Sahitya Akademi

REFLECTIONS: Vyasa and Ganesa

Author(s): K. Satchidanandan
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 53, No. 2 (250) (March/April 2009), pp. 6-8
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23348004
Accessed: 17-02-2016 05:22 UTC

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 REFLECTIONS

Vyasa and Ganesa

The legend around Vyasa relating to the writing of

and Ganesa
Mahabharata has deeply intrigued me as it raises several unresolved

questions and theoretical puzzles that seek to be heard and re

sponded to. The legend goes that Vedavyasa, the legendary author
of Mahabharata requested Brahma to provide him with a writer

qualified enough to take his dictation of the epic. Brahma

sugggested Ganesa as he had all the qualities needed for an excel
lent 'stenographer'. Ganesa accepted the job on one condition, that
Vyasa should never stop his dictation until the epic was complete
while Vyasa insisted that Ganesa should fully comprehend the

meaning of every word before he took it down.

The legend can well be used as a context to raise several

questions about writing and authorship. For example, is Vyasa' a

synonym for 'author? For, according to tradition, there were 28
Vyasas of whom it was Vedavyasa who composed Bharata, Puranas
and Upapuranas and classified the Vedas into four. Mahabharata

itself evolved over time. It began with Vaisampayana reciting the

24,000 verses of the Bharatasamhita for Janamejaya at the sarpasatm,
after a decade along with Vaisampayana recited
Ugrasravas,
Mahabharata that new accounts, enlarging the text to
incorporated
1,00,000 verses. Ganesa is said to have gone on writing it for three
years; so it must have undergone further changes. If so, Vyasa
cannot be a single person, but a generic name that includes several

Vyasas and thus becomes a synonym for the institution of the

author itself. While Valmiki had only sung the Ramayana, teaching the
verses to Lava and Kusa, Vyasa had Mahabharata written down,

thus, making him the first

proper while 'writer' or 'author' even
Valmiki was the adikavi, the first poet, in the oral tradition. Even
Mahabharata is, perhaps, a text on the borders of the oral and the
written, as it was first sung and then written and went on growing
like the oral texts, thus a of orature and
representing collapsing
literature (or ecriture). Even today Mahabharata has not ceased to
grow as it takes on new hues and produces new readings and

counter-readings.

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 Vyasa was 'author' in another sense too. He has been

recognised by Vishnupurana, Koormapurana and Srimad Bhagavatapurana

as the seventeenth incarnation of Lord Vishnu. The concept of the
'author' as we know, implies God, one who creates a world of his
own and remains
the source and repository of all meaning.
sense, Vyasa, like Valmiki, was one of the earliest
In one

autobiographers as he himself is a character in Mahabharata. He is

the seer who advises Dhritarashtra and Duryodhana to keep away
from batde though he fails to dissuade the Kauravas from the
battle with the Pandavas. It is then that he decides to record in
detail the whole battle scene at Kurukshetra.
May be, it is when
actual intervention fails or becomes impossible that one turns to

writing, that is essentially an act of witnessing: each writer has

perhaps in him a failed activist!
One may well ask, why in spite of being such a great seer
and poet Vyasa himself could not write Mahabharata. Was it because
he, a fisherwoman's son, did not know how to write he
though
had a poet's vision and imagination like many excellent rural poets?
In the earlier versions too, the is recited or never written.
epic sung;
If so, how come he was the guru of the great Suka, Jaimini and
others?
And
why did Brahma choose Ganesa and no one else to
take Vyasa's dictation? It could be because Ganesa could travel all
over the world, even into its dingy corners, on his mouse (an
ancient equivalent of the mouse that the whole
computer's opens

cyberspace for you?) or because he by definition is Vighneswara,

the remover of obstacles, with all the spheres in his
huge belly. If
he himself could remove all obstacles, he could have ensured that

Vyasa's dictation too

suffered no pauses; yet why did he insist that
Vyasa should never stop his chanting? Did he fear that in those
pauses and short silences he himself would, albeit unconsciously,
insert his own verses? Does it thus come from a concern
profound
for the authenticity and the 'authority' of the text? It could also be
because of a deep belief in the purity of inspiration, 'the
spontan
eous overflow' of the Wordsworthian kind.
This can also lead us to the question whether
actually Vyasa
paused at times and whether Ganesa really inserted some of his
thoughts and ideas
in the form of verses in the same metre,

during those
brief droughts that even Vyasa's inspiration might not
have been free from. This reminds me of some debates that took

place in Malayalam recently over the authenticity of some autobiog

K. Satchidanandan / 7

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raphies that were dictated by the subjects to others, like that oí the
tribal leader C.K. Janu. It was suspected that the writer had
romanticised the story, used his own tone and idiom, instead of the

original tone of the oral narrative. The question is complicated

further by the gender issue as the writer was male while the

protagonist was female. Fortunately, feminists may spare Ganesa of

that accusation though one can well see that Ganesa belonged to
another race, not being entirely man nor entirely beast. We can only

hope his trunk did not erase what his hand wrote.

Finally, Vyasa's counter-condition that Ganesa should not write

what he recited without grasping the meaning reveals the anxiety of
the 'author' about the 'meaning' of what he writes: an anxiety
neither Roland Barthes nor Jacques Derrida would have approved,
even if we forget all the reception theorists from Stanley Fish to
Wolfgang Iser!

JL^h
ICSatchidanandan
Guest Editor

8 / Indian Utemture: 250

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