More from the TV Mahabharat - a stylised blooding

Not that I’ve done any research on this, or intend to, but I wonder if episode 248 of the Star Plus Mahabharat – telecast on Friday night – represents a new frontier in the depiction of violence and gore in the history of Indian television. I suspect it does; I was startled by its vividness, even though one knows that the killing of Dushasana is not something that lends itself to refined, non-bloody treatment. In fact, even the YouTube version of the episode (which you can see here) is censored – some shots, including one where blood bursts like a geyser out of the dying man’s chest, have been excised. (This was also the case in earlier episodes involving the killing of Jarasandha and Shishupala.)

I have had a very complex relationship with this TV show over the months (and I intend to write about this at much greater length in the future sometime) – there have been some brilliantly conceived moments, some fine visuals, good performances and even intelligent writing, but there have also been far too many slack, simplification-riddled scenes, as well as internal inconsistencies and terrible pacing (nearly 10 episodes for the game of dice, followed by a hurried four or five episodes to depict the Pandavas's entire 12-year exile). However, I think there was much in this episode that was extremely well done, especially from around the 16-minute mark where Draupadi enters the battlefield and Bheema – who is practically in a trance at this stage, calling out to her in a hollow, robotic voice – begins the macabre ritual of washing her hair with Dushasana’s blood.

If you don’t like gore, you’re thinking: I don’t want to watch this, or even continue reading this. But (speaking as someone who does like gore, so possibly I’m not the best “objective” judge) I don’t think this scene is as viscerally revolting as it might have been. And the reason is this: it is heavily stylised. Everything about it is excessive and Grand Guignol – even the “blood” glistens and gleams, like the pig’s blood in the climactic scene of Brian DePalma’s Carrie – and while one could have seen that as a flaw in the production, in this case I think it perfectly fits the theatrical mood of the scene.

After all, this IS one of the most brilliantly hyper-dramatic passages in the Mahabharata. Apart from its importance as retribution, it is, from Bheema’s point of view, his moment in the sun – it represents a converging of almost every emotion he has experienced with regard to Draupadi, not just since that terrible day in the dice hall 13 years earlier, but also in larger terms: feeling unappreciated, second best, having to know that she feels much more deeply for Arjuna than for him. And here he is now, and here she is, and he alone is to be the agent of her long-desired vengeance, the one who will get to stroke and bind her hair after all these years of denial, while the other husbands and the other protagonists in this drama – even the puppet-master Krishna – are reduced to mute spectators, watching a performance. At the surface level, this is a depiction of a wronged woman being avenged (and the show has often drawn facile and somewhat problematic parallels between Draupadi’s story and the current public discourses about rape and capital punishment in India) – but at a deeper and darker level it is another vindication of the patriarchy, a depiction of a beast-like man asserting control and possession over a woman. And while this serial has hardly ever been radical about such things, I do feel that this subtext slips through in the scene. 

I never thought I’d say this about an Indian television actor (much less someone who was apparently cast in a role because of his physique and his experience as a wrestler), but I think the actor Saurav Gurjar, who plays Bheema, is pitch-perfect here. And the tone of the scene in general is very close to the many stylised depictions of this episode in our traditional dance forms like Kathakali. You can see one of those performances here, in an old episode of Shyam Benegal’s Bharat ek Khoj, starting around the 2.20 minute mark. It used to give me nightmares as a child.

