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Vassilkov Ya. The Mahābhārata as a Symbol of the Hindu and Indian Identity

Yaroslav Vassilkov
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0001-5508-5900
E-mail: yavass011@gmail.com

 

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ABSTRACT. The Mahābhārata (Mbh) nowadays figures as a symbol of Hindu confessional and Indian national identity. But in previous stages of development Mbh was an element of other historical types of identity. First the epic served as a sign of tribal identity for the Kurus or a group of tribes in the northern part of Gangā-Yamunā Doab. At the same time Brahmins compiled there the corpus of Late Vedic religious texts. Together with the Vedic tradition, Mbh started to spread across Northern India. Soon it became a part of identity for the inhabitants of Āryāvarta “land of the āryas” which first stood in cultural opposition to the East and North-West, but later spread over all territory between Himalayas, Vindhyas and “two (Western and Eastern) oceans”. At the next stage the epic diffused across the whole subcontinent through the roads of pilgrimage on which the Mbh underwent a transformation due to the influence of a new form of Brahmanic religion, the Hinduism. At that time the epic became a symbol of identity for inhabitants of Bhāratavarṣa — the whole South Asian subcontinent unified by common culture, religion and social organization (system of varṇas and castes). The origin of the name Bhāratavarṣa — “land of Bharata”, legendary ancestor of Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas, the king who “ruled the whole earth” — can be traced back to the epic tradition. For the first time the Mbh seems to be perceived as an element of all-India political identity at the time of centralized Moghul empire when Akbar ordered to make a translation of the epic from Sanskrit into Persian which had to serve for the cause of the Hindu-Muslim cultural and religious synthesis. At present many Indian Muslims, Christians, Buddhists etc. perceive the Mbh as a symbol of their all-Indian national identity; this is demonstrated in the paper on the example of Muslims’ active role in the creation of movie and TV adaptations of the Great Epic.

 

KEYWORDS: Mahābhārata, identity, symbol, Āryāvarta, Bhāratavarṣa, Hindu-Muslim syncretism, Bollywood, TV serials

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2022-1(15)-220-236
УДК 316.7

 

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