The Re-Imagined Mahabharata
[Since 2013 there have been many changes in my publishing plans, but the background material I describe in this collection of blogs is still valid. A book The Last Kaurava was published in November 2015 by Leadstart Pvt Ltd (Mumbai). I produced a revised/shortened version, The Making of Bhishma, for the US market (Amazon) in November 2016. Beginning 2018, Leadstart will be publishing The Making of Bhishma as the first book in a series titled The Fall of the Kurus. The Leadstart books are only for sale in India. I expect to set up to sell these books in the US via Amazon.]
In 2012, I released via Kindle an excerpt (The Making of Bhishma) from The Reimagined Mahabharata. A large number of people downloaded that excerpt and a few responded to my requests to post reviews on Amazon (Thanks, all!). Still, as it is not possible for the author to get details about the downloaders from Amazon.com, I do not know who my readers are. An email to kamesh@aiyers.net would be appreciated!
One observation I was able to make was that whenever it may have happened — the Mahabharata or something like it or something with a big war at the end — we have wildly differing pictures in our heads. People I know, aware and historically conscious Indians, have told me that they hated Peter Brooks' movie/play because nobody was wearing gorgeous multi-colored clothing with high crowns or golden tiaras, the way B. R. Chopra or Amar Chitra Katha has it. I don't know what to do when I see that reaction— defend Brooks, or attack ACK!, empathize with the speaker, or sympathize with them (considering that they must have had too much to drink).
Now, I don't know what exactly happened either. But, I do know one thing — none of us have any historically valid knowledge of those times. Even the people publishing lists of ancient Indian kings going all the way back to Vaivaswata Manu, the founding father of our current strain of humanity (imagine! just one Y chromosone produced all this— talk about founder effects.) don't seem to know what things were like — what did people eat, how were they governed, what tools did they use, what kind of groups did they live in, what was the population, etc., etc. — all the things that a good history should tell us is missing.
So what I've done is write a "Pseudo History" leading up to the Reimagined Mahabharata. I am going to put these up as a sequence of blogs. Let me state up front what I intend to setup as the stage for the RM: Kurus from the Saraswati-Sindhu urbanization; Nagas bands occupying most of the Gangetic plain with Panchala as their one big confederation; and, Rakshasa bands east of Chhota Nagpur and south down the coast of the Bay of Bengal that are being consolidated slowly into the Magadha coalition. The Nagas and the Rakshasas are matriarchies, the Kurus are in the process of developing a patriarchy, a process that will be speeded up by the war.
How did these groups come here? I proposed a long pre-history beginning with the African expansion along the Makran coast to the Indian coasts in 70,000 to 60,000 B.C.E, and migrations from Afghanistan in 10,000 B.C.E and from Tibet around 12,000 B.C.E. The first group splits in two and the western branch populates the Indus valley and merges with the 10,000 B.C.E. group to become the "Saraswati-Sindhu" culture. The eastern branch becomes the Rakshasas and a big subset of these go north of Orissa to the area around the Bengal-Bihar border. The group from Tibet come through Nepal and spreads across North India to become the Nagas.
By 2400 B.C.E., this political structure is in place. The Reimagined Mahabharata begins there.
Historical Background
The ethnic landscape of the Indo-Gangetic plain and South Asia
South Asia is a microcosm of the world when we consider
human diversity. To take the most
obvious, skin color: the population of India ranges from a very light, almost
pink in the north-west to a deep black in the south and a light yellow tinge in
the east. Other anthropometric measures
of diversity show similar variation – noses go from aquiline in the northeast
to broad and flat in east south; epicanthic fold is missing in the east and
northeast; the average height is greater in the northeast; hair goes from tight
curls to wavy to almost straight. In no
other part of the world is there an equivalent range of variation – Africa, the
most likely source of Homo Sapiens, which shows greater diversity
(genetically), fails to show it in easy-to-observe patterns
like skin color or proboscis prominence.
The only prominent feature that appears to be missing is hair color –
almost all South Asians have black hair, occasionally shading to a deep brown –
in which the blond and the red-head are completely missing in the sub-continent.
From the perspective of South Asia, Europe and China have strong “founder
effects” that can be traced to the last 10,000 years.
Digression into Genetics and Population studies
Geneticists use two models for explaining diversity in
expanding species. The first, and most popular, is that the source gene-bank of
the species will display the greatest diversity as migrating “families” exhibit
strong founder effects as well as random divergence. Second, and one not
currently in favor for explaining human variation, is that two separated
populations of a species evolved and then hybridized to create a mingled
population with greater variation.
The first hypothesis, let me call it the “single source”
model, explains variation by a mix of founder effects and random local
variation. Thus, as one samples the
prevalence of variants of a gene in a geographically distributed species, one
will find that particularly sharp difference between the population in geographically-separated
regions A and B will show up as present in the “source” population as a minor
variation. In addition, both source region and the others will show variants
that do not occur anywhere else that survived because they improved “fitness”
to the local environment.
The second hypothesis requires that the two sub-species
maintained cross-fertility even as other variations emerged. When the populations met, hybrid vigor results in fitter offspring
that contain all the variations from the two sources. As a result the original sub-species die off
or are submerged in the much larger hybrid population.
The technical problem with the second solution is that the
separate populations must not only stay fertile with each other, but their
off-spring must not be sterile. As an
example, tigers and lions can cross-breed but the resulting ligers or tigrons
are not fertile and cannot reproduce.
Similarly horses and donkeys cross-breed to produce sterile mules. In the human context, in addition to the
issues created by cross-breeding, is that the narrow female birth-canal
compared to the size of the baby results in a very difficult labor that
sometimes puts the life of the mother at risk.
Hybrid vigor, which often results in larger offspring, would have made
this even more hazardous. As a result,
the first solution is the preferred explanation for geographical variation in a
species.
... To be Continued [What the Caste system did to the Indian genome]
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