Distorting Reality in Ancient India: Hyperbole and Imaginative Transrealism

Hyperbole may be the most visible variation of immoderacy in ancient Indian literature, not infrequently developing into adynata. The West, conditioned as it is by mimetism in art, finds this feature one of the major obstacles in its reception of that literature. However, a realistic approach, not just to ancient Indian literature, but its containing culture in general, takes us only to a miscomprehension of a different way to treat reality. Distortion of characters, of plot, of the external, supposedly real, world, as well as of other coordinates of poetry remains loyal, in fact, to a higher reality, a reality that is imaginative and transreal. The article starts from various examples in the Indian epics, mostly the Mahābhārata, not just because this is the largest literary work of India, but also because it is a work claiming to be all-encompassing. In order to illustrate the far-reaching potential of the imaginative, instead of realistic, imperative in ancient India, examples are also included from non-literary texts, technical and legal, in which absence of realism becomes, by western standards, especially worrying.