The Mahabharata is the story of a dynastic struggle between two branches of an Indian ruling family, the Kurus, that culminates in a great war. The war draws into its maelstrom other ruling families of North India, many of whom perish as a result. The period and setting of the war is mythological -- its historical antecedents, if any, are still debated. If the events happened, they could be dated to sometime after 2000 B.C.E to before 900 B.C.E. Archaeological evidence confirms the existence of the culture described in the myth, but there is only literary evidence for the events described in the Mahabharata. The events of the epic are from a time when the Aryan tribes had expanded from the Indus plains, past the Thar desert into the land bounded by the two rivers, the Yamuna and the Ganges, and were just beginning to spread into the rest of the Gangetic plain. This is also the period when the Aryans formalized their scriptures into the four Vedas ("Books of Knowledge or Truth") and probably started composing the Itihasas ("Histories") and Puranas (the "Books of the Past"). The Mahabharata is frequently called the Maha-Itihasa (or the "Great History"). But as it now exists, it is not history, but myth, its historic core possibly unrecoverable.

The war enters Indian legend as one between the forces of good, represented by the five sons of Pandu (called the Pandavas, literally, sons of Pandu), and the forces of evil, the hundred sons of Pandu’s brother, Dhritarashtra (called the Kauravas, i.e., the sons of Kuru). By the fifth century B.C.E., the war is the stuff of legend, and has been enhanced by peripheral stories that provide social, moral, cosmological, mythological, and psychological background to the story. The epic poem of a 100,000 lines (over 5000 pages in a recent English translation) is a source book for Hindu religion, folklore, and mythology, was probably finally arranged in the second century B.C.E.

The story is as follows: Santanu, the king of Hastinapur, wishes to marry again, but is only able to do so because his eldest son, Bhishma, vows to be celibate and to relinquish his right to succeed his father. Santanu has two more son by his new wife, but he dies when they are still young. Bhishma rules as regent, and arranges for his step-brothers to be married while still young. But his step-brothers die before they can father heirs on their wives. Bhishma arranges for sons to be born to his sisters-in-law by inviting Vyaasa (an eminent sage and the author of the Mahabharata) to father children with them following the custom of niyojana, or levirate. The eldest son, Dhritarashtra, is blind from birth and is therefore disqualified from ruling; the second son, Pandu, becomes king. Pandu invites his brother to rule as co-King with him. Pandu is unable to have children, but by the grace of various gods who visit his two wives, has five sons, the Pandavas. Dhritarashtra has a hundred sons, Duryodhana, being the eldest. Pandu dies while his sons are still young, and Dhritarashtra reigns as King and regent for his brother’s children. Duryodhana would like to succeed his father as king, but Yudhisthira, the eldest Pandava, has a superior claim. Dhritarashtra attempts to contain the conflict by dividing the kingdom between the two sets of cousins. Despite receiving the better end of the deal, Duryodhana is not satisfied and arranges to trick the Pandavas into losing their half of the kingdom in a game of dice. The Pandavas are required by the terms of the wager to go into exile for thirteen years. When the Pandavas try to regain their kingdom at the end of the thirteen years, Duryodhana refuses to give up the kingdom and the war ensues. The Pandavas win, though millions die. The Pandavas reign happily. Many years later, the epic is sung at a sacrifice being performed by the great-grandson of the Pandavas and presided over by Vyaasa, the author of the poem.

The above narrative does not reveal the many twists and turns in the story. Some examples are: Bhishma is supposed to be the son of the river-goddess Ganga, who drowns seven earlier sons at birth, but is prevented from drowning Bhishma. The Pandavas are jointly married to a single woman, Krishnaa, also called Draupadi (daughter of Drupada, king of the neighboring kingdom of Panchala). Such a marriage is extremely unusual and has occasioned much commentary and explanation. During the game of dice at which the Pandavas lose everything, Draupadi is insulted and molested in front of the entire court while her husbands look on helplessly. Draupadi’s desire for revenge keeps the Pandavas’ fire alive during the long years in exile. The Pandavas have an older brother, Karna, who was abandoned as a child and raised in a lower-caste household. Karna is befriended by Duryodhana and rejected by the Pandavas -- he is Duryodhana’s alter-ego and fights on his side despite learning the truth. Bhishma is killed because of his refusal to fight Sikhandin, supposedly the re-incarnation of a woman Bhishma had kidnapped as a wife for his brothers and who had then been spurned first by his brothers, then by her former fiancee and finally by Bhishma, who pleaded celibacy.

