The Mahabharata and the Reappropriation of the Religious Rhetoric: An Exploration into the Connectivity of Literature and Health (original) (raw)

Abstract The Mahabharata is generally interpreted as a discourse on caste construction and the respective duties. However, I have attempted to examine the Mahabharata to show how it projects the wild as an indispensable entity even for the existence of the urbanity amidst the growing human fascination of cultivation, possession, and empire formation. My argument has grown up after a thorough study of the text in which the characters living in the wild forests come out to be more powerful and more knowledgeable whereas those in the palaces and cities meet a destructive end. While exploring in this problem, the research came to a finding that the cause behind this problem is in cultivation. Cultivation, on the one hand leads to the notion of possession and hence inclusion, exclusion, deprivation, conflicts, and wars. The uncultivated wilderness does not include or exclude any creatures or humans on the basis of caste, class, nationality or sexuality. Nor does it have the exclusive anthropocentric notion of rationalism. In the wild, all creatures live abiding by the law of nature privileging true equality, inclusion, freedom, harmony, and justice contented with their real share. On the other hand, artificial cultivation leads to lack of the basic thing provided by nature. The artificially cultivated food stuffs are far weak in their nourishing and healing capacity compared to the wildly self-grown plants and food supplements. Thus the uncultivated self-existent wild is to be redefined amidst our notion of the wild as something barbarous, uncontrolled, fierce, dangerous and should be established as something really essential. Without the wild, existence of no life is possible. To convey such a message that the wild is truly essential for the sake of human health, for ecological harmony, and thus for the health of the planet, it is necessary that the ancient texts like the Mahabharata in which characters spend their significant life spans in harmony with wild nature should be preserved, translated, reproduced, and disseminated along with which new art genres including films and documentaries about the wild should be juxtaposed in university courses.