Barbarik: The Muse of the Subaltern and the Marginal to the Mahābhārata

Abstract

A very different Barbarik, grandson of Bhima and possessor of three unfailing shafts, appears in the Mahābhārata. He does not appear in Vyāsa’s Critical Edition, but he is very much alive in the Skanda Purāṇa, local lore, and the living cult of Khatu Shyam Ji. The article reads Barbarik as a subaltern figure whose marginal status exposes the politics of caste, dynasty, and authority in the Sanskrit epic tradition. In short, the re-socialising of epic war could be morally commendable. But at the same time, it was dharma yuddha because Sañjaya had vowed to give a helping hand to the weaker party; he had possessed undaunted fighting prowess and undertook self-sacrifice before the Kurukṣetra war.

Barbarik’s ‘absence’ in the canonical Mahābhārata, then, is not a historical forgetfulness but a form of structural silence, and this paper approaches it by drawing on insights from subaltern studies and cultural memory. “The naive fact that he is referred to in the religion of the masses shows that the voice of those silenced by literate culture continues to sound in ethical consciousness, whether or not it finds a home among the powerful layer.”