Krishna, who is the god Vishnu incarnated on earth as the leader of the Yadava tribes, mediates between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, but is unsuccessful -- he does not fight in the war, but is charioteer for Arjuna, the third Pandava. At the brink of war, Arjuna who is to signal the start of hostilities, hesitates at the thought of killing cousins, uncles, and other relatives. Krishna teaches Arjuna that his duty is to fight this war and reveals his Divine Self -- this episode, called the Bhagavad-Gita (the Song of the Lord) is central to later Hinduism.

This is stuff of soap-opera. Like all good soap-operas, the story evokes universal themes. In addition, as in a soap opera, extraneous plots, intrigues, adventure, tales of love and hate, passion, and philosophy are woven into the script to keep it engrossing and interesting. The lines between the heroes and the villains is simply drawn and it makes the story simple to understand. But within that simple plot are hundreds of sub-plots and counter-plots. The characters are generally human, and even the divine ones (like Krishna) act within human constraints.

My version of the story barely follows the plot-line. I have tried to keep with the same basic cast of characters. The Mahabharata is first recited in public at a sacrifice conducted by a descendant of the Pandavas -- I have created a framework for telling my story that begins with Kautilya, the chief advisor to Chandragupta Maurya, the first historical (around 300 B.C.E) emperor of most of India. Kautilya is famed as the author of the Arthashastra, a treatise on the running of a kingdom. Kautilya’s work refers to theories of political management supposedly held by some of the participants in the Mahabharata.. I have also tried to place the Mahabharata in time (around 1500 B.C.E) by creating a rationale for the mass migrations of the Aryan tribes after they reached the plains of the Indus.

Placing the Mahabharata in a specific time period and tying it to pseudo-historical and environmental developments is close to fantasy. What is known about environmental change in Northwest India from 2000 B.C.E to 1400 B.C.E is that the preceding millennium had been unusually wet and these six centuries were unusually dry. We know that during this period, the Indus Valley civilization vanished. We know that a thousand years later the brahminical religion of most of India is ostensibly Aryan, but the people are predominantly dark-skinned to the south and are predominantly yellow-skinned to the east. This pattern of skin-color continues to this day, 3500 years after the Aryan invasion. That is to say, despite all the claims that have been made about the scope and comprehensiveness of the Aryan takeover of India, the Aryan invasion did not destroy the existing culture but ruled over it and assimilated into it.

I use the stories of the Dasavatara (the ten incarnations of Vishnu, described in the Vishnu Purana) to support the fantasy of a looming ecological disaster. I speculate that an organization, the Society of Poets, tried to come up with rational responses to the disaster. The rational responses, over time, congeal to become the modern-day practices of Hinduism, such as caste, cow-worship, discrimination against women and children, and so on.

Within the above framework, I have tried to rewrite the story as a realistic story without the magic of gods and demons. Stories that were fantastic in that they were magical have been dropped. I have embellished the story with other stories that can be viewed as a comment on contemporary events. This has not been particularly difficult -- it is amazing how modern many of the stories in the Mahabharata are in their concerns for the environment, their concerns over human emotions and relationships, and in the interaction between good and evil.

This work is not purely an interpretation of the Mahabharata. Interpreting the events of the Mahabharata to support the concept of an ecological crisis and positing that as the major motive force for the events provides a grand scheme but no details. My story is certainly a re-telling since I have changed the reasons for and consequences of much of the participants’ behavior, But the re-telling is based on a hypothesis concerning the development of certain aspects of Hinduism and even if the hypothesis is true, the idea of an organization responding rationally to the crisis is far-fetched and mechanical. Finally, unlike Shashi Tharoor’s version, The Great Indian Novel, I am not using the Mahabharata as an allegory to tell a different story, though there is certainly some use of allegory in the use of a fuel crisis to explain the exile suffered by the Pandavas.

