Tagore and the Mahabaratha
Tagore took episode (Udyog Parva, Chapters 142-4) from the Mahabharata although it is of less significance in the epic but with poet’s brush, Karna Kuntir Sambada/“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti” has become a glorious narrative or one scene playlet of all times. This is a grave, dramatic dialogue between a great warrior son abandoned at birth and the uneasy mother who now visits her son with vested interests. There is a vast background of the epic war, and there is also a sense of remoteness, awe and mystery which is peculiar to this meeting of a son with his mother whom he knows only as the mother of his antagonists. Before marriage, Kunti[1] had a son Karna[2], whom, to hide her shame, she abandoned at birth and who was brought up by the charioteer Adhiratha. Karna became in manhood a fierce warrior, the rival of Arjuna and the commander of the Kaurava army. On the eve of the Kurukshetra battle Karna sits by the bank of the holy Ganges to utter his prayers to the setting sun when he meets a mysterious woman who claims to have first acquainted him with the light he worships. This is a suggestive, a vague assertion, but more suggestive are the woman’s voice and the eyes which seem to take him beyond his earliest memory. Kunti waits for a full exposition till the darkness of the night has closed in upon the prying eyes of the day. It is necessary to refer to the part played in this narrative by the silence and darkness of the night which combines with the darkness of a mother’s heart bereft of love for her abandoned child and the battlefield silhouetted at the back in the dark of the night in the Warfield. The dark fear of probable defeat on Arjuna’s side has brought Kunti there and she plays a game of dice with Karna by inviting him to join their camp deserting the Kauravas. An atmosphere of mystery and gloom is appropriately created to this first and last meeting between the mother and the son. On her first appearance the woman impressed Karna as a strange personage with whom he might be distantly connected, but the sense of mystery is heightened when the woman reveals herself as the mother of his rival Arjuna. Chivalrous Karna immediately cries out:
My obeisance, noble lady. Mother of kings, Why here alone?
This is a battlefield,
I the Kaurava’s General. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
While he remains spellbound, Kunti recounts an incident of his boyhood, showing how she nursed a silent affection for him. On recovering from the shock of surprise with which the revelation of the visitor’s identity overwhelmed him, he asks her about the purpose of her visit, and is amazed to learn from her that she is his own mother who has come to take him back to her arms. For a moment Karna, who previously heard a vague rumour that he is an abandoned child, is overpowered with emotion at discovering her in the person of Arjuna’s mother, and before the tremendous significance of this revelation, the struggle for victory and fame and the rage of hatred against Arjuna are suddenly emptied of meaning. Karna says after knowing the truth of his birth:
I hear your words, Lady, as in a dream. See how the night
Cover the earth. The landscape disappears; the river is hushed. To what phantom land
Have you led me, to what forgotten home,
What dawn of being? Your words touch my rapt soul
Like ancient truths. My unformed infancy
Returns again, again. I feel around me
The darkness of the womb. Mother of kings,
Come, loving one: whether this be the truth of dream,
Lay your right hand upon my brow, my chin,
Only a moment. I have heard men say
My mother cast me out. How many times
That mother has come stealing in my dreams
To see her son! And I have wept and called in torment,
‘Lift that veil: show me your face, Mother, birth-giver!’ (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
And again he speaks thus:
Tomorrow starts the
Battle supreme. Why should I hear tonight
In Arjuna’s mother’s voice the loving call
Of my own mother? Why should her lips sound
My name like music? Suddenly my soul
Flies out to the Pandavas, my five brothers…
…Your voice awakes my inner soul. My ears
Are deaf to drum and war- conch. How futile
Now seems the rage of battle, hero’s fame,
Defeat and victory. Take me where you will. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
In a moment emotional weakness and chivalry Karna had uttered earlier:
Kunti. I have a prayer
To beg from you, my son. Do not deny me.
Karna. To beg? From me? Command what you may please– all but my manhood, all but virtuous duty – I’ll lay at your feet. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
He who was celebrated for his charity and was called Data Karna /Karna, The Giver, promised to give Kunti all that is not barred by his manhood and his honour as Kshatriya, the Warrior, and later when the veil which hid his mother has been finally withdrawn, for a weak moment he is ready to suspend all other ties, agrees to follow her. But soon he recovers from this emotional confusion, he gains clarity of vision and realises that his manhood and honour bind him to the mother at the charioteer’s house and his honour as a Kshatriya, will not release him from his loyalty to the chief of the Kaurava hosts. In the darkness of the night the future pre-figures itself, as it were, in a transparent mirror; his heart is full with a baffling restlessness. After he has known Kunti to be his mother and he is being the eldest of the Pandavas, he does not forget the charioteer Adhiratha’s wife Radha. The following is a marvelous piece from narrative:
Kunti. My son, I have not come led by hopes to draw you to my breast;
To your own birthright rather than restore you.