[Earlier posts on the Star Plus Mahabharat: Bride of Frankenstein; Kryptonite Karna; the benevolent patriarchy]

Pop goes the epic: Draupadi in High Heels, Karna’s Wife and other new-age retellings

[Yes, here I go obsessing about you-know-what again, this time for the Indian Quarterly, and with a focus on two new novels with Karna in a starring part. This is a slightly different version of the piece that appeared in the magazine]

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In the glossy new TV version of the Mahabharata, there is a scene where the princess Gandhari blindfolds herself so she can join her soon-to-be-husband Dhritarashtra in the world of the unsighted. This is among the most dramatic early moments in Vyasa's epic, and is usually presented in exalted terms - the princess proclaiming her resolution; the flamboyant, and decisive, binding of the cloth around her eyes - which is why I was intrigued by the new show’s handling of the scene. Much of the shot is filmed as point of view: we see Gandhari holding the blindfold, but then we watch it through her eyes as it comes closer and closer to them, eventually blurring the whole screen. The effect is akin to a handheld-camera horror film, complete with scary music and agitated breathing on the soundtrack. An earlier episode has established that the princess is afraid of the dark and awakens in a cold sweat if the wind blows out the dozens of diyas in her room. What she is now doing to herself feels much more immediate.

One doesn’t have to read too much into this, of course. High production values and reasonably thoughtful script notwithstanding, this Mahabharata, telecast five days a week, is very much aimed at viewers of daily soaps – which means presenting incidents in mundane, homely terms, stretching scenes out endlessly, and setting up episode-closing cliffhangers. The blindfold scene is a set-up for the next, hyper-dramatic sequence where Gandhari enters the Kuru sabha for her wedding, and viewers – along with the other characters in the story – get to see her with her eyes covered for the first time.

But the scene works on another level too, by showing a majestic act in human terms. Rather than a self-assured princess reaching for the Grand Gesture with her thoughts on posterity, this is a scared, impetuous girl who may have made a decision without realising its implications (and of course, there will be major implications for the story). It makes Gandhari easier to relate to, sympathise with or chastise, and it also ties in with what a number of recently published books have been trying to do – to make these old stories more accessible, with results that are inventive and facile in equal measure.

Such retellings of epics are not in themselves a new phenomenon. There have been countless “perspective” versions across the Indian languages, some notable ones being from major writers such as MT Vasudevan Nair (Randaamoozham, translated from Malayalam into English by Prem Panicker for his blog, and then by Gita Krishnankutty for Harper Collins) and Shivaji Sawant (the Marathi classic Mrityunjay). But a majority of those works were in the realm of literary fiction, and aimed at readers who had a deep enough knowledge of the epic to want to explore alternate narrative possibilities. What has been happening recently is a little different: stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana are being revisited in ways that would appeal to a wider range of readers, and in the garb of fast-paced genre fiction.

And inevitably, certain characters have special appeal for the new generation of bards. Prominent among them is Karna, half-brother of the Pandavas, who is abandoned as an infant, raised by low-caste foster parents and discovers his true identity too late. One of ancient literature’s most compelling tragic heroes, Karna is a notably "modern" figure even in straightforward Mahabharata translations. His presence continually runs against the very assumptions of the period – such as the “God-granted” division of people into social hierarchies by their birth rather than their capabilities – and raises uncomfortable questions for the other characters as well as for the reader. (What happens when a person comes up against consistently hostile circumstances, or when personal dharma collides with what is perceived as the greater good?) The new TV show gives Karna rousing speeches where, apparently addressing the camera directly, he punctures the hubris of the high-born people around him, including one where he sharply tells the Brahmin teacher Drona that there is no such thing as a divine or magical birth, because every birth is a wondrous event for the parents concerned.

An earlier issue of this magazine carried an essay about literary crushes. As a child, traversing the vast landscape of the Mahabharata, I was obsessed with Karna, and could see him as the template for the angry young men played by Amitabh Bachchan in films like Trishul. Reading C Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata aloud to my mother, I would sometimes excise sentences that showed Karna in a poor light. In my defence, I was all of ten years old; but it means I can relate to the many attempts now being made to turn Karna into an almost conventional, vanilla hero rather than a deeply complex person capable of extremes of anger and spite.