If I used a single phrase to describe this work, it would be "fantasy and science fiction." Not in the sense of a story with future science, or with fantastic, magical, or inexplicable events, but a fantasy in which an evolutionary development is explained in terms of rational choices and events. It is also a fantasy based on an imaginary reconstruction of a society that we know nothing about. This is "past history", constructed like the "future histories" of Asimov and Heinlein. In keeping with this theme and in keeping with the original’s digressive and epic style, I have allowed myself the liberty of constructing the origins of pre-Aryan and Aryan pre-history.

The sub-title for this work is "an ecological soap opera". The over-arching motivating device in this story is the ecological crisis. The details are melodramatic. I have tried to incorporate not only stories from the original Mahabharata, but also folk-tales from India and around the world. They had to be changed to fit, of course. Many of these stories come from memory and I could not necessarily provide a reference, even if I wanted to do so.

The rest of this preface describes the way I changed the story and the plot in greater detail

I read it first when I was eight or nine -- we had a copy of Rajagopalchari’s Mahabharata, published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. In the space of two weeks, I must have read it three times. I skipped a lot -- there was much to bore an eight-year old boy. But there was much to keep him engrossed as well.

Subsequently, I discovered that the Bhavan’s Journal, a magazine also published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, was serializing K. M. Munshi’s Krishnaavatara. (That was the story of Krishna, whose adventures intersects with the Mahabharata). My family did not subscribe to this magazine, and I would grab the opportunity to read it whenever we visited a family that did and spend most of time reading the issues I had missed. Like the Mahabharata, the story of Krishna has much to attract a soap-opera junkie (which is what I was at that very young age).

Unfortunately, K. M. Munshi’s goals were far, far higher than anything I aspired to. His work was a work of devotion, not necessarily one intended to keep a young boy’s mind entertained. There were frequent passages of undistilled tedium, interspersed with the exciting action-packed adventures of Krishna. Five years later, the Krishnaavatara had still not reached the Great War (of the Mahabharata) and I had moved on to other pursuits, primarily of reading mystery, science-fiction, humor, and horror stories. Still, I occasionally subjected myself to Rajaji’s Mahabharata. A good soap opera never loses its flavor or fascination.

In 1987 (86,88,89?), Peter Brooks and Jean-Claude Carriere’s Mahabharata was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Despite my best intentions, I could not attend, The reports of those who did left me unsatisfied. In 1990, a three-hour movie version (abridged from a six-hour version of the play) was released in the United States. I saw it, and hustled my wife and friends to go see it a second time. It had been abridged drastically, but its power to me was apparent. The following year, the six-hour version was shown on PBS and I watched it more than once.

In the meantime, the Indian TV industry had begun running a 100-episode version of the Mahabharata. The video-tapes had become available at local Indian grocery stores. I saw a few scattered episodes while visiting my sister and rented a few from the local store. The acting was poor, the special effects awful, the music too loud and intrusive, and the overall effect kitsch-y. There was one saving grace -- the story included folk-tales & plots that do not appear in the major versions but are part of the folk-culture of Northern India.

I found that I was dissatisfied with all these public versions of the story. The Peter Brookes’ TV movie was clearly done well and sensitively, but it seemed to be irrelevant in a way I did not think the Mahabharata was. The Indian version felt like a monument to the Hindu revival movements of the modern age.

There is more to the Mahabharata than a good soap. Soaps use universal themes as clichés and the clichés are often the fads of the moment. But many stories in the Mahabharata enunciate and expound on universal themes in critical and creative ways. The epic has proved itself as a living part of Hindu culture for two thousand or more years. It carries the messages of that culture. Many Hindus will claim that its messages are universal. But what are these messages? The obvious ones are clichés. But there is much that is not obvious. Many commentaries on the Mahabharata try to elucidate and extract these meanings, but they are necessarily interpreted by the commentator in the context of a new age. In time, the interpretation becomes the message and the original meaning could be lost forever. Sometimes, the meaning can be inverted. The longer the carrier exists, the more likely it is that such transformations of the message occur.

