Time Travel Mythology: Mahabharata

The mythology of time travel is extensive and far reaching. While the idea of an actual "time machine" wasn't conceived until the late 1800's, you can find legends and stories that features a hero traveling to the past or future in a magical, fantastical way. I thought I would share with you one of those stories that we’ll be touching upon in the documentary.

Mahabharata, 400BC

One of the very first time travel stories that have been recorded in history appears in the Hindu epic, Mahabharata– speculated to be written as early as 400BC. The story follows a king, his daughter, and their search for a perfect suitor.

Revati was the only daughter of King Kakudmi, a powerful monarch who ruled Kusasthali, a prosperous and advanced kingdom under the sea. Thinking no one could prove to be good enough to marry his beautiful daughter, Kakudmi took Revati with him to Brahmaloka, the home of Brahma, to ask the god's advice about finding a suitable husband for her.

Brahma

Brahma was listening to a musical performance when they arrived, and so they waited patiently until the performance was finished. Finally, King Kakudmi humbly bowed and made his request:

“O Brahmâ! To whom shall I betroth this daughter? I have come to you to ask on this point I have searched for many princes and seen also a good many of them and none of them is to my liking and so my mind is not at rest.”

Brahma laughed at the foolishness of the King.

“O King! The princes that you thought would become the bridegroom of your daughter, all died; their sons and grandsons and their friends even have all passed away.”

Different Planes of Existence

Time, Brahma goes on to explain, runs differently on different planes of existence. During the time they had waited in Brahmaloka to see him, 27 chatur-yugas, had passed on Earth. Everything that Kakudmi had and owned, his friends and family, his sons and wife, his armies and treasures, had vanished with the time that had passed. The King and his daughter were overcome with astonishment and grief for everything they had lost, but Brahma comforted them, and recommended a worthy husband currently on earth: Balarama, the twin brother of Krishna.

Balarama and his Wife Revati

What is really interesting though, is how similar their view of time was 2500 years ago to how physicists and astronomers conceptualize space-time today. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is relative to the observer’s frame of reference- it depends on the observer’s motion and strength of gravity. For instance, one could argue that time here on earth runs slower than in space because gravity slows the passage of time.


Hindu philosophy was familiar with the concept that time is relative and many passages on the Vedic scriptures continuously point out that the cosmic time of the gods is different than the time on earth.

One Chatur-Yuga is equivalent to 4,320,000 human years.

Were King Kakudmi and his daughter two unwitting time travelers? What they thought were just minutes in front god Brahma, millennia had taken place at home. When they came back, they did so to a vastly different place.

Today, we so often think of time as an arrow moving in one direction, with a beginning, middle and end. But I think it is interesting to look at different cultures and how they view time. Their perceptions help us look at time, and the idea of time travel, a little bit differently. 

Why Make This Documentary?

It’s been a couple of years working on this documentary, and almost always the question I get from my interviewees, friends, or anyone I talk to about the film is “So…why are you making a documentary about time travel?”

Calvin and Hobbes

I guess it goes all the way back to when I was a kid. Being a child of the 90’s, some of my favorite books—Harry Potter, A Wrinkle in Time—featured trips through history. I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes, and my favorite parts were when Calvin and Hobbes got into their cardboard box time machine to visit dinosaurs.

La Jetée (Chris Marker 1962)

But I didn’t really become absorbed with the idea of time travel until, halfway through film school, I saw what would become my favorite film of all time. La Jetée (1962) is a 30 minute featurette directed by Chris Marker. Comprised of a series of black and white stills with narration, it tells a post apocalyptic story of a man being sent to different eras in order to rescue the present, and an image engrained in his mind, a memory when he was a child, that haunts him.

Time travel was something that was a fun, adventurous thing in books and movies, but Chris Marker’s version brought up ideas that were just mind blowing to me- bringing up ideas of time, memory and mortality in beautiful, stark imagery- and I was drawn to the whole idea of time and time travel.

Doing a documentary on time travel was the perfect excuse to jump wholeheartedly into a topic.

Originally, I wanted this film to pit the physicists studying time travel—the “realists”—against the “fanatics” who thought time travel was possible. My main question was: who was right? But then I realized a couple things.

• Documentaries exploring whether time travel is possible are already out there, like Stephen Hawking’s Universe, or Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. 

• There are a lot—and I mean a lot—of time travel conspiracies [I refer to this academic paper on the subject: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7128]. And I didn’t want this film to be about conspiracies either.

What really inspired me when I was researching time travel was how far back the idea of time travel has spanned, and what that meant: Eons before H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, there were stories about time travel, although they don’t appear like the stories we see today, spanning across all cultures and myths. Humans are fascinated with time travel and it’s not just limited to a genre in fiction.

Urashima Taro

Mahabharata

A lot of people also ask if this is going to be a “nerdy documentary” about Star Trek and Back to the Future…to which the answer is yes, and no. I’m a nerd, for sure—but since time travel can be found everywhere from the Bible to video games to Afrofuturist literature, my nerd-dom is pretty wide-ranging at this point.

If you haven’t yet, check out the trailer for A Brief History of Time Travel, and I hope you can join me as I blog about my experiences making this film! 

Stephen Hawking threw a time traveler party in his TV Series to prove a point that there are no time travelers out there, but it was still cool!