Kollengode S Venkataraman October 1999
As teenagers decades ago, we grandchildren sat around our family. A matriarch snacking on jackfruit and banana chips during a warm, sultry summer full moon night in a Kerala village. She was telling us how the Mahabharata war ended:
As the war progressed in Kurukshetra, Arjuna killed Karna, his own brother. Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son, is killed. Acharya Bhisma, pierced by his favorite student Arjuna’s arrow, dies on a bed of arrows. Dusshasana and Jarasandha are slain by Bhima. And Duryodhana lies mortally wounded. Aswattama burns several of the Pandava princes by stealth in the dark.
After winning the brutal war, the victorious Pandava Fivesome go and meet King Dhrtarashtra and Queen Gandhari, the parents of the vanquished Kauravas, Grief-stricken with mixed emotions, they half-heartedly try to reconcile.
Then, I distinctly remember, my grandma telling us this:
You know what the Pandavas did afterwards? After destroying the Kauravas in the battle, the Pandavas go to the Ganga, and cremate the dead. And they perform the last rites for the dead warriors, including the Kaurava princes they killed. The Pandavas pour sesame (til) seeds and water during the libation (tarpanam) while invoking the names of their dead cousins as is the custom among us even today.
As a youth, I wondered, “If the Pandavas hated their cousins Kauravas so much to kill them in war, why were they grief-stricken?
And why did they perform the cremation ceremonies and offer til seeds and water after killing them? Patti (nani) was pulling a fast one on us grandkids.”
Later, in my 40s, I got my grandmother’s story confirmed in Rajagopalachari’s and William Buck’s renditions of the Mahabharata. The Pandavas doing the last rites for their sworn enemies after killing them was too much. Mahabharata’s author Vyasa, for dramatizing the scene, went too far in taking literary license, I thought.
Nearly 2500 years later, at the end of the 2-month war between India and Pakistan during May and July in Kargil, the above scene was re-enacted in the changed demography of the area. There was this news, not only in Hindustan Times, Times of India and The Hindu, but also in the venerable New York Times (July 17, Saturday) under the caption “India Buries Soldiers That Pakistan Won’t Claim.” During the Kargil war with India, Pakistan was in the worst possible spot whichever way you consider the misadventure. But in dealing with its war dead, the Pakistani military set the worst possible example.
Pakistan has been saying, not only for domestic consumption, but also for Indian and international consumption, that Pakistan gave only political, economic, and diplomatic support for the Kashmiri Mujahideens.
Militarily, they said, the Mujahideens were on their own.
Further, Pakistan insisted that its military regulars were never part of the Mujahideens. Nobody believed this inside or outside Pakistan. But Pakistani establishment had to live up to its oft-repeated fiction even when the Pakistani army regulars died in the battle.
According to the New York Times story, when Indian military personnel tried to hand over the bodies of Pakistani soldiers killed in action, Pakistan did not accept because doing so would imply that their soldiers were among the Mujahideens. This is the worst that a nation could do to those who have given the most precious of their possessions, their very lives.
Therefore, in the bone-chilling weather on the barren mountains at 15,000-feet altitude, Indian jawans on the Indian side of the Line of Control buried the Pakistani regulars killed in action at the very spots where they found the bodies.
How did they bury them? According to the New York Times story,
“the Indian soldiers covered the dead bodies of Pakistani soldiers in Pakistani flags. A Muslim cleric from the Indian army presided over a respectful, if abbreviated, minute-long funeral service. When he chanted Allahu Akbar (God is Great), six Hindu soldiers around him dutifully answered, Allahu Akbar.”
The Mahabharata is full of stories that not only exemplify honor, valor, generosity, compassion, loyalty, and love, but also portray the dilemmas, ironies, twists and turns, predicaments, treachery, and intrigues of life. Therefore, pouranikas (traditional storytellers) say whatever is not found in the Mahabharata, can never be.
After reading the story in the New York Times, Vyasa’s depiction of the Mahabharata war’s end, I recognized, was a lot closer to the 20th century reality of Kargil. END