My motivation to retell this story came because I felt I could identify that underlying message. The Mahabharata hints at the message. The message I felt I saw was not a religious one. It was ecological and political. It was about social responses to impending environmental disaster. This is clearly a contemporary concern. At the same time, it links us with similar concerns from the past and finding the message in the Mahabharata affirms our similarity to, and our links with, our ancestors.

So, I thought I understood the Mahabharata differently from these other interpretations. Initially, I thought this was better interpretation (I can hear the chorus of people who know me exclaiming, "That’s nothing new, you always think you know better"). In the effort to make my understanding work as a story, I now think it is different. What is new is that I am writing it down.

Like a good work of art, the Mahabharata has proven itself capable of bearing many interpretations. The message was probably not simple to begin with. It is probably not recoverable, even if we could get all the original composers of the epic together to elucidate such a message. I think the message lives in the religions and culture of India. This is merely one more interpretation.

The basic plot for my version of the story is:

The Mahabharata is a story of a looming ecological disaster that was averted by radical policies. The struggle to establish these policies resulted in a fratricidal war that was lost by the conservative party. These policies established certain critical features of Hindu society that are still with us.

The obvious questions are: What was the disaster? What were the policies that averted the disaster? Who benefited from the policies? What features of Hindu society were established by these policies? What features have survived 3500 years? and, why have they survived this long? I will begin with the last question and work my way backwards to explain my story.

Two major features of "modern" Hinduism appear in the Mahabharata and affect the course of the story -- the caste system (varna-ashrama dharma) and the ideal of desire-free action (nishkam karma).

Karna , the unacknowledged first son of Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, is not allowed to participate in a tournament with the royal cousins, because he is apparently the son of a charioteer and hence of a low caste and not a Kshatriya (a warrior). Duryodhana, the eldest Kaurava, crowns Karna king of a fiefdom, but this does not change his caste. However, all the evidence is that the Aryans did not have the elaborate and ritual-ridden caste system of later Hinduism and except for the one episode, Karna’s caste hardly impedes him. But his humiliation by the Pandavas and the friendship of Duryodhana motivates his role in the story. There can be little doubt that in the opinion of the composers of the Mahabharata, the caste system may be unfair and heartbreakingly unjust, but it was still Right. It is so right that even the extent of Karna’s suffering would not justify abandoning it.

A low-caste boy, Ekalavya wishes to become a warrior. He asks Drona, the teacher of the Pandavas and Kauravas, to be his guru, but Drona, a believer in the caste system, refuses. So Ekalavya sets up an image of Drona and practices in front of it. One day the Pandavas encounter Ekalavya and discover that he is a greater archer than Arjuna, and that he claims Drona as his guru. Arjuna reproaches Drona for having violated his promise that Arjuna would be the greatest archer in the world. Drona visits Ekalavya and when Ekalavya honors him as his teacher. Drona demands his left thumb as guru-dakshina, the teacher’s fee. Ekalavya unconditionally cuts off his thumb, crippling his ability to pull a bowstring. The justification for this tragic story, presented like Karna’s story without rationalization of its pointed cruelty and blatant unfairness is, again, that the caste system is Right.

Upto this point in the story, Arjuna and the rest of the Pandavas have been motivated by passion. At the crucial point, Arjuna questions the propriety of acting based on passion and desire. Krishna’s way breaks the connection between motivation and action This is generally interpreted as advocating indifference to the results of actions. The ideal of self-less action has always been part of the Hindu way to liberation and enlightenment.

It is difficult to understand why these two (among others) aspects of the Hindu religion should be so central to the epic story. The caste system with its rigidities did not exist in Aryan/Vedic India. The Vedas are full of prayers requesting goodies of the gods in exchange for sacrifices or other offerings. Neither Karna’s humiliation nor the Bhagavad-Gita episode can be considered interpolations from a later age (though the Bhagavad-Gita itself was almost certainly composed around 0 B.C.E.). These two events establish character and motivations and are essential to the story.

I did not realize any of this when I first read the Mahabharata. During my undergraduate years at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, I read a translation of Homo Hierarchicus by Louis Dumont. For the first time I read a description of the caste system that identified its features with the territorial range, and the economic and political power of members of a caste, rather than the function ostensibly performed by them. In a food chain, the well-fed animal has to be supported by a suitably large range. Similarly, members of a higher caste have to be supported by taxing a bigger section of the population than a lower caste. Also, the limited range and experience of a lower caste person meant that their requirements and desires could be controlled. The Hindu caste system acts to control the quantity, quality, as well as range of consumption of the population.

