Mahabharata – C Rajagopalachari
Mahabharata – C Rajagopalachari – Book Review
அறிவைக்கொடுத்ததோ துரோணரின் கௌரவம்
அவர் மேல் தொடுத்ததே அர்ஜுனன் கௌரவம்
It was Drona's honour to impart knowledge;
It was Arjuna's honour that struck him.
— Shivaji Ganesan, Kanna Neeyuma, Gouravam
Introduction
After a longer-than-anticipated hiatus — school, examinations, and the relentless arithmetic of academic calendars — I found myself returning not to easy reading, but to one of the most demanding narratives in the world's literary canon. It took me the better part of a month to work through C Rajagopalachari's retelling of the Mahabharata. In hindsight, that pace felt appropriate; some texts are not meant to be rushed.
About the Author
Chakravarti Rajagopalachari — popularly known as Rajaji — was among the most formidable intellects of modern India: a statesman, lawyer, independence activist, and writer of considerable distinction. He served as the last Governor-General of India before the Republic was proclaimed in 1950, and his literary contributions — including this retelling — remain canonical. His prose in this edition is deliberately measured: unadorned enough for the general reader, yet weighted with the quiet authority of someone who understood these stories as living moral documents rather than mere mythology.
The Mahabharata — A Brief Introduction
The Mahabharata is not simply one of the major works of ancient India; it is, by most scholarly assessments, one of the longest and most philosophically dense narrative poems ever composed. At its theological centre sits the Bhagavad Gita — a dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna on the eve of the Kurukshetra war — which has been as influential within Hinduism as the Bible within Christianity or the Quran within Islam. Rajagopalachari's version strips away the elaborate sub-narratives of the original Sanskrit text, rendering the epic in plain English without sacrificing its moral weight. For those encountering it for the first time, it is a more accessible entry point than one might expect.
Book Review
It is difficult to assess the range and quality of human emotions. Those with smiling, evergreen faces may have wormlike griefs gnawing at their existence.
— Chaman Nahal, The Silver Lining
The book opens with the episode of Ganapati as the Scribe and closes with Yudhishthira's Final Trial — a narrative arc that is less a story of victory and defeat than an extended meditation on consequence. The early chapters establish the principal characters with care: Bhishma (born Devavrata), the goddess Ganga, Amba, Devayani, Kunti, Karna, and Drona each receive dedicated space that situates them not as archetypes but as individuals shaped by circumstance. Particularly arresting is the explanation of Ganga's children — the eight Vasus condemned by Sage Vasishtha to be born as mortals — which frames the Mahabharata's tragedies as karmic rather than arbitrary from the very outset.
The central portion of the book traces the Pandavas' journey from their expulsion from the kingdom to the construction of Indraprastha — a city carved from desert — and then their catastrophic losses at the dice table, leading to thirteen years of exile. It is in this section that Rajagopalachari's restraint as an author is most evident. He neither editorialises nor melodramatises; he presents the events and allows the reader to sit with their discomfort.
Epic vs. Modern Cinema
Rajagopalachari himself draws a distinction worth preserving:
Whatever may be the explanation offered by the protagonists of the cinema, evil is presented on the screen in an attractive fashion that grips people's minds and tempts them into the path of wickedness. This is not so in the Puranas.
— C Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata
The popular tendency — reinforced by decades of film and television adaptations — to reduce the Mahabharata to a clean moral binary (virtuous Pandavas versus villainous Kauravas) does the text a disservice. In the epic, a character named Shiva is not necessarily good by that association alone, nor is one born of a malevolent lineage necessarily condemned to wickedness. The text operates in a register of ethical complexity that most modern adaptations flatten. A name like Sakuni, reflexively invoked today as shorthand for cunning villainy, deserves more careful reading. Whether he was wicked or merely loyal — fiercely, perhaps fatally loyal — to a cause he believed in, is a question the text leaves productively open. As Rajagopalachari's own framing implies: the victors write the moral of the story.
A Debating Session — Points of Contention
The following observations are not intended as advocacy for either the Pandavas or the Kauravas. They are, rather, an attempt to read the text without the weight of inherited conclusion.
On Draupadi's Humiliation
In vain Duhsasana toiled to strip off her garments, for as he pulled off each, ever fresh garments were seen to clothe her body...
