What timeless literature tells us about injustice, war and human nature

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08-06-2025

A work of literature is called great when it remains contemporaneous across time spans and ages. In our civilisation, the Mahabharata is one such epic. One can spend a lifetime poring over the plots and subplots of this epic, examining the complexity of its countless characters, the inter-relationships and crosscurrents among them.
Why is it so? Have our moral values, emotions, and social complexity not changed a bit over the ages? It does seem that when we look closely at the incidents of the Mahabharata that nothing has changed.
Draupadi's cheer-haran (disrobing) in the Grand Assembly of the Kauravas is one such incident. Dhritrashtra's Grand Assembly was graced by fearless, brave warriors without number. Celebrated intellectuals, spiritual greats, and policy analysts – all were present there. In this assembly of greats, Draupadi was dragged in by the hair like some object, like a seized object, and her disrobing began.
Not one man in this Grand Assembly of Aryavrat's most powerful people dared to unseal his lips in the face of this outrage. Courage, bravery, morality – all got muffled up when confronted with the might of the State.
Similar outrages have been recurring in every era over the ages.
But in that Assembly, there was one man who did dare to raise his voice against injustice. Dhritrashtra's eighty-sixth son, Yuyutsu. Yuyutsu not only rebelled against the Kauravas but also fought alongside the Pandavas in the ensuing battle.
The irony and tragedy of being Yuyutsu has been illustrated by Dharmveer Bharati in the play Andha Yug.
After the devastation of war, Yuyutsu, the only Kaurava alive, goes to the palace to meet his parents, only to discover that Dhritrashtra and Gandhari are filled with deep loathing towards him. They snub their rebel son. Dejected, Yuyutsu steps out and his eyes fall on an injured Kaurava soldier. He fetches water for the man, but the soldier recognises him as his aggressor and rejects the water touched by the enemy's hand.
Yuyutsu had set out to befriend the truth, but the truth of war turned out to be something else altogether. In the end, Yuyutsu found neither the truth he was seeking nor the love of his parents. Finally, he took his own life.
The absurdity Yuyutsu faces is the irony faced by every person down the ages who has stood up for truth and justice before State power.
To be rejected by one's own becomes his destiny.
The Pandavas wanted to give the Kauravas a fitting reply in the very language the Kauravas deployed. Till the last moment, Krishna made every effort to avert the war. In the end, the Pandavas fought back using the same language that the Kauravas used. Every kind of deceit and deception was deployed.
At the end of the Mahabharat, the Kauravas were erased but what became of the Pandavas?
The ageing Pandavas survived the war but their next generation was destroyed. Arjun and Subhadra's son, the unarmed Abhimanyu, got trapped in the Chakravyuh he knew how to enter, but not exit, and was killed. Draupadi's five sons were deceitfully murdered while still asleep in the camp. The only remaining trace of the Pandavas was Abhimanyu's unborn baby in his widow Uttara's womb. Ashwatthama, Dronacharya's son, bent on taking revenge for his father's death by deception, aimed the Brahmastra at Uttara's womb. Brahmastra, meaning the nuclear weapon of that age. Krishna somehow neutralised the Brahmastra and cursed Ashwatthama to an eternity of wandering in the wilderness, dragging his countless wounds.
War can always justify itself but Krishna tells that the man who uses weapons of mass destruction is always detested and abhorred, the way Ashwatthama was. Ashwatthama wanders with festering wounds even today, telling the world what punishment for genocide looks like.
In the preface to his timeless novel, Tamas, Bhisham Sahani writes, 'Those who learn nothing from history are cursed to repeat it.' The dialogue that Rahi Masoom Raza wrote for the screenplay of the televised Mahabharata also express this sentiment. The beautiful title song by Pandit Narendra Sharma has this line: 'Let the times gone by teach us, let us welcome a new era.'
But who learns from times gone by? Time flows on, new generations come and repeat the old mistakes. Time and again, the hostile emotions of men push great civilisations towards destruction. This happens in every corner of the world. Not for nothing did Stephen Hawking say, 'We are in the danger of destroying ourselves because of greed and stupidity.'
Many centuries after the Mahabharata, the great Hindi novelist Premchand wrote the story Shatranj ke Khiladi in the 20th century. As a metaphor, chess is equivalent to the dice game chaupad that the Pandavas played and lost.
The situation, the setting, the characters, the plot; are all different in this story but the tragic sense of irony is the same as Mahabharat. Meer and Mirza were addicted to chess the way our modern society is addicted to narratives of war. While worries of the East India Company launching an attack cloud the future of the 19th-century princely state of Awadh, the two men are worried that the Nawab might summon them to the battlefield and they would have to leave their game of chess midway. To escape the royal edict, the two addicts repair to ruins away from the city, so that they may continue their game of chess. Such is their enthusiasm in the two opponents to save their badshah, their chessboard vizier, that they exchange heated words over a move and then pull out their swords. The two ultimately kill each other as Awadh is occupied by the East India Company. The make-believe world of chessboard victories and slights that Meer and Mirza delight in is much like the war cries and victory chants issued from the televisions in our drawing rooms.
Times change, but the ironies of human existence do not.