Shortly after I finished my graduate thesis (and had the time again to read), I happened to come across a book Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris. That book pointed me to another work by Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. These books explained Hindu cow-worship as well as the phenomenon of non-violent religions in ways that matched what I (raised as a Hindu) understood and knew about them. I began to understand that religious prescriptions could be matched in a much more direct way to the growth of population and consequent ecological problems. I realized, for instance, that the harsh deserts of the Middle East, the Thar Desert in India, (and, hyperbolically, maybe even the Sahara) could have been the product of man-made ecological devastation.

In a later book, Cultural Materialism Marvin Harris describes the strategy and methodology of his approach.. Human societies face two problems -- production and reproduction. Marxist analysis focuses on the problems associated with the production (and distribution) of goods and necessities and neglects or ignores problems caused by population growth. Traditional Malthusian analysis focuses on the geometric growth of population and asserts the inability of technology to keep pace. The cultural materialist approach, advocated by Harris, takes both into account to explain the intensification of resource exploitation by societies as they face limits on their growth. Intensification of exploitation frequently leads to resource exhaustion. If a critical resource is depleted, the society will collapse. The collapse can be prevented by the adoption of practices, frequently codified as religious regulations, that manage the intensity of exploitation and the rate of resource depletion. In the hoped-for scheme of things, this buys time for the society to investigate or invent alternative technologies or alternative resource-bases. In practice, the disaster is simply postponed.

Harris points out that the Middle Eastern proscription of pig-meat followed a long period of cultural developments that included pig raising and eating, and is contemporaneous with loss of fertility and possible over-grazing of much of the Middle East. Pig raising visibly contributed to soil destruction, because, pigs can only be eaten and provide no other economic benefit. In the normal course of human economic activity, the deteriorating conditions for pig-raising would contribute to a rise in the price of pig-meat, but that would only attract more pig-raisers, and ultimately, lead to large-scale soil deterioration. For an agricultural society, the best social choice would be to limit or ban pig cultivation -- possibly, with state sanctions at first, but finally with religious sanctions. In a feedback model with a built-in time lag, the development of dietary laws concerning the pig would parallel the deterioration of the land. It is possible that this joint evolution of pig-raising, land deterioration, and pig-banning is the key to understanding the prehistory of agriculture in the Middle East.

Marvin Harris also discusses the role of cow-worship in the economy of the Indian village -- his observations are supported by local observers of the Indian village beginning with Gandhi. The cow is the insurance policy of the Indian villager. The monsoon rains have always been fickle in India -- a few years of good rain is followed by a few years of drought. If a farmer consumes his cows during one famine or drought, he will not survive the next one. If the farmer can save his cows, he will be able to rebuild his wealth and resources during the fat season before the next drought. In a culture that consumes the cow, the way to survive the next drought is to intensify cultivation of existing land and intensify water use. These actions increase the possibility of salinization of land during the drought and can quickly destroy arable land. Cow-worship is the savior of Indian village agriculture.

The development of religious prescriptions in response to resource depleting practices is not quick -- it probably took half a generation if consciously formulated, and longer if not. For the purposes of this story, I have subverted Harris’ theme of a slow and natural development and replaced it with consciously formulated "social policy". I identify four elements in the Mahabharata that are responses to resource-depletion. I make them conscious policy. These are cow-worship as an insurance policy, the caste-system as a method for consumption management, a variety of methods for population control, and the concept of a single empire for the region. The Mahabharata war happens between parties that conflict on the need and application of these policies. That is why it is a Great War, a war to establish the Right, the Noble, and the Good and destroy Evil.

The Thar Desert in India is the legendary home of the Sarasvati -- possibly the river on whose banks Aryan/Hindu culture began in India. The Sarasvati is no more -- satellite photographs can be used to trace a river-bed that might be the mythical river. It goes through the Thar Desert to join the Indus in Sind.

