The "Good or Bad" series: Ashwatthama

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Ashwatthama should be an easy call. The son of Dronacharya, Ashwatthama develops enmity towards the Pandavas and loyalty to Duryodhana (not unlike Karna) and commits several wrongs that seem to me to be unparalleled in the Mahabharata.

Ashwatthama is considered a partial avatara (amsha) of Shiva..

When Ashwatthama is still a child, Dronacharya is insulted by King Drupada (father of Draupadi) when he goes to ask for a cow to feed milk to his son. It is only after this incident that Kripacharya offers him a position as a teacher to the Pandavas and Kauravas. There perhaps was some anger in Ashwatthama towards Drupada (and hence Draupadi) due to this slight.

Ashwatthama's real enmity towards the Pandavas starts when they kill Dronacharya on the battlefield due to a 'lie' by Yudhishtira. When Drona is told by many that Ashwatthama is dead (not entirely untrue, because an elephant by the same name had died), he refuses to believe anybody but Yudhishtira. Yudhishtira confirms the death of the elephant, but Krishna blows his conch to blot out Yudhisthira's reference to the elephant. Drona, on hearing this, drops his weapons, and sits down in meditation on the battlefield. Seizing the opportunity, the Pandavas (Arjuna?) finish him off. Surely this must have angered Ashwatthama enough to commit all the atrocities he eventually does at the end of the war.

As a side note, it is interesting that there are several warriors in the Mahabharata that are considered unbeatable at one point or another. Bhishma is the first, whom even Parashurama is unable to beat (the Amba story), and he is only taken out when Shikhandhi is used to make him drop his weapons. The second is Arjuna, although his case is slightly weak, given that he is protected against Karna once or twice. Drona is deemed unbeatable in the Mahabharata war (although he is beaten by Arjuna in the Virata parva battle), and hence the Pandavas resort to trickery to take him out. Bhimasena is of course invincible and he routs most of the key bad characters in the entire Mahabharata.

Towards the end of the war, Ashwatthama resorts to killing several warriors in the Pandava camp including the sons of the Draupadi/Pandavas (mistakenly assuming that they were the Pandavas themselves) in stealth at night, not becoming of even a lowly soldier let alone a top warrior in an army.  

Ashwatthama also directs his brahmAstra at the womb of Uttara (daughter of king Virata, wife of Abhimanyu) to finish off the as-yet unborn Parikshit, since he would be the last of the Kuru clan. Krishna uses his chakra to protect the child and mother, but only ends up reviving the child after a still-birth.

Lastly, Duryodhana, in his death bed, requests Ashwatthama to have a child with his wife Banumati, so that that child can be the ruler of Hastinapura. While Ashwatthama does not actually oblige, he neither accepts not refuses to Duryodhana, not a good quality for someone who should immediately know the right Dharma.

On the last item, Vyasa himself sires Pandu and Dhritarashtra (with Ambika and Ambalika) to keep the Kuru clan alive. Is that considered Dharma because he is a rishi and God Himself? Or is it because Vyasa is a son of Satyavati (the fisherman's daughter who is married to Shantanu) and he is obeying his mother's command and acting on behalf of his now-dead younger brother Vichitravirya? In this case, the continuation of the clan is for the good of humanity, perhaps, while not so in the case of Duryodhana? 

To hell with relativism - a look at the Ramayana

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I have come to believe that relativism - moral or cultural - is dangerous. There are several reasons why I believe that.

In case you are not familiar with the terms moral relativism and cultural relativism, here are simple definitions in my own words:

Moral relativism holds that morals (standards) are relative and what one may hold as the right thing to do in a certain land is not necessarily the right thing to do in another. For example, the idea that if it is immoral for most of humanity to kill one another, a cannibalistic society can still do what it pleases.

Cultural relativism is similar. For example, the idea that while I may consider equal rights to men and women as sacred, I would tolerate cultures that do not hold the same standard. 

  

Today's attitudes in the liberal, democratic world are largely culturally relativistic (though may be not morally relativistic). Let's look at the Ramayana in the lens of cultural and moral relativism and see where that might lead us. 

I was talking with a friend about Rama a few years back. The conversation quickly came around to how he thought Rama was an aggressor because of the Ashwamedha Yagna. Contrast Rama's 'aggression' with, for example, Ashoka, who 'renounced' violence and became a peace loving king. This is an argument of a moral relativist. Peace is definitely the ideal to strive for, but for the kshatriya (the ruler, the politician, etc.), the duty is to protect his people. However, the duty of the kshatriya is also to protect people beyond his borders. Afterall, Indian culture talks of the principle of Vasudaiva Kutumbakam, that the entire world and its people is one family. So, while the Ashwamedha Yagna involved the king's (Rama) army going from kingdom to kingdom asking its ruler to accept the leadership of Rama, that ruler was still autonomous. The leadership of Rama meant that Rama Rajya would come to that kingdom as well, and Rama Rajya would not strip the ruler of his individuality, merely ensure that tresspasses from the right path, if any, would be prevented.

Here the relativist can of course ask: "What makes Rama Rajya superior to the other governments?", "Why should Rama be superior to others?", etc. This is a question born out of our experience from today's worldview where no form of government is without significant flaws. So, if the US asks extremist Islamist despots to give up their dictatorship and embrace 'democracy', the decision is not a no-brainer even for the people. Comparison with Rama's Ashwamedha Yagna is therefore not congruent.

