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● The correspondences may almost seem coincidental.

● Labonya's love for Arjun remains unreciprocated . She is molested by Dibya before his
own men . One can draw a parallel with Draupadi in the epic .
● In the novel , nishi thakurda is blinded by the colonial police because of his association
with the nationalist. In a way he becomes dhritarashtra .
● Labonya's father is Biswanath . The name means lord of the world. There are obvious
parallels of the struggle over land.
● At the same time , there are subtle parallels also. For example , the novel's five homes in
place of the pandavas' requested five villages or say the faithful dog that follows
Somnath .
● Arjun has been named after the invincible archer in the epic mahabharata but unlike his
namesake in the epic, our arjun is a much lesser man . He is definitely not a prince
whose kingdom has been usurped. He is an extremely ordinary young man who is facing
certain consequences.
● He has been living in some circumstances which have been imposed on him by the
political conditions.
● Arjun's world is a very small one. It is a shrunken world and in order to survive , he must
accommodate himself to scarcity and discontent in a volatile and vicious circumstance
● This whole idea of the contrast between the hero of the epic and the hero of the novel
gets dramatized when Arjun migrates to India and expresses his ecstasy when he
receives some rice, few potatoes and eggplants as alms. Very unlike to what happens to
the epic hero.
● He returns to his mother and he says 'look what i brought for you today'. It almost
echoes yudhisthira's words to kunti once the victorious pandavas returned with draupadi
whom arjuna had won at the swayamvara ceremony.
● The irony lies in the distance between the world of the epic and the world of the 20th
century novel . The distance is compassed by the divide between the two objects of
desire. In the epic it is draupadi and in the novel , it is food.
● when arjuna plays with darts which is a parallel to the epic hero's feats of arch , there is
an irony . It reminds the readers of the frivolity of the present.
● The last thing that makes the distance between the epic and the novel very obvious is
the atrophy of the world around which is marked by the absence of the mythic
communion between the humans and the celestials of the Mahabharata .
● In the novel , the gods do not exist and even if they existed , they had departed, so that
there is no question of divine assistance. Therefore no help reaches Labonya when
dibyo molests her.
● Neither do we find the presence of the omniscient counsel which was available to the
epic hero when Arjun in the novel is vacillating before he engages in a fight with kewal
singh's men.
● However, the romantic wistfulness of the time when celestial beings and men lived
together is redoubled in the novel. It is presented by Gangopadhyay portrayal of post
partition indian modernity and not of modernity per se.
● We are able to decode and decipher the kind of connections which are present or not
present between the novel and the epic. But if we focus solely on the characters, they
remain locked in some place , unaware of the presence of the epic past,
● Therefore , their echoing of the epic utterances in their displaced circumstances seems
to be extremely ironic. The characters in the novel live a straightforward scripted form of
life.
● They not only do not know their association with the metaphysical ground of the script
because of their setting , they are also doomed to wander the narrative landscape
repeating incomprehensible fragments of the past. Only once in the story is the
character's lack of awareness broken . This is revealed when we find sukla laughing at
arjun's target at the bird's eyes and says that it reminds her of something else. But she
refrains from any kind of elaboration.
● Gangopadhyay , through his selection of the mahabharata as the subjects , puts
together the long past of the Indian subcontinent which is now a split maha-bharata.
● There is a dramatic irony here when most of the characters remain incognizant of the
past. Only by coming to terms with the past by understanding the movement of the past
and their place in it , can they comprehend their present circumstances.
● Until they are unable to connect their position in the past and in the present , such an
entry onto the new post colonial society would not take place
● But in the novel the characters simply echoes the past which means that they have not
learnt much from the past. The past for them remains unmastered. They keep on
rehearsing it over and over again , thereby enacting a kind of repetition compulsion.
● The characters in the novel cannot become agents in the history , they are almost like
puppets ,or marionetes who are unaware of who is pulling the strings for them and the
fact that they are history's puppets.
● The text becomes a series of unconscious compulsions. The kind of reference that we
draw from the mahabharata really do not add up to except for a set of random allusions.
● That is why the writer's repeat performance of the mahabharata is devoid of the epic's
splendour. Therefore the narrative requires a more prosaic democratic aesthetic .
● An instance of such an aesthetic is perhaps present in the relationship between arjun
and shukla. Because in the mahabharata arjuna could successfully aspire to krishna's
sister subhadra as both were from royal families. Whereas in the novel , Arjun and Sukla
reach out to one another across a wide class divide.
● Arjun's predicament in the face of his possible confrontation with dibyo and others
expresses a deeper concern for human suffering.
● Unlike Arjuna in the epic encountering his kins at kurukshetra , our protagonist has no
blood ties with his adversaries and they represent a larger family of the oppressed that
Arjun has entered into.
● It is not in the name of futility of human action that Arjun is urged to fight . It is rather the
sight of blood on his older brother's pet dog that instigates him into fighting to change the
oppressive conditions of his fellow migrants' lives.
● Because of the absence of the gods and the divine guidance, Arjun in the novel gave
some scope of genuine ethical agency .
● Despite the mythic allusions in the novel , the real setting and subject of
Gangopadhyay's arjun is none other than the contradictions of modernity.
● At one level it can be read as a signal for the impossibility of reproducing the epic form in
the modern age.
● It is a partition which has fundamentally altered the very world of the text. Therefore , the
novel's relationship to the Mahabharata is not a parody.
● Here we reiterate lukacs distinction between epic and novel form . He clearly pointed out
that the two genres differ from one another not by their authors' fundamental intentions
but by the historico philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted.