Going through a filter blog this morning, I followed a link to this interesting interview on the National Public Radio web site. Caroline Alexander, author of a new book on The Iliad, analyses that great epic for its lessons on war and heroism, and in the course of her book, she has called The Iliad “the greatest war story ever told.”

 

 

I first read The Iliad on a train that had been delayed by 24 hours, and was often simply stuck in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the tracks ahead to be cleared. I’d brought two books along, and my plan had been to alternate between The Iliad and a lighter read. (Ironically now, I forget what that lighter read was.) Tha plan would have worked just fine if the train hadn’t been delayed, and having finished my lighter option, and with roughly 12 hours still to kill, I was left with no choice but to plough through The Iliad.

It’s an old trope that many of these great epics are simply operatic stories of sex and death and battle, masked only by language that is difficult to access. So perhaps I wasn’t surprised by how hooked I got onto The Iliad when I read it in the train. With nothing else to do, I read straight through the Robert Fagles translation without a break. “Gripping” doesn’t begin to describe it.

But I have to disagree with Ms. Alexander; the Mahabharatha is, if not greater, than at least as good a war story as The Iliad. The Mahabharatha has the advantage of what reporters like to call “deep background,” tracing many of the characters back many generations, laying the seeds of the Kurukshetra War not in its own time but in the past — which proves to be the case, more often than not, with real wars.

Both epics raise very similar ideas about the nature of war. Even in the righteous camp, there can be dishonourable conduct: Witness, for instance, Yudhisthira’s lie about Ashwathama or Achilles dragging Hector’s body through the dust. Even among the enemy, there may be honourable men: Karna or Hector. Both think deeply about military strategy; The Iliad had its Trojan Horse, the Mahabharatha had its Chakravyuh. Both emphasise the role of fate in war: Patroclus knows he will die by Hector’s hand, and Bhishma is similarly slain by Sikhandi, who had vowed such an act in a previous birth. Both treat war not as a horrible aberration but as “the way of the world,” as Ms. Alexander says in her interview.

It is in the matter of ethics that the Mahabharatha is particularly rich, and although I haven’t read it yet, I’m curious to know what Gurcharan Das gleans from the epic in his new book, The Difficulty of Being Good. If any Bookends followers have read the Das book already, do let me know what you think.