My speculation runs as follows: Around 2000 B.C.E, the Aryan tribes advanced into the valley of the Indus and the Punjab (areas currently in Pakistan). The land was occupied by a matriarchical Dravidian civilization that built great cities on the river bank and dams to control river floods and for irrigation. The Aryans were initially invited for their military expertise but the conflict between their nomadic way of life and the settled agriculturists could not be resolved. The Aryans established their rule by showing their ability to destroy what they could not understand. But as rulers, they needed the cultivators to restore the old system of cultivation. This resulted initially in a synthesis of Aryan military power represented by the Kshatriya with Dravidian technical know-how represented by the now-disarmed Brahmins. Religion in the Dravidian tradition was knowledge encoded in ritual and the Brahmins were willing to continue the same function on behalf of the Aryan rulers. But unlike the ritualistic Dravidian society in which all classes ritually controlled their consumption, the new Aryan rulers did not understand the need for controlled consumption. The result was intensified cultivation. In addition, neglect of appropriate irrigation techniques, and frequent flooding resulting in salination. As Aryan tribes continued to pour in, attracted by the apparent prosperity of their brethren, they were encouraged to move on to the valley of the Sarasvati, This probably happened before 1500 B.C.E.

The Sarasvati valley is the traditional land of the RigVeda. In that era, cattle and land were the measures of prosperity. Cows were eaten and considered food fit for the gods. The lands to the east and south were considered enemy territory and peopled in imagination with fearsome demons. The bed of the Sarasvati is now in the heart of the Indian desert, in lands considered extremely fertile in the RigVeda. Something happened, the land turned to desert, the Sarasvati dried up, and the Aryans moved further east. The move east could not have been easy. The Gangetic plain is more susceptible to flooding, than the Sarasvati probably was. Even though the water-flow is snow-fed and perennial, droughts happen and famines are more frequent and harsher. The heat and dust can be be stifling. The land is harder to till. As described by a host of Indian economists and Marvin Harris, the cow is much more critical to survival. The move from cow-eating to cow-worship must have been difficult and conflict-ridden. But it could have consciously come into being as the migrants tried to figure out how to survive in this new land and forestall a second environmental disaster like that of the Sarasvati.

The Mahabharata is evidence that the change produced internecine wars. The Mahabharata and the stories of the Krishnaavatara can be read as evidence that the migrants were not always welcomed by the previous inhabitants. We can speculate that the Yadavas (Krishna’s tribe) were in the forefront of the migration and had to turn back and go south when they encountered opposition from the Magadhan empire ruled by the demonic Jarasandha. The kingdoms of Hastinapur and Panchala were successfully established in the region north and east of present-day Delhi.

It is possible that there were two migration routes to this area -- one from the northwest used by migrants from the Punjab, and the other from the southwest used by the migrants from the banks of the Sarasvati. This could have lead to the conflict of public policy -- the southerners wanting to ensure that the Sarasvati experience not be repeated and the northerners unwilling to change their practices to deal with a problem they had never encountered. The southerners would also have absorbed practices, possibly like the caste system, that controlled the consumption of food by the poorer sections of the population, including the non-Aryan peoples that they would have fought with and enslaved. In particular, these would not have been allowed to bear arms. The caste system is a system intended to manage the consumption level of the mass of the population in exchange for a guarantee of survival in bad times. The northerners might have found this unacceptable.

The trade-off between consumption now and survival later is a difficult one to accept for both lower and upper castes. If the upper castes show bad faith and do not deliver during bad times, the system will not endure. The lower castes have to accept on faith that they will receive their just due. The Bhagavad-Gita can be read as an attempt to persuade both sides that they should do their "duty", no matter what the immediate fruits.

The alternative to managing consumption is managing population growth. This might have been an alternative acceptable to both the northern and the southern immigrants. In the absence of effective birth-control devices, the best way to manage population is to specify abstinence for both men and women or to control fertility of men and women. The option of abstinence is an old one in Indian thought -- if we believe that Jain myths have a core of truth in them, abstinence was advocated by a heterodox community even in Vedic times. Inexplicably, I suppose, abstinence has a tendency to fail.

There are many ways to control fertility -- abortion, infanticide, polyandry, and finally, female infanticide are the traditional options. Each of these options has its problems. This is the third element of the conflict that I discover in the Mahabharata. Of these, only female infanticide can be said to have survived in Indian practice, though frowned on legally and theoretically.

