Dialectics of Violence in the Mahabharata

This paper is about how violence is discussed, debated, and experienced in the Mahabharata. Much of the Mahabharata is a meditation nonviolence, as the central event in the story is a massively destructive civil war in which 1,660,020,000 combatants are killed and only 8 people survive. While it is impossible for us to separate history from myth concerning the facts of the war, or whether the war ever actually happened sometime in India’s distant past, the Mahabharata, nonetheless, offers a thoroughgoing interrogation of violence, from a wide range of perspectives, as different characters contemplate the tragic costs of the war, the religious and philosophical explanations for how such a horrifying event could take place, the possible alternatives there might have been, whether violence can ever be avoided or is a core aspect of human nature, the implicit harm that is caused by seemingly peaceful practices, and a wide range of emotional responses to nviolence, including feelings of loss, grief, and remorse. In this paper I hope to highlight the many layers of perspectives through which the Mahabharata explores the problem of violence