goering and Goebbels are certainly possessed by Vital Beings. For Sri Aurobindo, Vital Beings were Asuras or forces adverse to the Light.
Dhritarashtra s message to the Pandavas in the face of war was, It is better for the sons of Pandu to be dependents, beggars, and exiles all their lives than to enjoy the earth by the slaughter of their brothers, kinsmen, and spiritual guides: contemplation is purer and nobler than action and worldly desires. Peace in our time was the watchword of Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister whose foreign policy sought infamously to app