There came a day, as the times grew dark, when it became evident that the Four Vedas did not exhaust every form of knowledge. The hymns and ritual gestures went on, self-sufficient in their meaning. But, in the space between one ritual act and another, time was penetrated by the act of someone telling a story. Sitting in the ritual enclosure, people listened. For months and months, while the sacrificial horse wandered freely around, the king listened to stories. Then the horse was led back to him so that it could be killed, so that its lifeless body might lie a night with its hooves intertwined between the naked legs of the mahiṣī, the first queen. In the beginning, stories were no more than appendices to knowledge, but gradually the time given over to then grew in the gaps in that knowledge like grass between the bricks of the altar of fire, expanded and multiplied in stories that generated more stories, until they covered the whole construction of knowledge in which they had made their first furtive appearance as no more than an intermezzo. Thus literature began. Literature is what grows in the intervals of the sacrifice. First a grass, then a creeper that slips into the joints between the bricks and breaks them from within.
And there came another day when the bard Ugraśravas took advantage of a break in a twelve-year sacrifice celebrated in the Forest of Naimiṣa to begin the story of the war between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, a story he had heard Vaiśampāyana tell during a break in the sacrifice of the snakes celebrated by King Janamejaya, great-grandson of Arjuna and last descendant of the Pāṇḍavas, in the place later to be known as Taxila. And Vaiśampāyana had heard the story from Vyāsa, who had had an overall vision of the tale and was also involved in it himself, being grandfather to both the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas and likewise their counselor. Thus was the Mahābhārata told.
In the beginning the Āryas celebrated rites that were also hymns of praise that illuminated those rites. Then at a certain point they found themselves celebrating the same rites, but with their attention now concentrated on the intervals between the various phases of the rites, during which long stories of kings and warriors were told, stories in which the very rites that they were now celebrating played a part. The ancient hymns of praise were brought together in the Ṛg Veda, which is the knowledge of “praise,” ṛc. The stories told in the intervals within the rites made up the Mahābhārata, the longest epos the world has ever known. As to how and why they passed from the one form to another, never a word was said. But though dates slither back and forth across a range of hundreds and hundreds of years, one can safely say that the two forms were separated by at least a thousand years. What happened in that time? Why were the hymns established and settled once and for all? Why did the stories of kings and warriors go on multiplying?
They moved on to the epic, which is the threshold of history, when they recognized that the system of ritual was producing aberrant results. Once it had been ritual that absorbed history: the rājasūya, the ceremony that consecrated the king, was full of hints of ambushes and forays and duels. But now the opposite was true. One began the celebration of a rite, Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya, for example, or, three generations later, Janamejaya’s sacrifice of the snakes (during which Yudhiṣṭhira’s sacrifice was already being recounted), and something escaped one’s grasp: the consequences of the rite became facts now — a crude, poisonous category of events. And facts that were horribly visible. Draupadī abused, the Pāṇḍavas exiled, Arjuna cut down by his own son. Not only was ritual no longer able to contain violence but it multiplied it, like a machine — not of desire now but of disaster. Indeed, might not ritual itself, this faith in the absolute precision and truth of gesture, be the very thing, in the end, that was provoking the worst of evils?
Should they say all this? It would be a wicked notion, like so many others making the rounds of the city streets. Could they show it perhaps? But how does one show something? By having it happen. There is a point at which having something happen and recounting something converge: they both leave an impression on the mind. Telling a story is a way of having things happen at the highest possible speed, that of the mind. What was needed was a story that would bring all this out — that would itself be everything, since ritual deals with everything there is. But stories are always strictly referential, they are stories about one person or a few people in a certain segment of time, in a certain combination of circumstances that could not have occurred previously. So they needed a story that would bring together everything, going back in time and pointing forward in time, and have it run in a single channel, like the water that ran from a stone yoni. It was the story of five brothers in a kingdom of the plain that lies between the Gangā and the Yamunā. Thus Vyāsa, who composed the story (who saw it), and played a part in it himself (after all, those five princes were his grandsons), said from within this story: “Whatever is here, on Law, on Profit, on Pleasure, and on Salvation, that is found elsewhere. But what is not here is nowhere else.” It was the first of those “works that are too complete, works in which everything is expressed,” that from then on were to present themselves from time to time, and imperiously so — right up to Wagner’s Ring and Proust’s Recherche—as somehow unavoidable, and that would quickly arouse not only admiration but also a certain intolerance, because they mean too much, even though, once one has listened to them, every other story “will sound harsh as the crow sounds to one after hearing the cuckoo sing.”