Mahabharata – 155

by

Sankar Mukherjee

and

Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya
                       Aadivamsavatarana Parva

The Ganga Samtanu episode reconsidered

There is a school of historians who claim that the Aryans migrated into India from else where. Who were the Aryans? For our purpose it were the people who composed this Mahabharata.The Mahabharata refers to the Vedas over & over again as the scriptures par excellence that should guide the society. The Vedas are the extant manuscript of the earliest Indo – European language. The Vedas has their hymns to the rivers e.g.Nadisukta. The Vedas address the rivers of India as their mother. This clearly shows that the authors of the Vedas did not know that they had migrated from else where.Their home was India. It goes without saying that the Vedic rishis knew less about their time than what our modern western scholars such as Max Muller & the like know about their time or the Vedic time. However India is a land which is embedded with the rivers of goddesses. In other words a river is a river & yet it is a goddess. And no wonder Santanu was married to the most revered of the goddesses of the rivers. And rivers are ever in flux. When a river becomes your wife her conduct is unpredictable. So one should not look askance at Ganga, when, she killed her babies one after another. The sight of this might remind a French reader of the aesthetics of cruelty as propounded by Antonin Artaud.Even in India today we have seen mothers killing their children out of greed.Think of Peter Mukherjea & his wife Indrani. But what seems heartless & uncouth with mortals like us might be looked upon differently from heavenly stand point.To explain this the fortune of the Vasus who were divinities themselves have been cited in the Mahabharata.The Vasus  are gods & they were destined to be born as men. But human life hateful to them. Does it not prove that human life is full of sorrows in relation to the life in heaven? But at the same  time the Mahabharata speaks of activities of god that are offence not only in the eyes of men but also in the eyes of heaven. Besides the speaks of human sages who are highly revered by the gods themselves. The divinities called the Vasus behave like men when they went to steal the cow of sage Vasishtha. The cow of sage Vasishtha is e recurrent motif in the Puranas & the epics.The great sage Viswamitra also wanted to rob Vasishtha of his cow. Viswamitra apprently failed in his venture. But the consequences for him was not deplorable.The failed Viswamitra continued in his struggle through penance. And in the long run he discovered the Gayatri mantra.The chanting of the Gayatri mantra is a must for every Brahmin including Vasishtha.Needless to say Viswamitra who was born a kshatriya had a phase shift.He was acknowledged as brahmin.The story of Vasus & Vasishtha reminds us of the story of Viswamitra & Vasishtha.