My literary crush was a platonic one, but two new books, both written by women who clearly feel strongly about Karna, explore his possibilities as a romantic hero. In these novels, Karna – about whose love life we learn almost nothing in the original Mahabharata – has transformed into an irresistible, golden-eyed (or blue-eyed) hunk, a sensitive new-age metrosexual, a darkly mysterious stranger who is essentially good-hearted and who might be saved by the love of the right woman. Both books begin with the heroine’s first glimpse of this man, whose physical features and personality are described in near-fetishistic terms. A strong strain of wish-fulfillment runs through them, and both are roughly classifiable (if you like classifying books) as “commercial” or “mass-market” fiction, though in my view they are very different in quality.

The less interesting of the two, Aditi Kotwal’s Draupadi in High Heels – an entry in Penguin India’s Metro Reads imprint for popular fiction – centres on a poor little rich girl named Deeya Panchal who, in the midst of jet-setting around the world, socialising with the likes of Sonam Kapoor at fashion shows and brooding about ex-boyfriends, discovers that her life has uncanny parallels with the mythological Draupadi's. For one thing, she is in degrees of romantic or potentially romantic entanglements with three suave, business-family brothers, the modern-day versions of the Pandavas (“Uggh. I suddenly felt like a doll which was being passed around from one brother to the other”). She also confides important matters to a close friend named Krish Gopinathan (Krishna), and is drawn to a handsome social outsider named Karan, whose origins are “shrouded in mystery”.

Though the framework here is the genre often derisively called chick-lit (“brat-lit” might be more accurate for this novel), the central idea has been explored before. The possibility of an unarticulated connection between Karna and Draupadi – both fiery, headstrong people – has persisted for a while in folklore and in regional extrapolations of the epic; it was there in Pratibha Ray’s celebrated Oriya novel Yagnaseni, in P K Balakrishnan’s Malayalam Ini Njan Urangatte (translated into English as “Now Let me Sleep”) and more recently in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, which ended in a bohemian post-war Heaven where Draupadi is finally free to express her real feelings for Karna.

In contrast, the Deeya of Draupadi in High Heels goes about her work on terra firma. She not only chooses Karan to be her life partner, but also helps him discover his real identity. (He was the product of a hushed pre-marital affair involving a socialite and her German boyfriend in England!) The book’s final two sentences – “As I looked into his light-brown eyes which glowed with abundant love, I realized that a man with a golden heart like his deserved all the happiness and acceptance in this world. And I was so glad that I got to share these moments with him!” – should tell you everything you need to know about the mawkishness of the prose, as should the supposedly descriptive passages (“What fascinated and captivated me the most was his face – which was the most perfect that I had ever seen!” and “Some strong, indefinable feeling swept through my body and found its place at the bottom of my stomach”). 

But they will also tell you that this is an attempt to give Karna a happy ending, to retrospectively correct the wrongs done to this anti-hero – and in fact, this impulse is common to many Mahabharata-retellers. In 1991, the acclaimed film director Mani Rathnam made Thalapathi, with Rajnikanth as a modern-day Karna, which ends with the protagonist achieving validation and self-worth. “[As a reader] I’ve always wished that he lived on,” Rathnam told Baradwaj Rangan in one of the interviews in the book Conversations with Mani Ratnam, “So much has gone wrong. There’s so much stacked against him. Maybe there’s a bit of hope, a bit of optimism in this, but I felt that his death would look too doomed, too tragic.”

The other new Karna-as-romantic-hero book is Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife, redundantly sub-titled “The Outcast’s Queen”. Despite its weak points – flat dialogue, for one – this is unquestionably a more serious-intentioned work than Kotwal’s, and founded on a closer psychological understanding of the epic. (Kane has probably read her Mrityunjay too.) The protagonist here is a freshly created character, a princess named Uruvi who becomes Karna’s second wife after performing an action that is exactly the opposite of Draupadi’s: she rejects Arjuna, whom everyone expected her to marry, in favour of the intense social outcast.

