Dear Artur,

I see several problems with your argument.

>> quite unknown to the earlier strata of the epic. 

How are you identifying the “earlier strata” of the epic? If you argue, the earlier strata are the ones that do not report polyandrous marriage, the argument is circular.

>>To my mind – a bit of cultural politics, at work. Surrounding inclusions of new economically important tribal territories in the realm of the 'Aryas'.

Do you have evidence for thinking polyandry is non-Aryan? German Indologists claimed the Pāṇḍavas were non-Aryan (see The Nay Science, 123); Fitzgerald rehashes this theory (ibid., 151). But for the argument to work, the Pāṇḍavas must be originally non-Aryan, whereas, for the attempted cultural assimilation to hold, they must be Aryans in the MBh, but the reason for positing a discrepancy between the text and “historical” reality is their polyandry, which is non-Aryan, but this was the very point in contention.... I am sure you appreciate the circularity. 

>>The need to show to its fresh members that they do belong – despite some of their outlandish customs. 

If the point was to suggest “that they do belong,” surely it is better to retain them in the text rather than “whitefacing” them. Indeed, if the point was to show that, though non-Aryan, on consideration polyandry is acceptable, there was no need to make the Pāṇḍavas “Aryas.” I think the problem arises from your vacillation between the MBh’s use of the term and a racial sense (which you wrongly identify with the “historical” meaning), and the circumstance that you use the former as evidence for the latter. 

>>The need to demonstrate that we, the 'Aryas', also share them - the example of one of them, of polyandrous union, is certainly to be found in our great epic. And, considering the status of its participants, it is given a properly high prestige. 

But what epic? In what text was this change made? Presumably, it was made in the exemplar or exemplars destined for dissemination in “tribal territories,” since the claim was for their appeasement. How, then, do you explain its occurrence in the manuscripts found today? Do you suppose that the exemplars in the Aryan territories ceased to be copied and control of the tradition passed to “tribal territories”? 

>>is certainly to be found in our great epic. 

Non-Aryan tribes could hardly know of the MBh as “our great epic,” since this was their first encounter with it. (If it was not, the argument doesn’t work, since they then know a version exists without polyandry.) The argument thus requires them both to know and not know of the MBh. Perhaps you mean the MBh’s fame preceded it such that the tribes could appreciate the favor done them… But they could only appreciate the favor done them if they knew that polyandry was not normally accepted among “Aryans.” The argument is self-defeating.

Moreover, scholars have worked the argument both ways—certain sexual or social practices were commonplace among the “Aryans”; it is not the practice that was inserted into the text but its posterior justification. The only criterion appears to be what the scholar wishes to attribute (or not see attributed) to his “Aryans”—constructed, of course, entirely from his fantasy self-image. Winternitz’s comment is apt: “Mr. Dahlmann says that the custom is ‘un-Aryan’ (p. 90). But who can tell whether the Pāṇḍavas were Aryans or non-Aryans? Besides, what right have we to describe everything we do not like as ‘un-Aryan’?” (“Notes on the Mahābhārata,” 756). I recommend revisiting his article and also The Nay Science, chapters 1–2. 

Three final points: (1) You appear to be working on a model of donor-donee cultures, which has its origins in Friedrich Schlegel’s work, and was clearly not just racial but racist in intent. Vast amounts of time and ingenuity have been expended on figuring out what proportion of Indian culture can be attributed to “Aryan” influence (Oldenberg, Frauwallner, etc.). Perhaps we should move beyond it. (2) Cultural interactions are more complex than our models assume. Even in the most recent “Aryan” aggression (for which we also happen to have reliable historical data), the situation was more complex, as this article explains: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/poland-holocaust-death-camps/552455/. (3) Ever since Christian Lassen, it has been customary for Indologists to identify racial explanations with the “real,” “historical” meaning of the text. In truth, these pseudohistorical explanations clarify nothing. They only attest to our penchant for privileging racial explanations over other kinds of explanation (literary, aesthetic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, etc.). Here also, we should ask why we think we have understood a text when we have converted it from one set of symbols (its own) into another (our own). We should ask why race is the fiction that in our time we grant immediate reality such that when we have identified MBh characters with tribes or communities, we think we know what really happened or the real underlying event that was blown up into “mythic” proportions. (From this also arises the notion that Indians lack a historical sense; what we really mean is that they don’t possess history in our specific sense of a racial narrative.) This also applies to Indian scholars such as Irawati Karve, for whom the “myth” of the burning of the Khāṇḍava Forest is “really” about Aryan invasion and land-clearing. Incidentally, Irawati Karve received her PhD under the infamous Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik so these connections of how racial discourse entered South Asian studies can be quite easily traced. 

Regards,

Joydeep