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Summer School
SUMMER SCHOOL
ON
THE CONCEPTUAL UNIVERSE OF THE MAHABHARATA
(12 – 26 June 2011)
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The Mahabharata is a veritable treasure of almost everything one can imagine about human life and the world which envelops it, which the epic itself has rather boastfully claimed as what is here can be found elsewhere while what is not here may not even exist. For an epic of hundred thousand stanzas, with innumerable layers of narratives, no wonder, accretions humbly acquire their own mantle and the search for an originary tale becomes futile. While narrative sophistry of the Mahabharata has been greatly appreciated and has been zealously analysed, a much challenging exercise of exploring its vast conceptual universe still awaits us, which has not gone beyond a few attempts at studying discrete ideas and concepts.
Concepts, as we have come to know, are tools for organizing the world around us and our perspectives, experiences and actions. Philosophical debate on relations between concepts, words, meanings and the world has been highly contentious and muddled. While one may wish to circumvent these issues in an exploration into epic concepts, they do, however, remain central to inquiry. To put it plainly, to the extent concepts are products of abstraction, which can as well be pre-linguistic, they impinge upon the way one acts and understands the world. For those who see concepts as inevitably tied to certain words, changes in their meanings in a given context and through time become important. Possessing a concept, thus, becomes inalienable from having some linguistic referent and knowing its meaning, even though, this may not assure us of its correct or desired uses. For some a concept may be in use for a sufficiently long period of time without having a word for it, while such a concept may guide human action. One is forced to think if many a time our actions and practices not only help a concept to be formed but also to be changed and erased from our consciousness. One may also query if a concept is not produced in the act of describing an event or action without necessarily having a specific word for it!
The Summer School on the Mahabharata aims to open up the epic’s conceptual universe by raising a variety of questions in this light. Does possessing concepts determine the way one individually or collectively acts; how far concepts become routes to theories of actions and morals; what does knowledge of certain concepts mean when motivations for human action lead to opposing directions; to what extent is a look into the conceptual universe of the epic anachronistic; do we impose a progressivist account onto the epic concepts and rather carelessly treat them as a resource to fix our contemporary malaise? And lastly, one may ask, if epic concepts form some sort of intellectual heritage, distant and yet familiar?
Needless to emphasize, the conceptual universe of the Mahabharata is one of the most challenging arenas to engage with above questions from a variety of inter-disciplinary perspectives. The epic is replete with instances where words designating certain concepts sound hollow in the realm of action, where certain concepts appear inexhaustible as far as their exegesis is concerned, and where certain concepts are registered in the narrative maze only.
The Mahabharata is the prime example the way narratives, concepts and actions are woven in an epic milieu. One rarely fails to notice that it is not a formulaic epic of ideas, as its concepts need independent narrative trails in each context, and each narrative lays bare a conceptual formation of its own. While, on the one hand, concepts in the Mahabharata appear as fickle, subtle, and resolute as human character and situations tend to be, on the other, one may contemplate on its characters, events and dialogues as embodiments of certain concepts.
One of the challenges of the Mahabharata’s conceptual universe is the constant gap between the meaning a concept exudes and its actualisation, which is not to be seen as the futility of a particular idea but an indication to ground it again and again in the uniqueness of human condition. One is also tempted to look into this conceptual universe from the perspective of the universal or a priori status of concepts through which individuals and cultures clothe in their world-views.
Our understanding of the Mahabharata has been filtered through different conceptual lenses, if one randomly thinks of Madhva and Nilakantha’s commentaries of the mediaeval period informed respectively by dvaita and advaita Vedanta; Anandavardhana’s recourse to the epic in his ingenious reformulation of the rasa poetics; numerous literary, folk, visual and performative renditions of the epic through millennia; and, of a variety of modern scholarly attempts to make sense of it.
The three key areas from which concepts will be explored in the Summer School will be the moral, the political and the aesthetic. The broad focus will be on particular or a cluster of words such as atman, artha, kama, daiva ,mrityu, prasna, soka, anukrosa, ahimsa, anrisamsya, svartha, niti, dharma, purusartha, sadacara, kala, moksa, and dama; on certain concepts relating to life-cycles, social and moral order, violence, compassion, revenge, desire, fate, human endeavour, virtue, discipline, time, cosmos, nature, transcendence, and release; and, on the key motifs and narrative episodes in the epic. Concept formation and narrative structure are intertwined through which the Mahabharata projects its social world. Its conceptual frame may appear well congealed at the surface but in the deeper structures of narrative all concepts remain tentative perspectives on the world from which they are born and to which they are tied.
We may end up with different answers as to where do we stand in opening up a discussion on the conceptual universe of the Mahabharata. For some of us it would be an act of self-understanding, touching those obscure horizons of epic tradition which hang above us; for some it could be sheer wonder to exercise our analytical skills to know the way an epic erects its conceptual edifice; and, for some it might be a scholastic journey through a range of epic concepts made and remade through myriad interpretive routes.
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