A problem with some “perspective” versions of the Mahabharata is that they turn their protagonists into near-omniscient narrators – The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata, for instance, is part-narrated by an Ashwatthama who seems blessed with a panoramic view of everything that is happening to all the other characters. The same charge could be leveled at Karna’s Queen: the fictional Uruvi conveniently happens to have grown up around the elders of Hastinapura and is even the foster-daughter of Kunti (mother of Karna and the Pandavas), which means she is privy to all sorts of information. The very opening page is a description of her first view of Karna when he challenges the Kuru princes during their competition; Uruvi has a ringside seat here, right next to Kunti, and she chirps on in modern slang, providing such commentary as “Bhima is downright mean!” and “Ma, please, it’s fair enough!”

At this stage I was ready to dismiss Karna’s Wife as another facile retelling, but reading on I found points of interest in it. Uruvi – even though she is part of Karna’s life and is affected by his actions– can be viewed as a sutradhaar figure who is essentially outside the narrative, a stand-in for the author. It is almost as if Kane traveled in a time machine to Hastinapura (think of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) and then set about confronting major characters like Bheeshma, Kunti, Duryodhana, and Karna himself, and either telling them off or getting a clearer understanding of their feelings. If one were to be really generous to this book, one might say that what she has attempted (consciously or otherwise) is a form of literary and social criticism – revisiting the story as a 21st century person, bringing modern morality to it, and doing this not from a safe distance but as an insider. (In an interview, Kane was asked which character from the Mahabharata she would like to meet and speak with. “Karna, of course!” she replied, “And I would have done exactly what Uruvi did.”)

If Karna is a dashing lover in these books, the new TV show also presents him in terms that resemble the Western comic-book superhero. Poetic licence has been taken with the impenetrable armour and earrings attached to his body, gifts from his divine father, the Sun God. In a touch that may remind you of Clark Kent turning into Superman in the phone booth, the new serial has the protective armour making its appearance only in specific moments of crisis; it then spreads across Karna’s muscular abdomen, which, seen in close up, resembles that of modern superheroes in full gear. The parallel with Superman, who is encased as a baby in a protective bubble by his father Jor-El, is hard to resist. And of course, the armour will also turn out to be Karna’s Kryptonite when he has to give it away. All of which may be a way of reminding oneself that the Superman story is itself a modern myth that is derivative of ancient ones. The circle completes itself here.

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It’s worth asking why the epics are such an endlessly replenishing mine for contemporary writers. One obvious answer is that these are rich stories with multiple strands, forever open to new interpretations and psychological analyses. A more cynical answer would be that they provide lazy or unimaginative authors with a ready-made template: the plot, structure and character types are largely in place, and the embellishments (or twists, as in Draupadi choosing Karna over Arjuna) are all that are needed.

Everything hinges then on the quality of execution, on what new ideas are introduced, and how convincingly they are injected into an existing palimpsest. One of the more notable (in theory at least) attempts to shift the epic to a modern setting was in Sandipan Deb’s gangster novel The Last War, which set the Mahabharat in the Mumbai underworld, casting Arjuna and Karna as Jeet and Karl, two expert hitmen primed for a final showdown. It was a good idea to move the story to the Bombay of the last 60 years, letting the many familiar dramatic episodes play out against the backdrop of a fast-changing city, with occasional references to such real-life events as cricket match-fixing. (In this version, Yudhisthira goes to jail when he is tricked and implicated in a cricket-betting controversy.) And there is an irreverence built into the book's very fabric: the very first chapter has the modern versions of Krishna and Arjuna faux-philosophising over glasses of Scotch, and all the characters are basically thugs.

But this also raises questions about Deb’s decision to lift plot details and even dialogues wholesale, and to clumsily stick them into situations where they become anachronistic. For instance, the episode of Arjuna seeing only the eye of the wooden bird he has to shoot at is presented exactly as it is in the original, except that of course he is using a rifle. After Draupadi (called Jahn here) is nearly raped, she swears that she won't tie or oil her hair until she has soaked it in her assailant’s blood. Besides, the prose includes several pretentious references to “dharma” or duty. Deeply ambiguous as this concept already is in the original Mahabharata, it is rendered meaningless in a situation where everyone is operating outside the law.

