VIDULA

This poem is based on a passage comprising four chapters (Adhyayas) in the Udyog-parva of the Mahabharata. It is not a close translation but a free poetic paraphrase of the subject-matter; it follows closely the sequence of the thoughts with occasional rearrangements, translates freely in parts, in others makes some departures or adds, develops and amplifies to bring out fully the underlying spirit and idea. The style of the original is terse, brief, packed and allusive, sometimes knotted into a pregnant obscurity by the drastic economy of word and phrase. It would have been impossible to pre­serve effectively in English such a style; a looser fullness of expression has been preferred sacrificing the letter to the spirit. The text of a Calcutta edition has been followed throughout. The whole passage with its envoi or self-laudatory close reads like an independent poem dovetailed into the vast epic.

 THE MOTHER TO HER SON* 

There are few more interesting passages in the Mahabharata than the conversation of Vidula with her son. It comes into the main poem as’ an exhortation from Kunti to Yudhisthir to give up the weak spirit of sub­mission, moderation, prudence, and fight like a true warrior and Kshatriya for right and justice and his own. But the poem bears internal evidence of having been written by a patriotic poet to stir his countrymen to revolt against the yoke of the foreigner. Sanjay, prince and leader of an Aryan people, has been defeated by the king of Sindhu and his Kingdom is ~m the possession of the invader. The fact of the king of Sindhu or the country wound the Indus being named as the invader shows that the poet must have kid in his mind one of the aggressive foreign powers, whether Persia, Graeco-Bactria, Parthia or the Scythians, which took possession one after the other of these regions and made them the base for inroads upon the North-West, The poet seeks to fire the spirit of the conquered and subject people and impel them to throw off the hated subjection. He personifies in Vidula the spirit of the motherland speaking to her degenerate son and striving to awaken in him the inherited Aryan manhood and the Kshatriya’s preference of death to servitude.

• When the poem was first published in Bande Mataram in 19O7 it was called The Mother to Her Son and prefixed with this note. 

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