Mahabharata – 185
by
Sankar Mukherjee
&
Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya
    Aadivamsavatarana Parva
The hunting episodeThe hunting episode is very educative. Hunting is a recurrent motif in the Puranas and the Mahabharata.King Dasharatha in the Valmiki Ramayana went  ahunting and taking the son of a blind saint for a deer, killed him. It is a usual  sport  for the kings to go ahunting.And Pandu says that it is through hunting that the kings learn to attack and kill the enemies.And surely there is nothing mean in war. You can take your enemy unaware and kill him.This is rather a modern outlook where we exploit Nature unscrupulously to our ends.But this episode seems to protest against this kind of usage.Even in war there should be certain rules.In modern times also during war hospitals should not be bombed, for example.Earlier during the Indo-Pakistan war a hospital at Ambala was bombed.The action of Pakistan was vehemently criticised.During the Kurukshetra war for which the narrative is as it were born the rules of war have been violated over and over again and they will be discussed by the protagonists of the narrative in times to come.The legitimation of the present narrative is that one must not kill any one when he or she is engaged in sexual coitus,The Mahabharata straight away asserts that sexual coitus is something very sacred. One who is engaged in sexual coitus is engaged in a sacred act.Because it leads to procreation.The Bible asks man to multiply.And it is in this light that marriage is very sacred.Everywhere in the Mahabharata marriage takes place so that the family line is continued there by.The women also look forward to begetting a child.A child was born to Kunti and Gandhari was in a haste to beget a child.And children were all in all with their mothers.Shakuntala wanted her child Sarvadamana to be the monarch of all that he surveyed.Now a days women often protest against  being treated as instruments to beget children.With them the pleasures of youth is more important than the the pleasures of becoming mothers.Thus the values change in course of time.However during the days of the Mahabharata an ascetic does not hesitate to plunge into sexual activity.The deer that was killed by Pandu was an ascetic in disguise.The dying declaration of the ascetic asserted that even sages can participate in sexual intercourse.In a flash it legitimatises the affairs of the sages like Viswamitra.But this is not all.Why did not the sage co-habit with a human woman?Instead he took the shape of a deer to enjoy the company of a doe. The sage said that he was too modest for a human woman.In other words the sage condemns culture and posits that nature is superior to culture.The sage became one with the animals wandering in the forests or in the lap of Nature and speaks on behalf of the animals in the nature against the cruelties of man.Do not they have their right to live just as we humans do have? In the Puranas and the epics there are great saints who partake limbs of animals. For example take the case of the sage Risyasringa. He had the horns of a deer.It is claimed that his father the sage Vibhandaka co-habitted with a doe.The doe was the mothe of  Risyasringa.And had not Sree Rama be friended the monkeys that stand for animal energy and strength he could not overcome the evil and the ogre Ravana.So Nature must not be destroy to gratify human greed.

May be,taking the cue from the Mahabharata Kalidasa’s famous drama Abhijnanasakuntalam opens with admonitions to Dushyanta --- Don’t shoot your arrow at the body of this deer.Don’t do it.

Thus body is as important as the soul.And surely killing a body be it the body of an animal or a human is a sacrilege.