With Rama Rajya, there was no doubt. We are talking about the ideal government, with all its people happy with the rule. For what it is worth, MK Gandhi did want to see Rama Rajya in India after independence (which most Indians conveniently ignore when they talk of Gandhism); although the ideal, how Rama Rajya would be achieved would have been up in the air (much like the Islamists' ideal of a 'just' Khilafa). During the Ramayana, people in other kingdoms will not have seen Rama as an aggressor, and only a tyrant or egoistic king would have seen the need to protest the leadership of Rama.

I know I will not have convinced the relativists, but it is important to see Dharma, the good of the people, truth, etc., as objective and non-relativistic concepts. Without that, there is no way to arrive at the correct answer to important questions, for example, Arjuna's question of whether he should fight his own relatives. Ashoka might have advised diplomacy or surrender.

The pursuit of happiness

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(This post is not related to any of the epics directly..)

Why do we do what we do in life? Why do we go to work, have kids, go to the park for a walk, or study hard? While all these activities may have some intermediate benefits, the ultimate goal of all humans is happiness. There is not one thing that we do that is not in some way aimed at making us happier.

Let's of course leave cases such as masochism out of the picture for now, even though they can be explained without much trouble.

Just one Mahabharata reference related to 'happiness'. Kunti prays to Krishna (not sure when in the Mahabharata) to give her constant sorrow, because she believes that only when in sorrow do we tend to think about God. When happy, we may of course praise God, but the tendency is to tie that momentary happiness to our own accomplishment or activity - "I worked hard and got my bonus", for example. Mere mortals like us would, of course, never pray to God to deal us a tough hand. So, was Kunti an idiot?

As I write these lines, I feel like this post is going to be long winding, but I'll try to keep this concise.


Rebirth. To begin with, we must agree that our lives and transit through the material world necessarily involves a cycle of birth and death. That is, our present lives are not the first and last. I have a simple way of explaining why this must be the case. We all have a sense of natural justice, and even if a human grows up without seeing any other human (eliminate bias and influence), that sense of natural justice is going to prevail. For example, this 'lone' human is not going to kill indiscriminately because something might tell him that that is incorrect. Even when we know that some form of natural justice pervades the world we inhabit, we see injustice all around us. I am not talking about 'local' events here, but the 'full lifecycle'. That is to say, some criminals lead perfectly happy and affluent lives, while some honest hardworking people face nothing but misery. There's of course a continuum between these two extremes. So, if justice didn't prevail in this birth for some people, there must be at least one rebirth and a better model yet, a birth-death cycle that would account for all their good and bad activities. How the 'accounting' takes place is a longer discussion of course, with many schools of thought explaining how good/bad and heaven/hell work.    

Rebirth, of course, is a very difficult concept for us to imagine or accept. If I am going to be born again, am I going to have a different father and mother, a different spouse, different children, and am I going not going to be rich? Let me life the life I have now as well as I can, why should I worry about a rebirth or plan for it in any way? Who is going to count my bad deeds and punish me? I can explain why I cheated on my wife, etc. As a result, much of our pursuit of happiness is short-sighted. Most of us never give any thought to much beyond a good living in this life, and in many cases it is instant and other forms of gratification that we crave. However, the moment we acknowledge that some form of natural justice exists (whether or not we accept the existence of a supreme being) we should ideally start thinking beyond our current lives, and how things might work outside of our limits of knowledge.

Now, back to Kunti (and whether she was an idiot).
All the happiness we experience in life, whether momentary (like eating an ice cream) or extended (like romance) are very materialistic or physical in nature. Still, these 'happy' states are not impenetrable. You can eat one extra cone of ice cream and regret it because it numbed you, or hurt yourself while on a beach with your loved one. The human mind, of course, is accustomed to assuming that the current happiness will never go away, and we make that mistake over and over again.

Sure, everyone knows that life has its ups and downs, etc. based on experience, but most of us want to just put up with this (not knowing a way out), while secretly wanting eternal happiness.

Kunti prays to Krishna to give her constant sorrow because while the sorrow may be physical and material, if she can hold Him in her thoughts, that will be happiness and bliss (that is of a non-material kind). She rightly realizes that the only way to sail through both the ups and downs is to hold God in her thoughts. For, no other source can comfort one through sorrow. Even in times when we might consider ourselves happy (when we've received a raise at work, for example) news that a colleague received a larger raise will tell us that we weren't really 'happy' in the true sense of what we want in the 'happy' state. We ideally want happiness that is uninterruptible, and that state cannot be material or physical in any way.

So, no, Kunti was most definitely not an idiot. If God did grant her constant sorrow and sped her material and physical experiences, may be she would not have to go through a multitude of rebirths. When unaware of how many lives we may have lived already, this doesn't seem like a big deal to us, but once we do realize it, the feeling is not unlike doing the same exact thing at work every day for years and years together. Nobody wants that, and an escape is what we would crave. That is exactly what Kunti must have been shooting for - the concentrated experience that will get her through the material world as quickly as possible. And, of course, the non-material world would mean heaven and uninterrupted happiness for the good.