Review: Sacred Songs – the Mahabharata’s Many Gitas by Bibek Debroy

Besides his prodigious public service record as an economist, the late Bibek Debroy (25 January 1955 – 1 November 2024) contributed very greatly to reviving the soul of India, which resides in her scriptures.

Debroy translated the unabridged version of Vyasa’s Mahabharata into English, in a series of 10 volumes. He also translated the Bhagavad Gita, the Harivamsa (an abridged Mahabharata also credited to Vyasa), the Vedas, no less, and Valmiki’s Srimad Ramayanam in three volumes.

His services to the Puranas were no less monumental. He translated the Bhagavata Purana in three volumes, the Markandeya Purana in one volume, which contains the Devi Mahatmyaham recited every year during Durga Puja, the Brahma Purana in two volumes, the Vishnu Purana in one volume, the Shiva Purana in three volumes and the Brahmanda Purana in two volumes. Besides Manmatha Nath Dutt (1855-1912), he is the only other person to have translated both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in unabridged form into English.

For his translations, he was conferred with the Sir Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar Memorial Award in July 2023 by the venerable Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, which put the entire Mahabharata together in a critical edition. This edition was prepared with the painstaking efforts of committed scholars over nearly five decades, consulting 1,259 manuscripts. The completed critical edition of the Mahabharata was finally released in 10 weighty volumes on September 22, 1966 by Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, then President of India.

It is this milestone Sanskrit text that Debroy gamely translated into English in the service of modern Indians, many of whom are trapped in the English language as by-products of colonial education. Written simply and accessibly with footnotes, Debroy’s labours of love have found favour with the Indian public for their reverse engineering – using the English language to re-possess these ancient spiritual texts and thereby filling the God-sized hole left in many Indian hearts because of the educational disconnect with their heritage.

Debroy’s last legacy to us is Sacred Songs – the Mahabharata’s Many Gitas, released late last year. A dense, layered book of 684 pages, it has 25 chapters, each devoted to a gita, 24 from the Mahabharata, with the last being the Pandava Gita, which exists outside the Mahabharata. The Bhagavad Gita or Song of God, not included here, is of course THE gita of gitas. But other gitas bejewel the unabridged Mahabharata, a gita being a philosophical or advisory passage that can be sung or chanted. The Sanskrit verses in each such gita are pleasingly printed above Debroy’s English translation and explanation of each compact verse: as the Chandogya Upanishad said with satisfaction about the education of Satyakama Jabali, who did not know who his father was, “Nothing was omitted, yes, nothing was omitted”.

The first gita in this volume is the Shounaka Gita. This is named for an ancient rishi in the Naimisharanya forest (today’s Neemsar in modern Uttar Pradesh). Shounaka advises a depressed Yudhishthira in the Vana Parva or forest section of the Mahabharata. He tries to implant a sense of detachment in Yudhishthira, saying that attachment is the cause of all misery, that Yudhishthira should ideally “Perform karma, but also renounce it”. This anticipates the Bhagavad Gita’s best-known words, ‘karmanyevadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachanaha’. That says, with clinical detachment that, ‘You are entitled to perform actions but not automatically entitled to their results’. This is popularly understood to mean, ‘Keep going anyway because that’s what life is about’.

The Dharma Vyadha Gita is from a beloved Indian story, also from the Vana Parva. It is told by Rishi Markandeya who is a favourite with the Pandavas and Sri Krishna because he is a fantastic story-teller. On one occasion, he tells them how a butcher taught a Brahmin. There was a conceited scholar called Kausika who was eventually schooled by a butcher called Dharma Vyadha. Kausika left his old parents to fend for themselves, whereas Dharma Vyadha lovingly looks after his. He teaches Kausika about the nature of dharma, including emotional responsibility, and sets the scholar right on matters spiritual and corporal. That Dharma Vyadha is a butcher is of no consequence for that too is a genuine profession in society and a butcher is as capable of dharmic righteousness, in this case more so, than the Brahmin. It is delightful to be able to access their actual conversation through Debroy’s lucid text.

The Nahusha Gita occurs as a dialogue between Yudhishthira and Nahusha, an ancestor of the Pandavas, who was expelled from heaven and cursed to take the form of a python by Rishi Agastya. He coils himself around Bhima, and Yudhishthira must set him free by conversing with Nahusha. When Nahusha asks who is a brahmin, Yudhishthira responds that a brahmin “is one in whom truthfulness, charity, forgiveness, good conduct, lack of cruelty and compassion can be seen.” And, “If these traits are seen in a Shudra, he is not a Shudra.” Which, like the grand old Upanishads, posits categorically that ‘caste’ is indicated by character not birth.

This pattern of outright social subversion and valorizing moral character high above the accident of birth comes across repeatedly in these ancient gitas, which amaze and gladden the modern reader. Also, in their various ways, these gitas emphasize the harm done by the Shad Ripu or Six Enemies of the mind found in every human being. They are kama (lust), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (attachment to people and things), matsarya (jealousy), and also alasya (laziness).

These enemies of the mind invariably spoil our lives. So, there is much useful advice for a modern reader to reflect on and imbibe in our stressful, violent times. The point that comes through from these gitas is that things were always stressful, there was always anger, jealousy, injustice and sheer bad luck.

So Debroy’s last and moving legacy is to give us these ancestral voices that gently teach us how to cope with it all, to be read in the privacy of home without needing to bare our souls in expensive therapy or on social media.

Renuka Narayanan is a journalist and author. Her latest book is Learning from Loss.