A king is responsible for the happiness of his subjects. He is responsible for all the hurt he causes them, even without meaning to. We live in times where politicians talk of Dharma but refuse to take responsibility for failures of their own governance. So what is Dharma? It is often translated to mean duty or righteous conduct. But at a fundamental level, Dharma is what distinguishes man from animals; it is what makes man human. All other living creatures subscribe to matysa nyaya, or law of the fishes: might is right. But man is capable of reversing the law. In human society, might need not be right. The weak can have rights too. Even the feeble can thrive. An ideal human society is one based not on power and domination as in nature, but on the very opposite – love and generosity.
They say children inherit the sins of the father. The Mahabharata refers to this concept again and again – how crimes committed in an earlier generation end up affecting a later generation. The epic begins with the story of Janamejaya, angry that his father has been killed by a snake, until he is told that his great-grandparents destroyed an entire forest that was home to thousands of snakes. Even the horrific war at Kurukshetra, like the World Wars, is not merely the fight of cousins, but the outburst of several generations of rage, denial, frustration and envy. That is why these stories look not at one generation but at several. So long is the history and so deep is the wound that everyone assumes they are the victims and no one is prepared to accept the role of the villain. Such is life. There are no heroes or villains, just people who choose to exploit, people who seek retribution, people who cannot forgive and people who shy away from responsibility but yearn for nobility. The original epic was called Jaya , then it was called Vijaya , then Bharata and finally Mahabharata . Jaya was about spiritual victory, Vijaya was about material victory, Bharata was the story of a clan and Mahabharata included also the wisdom of the land called Bharat-varsha. Many modern scholars, writers and playwrights, exhausted and overwhelmed by the maze of stories of the final version of the epic, are convinced that
Image: David Cooper
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