The first three elements are not enough to survive the occasional extended Indian drought. The story of Joseph in the Bible highlights the need for management to survive long periods of drought. In India, an extended drought occurs every other generation. The Dravidians had developed mechanisms to deal with this. The migrating Aryans discovered the need to develop chiefdoms that acted to accumulate royal stores that were distributed to the population during such a major famine.

Building dams and extended irrigation systems is not a solution in the context of the Indo-Gangetic plain. When there is no drought, these are not needed, and they silt up very quickly. When there is a drought it is usually too late to do anything about it. In any case, an empire is needed to sustain such an effort. Unfortunately, the Indo-Gangetic plain is apparently not conducive to the long-term existence of empires. Till the Mughals in the 16 century, few indigenous empires survived more than a generation or two. But the Mahabharata extols the concept of the empire built in Aryavarta (i.e., primarily the region in which the Mahabharata took place). In addition, Hindu scriptures specify that only Aryavarta is suitable for empire-building -- expanding the empire beyond this base was considered unnecessary. It is easy to assume that emperors whose interests went beyond this region tended to neglect maintaining the dams, the irrigation systems, and other flood-control systems. A successful indigenous empire had to be this large and no larger and the scriptures valiantly try to restrain the would-be emperor.

Whatever one might think of the result, the post-Mahabharata Aryans were extremely successful. The Vedic religion, modified by indigenous practices, became the religion of Northern India. The caste system as well as the Bhagavad-Gita’s teaching of unselfish action acted to manage the consumption of the population. The guarantees to the population of support during lean times appear to have been met. By the time of the Maurya empire (in 300 B.C.E.), India was estimated to have a third of the world’s population (about 100 to 150 million) and growing fast.

The system continued to be successful in that India’s population grew very slowly from 300 BCE to 1500 CE. At the same time, the population spread out slowly across the entire sub-continent and even expanded across the southern seas to Sri Vijaya (Indonesia) and Khamboja (Cambodia and Indo-china). The policy was a failure in that the vast majority of the population lived increasingly impoverished lives while their rulers became vassals to foreign empires and the wealth of the nation was increasingly drained off to the North and thence to the Northwestern empires of the Bactrian Greeks, the Shakas, the Persians and then the Arabs. Under the Mughal emperors, the drain was slowed -- consequently, the population grew faster. Also, the religion of the rulers was slowly replacing Hinduism in the north. Then the British came -- new technologies for intensified exploitation of natural resources, new medical technologies, and the identification of new resources for exploitation resulted in a population boom that continues to this day. The British continued a systematic drain of the nation’s wealth -- as a result, the population remained impoverished. In addition the British controlled the seaward routes and skimmed the profits from the Indochina and African trade thus finally putting a stop to profitable expansion. Under the British, Indian expansion abroad continued via indentured labor and not through profit-making merchant-princes. And finally the caste system was a failure since the rulers no longer depended on the support of the population for their power. The ruled did not get the expected benefit from the system of consumption management. This acted to reinforce the other elements of the package, namely, cow-worship and the village-focus of Indian culture and civilization.

Thus Hinduism and Hindu culture survived. From the standpoint of longevity, it has been extraordinarily successful. And as long as it could stay a relatively closed system it worked. But in a deep sense, it failed. The regulatory systems it established became tools to keep most of the population impoverished. The alienation between the rulers and the ruled meant that change in the rulers made little difference to the ruled. As time went by, the proportion of the population that was "outside" the formal four-part caste system increased -- in some parts of India, upto half the population was not part of the support system.

Other responses are possible in the face of ecological disaster. Migration is one that is frequently attempted. In the case of ancient India, it was probably not feasible. But in medieval times and in modern times, this has been happening. The regulatory approach might have worked if the Northwest passes of the Hindukush could have been blocked and invaders kept out. Parts of India that remained free were generally prosperous, even when their rulers were not Hindu.

The Mahabharata is a document that justifies and institutionalizes the practices of "modern" Hinduism. This retelling is an attempt to justify an ecological interpretation for the Mahabharata.