MUCH of India’s myths and legends are so intimately bound with Indian thought and philosophy that it is difficult to appreciate it unless one has some rudimentary knowledge of the ideals that govern the Indian mind. An awareness of this fundamental constraint in understanding India’s mythology lends to it an aura of mystery and mirth, as revealed in the vigour of India’s epical genius, in the clarity of its language and the originality of its thought.
The meaning and significance of Indian mythology stems from its cultural background, a mixture of popular philosophy, folklore, tradition, legend, and history. This background affected Indian life and character and produced an atmosphere of tolerance and reasonableness, an acceptance of free thought in matters of faith, and a desire and capacity to live and let live.
Pervasive influence
Although Indian mythological writings point back to Vedas, Upanishads, Brahmanas and Sutras, the two humungous Indian epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata – are of greater significance. They have exercised a pervasive influence on the human mind. The epics deal with the early days of the Indo-Aryans, their wars and conquests, customs, manners, way of living and thinking, representing the typical Indian method of catering en masse for various degrees of cultural development, from the highest to the simplest.
Michelet, the French savant, has said of Ramayana: Whoever has done or willed too much let him drink from this deep cup a long draught of life and youth…It is a great poem, as vast as the Indian Ocean, blessed, gilded with the sun, the book of divine harmony wherein is no dissonance. A serene peace reigns there and in the midst of conflict an infinite sweetness, a boundless fraternity, which spreads over all living things, an ocean …of love, of pity, of clemency.
Colossal encyclopedia
Majestic as the Ramayana may be as an epic, it is the Mahabharata that is regarded as one of the outstanding books of the world. It is a colossal work, an encyclopedia of tradition and legend, of political and social institutions. Mahabharata contains the polytheism of Vedas, the monism of Upanishads, and deism and dualism. Laying stress on ethical and moral principles in statecraft and in life, the brunt of the epic lies in social welfare – not the welfare of a particular group only, but of the whole world. For, it says, the entire world of mortals is a self-dependent organism.
Mahabharata also contains the Krishna legends and the famous philosophical poem, Bhagavad Gita. It is a poem of crisis, political and social, a crisis in the spirit of man torn by the conflict of duties, obligations and moralities. From a personal conversation between Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield, we are taken gradually to more impersonal regions of individual duty and social behaviour, of the application of ethics and spiritual outlook to human life. The message of the Gita is not at all sectarian; it is universal in its approach and has thus found favour with all.
An imagined history
Indian mythology is not confined to the epics but appears in many forms and garbs in Sanskrit and Prakrit literatures. The myths are vast and full of meaning wherein facts and fiction are so interwoven as to be inseparable. This amalgam becomes an imagined history indicating what people believed had taken place, and this becomes the basis for thought and action.
The jewels in the crown of Indian mythology are Panchtantra and Jatakas – the oldest extant folklores that influenced West Asian and European animal and other stories, such as Aesop’s Fables. Jataka stories in Pali narrate the successive lives of Siddhartha Gautama, previous to the one in which he became the Buddha, the Enlightened One. They are full of references of the period, of trade and commerce and specialised guilds and crafts, revealing a multiform and chaotic society resisting every attempt at classification.
