Sri Gangadhar Rath, who taught mainly English in the higher classes (Classes X and XI) at B.B. High School, Dhenkanal, in the nineteen fifties, sometimes taught history. During those days, if the regular teacher of a subject was unavailable on a certain day, another teacher engaged the class. Classes were not canceled. I was in Class IX then. One day he came to our history class as the substitute teacher for that day. I do not remember what he was teaching us, but this I distinctly do after seventy years. He said almost theatrically, “jishu krishta kebe janma hoithile taha kahiba kathin, na ki (It is difficult to say when Jesus Christ was born, isn’t it?)?” Quite a few of us readily agreed that it was indeed difficult to say; such was the power of his rhetoric. His purpose achieved, he said in a normal tone, “You are all so stupid!” Having recovered from the impact of his theatricality, we realized in seconds that our response was indeed stupid. We learned our lesson. We were not focused on the content of the question, so carried away by the manner in which it was asked. This experience helped at least some of us later in life; it taught us how to search for facts hidden in rhetoric – how to understand, for example, commercial advertisements, manifestos, propaganda literature in one form or the other, news reports, gossip, among others. Incidentally, Rath Sir was an excellent teacher of English.
“Who wrote Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata?” would appear to be a question like our Rath Sir’s. Isn’t the answer there in the question itself? A couple of months ago, I called up a young researcher working with an institute of language research in Bhubaneswar and requested her to get me a copy of Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata. “You mean ‘Bhagabata’?” she asked. “No, Mahabharata,” was my reply. She, who specialized in Odia language and literature, said she didn’t know that Jagannath Das had composed Mahabharata. Soon I found that many didn’t. In fact, I didn’t know until the well-known columnist and writer Asit Mohanty told me. He did me a great favor by lending his copy to me about five years ago. “The book goes by the name of Jagannath Das,” he told me when he gave it to me. He didn’t think Jagannath Das was the author, but he did not know who was. Scholar, academic, and literary critic Jatindra Kumar Nayak told me that such things had always happened in the world of Odia literature (no reason to believe that this is specific to Odia literature) – someone was the real author and had attributed the authorship to someone else who was famous or powerful, either willingly or under compulsion. When the printing facility became available, many palm leaf manuscripts were published in the name of persons who were not the real authors. I left the matter at that – that was five years ago.
Only a couple of months ago, I returned to the question of the authorship of Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata. The celebrated poet, thinker, literary critic, and scholar Mayadhar Mansingh does not mention this book in his authoritative history of Odia literature (Odia Sahityara Itihasa), neither does Jatindra Mohan Mohanty in his History of Oriya Literature. Nrusingha Sarangi, a specialist in Odia Puranic literature, does not mention it in his well-known book – Odia Purana Sahitya. However, there is mention of it in Pandit Surya Narayan Das’s well-researched book Odia Sahityara Itihasa, a work that Mansingh admires for its careful scholarship. Das observes that although Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata is not as well-known as his Srimadbhagabata, it is not inferior to it in aesthetic terms and in terms of the elegant use of language. He says that this work is strongly influenced by Sarala Das’s Mahabharata and that it would not be incorrect to describe it as a summary of Sarala’s much-celebrated work in nabakshari (each line having nine letters) couplets.
Surya Narayan Das’s book was published in 1963. The copy of Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata, which I got from Asit Mohanty, was first published by Abhijit Prakasana of Puri in 2003, which means that another publisher had published the book before the Puri publisher did. Or Das had studied a palm leaf manuscript, but since he did not say anything about it, we can assume that he had studied the book, not the palm leaf manuscript. He would have mentioned it if it were the case. Ordinarily, one mentions not the expected, but the unexpected. I am not sure whether Asit Babu knew about this book (i.e., the one Das had read); most probably, he didn’t. When academic and Sarala Mahabharata scholar Gouranga Charan Das told me that he had seen the book but he did not remember where, I think the book he had in mind was the one that Surya Narayan Das had studied. If I remember our telephonic conversation in this regard a couple of months ago, he didn’t know about the book published in 2003.
The well-known scholar Pandit Nilamani Mishra mentions Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata as an “unpublished” work of Das in his introduction to Srimadbhagabata, published by Orissa (now spelled “Odisha”) Sahitya Akademi in 1989, years after Surya Narayan Das’s book under reference here was published. If he was familiar with that book, it is unclear why he made no reference to Das’s observations on Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata. It is too important a matter to be ignored. There is no mention of this work in Prasanna Kumar Mohanty’s well-researched and highly informative book Odia Sahityara Itihasa: Adya Pryasa, (history of Odia literature), published in 2007. It contains lists of unpublished works, but Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata does not occur in any list. Like Nilamani Mishra, Mohanty seems to have missed Surya Narayan Das’s work.
As for the book published by Abhijit Prakasana, Mahanta Maharaj Sri Banshidhara Das, the head of Bada Odia Matha in Puri, gave the pothi (palm leaf manuscript) of Jagannath Das’s Mahabharata to Sri Bhagaban Das on the latter’s request, who got it published by the above-named press. In the book Mahabharata, Bhagaban Das calls himself “Sangrahaka” (collector) and Atibadi Jagannath Das, the author.
Now, is it possible that someone wrote the Mahabharata pothi (book) and gave the authorship to Jagannath Das? Did Jagannath Das really compose Mahabharata? The best answer would be “Yes, he did.” In the eighteenth-century poet Dibakar Das’s Jagannath Charitamruta, a kind of biography of Jagannath Das, it is mentioned that before composing Srimadbhagabata, Jagannath Das had composed Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Now, granted that Jagannath Das wrote Mahabharata, how can one be sure about the authenticity of the pothi – that is, is the manuscript that Bhagaban Das published the one that Jagannath Das wrote? One can never be sure, I think. But so long as there is no contestation based on reasonable grounds, I, for one, will have no hesitation to accept that the pothi under reference is authentic.
But then, what is the source of the book that Pandit Surya Narayan Das had consulted?
(The views expressed are the writer’s own)
Prof. B.N.Patnaik
Retd. Professor of Linguistics and English, IIT Kanpur
Email: [email protected]
(Images from the net)