However, one might note that even in this amoral version – where there are no real standards of “good” and “evil” – the Karna character is the one who secretly makes the phone call that helps preserve Draupadi’s honour. It seems that even the author of a hard-boiled underworld rendition of the epic can’t resist whitewashing Karna, almost to the point where his complexities are siphoned away.

That’s another feature common to contemporary retellings though: the need to subvert conventional ideas about the “bad guys”, or to reveal the shaky moral foundations of the “good guys”. Among recent books, there are Anand Neelakantan’s Asura and Ajaya, which eschew the history-as-told-by-the-victors narrative to present the Ramayana and Mahabharata through the eyes of Ravana and the Kauravas respectively. The Rama-Sita relationship has been thoughtfully dealt with in such modern-lens retellings as Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen (a “speculative thriller” about a journalist’s search for Rama’s missing wife after the war with Lanka) and Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by the American Nina Paley, who intersperses episodes from the Ramayana with the story of Paley’s own estrangement from her husband.

And always, there is the story of Surpanakha, Ravana’s sister who becomes the catalyst for events in the Ramayana after she is rebuffed and disfigured by Rama and Lakshmana. The incident – though presented in terms of the good guys giving a demoness her just desserts – is an inherently ambiguous one, and can be interpreted in terms of gender-directed or caste-directed violence. This has been done many times in modern fiction (an example being Amit Chaudhuri’s spare, uncompromising short story “An Infatuation”), but one of the most enjoyable Surpanakha retellings I have read is a piece in the anthology Breaking the Bow, which collects speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. Kuzhali Manickavel’s “The Ramayana as an American Reality Television Show” is a clever account of how the Surpanakha episode may have unfolded in the voyeuristic-exhibitionistic cyber-age, with statements from the aggrieved rakshasi’s blog, the hysterical social-media reactions by her fans and detractors, and Twitter ripostes by the “Real Rama”. It adds up to a commentary not just on the ancient epic (it is easy for contemporary writers to poke holes into the social mores and pomposities of an earlier era) but also on the vagaries of our own time.

In any case, the past few months alone have brought us romantic Karnas, a gangster Mahabharata and the Ramayana as science fiction and thriller, along with prolonged daytime soaps where one might conceivably, in future episodes, get to see Duryodhana helping his son with his Algebra homework. And all this in addition to the ever-growing corpus of books by Amish Tripathi, Krishna Udayashankar, Ashok Banker and others, where Indian mythology is retold in a style resembling 20th century Western fantasy from Tolkien onwards. Or Amruta Patil's beautifully illustrated visual retelling, Adi Parva. But why stop there? Other genres and tropes are yet to be explored. Personally I am toying with the idea of getting onto the bandwagon and fashioning two of my personal obsessions – tennis and irreverent humour – into Mahabharata novellas. One of them would stage the Kurukshetra war as a series of Grand Slam matches, with the Karna-Arjuna battle played out in the manner of a Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal epic in a Wimbledon final. (As Orwell said, sport is war minus the shooting. Such a story would require no “arrows can be injurious to health” signs.) The other would cast Groucho Marx as a non-sequitur-spewing Krishna, confounding Arjuna and everyone else on the battlefield with a modern Gita that begins “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” Like Groucho, the epic is whatever you want it to be.

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[Some related posts: the Rashomon-like world of the Mahabharata; Iravati Karve's Yuganta; The Palace of Illusions; The Last War. The PDF of Prem Panicker's Bhimsen is here. And something about the Karna-as-Rafa illustration that went with the piece.]

Bride of Frankenstein

Having lately discovered that Karna and Superman are the same person, I have now unearthed similarities between Draupadi and the Frankenstein monster. This is best illustrated with screen grabs from the Star Plus Mahabharat and old movie versions of the Mary Shelley story.

