Maybe, she was merely telling me what she had heard. According to her, he was a braver man than Ram. While growing up, my mother used to tell me stories about Ravana. If I have to be very honest, then, had I not been exposed to Mahabharat in its unabridged form (by work of fate), perhaps, I too would have wholly subscribed to the non-traditionalist skeptic’s ideology. If some follow the good vs bad template, others dismiss such binaries in the epic by creating more binaries (but of a different kind): Upper Caste vs Lower Caste, Brahmin vs non-Brahmin and Aryan vs non-Aryan. The latter are further aided by a new breed of authors who – perhaps to counter fundamentalists – polarize the whole narrative as a struggle between supposed orthodoxy of Pandavas and equally conjectured progressiveness of the Kauravas. Reason? Winston Churchill’s famous saying: History is written by winners. The skeptics, however, categorically dismiss this notion. To all these above questions, one side takes the well-trodden route: The Pandavas were righteous, and were following the dharmic path given to them by God Incarnate Krishna. Were the Pandavas or Krishna really that good? Isn’t Mahabharat biased towards the Pandavas? Who were actually righteous in the Mahabharat? Nonetheless, some pertinent questions of morality are often raised by the latter kind: There are third/fourth sub-categories too, but that is a discussion for another day. And the skeptics who question and challenge the existing narrations, seeing the primary texts through a prism of cynicism. The traditionalists, who loyally stick to the standard texts and their conventional interpretations. There are two kinds of people that read Mahabharat.
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