Was Ved Vyas, author of the Mahabharat (Greater India) epic futurecasting the death toll of an India-Pakistan nuclear holocaust in numbering the dead at the end of the Kurukshetra War?
That could well be a 1.6 billion-plus-people question as the two nations shift gear to unknown terrain.
Recent archaeoastrological estimates, based on the Sinauli dig near the Kuru capital Hastinapur, and modern India's capital city Delhi (then the Pandav new town of Indraprasth), and readings of star locations described in the epic, place the probability of the Kurukshetra War to 3000 BCE. Five thousand years ago, India'a population was an estimated 14 million, of which, around 5 million inhabited the Indus Valley cities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau based on data from Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, British polymath scholars who co-authored Atlas of World Population History.
Readings from Vyas's available narrative, on the other hand, conservatively date his grand epic to 500 BCE. This, when the earliest written palmleaf manuscripts of any surviving Indian text are only as old as the 8th-9th centuries CE. Going by this earliest possible dating of India's epic poem during Vyas' plausible lifetime, India's population in 500 BCE is estimated at 23 million.
Yet, the Mahabharat War, in which every Indian, from Kandahar (Shakuni) to Kohima (Ghatotkachh) fought and died, puts the death toll at an astounding number in several million multiples of the population of those times. We will get there in time.
First, to appreicate the catastrophe pictured by Vyas, it is worthwhile to recollect that much like Mahabharat, the India-Pakistan tragedy, of which Pahalgam is only a metaphor in the immensity of time, has been festering since birth, in the backdrop of the withdrawal of a colonial enterprise that itself was nourished on the sapping strength of previous colonial expansions across the past millennium.
Yet, unlike all previous takeovers of Bharat, that is India, 'a final confrontation,' between India and Pakistan, whenever that comes, will be so much of a clash of civilisations that outperforms the indiscretions that led to Kurukshetra. And still, they would be so similar in their makings.
Mahabharat, in our everyday speak, refers to Greater India. From Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean. Today, it is as much an aspirational dream in Hindu India's articulation of Akhand Bharat (undivided India) as it is for Ghazwa-e-Hind the defined objective of India's neighbours (Pakistan and Bangladesh), both terms ultimately meaning Mahabharat, one way or the other.
In this subcontinental aspiration birthed in the realm of history and mythology, India's oral traditions and written inheritances, have forever been the playground of heroes and anti-heroes, in which, the place of good or evil, dev or devil, deity or daitya, was always determined by the vanquished and the victor. This has been the leitmotif of our superhero stories, at all times since our prehistoric and mythical past, to the Vedas and now in the time of our 75-year-young written constitution.
In these standoffs between the Deva and the Danav, as in the confrontations of Indra and Vritra, Narasimha and Hiranyakashipu, Parashuram and the Kshatriya warlords, Ram and Ravan, Krishna and Kansa, Pandav and Kaurav, Alexander and Porus, Chandragupta and Selucus, Ashok and Anantha (the Kalinga War), Ghori and Prithviraj Chauhan, Taimur and Tuglak, Babur and Lodhi, Pratap and Akbar, Shivaji and Alamgir, Nadir Shah and Rangila, Ahmad Shah and Shah Alam, Clive and Shiraz, Gandhi and Jinnah, Shastri and Ayub, Indira and Yahya Khan, an unimaginable number of lives have been sacrificed with the March of Time.
Now, in our age of "viral wars" and Facebook reality, the forces of good and evil are arraigned once more, with entire populations indoctrinated with visceral hatred against each other. Can yet another war change our lives for the better? Can India and Pakistan (and Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Myammar, Nepal, Sri Lanka) come back together, once again, as one civilisation, as our respective state policies lead us into believing?
Looks unlikely, as long as Pakistan, riding on the back of its generals and now, with Bangladesh and Maldives in tow, believes that the Mussalmans and the Hindus are two different races, two different civilisations, two different histories, that have nothing to share in common. Looks unlikely, as long as India, fuelled by its chauvinistic upsurge, continues to treat its own Muslim population as the significant and repulsive other.
Wither, then, Mahabharat?
Exactly 1,500 years ago, one person understood this conundrum well, and created a solution with well-intended consequenes. Muhammad! After years of narrowcasting his Voice of God through word of mouth, the prophet of Islam realised that the pen wasn't as mighty as the sword. For, he had, at best, rallied around only a handful of like-minded companions after years of ranting the name of al~Lah, that happened to take him nowhere near to pushing his narrative of mass conversion to his ways of the world. Muhammad's solution: total annihilation to rebuild all over again. The world has since been witness to succesive such progroms ... even a millennium-and-half since Muhammad.
Starting with the Ghazwa-e-Khandaq (Battle of the trench) in 627 CE, Muhammad waged pulverising wars in which all adult males were slaughtered if they could not be converted to his faith. Women were taken in as common harlots, concubines or wives, or else, traded for cattle. Only underage orphans were spared, and adopted, and coopted within the family, and nurtured with overwhelming compassion, to fade out flickering memories of their lingering haunted childhood. Then, they were systematically indoctrinated and weaponsised to wage the wars of conviction and conversion.
Muhammad's strategy of absolute overhaul was deployed relentlessly till the Mamluk nobility came into being among the Turks that eventually toppled the Arabs as cutodians of Islam a good 500 years after their prophet, expanding the Empire of The Relentless from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Ghazwa-e-Hind, the sine qua non of Pakistan's existence bears the imprint of Muhammad's genocide at Khandaq. And it doesn't cease fire at Pahalgam. The battles will be re-enacted for ever and ever, just as with the timeless confrontations of the daitya and deva in the immensity of the Hindu cosmos, in which the victor and vanquished will determine every good for evil.
For Pakistan to win this War, there is need for a strong outpouring of the adrenaline rush of 'jigar' that played out the total annihilation of Khandaq. India's response, then, has to be a full replay of Kurukshetra.
Do Indians have the stomach for such outcome? Does Pakistan have the jigar and the wherewithal to make that happen? Both are nuclear powers.
Does the 21st century have the appetite for total destruction? If Israel's engagement with Gaza, and Russia's with Ukraine are pointers, an all-out war will still take us nowhere.
At the end of the Kurukshetra War, Yudhistir, the victor of Mahabharat, grieving at the loss of lives, placed the total casualty on both sides at 1,660, 020,000 dead. That's frighteningly close to India and Pakistan's combined poplation, today, at 1.647.5 billion (1.4 billion India, 247.5 million Pakistan). Throw in a few extra hundreds of millions from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka into the casualty list, and we have the makings of Akhand Bharat all over again.
Or call that Ghazwa-e-Hind, if you must.
Back to Essays