Six Mahabharatas in Search of Modernity: My end was in my beginning

Mahabharata after modernity and the cyclical 'sense of possibility' in history

Since this is the last Slow Reads post of 2025, please accept it and the full voiceover as my gift to all readers.

We have come to the end of our introduction to the artful complex story-telling - or is it just history? - of the Mahabharata. What does it tell us about the wheel of time?

The Wheel of the Sun Temple of Konark

Let us first review the fantastic journey through history, myth and ethics this epic gave us.

First, I narrated to you the whole story of this enormous epic poem in 30 minutes.

Mahābhārata: 3000 years of stories in 30 minutes

Then I highlighted the stories of six characters and six historical reinterpretations of the Mahabharata. Like Pirandello’s plays, both the characters and the history writers were in search of the modernity of the Mahabharata.

Mahabharata: Yudhisthira

Mahabharata: Bhagavad Gita and Draupadi

Mahabharata: Indian Statecraft and Arjuna

Six Mahabharatas in Search of Modernity. Kunti the Mother

Six Mahabhratas in Search of Modernity: The Old, Blind King

Six Mahabharatas in Search of Modernity: The Villain

And now in this final episode of the Slow Read program, we will reflect on how this old epic story might be a resource to reimagine how we tell history in our times.

Olga Tokarczuk said in her Nobel Lecture that we all need literature - and I, and I suspect Pani Olga, see history as a form of literature, and literature as a window onto history. We need it because we are suffering an epidemic of cheap, trashy, abusive narratives in spin, fake news, celebrity culture, politics and, of course, AI. “In a word,” Tokarczuk said, “we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.”

That leaves us both a task of invention, as in the modernist tradition, and rediscovery of the past through dialogue with the neglected potent stories of other cultures and times. The stories we find in that eclectic art form known as history.

My hope for this slow read has been to introduce you to, or to deepen your connection with, one of the most potent, rich and, in the West, neglected, stories of the world of literature, the Mahabharata.

As I look at my enormous 10 volume edition sitting on my shelf, I know that I have merely dipped into this tradition. But no one is testing me or testing you. If the slow read has opened one curious eye about this ‘greatest story ever told’, then I am satisfied.

The redemptive power of old stories

The theme of this post was prefigured, long before I conceived or wrote it, in one of my first posts of 2025.

History’s Mild Redemptive Power

Does knowing just a bit of the Mahabharata change how you think about history and modernity? Is there something to be said for the cyclical model of history that the Mahabharata narrates, rather than the linear Pilgrims’ Progress myths of Western culture?

Through Walter Benjamin and Priya Satia’s rereading of the fable of the angel of history, I asked some searching questions. What are the ethical reasons to read history? What drives me and you emotionally to write, tell or share its stories?

How can history offer a ‘mild redemptive power’ to make amends for the sorrows of the present, and to find grounds for hope, or at least to keep going on, into the future? Asking those questions proved to be a way to search for modernity through the Mahabharata.

But why choose history over scientific disciplines or poetic inspiration or pragmatic politics to redeem the world? History was an old form of ‘inquiry’, in Thucydides’ Greek; or a fabulous myth about the cycle of life and death as in the Mahabharata. The Indian epic reminds us that history was a branch of literature for millennia.

Jeff Rich, History’s Mild Redemptive Power, January 2025

Priya Satia presented an unusual argument in the Western academy on the power of history to shift your perspective on this changing world. In Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire, she argued in favour of the pluralist and cyclical vision of time and history that can be found by we moderns in the ancient Indian epics.

Satia challenged the concepts of linear time embedded in fables of Western progress and imperial beneficence. The idea of progress allowed imperial actors to justify violence, dispossession, overrule and patronising contempt as vindicated by the judgment of history, evidenced in the progress of humanity. Present wrongs were morally rationalized by the lessons of history, grounded in an expectation of future outcomes. Liberal advocates of empire saw progress in prosperity, development, and national self-realisation. Marxist historians saw progress in the Revolutionary Proletariat and its class consciousness.

But whatever the particular politics of the historian, history was the source for moral fables that allowed leaders, history-writers and citizens to live with their conscience amidst the many atrocities and acts of exploitation by empires. She finds a similar urge to redeem the past in the work of subaltern studies, critical of colonialism, and in the poets and writers of the Partition Generation.

In these poets and in the South Asian historical traditions of cyclical time, the yugas, as told in the Mahabharata, Satia finds an alternative to history’s service of power, progress or prophecy. She finds a way in which complex stories of the past can reengage us in the plurality of the present, and demand our ethical engagement with this complex world. Among the Urdu progressive poets of that Partition generation, who used a metaphor of “dawn” for freedom, Satia finds redemptive inspiration.