You are a prince, no chariot-driver’s son.
Lay by your past disgrace, and come with me
Where your five brothers wait you.
Karna. Mother, no.
I wish no greater title for my lot
Than charioteer’s son, Radha my mother.
Let Pandavas still Pandavas remain,
Kauravas be Kauravas. I envy none…
…you plucked me out of my life. Should I now disown
The chariot-driver’s wife, my mother grown,
For royal mother? Should I, in search of thrones,
Break my vowed bonds with the Kaurava king?
O foul dishonour!
He ends like a true warrior prince:
On my birth-night you left me on this earth
Nameless, homeless: now with ruthless will
Once more desert me, mother, cast me out
To unachieving lusterless defeat.
Only leave me this blessing: may I never
Once transgress from the hero’s virtuous course
Through lust for fame or rule or victory. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)[3]
Rarely has Tagorean poetry or drama shown such unflawed nobility of gestures. Spontaneous as well as chiselled, it is a masterpiece, far superior to the sensuous or symbolical fare for which he is usually remembered. It is important to note here that the songs of Gitanjali/Songs Offering are well-known to the world but this unexposed quintessence descriptions of the heroic qualities of the great warrior Karna that are marvellously described in the above lines surpass even the original author of the great Indian mythology Mahabharata. Through the liquidness and the fluidity of style Tagore’s One-Scene-Playlet “The Meeting of Karna and Kunti” appeals directly to the aesthetic senses of its readers.
[1] Kunti-The mother of the Pandavas in the epic Mahabharata
[2] Karna is Kunti’s first born before her marriage and was abandoned at his birth
[3] Sukanta Choudhary (ed.):The Oxford Tagore Translations: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (New Delhi, OUP, 2004) p.202
Tagore took episode (Udyog Parva, Chapters 142-4) from the Mahabharata although it is of less significance in the epic but with poet’s brush, Karna Kuntir Sambada/“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti” has become a glorious narrative or one scene playlet of all times. This is a grave, dramatic dialogue between a great warrior son abandoned at birth and the uneasy mother who now visits her son with vested interests. There is a vast background of the epic war, and there is also a sense of remoteness, awe and mystery which is peculiar to this meeting of a son with his mother whom he knows only as the mother of his antagonists. Before marriage, Kunti[1] had a son Karna[2], whom, to hide her shame, she abandoned at birth and who was brought up by the charioteer Adhiratha. Karna became in manhood a fierce warrior, the rival of Arjuna and the commander of the Kaurava army. On the eve of the Kurukshetra battle Karna sits by the bank of the holy Ganges to utter his prayers to the setting sun when he meets a mysterious woman who claims to have first acquainted him with the light he worships. This is a suggestive, a vague assertion, but more suggestive are the woman’s voice and the eyes which seem to take him beyond his earliest memory. Kunti waits for a full exposition till the darkness of the night has closed in upon the prying eyes of the day. It is necessary to refer to the part played in this narrative by the silence and darkness of the night which combines with the darkness of a mother’s heart bereft of love for her abandoned child and the battlefield silhouetted at the back in the dark of the night in the Warfield. The dark fear of probable defeat on Arjuna’s side has brought Kunti there and she plays a game of dice with Karna by inviting him to join their camp deserting the Kauravas. An atmosphere of mystery and gloom is appropriately created to this first and last meeting between the mother and the son. On her first appearance the woman impressed Karna as a strange personage with whom he might be distantly connected, but the sense of mystery is heightened when the woman reveals herself as the mother of his rival Arjuna. Chivalrous Karna immediately cries out:
My obeisance, noble lady. Mother of kings, Why here alone?