— C Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata
Whatever the legal standing of Draupadi as a stake in the dice game — and this is itself fiercely contested within the text — the attempt to publicly disrobe her was an act without moral justification by any standard of dharma. The Mahabharata is not naive about this. What is more instructive, perhaps, is the longer consequence: her humiliation paradoxically spared the Pandavas from a more absolute form of servitude. Had she not challenged the assembly — had no miracle intervened — the five brothers, along with their wives and descendants, would have been the permanent property of Duryodhana's court. The dice game's second iteration, and the ensuing exile, though brutal, preserved something of their agency.
Why Did Bhishma Remain Silent?
Bhishma's own explanation — delivered much later, to Yudhishthira — is among the most honest passages in the book. He concedes that eating Duryodhana's salt had, in some moral sense, clouded his judgment; that only after Arjuna's arrows had drained the corrupted blood from his body could he speak with clarity. Whether one reads this as metaphor or as a genuine account of how loyalty to one's patron can dull one's moral faculties, the episode raises a question that is timeless: can obligation become a form of complicity?
On the Rules of Kurukshetra
A horseman could attack only a horseman, not one on foot. Likewise, charioteers, elephant troops and infantrymen could engage themselves in battle only with their opposite numbers.
— C Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata
Both parties entered Kurukshetra under agreed rules of engagement — rules that were violated, with regularity, by both sides. Uttara's charge on an elephant against an infantry opponent, Arjuna's attack on Bhurishravas from behind during a separate duel, Satyaki's killing of the disarmed Bhurishravas while he sat in meditative retreat — these are not minor infractions. They are moments where the text itself seems to be asking: when does strategic necessity become moral bankruptcy? That question has no clean answer, which is perhaps precisely the point.
On Bhishma's Oaths
Bhishma's extraordinary capacity for oath-taking — his celibacy, his renunciation of the throne, his commitment to serve whoever sat on Hastinapura's throne — is presented in the text as heroic. One could read it differently: as a series of choices that accumulated into an inability to act when action was most needed. The root cause, as Rajagopalachari makes clear, was Shantanu's infatuation with Satyavati — an ageing king's desire, accommodated by a son who loved him without adequate scrutiny. Devavrata's sacrifice was magnificent; whether it was wise is another matter.
On Karna
Grandsire, I know I am Kunti's son, and not charioteer-born. But I have eaten Duryodhana's salt and must be true to him.
— C Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata
Karna's refusal to switch allegiances even after learning the truth of his birth is one of the text's most affecting moments. Dharma instructs that a mother precedes all other obligations; and yet the same dharma insists that one does not betray those who stood by you when the world would not. Karna chose the latter. Whether that constitutes a failure of wisdom or a form of tragic nobility depends entirely on which strand of dharma one assigns greater weight — and the Mahabharata, characteristically, declines to adjudicate.
On Yudhishthira's Leadership
O warrior that made Duhsasana flee in fear, are you dead? What then is there for me to fight for?
— C Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata
Yudhishthira's lamentation over Abhimanyu — his nephew, whom he sent into the Chakravyuha formation knowing the young prince lacked the knowledge to exit it — sits uncomfortably alongside his grief. The same families whose sons fell across the eighteen days of Kurukshetra could, with equal justification, have uttered those words. Dhritarashtra's parallel guilt is similarly clear: as a blind king who saw everything except what his own indulgence was enabling, he permitted two rounds of dice, two exiles, and ultimately a war. His laments to Sanjaya during the battle read, at times, as a belated accounting he could not bring himself to make while the choices were still available to him.
On Krishna's Counsel to Lie About Ashwatthama
"If he hears that Aswatthama is dead, Drona will lose all interest in life... Someone must therefore tell Drona that Aswatthama has been slain."
— C Rajagopalachari, Mahabharata
This is perhaps the most philosophically charged moment in Rajagopalachari's retelling. Krishna — presented throughout as both divine counsel and strategic actor — recommends deception to secure a military objective that could not be achieved by force alone. One may read this as the text's acknowledgement that even the most principled war eventually compels compromises that sit uneasily with the principles that justified it. The student who studies hard and the one who cheats may both pass the examination; but they do not occupy the same moral position, even if the result appears identical.
Conclusion
The Mahabharata, as rendered by Rajagopalachari, is not a comfortable book. It does not distribute virtue and vice along predictable lines, nor does it offer the satisfaction of a moral verdict. What it offers instead is something rarer: a sustained invitation to sit with ambiguity — to recognise that loyalty, obligation, love, and dharma can, and regularly do, pull in incompatible directions, and that the consequences of those tensions are borne not only by kings and heroes but by everyone within reach of their decisions. The reader who finishes it having firmly decided that one side was right and the other wrong has, in all likelihood, not been paying sufficient attention.