#john d smith

[strix-x]

the silliest dudes east of the sword coast

[snarp]

In 1886 a young English writer published a review of the twenty-fifth fascicle of K. M. Ganguli’s monumental translation of the Mahabharata. The tale of the great Bharata war had clearly failed to impress him. In order to convince his readership of the worthlessness of the ‘interminable work’, it was to descriptions of battle that he turned for the most damning supporting evidence. In case his own judgement of the text (the general tenor of which emerges from a list of the adjectives he uses — ‘monstrous … nightmare-like … monotonous … impossible … nebulous’) should fail to persuade, he reproduced a short section of battle narrative:

"And he soon covered the entire welkin with clusters of blood drinking arrows, and as the infinite rays of the powerful sun entering a small vessel are contracted within it for want of space, so the countless shafts of Arjuna could not find room for their expansion … And that hero of inconceivable energy overwhelmed, by means of his celestial weapons, all the great bowmen of the enemy, although they were possessed of great prowess. And Arjuna then shot three and seventy arrows of sharp points at Drona, and ten at Dussaha, and eight at Drona’s son and twelve at Dussasana, and three at Kripa the son of Saradwat. And that slayer of foes pierced Bhishma, the son of Santanu with six arrows and King Duryodhana with a hundred."

The name of the reviewer was Rudyard Kipling.(1) To him it was clear that detailed discussion of such ‘profitless’ stuff was unnecessary: all he had to do was to assure readers of the Civil and Military Gazette that the ‘interesting epic’ consisted of a sequence of passages ‘appealing, exactly as much as this one, to the Western mind’. Such ‘fantastic creations’, he mused, were ‘monstrous, painted in all the crude colours that a barbaric hand can apply; moved by machinery that would be colossal were it not absurd, and placed in all their doings beyond the remotest pale of human sympathy’.

(1) The review appeared in Civil and Military Gazette of 24 August 1886; it is reprinted in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884—88 (London: Papermac, 1987), pp. 175-8. I have silently corrected three typographic errors in the spelling of proper names.

-- from the introduction to John D. Smith's The Mahabharata: An Abridged Translation (p. liv-lv)