Implying that the time of suffering is like a long night, but, like every night, it must end in dawn. As Faiz wrote: “Lambi hai gham ki shaam magar shaam hi to hai” (Long is the night of sorrow, but it is still just a night). …. We are not going to reach the end of social evolution; time is cyclical. Liberation is not a condition we achieve at the end of linear time, but something we experience in fits and starts in the very pursuit of liberation.

Satia, Time’s Monster, pp. 296-297

Satia concluded Time’s Monster with a stirring evocation of the pluripotential of history as both story and events.

We will need history to understand how we got here - the tension between a historical and antihistorical outlook will be permanent in our souls. We might tell now, more encompassing, perhaps more chaotic stories that will return us to the fullness of time. In their telling, we may make new history, too. That history can have no end; the struggle to renew humanity is an end in itself.

Satia, Time’s Monster, p. 298

Cyclical history, in this understanding, is not the iron chains of being, but rather the fluidity of infinite possibilities. Infinite ways to tell a story, to interpret an event. Infinite perspectives by observers. Infinite uncertainty caused by the chasm of time that is opened by death between the living presence of the past and the present.

I recall a phrase from my university days that justified my aversion to the abstractions and logical rigours of philosophy, a discipline I remain poorly read in. History is philosophy taught by example.

I looked up the source of this saying that I had absorbed perhaps from one of my teachers. It came from a letter from a Tory English politician of no currency today, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). In his posthumously published Letters on the Study and Use of History, he wrote to his forgotten interlocutor:

“Your lordship may very well . . . ask me what then is the true use of history? In what respects it may serve to make us better and wiser? And what method is to be pursued in the study of it, for attaining these great ends? I will answer you by quoting what I have read somewhere or other . . . that history is philosophy teaching by examples”.

Henry St. John

Even the attributed source of the quote was not sure where he got the idea from. Truly, ancient wisdom. It is so, they say.

However, I think our encounter with the Mahabharata and so many ways of telling history this year shows that history is something other than philosophy by examples. It is not a series of case studies of general principles. It is the greatest story ever told that darts and dashes in eccentric, unpredictable fashion, and is filled with a galaxy of characters each of whom resists precepts, general principles and pedantic predictions.

Then again, even stuffy, bewigged and Tory Bolingbroke had some insight into the moral stuff of history. In another letter, he wrote,

That the study of history, far from making us wiser, and more useful citizens, as well as better men, may be of no advantage whatsoever; that it may serve to render us mere antiquaries and scholars, or that it may help to make us forward coxcombs, and prating pedants, I have already allowed. But this is not the fault of history; and to convince us that it is not, we need only contrast the true use of history with the use that is made of it by such men as these. We ought always to keep in mind, that history is philosophy teaching by examples how to conduct ourselves in all the situations of private and public life; that therefore we must apply ourselves to it in a philosophical spirit and manner; that we must rise from particular to general knowledge, and that we must fit ourselves for the society and business of mankind by accustoming our minds to reflect and meditate, on the characters we find described, and the course of events we find related there.

Henry St. John

It is not a bad summary from the old boy.

But let me leave the last word to Bibek Debroy in his introduction to his translation of the full Mahabharata.

In the Mahabharata, because it is nuanced, we never quite know what is good and what is bad, who is good and who is bad. Yes, there are degrees along a continuum. But there are no watertight and neat compartments. . . . Throughout the Mahabharata, we have such conflicts [between objectives of human existence], with no clear normative indications of what is wrong and what is right, because there are indeed no absolute answers. Depending on one’s decisions, one faces the consequences and this brings in the unsolvable riddle of the tension between free will and determinism, the so-called karma concept. The boundaries of philosophy and religion blur.

Bibek Debroy, Mahabharata, p. xxxiii-xxxiv

And so they blur between epic and myth, history and literature, story and life, modernity and tradition and whatever the yuga is that we live in now.

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Thanks for joining me on my slow reads this year. We have read two of the greatest books from my list of 100 books to read before it is too late: some parts of the full Mahabharata, and the whole, fantastic journey through history of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob.

You can check back on the experience at the slow reads page, especially if you joined in the last few months. You can go through the journey yourself, guided by my posts at any time.

And I will be letting you know next week about my approach to slow reads on the Burning Archive next year.

And since this is the last Slow Reads post of 2025, please accept it as my gift to all readers.

And if you would like to enjoy all my slow reads, deep dives, history insights and observations of the world, please join me as either a paid subscriber or an Angel of History. We are going to have a wonderful 2026 in the world’s best history book club.

Thanks for reading the Mahabharata

🙏❤️🌎

Jeff