First, behold how the monster (in the 1910 film, that is) and Draupadi are each born of fire – though one emerges from a vat, the other from a sacrificial yagna:

(More about the fire scene in that old Frankenstein film here)

Next, mark ye, that both these hapless creatures (still coming to grips with the strangeness of the world around them) are surprised by their reflections in a mirror:

As they settle in, they each befriend a little girl and sit with her by the side of a pond, playing with flowers and such.

Much of the emotional impact of those scenes comes from the knowledge that the fire-princess and the monster have never experienced the joys and wonders of childhood. But grown-ups can have fun too. Here is Paanchali doing something that would get Boris Karloff lurching manfully towards her swayamvara:

[Coming up next: Bheema and Jughead Jones]

Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)

[Did a version of this review for Biblio. And here I had thought this piece was the last thing I would ever write about the great epic. To quote Michael Corleone, or is it Bheeshma, “Just when I thought I was out, they PULL me back again”]

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Even if you don’t know beforehand that Sandipan Deb’s bulky underworld thriller The Last War is a modern version of the Mahabharata, the dots will begin connecting within the first couple of pages. In the opening chapter, set in July 2007, a conflicted gunman named Jeet and his family friend and advisor Kishenbhai discuss a great war that lies ahead. Over glasses of Glenmorangie, they speak indolently of “dharma”, mull the ethics of taking up arms against friends and family. The conversation is full of high-sounding hokum. “Now listen, brother, and I will explain the fucking philosophy of action,” Kishenbhai says (as he pours himself a stiff drink and plumbs the ice bucket), “If we allow the mind to stray, it can take you into all sorts of unrelated detours.”

You were born and you are going to die. That’s the writing on the wall. Then you are reborn and take a look at the wall, and it’s still the same message out there. Who knows where’s the beginning, where’s the end? What we see are the intervening formations. Do your stuff, get the fuck out. Your duty.

Mumbo-jumbo aside, this prelude – which is, as should be clear, a tongue-in-cheek variation on the Bhagwad Gita – puts some of the story’s blocks in place. The men are interrupted by Jeet’s lover Jahn – this narrative’s Draupadi – who fierily demands vengeance for what was done to her years earlier (we are also told she “shares a bond” with Kishenbhai, who “instinctively sensed her slightest desire and fulfilled it even before she had articulated it properly in her own mind”). There are allusions to a period of banishment, to a young son named Abhi (Abhimanyu), to Jeet’s nemesis Karl (Karna), and to family elders named Yash Bauji (Bheeshma) and BK Acharya (Drona) whom Jeet is reluctant to kill.

Having served this aperitif, the book flashbacks to 1955, when the saga of the “Kuru clan” begins with the gifted archer Yash Kuru practising his skills near the Gateway of India (much as the young Bheeshma did on the banks of the Ganga). Yash happens to catch the eye of an elderly Parsi smuggler and goes on to become a hitman and eventual caretaker for the latter’s crime empire; over the decades, he tutors generations of businessmen, beginning with his own nephews and their children, who grow up to be versions of the Pandavas and Kauravas. Then things get ugly, as they will do if you're living and working in the underworld.

There have been many Mahabharata retellings in recent years, including point-of-view ones that filter the story through this or that character, and creative treatments like Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, which used tropes from the epic to examine modern India’s political history. The Last War is an addition to that large corpus, and it is a promising idea to shift the tale to the organised-crime world of the last 60 years, letting the familiar dramatic episodes play out against the backdrop of a fast-changing city, with occasional references to real-life events. There is a certain irreverence built into the book’s fabric too: the very first chapter, after all, give us a Krishna and Arjuna faux-philosophising over Scotch, and we know that all the characters, including Kishenbhai, are basically gangsters.