This is a battlefield,
I the Kaurava’s General. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
While he remains spellbound, Kunti recounts an incident of his boyhood, showing how she nursed a silent affection for him. On recovering from the shock of surprise with which the revelation of the visitor’s identity overwhelmed him, he asks her about the purpose of her visit, and is amazed to learn from her that she is his own mother who has come to take him back to her arms. For a moment Karna, who previously heard a vague rumour that he is an abandoned child, is overpowered with emotion at discovering her in the person of Arjuna’s mother, and before the tremendous significance of this revelation, the struggle for victory and fame and the rage of hatred against Arjuna are suddenly emptied of meaning. Karna says after knowing the truth of his birth:
I hear your words, Lady, as in a dream. See how the night
Cover the earth. The landscape disappears; the river is hushed. To what phantom land
Have you led me, to what forgotten home,
What dawn of being? Your words touch my rapt soul
Like ancient truths. My unformed infancy
Returns again, again. I feel around me
The darkness of the womb. Mother of kings,
Come, loving one: whether this be the truth of dream,
Lay your right hand upon my brow, my chin,
Only a moment. I have heard men say
My mother cast me out. How many times
That mother has come stealing in my dreams
To see her son! And I have wept and called in torment,
‘Lift that veil: show me your face, Mother, birth-giver!’ (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
And again he speaks thus:
Tomorrow starts the
Battle supreme. Why should I hear tonight
In Arjuna’s mother’s voice the loving call
Of my own mother? Why should her lips sound
My name like music? Suddenly my soul
Flies out to the Pandavas, my five brothers…
…Your voice awakes my inner soul. My ears
Are deaf to drum and war- conch. How futile
Now seems the rage of battle, hero’s fame,
Defeat and victory. Take me where you will. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
In a moment emotional weakness and chivalry Karna had uttered earlier:
Kunti. I have a prayer
To beg from you, my son. Do not deny me.
Karna. To beg? From me? Command what you may please– all but my manhood, all but virtuous duty – I’ll lay at your feet. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)
He who was celebrated for his charity and was called Data Karna /Karna, The Giver, promised to give Kunti all that is not barred by his manhood and his honour as Kshatriya, the Warrior, and later when the veil which hid his mother has been finally withdrawn, for a weak moment he is ready to suspend all other ties, agrees to follow her. But soon he recovers from this emotional confusion, he gains clarity of vision and realises that his manhood and honour bind him to the mother at the charioteer’s house and his honour as a Kshatriya, will not release him from his loyalty to the chief of the Kaurava hosts. In the darkness of the night the future pre-figures itself, as it were, in a transparent mirror; his heart is full with a baffling restlessness. After he has known Kunti to be his mother and he is being the eldest of the Pandavas, he does not forget the charioteer Adhiratha’s wife Radha. The following is a marvelous piece from narrative:
Kunti. My son, I have not come led by hopes to draw you to my breast;
To your own birthright rather than restore you.
You are a prince, no chariot-driver’s son.
Lay by your past disgrace, and come with me
Where your five brothers wait you.
Karna. Mother, no.
I wish no greater title for my lot
Than charioteer’s son, Radha my mother.
Let Pandavas still Pandavas remain,
Kauravas be Kauravas. I envy none…
…you plucked me out of my life. Should I now disown
The chariot-driver’s wife, my mother grown,
For royal mother? Should I, in search of thrones,
Break my vowed bonds with the Kaurava king?
O foul dishonour!
He ends like a true warrior prince:
On my birth-night you left me on this earth
Nameless, homeless: now with ruthless will
Once more desert me, mother, cast me out
To unachieving lusterless defeat.
Only leave me this blessing: may I never
Once transgress from the hero’s virtuous course
Through lust for fame or rule or victory. (“The Meeting of Karna and Kunti”)[3]
Rarely has Tagorean poetry or drama shown such unflawed nobility of gestures. Spontaneous as well as chiselled, it is a masterpiece, far superior to the sensuous or symbolical fare for which he is usually remembered. It is important to note here that the songs of Gitanjali/Songs Offering are well-known to the world but this unexposed quintessence descriptions of the heroic qualities of the great warrior Karna that are marvellously described in the above lines surpass even the original author of the great Indian mythology Mahabharata. Through the liquidness and the fluidity of style Tagore’s One-Scene-Playlet “The Meeting of Karna and Kunti” appeals directly to the aesthetic senses of its readers.
[1] Kunti-The mother of the Pandavas in the epic Mahabharata
[2] Karna is Kunti’s first born before her marriage and was abandoned at his birth
[3] Sukanta Choudhary (ed.):The Oxford Tagore Translations: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (New Delhi, OUP, 2004) p.202
