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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Epic Fictions
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| The Mahabharata offers a kaleidoscopic world of possibilities to those looking to retell its stories |
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COURTESY RANDOM HOUSE INDIA |
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| Maggi-Lidchi Grassi’s book is described as a “reinterpretation
of Vyasa’s epic poem from Arjuna’s point of view”, but Arjuna
isn’t the book’s only narrator.
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| I |
MADE MY FIRST STAB at literary censorship at an early age. I was barely 10 when I took it upon myself to read out C Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata to my mother. For days on end, as she did her housework, I followed her about with the book in my hand, omitting not a sentence—with one exception: I would bowdlerise any passages
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that presented my personal hero, Karna, in an unfavourable light. Thus, the command to disrobe the Pandavas and Draupadi was transferred from his mouth to Duryodhana’s. The Kauravas’ disastrous expedition to the forest to mock their exiled cousins—an adventure stirred up by Karna—found no mention in my selective retelling. The killing of Abhimanyu, in which Karna had a hand, was toned down.
By that age I had devoured at least three more Mahabharata retellings (those by RK Narayan, P Lal and William Buck) along with uncounted Amar Chitra Katha comics. Much of my interest was centred on Karna’s unhappy life. This is not an uncommon reaction among young Mahabharata readers who are introverted by nature and whose literary heroes tend to be loners and outsiders: the Pandavas’ illegitimate elder brother is one of ancient literature’s major tragic figures, and some of the most stirring episodes in the final third of the narrative are built around him. But I may have taken this hero worship too far. Perhaps I had subconsciously linked Karna with the social outcasts played by another childhood idol, Amitabh Bachchan, in films like Deewaar and Kaala Patthar.
I felt a sense of vindication, even pride, while reading passages that stressed Karna’s virtues—such as an introduction to Shanta Rameshwar Rao’s retelling, which proclaimed that he could be viewed as the “real hero” of the epic. Later, I would revel in Kamala Subramaniam’s gentle, humanist retelling (still a personal favourite) that emphasised the nobler qualities not just of Karna—or Radheya, as she refers to him throughout—but of most figures in the epic (Subramaniam even cast Duryodhana as a Shakespearean hero doomed by a single fatal flaw). When BR Chopra’s TV version premiered in late 1988, I spent much time fuming about the show’s simplifications to anyone who would listen. Sharing my seat on the school bus was a friend who disapproved of Karna (because he was on the side of the bad guys); our Monday-morning discussions about the previous day’s episode were frequently heated.
Even as a child I resisted grandparental attempts to paint the story as a simple good-versus-evil treatise. But it took a few more years—and a deeper engagement with the Mahabharata as well as scholarly literature on it—to appreciate that this epic is bigger than the sum of its parts. Karna’s struggles are stirring, no doubt; but so too—if perhaps less dramatically—are the predicaments of other characters like Arjuna and Drona, Gandhari and Dhritarashtra, Kunti and Vidura.
For the Mahabharata junkie, one of the best ways of appreciating the epic’s complexities is to read “perspective retellings”—centred on the lives and experiences of specific characters. Such works (whether narrated in the first or the third person) affix us to the consciousness of a single protagonist and can be very effective when the reader is already familiar with the story told in the conventional way. It’s possible, then, for retellings to open new doors—allowing us to grasp a range of motivations and compulsions.
Versions of the Mahabharata told from the perspective of individual characters can be traced back nearly 2,000 years, when the legendary playwright Bhasa portrayed Duryodhana as a generous prince, mindful of family honour, in Urubhanga. In more recent times, dozens of notable books have appeared in all the major Indian languages (though unfortunately for the English-language reader, few have been translated well). Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay (Marathi) is a powerful account of Karna’s tribulations, while Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni (Oriya) and PK Balakrishnan’s Ini Njan Urangatte (“And Now Let me Sleep”; Malayalam) leave the stage to the Pandava queen Draupadi. Even non-Indian writers who might possess only a passing acquaintance with Hindu mythology have been tempted by the epic’s possibilities, often with amusing results—a couple of decades ago, an American writer named Elaine Aron produced a florid work titled Samraj, which emphasised the roles of Yudhisthira and Draupadi as emperor and empress of a new world (along with much eyebrow-raising sexual imagery involving plough-and-furrow metaphors, and even a small part for a slave-girl imported from Egypt!).
For me, the value of a really good perspective retelling was demonstrated by Prem Panicker’s ‘Bhimsen’—an excellent transcreation in English of MT Vasudevan Nair’s Malayalam Randaamoozham, written in the voice of the second Pandava, Bhima. In mainstream renderings Bhima is frequently depicted as a gluttonous oaf or a comic foil, but Nair turned him into a sensitive, thoughtful figure—a large-hearted and brutally frank man with a minor complex about being in the shadow of his brothers Yudhisthira and Arjuna.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Reema Sahay Rastogi
3 November 2011
11:22 AM
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Nice article, and more importantly, I'm thrilled at discovering more versions of the epic. Surprisingly, I have not read the first three you mentioned by Narayan, William Buck, P. Lal. I have / read the rest of the interpretations in English. I am extremely keen on reading Duryodhan's version. As far as I know, there's one by Kaka Vidhate but not available in English or even Hindi. Yajnaseni is my personal favourite.
I'm a Mahabharata junkie too, though I explored it quite recently. I have around 15 different versions.
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Shyam
26 August 2011
03:09 PM
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The last sentene is telling for whatever little I have read of Vyasa's epic, I found it to be written from his perspective. Then again in my perspective, only Bheeshma, Vidura & Bheema come somewhat close to being as interesting as Karna.....neither Krishna nor Arjuna..Nice article
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Kaber
3 August 2011
03:36 PM
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I totally feel what you feel for Karna too.
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