Yet, as this narrative lumbers on, it turns out to be less imaginative than many of the seemingly more conventional Mahabharata tellings – the one that retain the original setting. There are a few good twists – Yudhisthira goes to jail when he is tricked and implicated in a cricket-betting controversy – and I liked witty little touches such as the transformation of the original story’s Jarasandha (born as two halves and eventually returned to this state after a wrestling bout with Bheema) into twin brothers Jara and Sandha, small-time players challenging the Kurus for control of the underworld, who sometimes complete each other’s sentences. But in a nearly 600-page book, these touches are too few and far between, and too much of the other invention occurs at a sniggering, schoolboy level (Arjuna’s famous bow Gandiva becomes Jeet’s pet gun Gandu).

Instead of using the Mahabharata template discerningly, Deb lifts entire episodes, plot details and even dialogues wholesale, and clumsily sticks them into situations where they are laughably anachronistic. Thus, the episode of Arjuna seeing only the eye of the wooden bird he has to shoot at is presented exactly as it is in the original, except that of course Jeet is using a rifle. After Jahn/Draupadi is nearly raped by Ranjit/Duhshasana, she swears that she won't tie or oil her hair until she has soaked it in his blood. In one mind-boggling passage that shows how mundane these episodes can be if unthinkingly replicated, Preeti maaji (Kunti) recognises that the adult Karl was the baby she had abandoned because of – wait for it – the azure colour of his eyes. (In the original, it was the divine, unmistakable, Sun-gifted armour and earrings glued to Karna’s body. Presumably there weren't a lot of other young men running around with those accessories.) As if to acknowledge the existence of the many Mahabharata perspective tellings, a few random chapters are narrated in the first person by a different character (Jahn, Karl), but there is no pattern to this – it is a device indulged in for its own sake. And because the author is so keen to stick to the basics of the story, while also getting on with the action, there are passages like the one where we are hurriedly informed of the exact months and years of birth of the three “Pandavas” and the two “Kauravas”.

Preeti gave birth to Rishabh in December 1962, followed shortly afterwards by Shankar’s son Rahul, in April 1963. Preeti’s second son Vikram arrived in the world in April 1964 and then Jeet in March 1965. Aditi’s second son Ranjit was born in July 1964...

And so on, but you get the idea. (Apart from the laziness of this writing, that first sentence is grammatically problematic, appearing to suggest that Rahul is also Preeti’s son.) This is compounded by trite character summaries – Rishabh (Yudhisthira) is virtuous and introverted and fond of playing cards, Vikram (Bheema) is strong and naughty but also a protector of the weak – and by bombastic language. The characters say things like “This is my word to you as Rahul, son of Shankar” and “I curse you, Rahul, that if you are lying to me, then at the most important moment of your life, when you will require your physical and mental strength the most, that strength will desert you, and you will be left a weak man. This is a mother’s curse. It will be true.” Jeet and Karl make pronouncements about how each has to prove he is the greatest gunman of the age. “I have not come here with hope that I will be able to secure a peaceful settlement,” says Kishenbhai affectedly, “but only in order that the world will not hold me to blame.”

All of which may prompt the reader to ask, “Who cares about your silly ego games, you nobodies?”

This is not a minor point. To read the original Mahabharata is to buy into the conceit that the very public actions and interrelationships of these royals affect the whole of Bharatvarsh. There is the inbuilt assumption that every last family in the land is invested in the saga of the Pandavas and Kauravas; that their exploits amount to a Dwapara Yuga version of front-page news (or in some cases, page-three news); that bards are roaming every corner of the kingdom, regularly updating the “common people” with the stories; that the great war will alter all lives for good and for ill.

