In 1947, as Partition massacres in northern India left hundreds of thousands dead, Mahatma Gandhi invoked India's epic, the Mahabharata. It was a forceful comparison which he used partly because of the text's sacrosanct position within Indian culture - but also because, for more than 30 years, the Mahabharata had informed his own thinking about violence.
The Sanskrit word "maha", used both in the name of the epic and in the popular epithet for Gandhi himself, means "great". Thus the epic's name translates as "Great India" and Gandhi in turn was called "Great Soul", in recognition of his centrality to the Indian freedom struggle. (Not to be outdone, Pakistan's first leader MA Jinnah was called Quaid-e-Azam, "Great Leader" in Urdu.) If Gandhi was, by 1947, an iconic figure in Indian politics, the Mahabharata was his literary equal: an epic so vast and comprehensive that it was said to contain all of Hindu myth and religious lore, including the Ramayana, India's other major epic. The conversation on the battlefield between the god Krishna and Arjuna, the champion archer, stands alone as the Bhagavadgita, one of the most revered texts of Hinduism.
Composed from ancient oral histories over many generations in the first millennium BC, the Mahabharata had been part of Indian culture for many centuries by the time Gandhi came to it. Most Indians grew up watching performances of the Mahabharata, having its stories recited to them, or being told of the feats of its heroes. In it, Gandhi found a flexible medium for his message, a book that was quasi-spiritual but not religious, encompassing diverse aspects of Indian life: history, society, geography, language.
But for a man who hoped to speak to Muslims as well as Hindus, there were disadvantages in a text that predated the arrival of Islam in India. Gandhi was therefore careful to discuss the Mahabharata in neutral terms, emphasising to his feuding country that its violence was not about faith but dominion over land, and between coeval relatives rather than religiously divided communities.
India's longest Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata is also its bloodiest. Narrating the decade-long feud between the children of two royal brothers, it culminates in apocalyptic violence as the cousins fight to control India. Both the Pandavas, who are the epic's heroes, and their enemies the Kauravas, practise deception, betrayal and homicide. There are few saints in the Mahabharata; and there are no victors. Eighteen million people die in the war. Aside from one foetus, an entire bloodline is wiped out.
It is therefore unsurprising that Gandhi - who spent his life advocating ahimsa, or non-violence, as the means by which the British Empire should be defeated - was never complacent about his nation's commitment to the doctrine. In 1918, the Christian priest CF Andrews, Gandhi's friend and ally, wrote to him praising Indians who "as a race did repudiate bloodlust". But Gandhi disagreed: "Is this historically true?" he replied, "I see no sign of it either in the Mahabharata or the Ramayana". Instead, Gandhi viewed India's mythical history as a precursor to the violence of his own times. The characters in Hinduism's sacred texts are "bloodthirsty, revengeful and merciless", he pointed out; "the battles are described with no less zest than now".
Carnage notwithstanding, Gandhi argued doggedly that the epic upheld the value of ahimsa: "The Mahabharata is the story of a bloody war. But I have maintained in the teeth of orthodox Hindu opposition that it is a book written to establish the futility of war and violence." The same, he insisted, went for other holy texts, such as the Qur'an. Despite incidents of war and bloodletting in the Prophet's own life, Gandhi reasoned that Islam, too, enjoined non-violence upon its followers.
In April 1947, during the tense and bloody build-up to Partition, Gandhi once again turned to the Mahabharata in an attempt to illustrate to both Muslims and Hindus that conflict was destructive and pointless: "What has been said in the Mahabharata is of universal application ... Renouncing ahimsa they took to violence and fought among themselves... This is exactly what is happening in our country today."
When Independence was declared in August, Gandhi fasted and prayed. Instead of celebrating, he travelled to eastern India to stay with a Muslim family, hoping by this action to calm sectarian feeling. Returning to Delhi, he found that Muslims had taken refuge in the Purana Qila, the old fort. Gandhi was distraught that in this former Mughal capital, where "Hindus and Muslims have grown together", Muslims now cowered, dispossessed, without food and water. In a prayer meeting held on September 13 1947, he appealed to Hindus by drawing a parallel between the plight of Muslims, and that of the five Pandava brothers who for 12 years were helpless exiles from their own kingdom: "It is said that in the Mahabharata period the Pandavas used to stay in this Purana Qila." Just so, Gandhi said, the Muslims "are under your protection, and under my protection".
It was yet another attempt to expunge what he called the "poison in our hearts". By casting Muslim refugees in the role of the Pandavas, and framing the Partition massacres as a tragic sequel to the Mahabharata, Gandhi was exhorting both sides to see each other for what they were: brothers and sisters, not religious enemies. Sixty years later, Gandhi's comparison exposes the legacy of Partition violence in the persistent fissures in north Indian and Pakistani society.