Rapid-fire comparison of epics

Sai R Vaidyanathan

If you know the Ramayana and the Mahabharata fairly well, this book is for you. After reading the epics, you must have drawn some parallels between the two. Devdutt Pattanaik brings many more similarities to the fore in the book’s 56 chapters.

To a casual reader in the field of itihaasic literature (the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are classified as itihaas i.e. history), however, the connections will appear to be made in a rapid-fire mode. The Ramayana is the simpler of the two as it covers only three generations — of Dashrath, his son Lord Rama and grandsons Luv and Kush. It is easier to relate to due to its annual enactment in the form of Ramlila.

The massive Mahabharata’s core story covers as many as seven generations — of Shantanu, his son Vichitravirya, his grandsons Dhritrashtra and Pandu, of Pandu’s son Arjuna, of Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu, grandson Pareekshit and great grandson Janmejaya.

To add to this, Devdutt brings in the folk versions of the epics, their Jain and Buddhist retellings, the Sanskrit plays and novels based on those.

And that is not all. The well-read author also compares these works with Greek mythology, Biblical tales, Hollywood, North-Indian ballads and even other puranic stories.

All these may be told too fast and are too much for the present generation that is hooked on to social media.

Some of the not-so-popular proper nouns are different from what I have encountered in the epics in my 20 years of study. For example, the name of the son of King Shantanu of Hastinapur is Chitrangada, but Devdutt calls him Chitrasena. The king who adopted Lord Rama’s elder sister Shanta was Romapada. Devdutt identifies him as Lomasha.

According to C Rajagopalachari’s the Mahabharata, Lomasa was a ‘brahmana sage’ who meets the Pandavas during their exile. Dantavaktra of Karush whom Krishna killed has been spelt as Dantavakra, with a ‘t’ missing. And the missile that Meghnad fired to tie up Hanuman at Ashokvatika was a Brahmastra, not a naga-astra, as Devdutt writes. I am sure the author must be having reliable sources for these variations.

Ramayana versus Mahabharata also stops just short of declaring Rama and Krishna as historical, even while the introduction gives the traditional dates ascribed to Rama and Krishna as 7,000 BCE and 5,000 BCE, respectively, and the very first chapter attempts to link the epics to geography and history.