Embedded Stories and the Use of Ambiguity in Ancient Indian Narratives: Selfshadowing in the Anugītā

In the evolution of Indian philosophy, knowing one's self is a vital concern. Even more fundamental is avoiding mistaking oneself for something one is not. In the Indian tradition, one must not be deceived about the nature of oneself. To be confused in such a fashion is a "kind of ontological illness, and thus something that might be overcome only with the utmost arduous effort and disciplined attention" (Deutsch, "Self-Deception" 323–4). At the core of this ontological malady is a person who identifies his self "with the nonself" (318). Removing the causes of such a harmful misidentification or self-deception is the ultimate goal of much Indian philosophical work. Since a significant portion of these didactic texts take the form of narratives and myths (Oliver 45–60; Babbili 128–58), we must account for how narratives can play a role in removing the obstacles to self-knowledge, enlightenment, and true freedom.

One interesting class of Indian narrative is that of the "gītā" or devotional texts. Some of these come from larger narrative contexts, yet all of them can be encountered in India and the west as stand-alone texts participating in the religious-philosophical discourse of the Indian tradition. While some work on Indian thought has focused on gītā texts and the means by which they aim for self-knowledge and enlightenment (e.g., Stroud, "Multivalent Narratives" 369–93, and "Narrative as Argument" 42–71), an interesting case of related gītās has gone unexamined. Many have no doubt heard of the well-known episode from the epic Mahābhārata, the Bhagavad Gītā. This dialogic narrative portrays Krishna as explicating the way to enlightenment for Arjuna and, by extension, for the text's readers or hearers. Another, lesser-known part of the Mahābhārata is the Anugītā, a text that identifies itself as a retelling of the earlier episode known as the Bhagavad Gītā. The Anugītā is notable because it differs in form from the text it purports to retell. Instead of being a straightforward conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, the message of the Anugītā is buried in a series of narrators telling stories about other narrators in answer to different interlocutors. The divine Krishna shapes this process of storytelling in his response to Arjuna, but his controlling rhetorical influence quickly gets buried by new narrators creating new stories with their own narrating characters. Nevertheless, this unusual text represents itself as a retelling of the Bhagavad Gītā's central lessons on self and enlightened action. Scholars have endeavored to understand its content in light of the larger Mahābhārata story, but this enigmatic text always seems to resist straightforward readings.¹ Instead, we propose to examine the form of the Anugītā as a key to explaining the text's rhetorical functioning, especially when placed beside the work it purports to echo. The Anugītā provides an excellent opportunity to ascertain the difference that overt and perplexing narrative structure makes in the practice of ancient Indian rhetoric.

To understand why the Anugītā relies on a complex strategy of embedded or framed narratives—dialogic questions being answered by stories involving the retelling of other stories (Nelles 1–3)—we engage Gary Saul Morson's structuralist theory of narrative and his concept of sideshadowing.² Morson's theory offers an intriguing and understudied structural approach to understanding narrative's effects on an auditor: it focuses on the reader's experience of the structure of an experienced narrative, and it provides a conceptual vocabulary to account for narratively induced value and belief change. Thus, it is aptly centered on the experiential issues of comprehension and persuasion. More than this, Morson also examines themes such as time, causation, and freedom, paralleling vital concerns in ancient Indian narratives such as the Mahābhārata (Hudson 146–177). Using this framework for narrative as a starting point, we argue that the complex narrative frames in the Anugītā function in a unique way...