We've Moved!
Visit SDSU’s new digital collections website at https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu
Description
Kunti's story had to be told. By me. This I realized when reading translations of the Mahabharata with the idea of preparing a thesis on the life of Arjuna, one of the five brothers whose story is told in that magnificent Hindu epic. Like some female latter-day Cortez (or, if you must have it, Balboa), I discovered the mother of the five heroes, the enigmatic and adorable Woman whose person and personality were so impressive that I can only explain the world's ignorance of her story as the result of a determined, millenia-long hushing-up policy on the part of the patriarchal Establishment. The problem was not only to present Kunti to the public as she truly was, but to construct from the miserly trickles of information allowed to dribble out about her, a logical interpretation of her actions. For even when she appeared to act with the most maddening irrelevance, or utter the most ridiculous non sequiturs, Kunti managed to obtain, in some mysterious way, the exact action or reaction she desired from her companions. To borrow a turn of phrase from an elder statesman-- some irrelevance! The problem was also to show Kunti and her contemporaries in such a manner that they would come alive for a modern reader; to be true to Hindu ways of thought and action while making those thoughts and actions understandable to a people with very different mores and attitudes. The problem was complicated by the author's decision to tell Kunti's story as a Return to the Beginning, to the Source of Being, while at the same time relating the forward movement of her activities in time. The novel opens at a crucial moment in her life, when she has decided to seek instruction from the sage Vyasa. Using this decision-moment as a fulcrum, we observe Kunti traveling back into her own past, while moving forward with her daily activities; the whole exercise, and the novel, ending when these two lines--memory and experience--meet at one climactic point in space-time, completing a full circle; proving human life to be an illusion, yet creating, paradoxically, in the form which the novel has taken, an ansated cross, symbol of the eternity of Life. Along the way we find magic, philosophy, superstition; gods, kings, and commoners; cold swords and warm hearts, and an undeniable space ship. (Lest the cry of science fiction be raised, let it be stated that the description of the Ship of Ishtar has been meticulously copied from translations of Chaldean tablets.) If there seems to be a cavalier mingling of more than one philosophical system, pantheon, and historical age, this too is part of maya, life as illusion. My own advice to the reader is that he do as Kunti did--just enjoy it.
