This interesting and informative book concerns one particular dramatic moment in the Svargārohaṇaparvan, the last of the Mahābhārata’s 18 parvans (books).
After the Pāṇḍavas kill their Kaurava cousins in battle, Yudhiṣṭhira reigns for decades as king. He is the last Pāṇḍava to leave the mortal world. When he does so he is taken to heaven, but his cousin and antagonist Duryodhana, the Mahābhārata’s main villain, is seated there in glory, and his own brothers and wife are absent. Disgusted, he says he wants to go wherever they are. So an envoy takes him into a foul realm of darkness and pain. Realizing his brothers and wife are suffering the tortures of hell, he rails against this injustice, angrily denounces the gods and dharma (virtue, propriety, duty), and declares he will remain there with his brothers. The gods then arrive en masse, and hell turns into heaven. God Indra explains that Yudhiṣṭhira's experience of hell was a result of his misdeeds, but that he has passed his final test and may now bathe in the celestial Gaṅgā.
Shalom's particular interest is in Yudhiṣṭhira's denunciation of dharma. Yudhiṣṭhira is the god Dharma's genital son, and is a principled and dutiful character throughout (when king he is called King Dharma), so this is a powerful and paradoxical dramatic moment. The main strength of Shalom's book is that it stays focused on this moment, while viewing it from a different perspective in each chapter, and so the book is simultaneously very specific and very broad. Shalom's central hypothesis is that Yudhiṣṭhira's denunciation of dharma is the Mahābhārata’s culmination and conclusion, but that it has been downplayed or erased by interpreters ancient and modern, to the detriment of the text's appreciation.
The five disparate chapters are arranged in approximately chronological order depending on their focus. Chapter 1 sites the denunciation scene in the context of the whole Mahābhārata, exploring the text's use of the verbs garh, nind, and kṣip, and discussing various scenes that feature the verb garh (denounce) in different ways. The mongoose scene at Yudhiṣṭhira's horse-sacrifice, discussed repeatedly in recent scholarship, is a particular focus (pp. 38–51). The chapter shows that Yudhiṣṭhira's denunciation of dharma is culminatory in terms of the thematics of the narrative.
Chapter 2 surveys early Mahābhārata adaptations in Sanskrit to see how they handle this scene. Shalom focuses especially upon three adaptations that purportedly cover the whole story, namely the Bhāratamañjarī of Kṣemendra Vyāsadāsa and the Bālabhāratas of Amaracandra Sūri and Agastya Paṇḍita. She shows that these authors either omit the scene, or dilute its effect by having Yudhiṣṭhira denounce something other than dharma.
Chapter 3 discusses the views of three Sanskrit literary theorists: Ānandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, and Kuntaka. These theorists discuss the Mahābhārata in terms of its evocation of the ninth rasa, the śāntarasa (feeling of serenity). The Svargārohaṇaparvan’s disquieting events are seen as a means to this end, but Shalom finds that none of these theorists discuss the denunciation scene with the requisite specificity or thematic focus.
Chapter 4 turns to modern Mahābhārata scholarship, comparing various schemes of the text's development to see when they place the Svargārohaṇaparvan, and drawing also upon the Spitzer manuscript that has sometimes been cited in support of such schemes. Shalom argues that although such schemes include the Svargārohaṇaparvan at an early developmental stage, nonetheless scholars have usually sidelined the Svargārohaṇaparvan as relatively late. Shalom also surveys scholars’ summaries of the Mahābhārata’s narrative: these typically omit Yudhiṣṭhira's denunciation of dharma.
Chapter 5 revisits the subject of Mahābhārata adaptations in Sanskrit, focusing upon the Bhārataprabandha, a hitherto neglected Keralan retelling that, exceptionally, features Yudhiṣṭhira's denunciation of dharma. Shalom introduces this text, discusses its possible authorship by Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa (c. 1550–1650 ce), and outlines its faithful narration of Yudhiṣṭhira's final scenes. Thus, despite the negative results of chapters 2–4, Shalom finally finds confirmation for her hypothesis that the denunciation is crucial.
Shalom's argument is a careful balance of positive and negative judgements. Chapters 2–5 showcase admirably broad and sensitive research and contain passages that will interest various specialists, but chapter 5 might seem to counterweigh chapters 2–4, leaving chapter 1 as the book's main positive contribution to the Mahābhārata’s interpretation. Indeed, the rich material in this chapter might potentially have formed a book of its own. This chapter is more dense, convoluted, and heavily annotated than the others, and raises more questions. Regarding secondary literature, one might have wished for more discussion of recent work on the Svargārohaṇaparvan by Emily Hudson, Tamar Reich, and others (work mentioned in n. 26, p. 178).
Regarding primary literature, Shalom does not mention the pre-story of Vidura (Ādiparvan 101), which may contain the Mahābhārata’s closest analogue to Yudhiṣṭhira's denunciation of dharma. The relatively innocent sage Māṇḍavya suffers a hideous drawn-out punishment, and when he hears god Dharma's supposed explanation he curses Dharma to be born from a śūdrā (Vidura's mother). Māṇḍavya suffers from his own pain while on earth (his afterlife is not mentioned), Yudhiṣṭhira from the pain of his brothers and wife in his afterlife. But after hell has disappeared, Indra explains that “those whose good deeds are greater than their bad actions first experience naraka and then ascend to svarga” (p. 63), and so Yudhiṣṭhira's impression that the gods are unfair is ultimately false. If the Svargārohaṇa scene pivots on the power of Indra's māyā, then King Dharma's denunciation of dharma/Dharma, while certainly neat, might not be as momentous as Shalom implies.
Shalom repeatedly asserts that the Svargārohaṇa scene is the Mahābhārata’s ending, with all associated interpretive implications. But although this is the ending of the Pāṇḍava story, the Mahābhārata’s ending is the ending of the Harivaṃśa, so perhaps Shalom re-ends the Mahābhārata as much as the writers she critiques. Considering the whole Mahābhārata might bring one closer to Ānandavardhana's position, whereby the text promotes perfection through love of Kṛṣṇa. But Shalom's book has certainly opened up the space for some crucial interpretive discussion, and is to be commended for its range and rigour.