For such a conceit to work in a contemporary scenario, one would probably have to hypothesise a situation where, say, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi and their supporters were facing off in a dharma-yudh being breathlessly covered by every TV channel in the land, with the future of India and the world on the line. Or a subtler thriller where battlefield action was substituted by the twists and turns of electoral politics. But the scale of the action in The Last War is very modest - even given what we know of the Mumbai underworld's reach - and the narrative itself inadvertently reveals this in places. (At one point the cricket betting subplot includes a needlessly prolonged account of the 1996 World Cup final between Sri Lanka and Australia, complete with mentions of real-life participants – Arjuna Ranatunga, Glenn McGrath etc. But this, like a later allusion to the September 11 attacks, becomes a reminder that a much larger world exists outside the one inhabited by these self-absorbed characters, and that they are fairly inconsequential in the overall scheme of things.)

Given this, Deb’s decision to use the archaic, self-aggrandising prose of an ancient epic seems ridiculous. In the context of underworld skirmishes, what does it mean to say that it has to be “decided” whether Jeet or Karl is the "greatest warrior"? It is not as if they are even going to face off in an old-style gun duel. The Arjuna-Karna battle was governed by certain rules of warfare; their final duel, even if it was settled unjustly, was a one-on-one confrontation involving individual skill that would be gaped at by others on the battlefield. The situations are not remotely comparable, it amounts to a lazy transposition, and after a while one begins to wish for Quick Gun Murugun or Chulbul Pandey to turn up and show these boys what is what.

The prose also includes multiple esoteric references to “dharma” or duty. Deeply ambiguous as this concept already is in the original Mahabharata, it becomes meaningless in a situation where everyone is operating outside the law to begin with. To his credit, Deb does show awareness of this in an early character sketch of Yash bauji that captures something of Bheeshma’s relentless self-righteousness, as well as the self-deception of anyone rationalising a position of power and privilege.

There was a tight framework of logic within which Yash’s mind functioned, and almost any problem was attacked from the first principles of that logic or the carefully worked out corollaries. It was a system complete in itself [...] its building blocks would effortlessly rearrange themselves to adapt and respond to every situation.

And yet, the characters go on saying things about “the malleability of dharma”, and doing it in a languid, theoretical way that seems to have no real relevance to their own lives and actions. (Incidentally, it is indicated that English is their primary language of communication, which makes some of this dialogue seem even more woodenly incongruous.)

For me, two questions were central to understanding whether this book worked or not. First: does it do anything especially fresh or creative with the Mahabharata? As indicated above, no. Whereupon the second question follows: does it work on its own terms, as a good, fast-paced thriller? This is a little more difficult to answer. Certainly there is a lot of action, there is a sense of a multidimensional saga with people flitting in and out of the frame, and in a few – too few – passages there is interesting use of setting (as in a sequence set in Dharavi) and a glimpse of a shadowy, noirish Mumbai. (“They call this the city full of life, but should life be like this? [...] It was a city of mediocre, obedient zombies. What a place to run your sort of business, Rishabh.”) But it all drags on for too long, and besides it is never possible to read this as a stand-alone story, for the Mahabharata reference points are everywhere, constantly weighing the narrative down.

Searching for a key to the tonal incongruities, I returned to one of the Gita conversations. (Turning to the Gita for “answers” does seem like a reasonable thing to do.) At one point, cutting through Jeet and Kishenbhai’s psychobabble, Jahn asks Jeet to sing to her, whereupon he begins droning the lyrics to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (and she joins in by screaming the line “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”). The moment made strange sense. Perhaps this whole story is a drug-induced fever dream, with these bored people amusing themselves by using the ancient epic as a palimpsest for their own lives. In which case, I wish Deb had been much more over the top and thrown in a few more flourishes as well as an extended Epilogue set in heaven as an opium den where all the assassinated Kurus would carry on as if nothing had happened. After all, as Kishenbhai sagely puts it, “Why grieve? Either for the dead or the living? No point at all. We are here today, we were here yesterday, we will be here tomorrow. There was never a time when we were not around.”

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[A selection of Mahabharata-related posts from the archives: Ekta Kapoor's Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; flash fiction on the fall of Bheeshma; astonishing births in the Mahabharata; Karna and the Madraka women; how Rukmi learnt to stop worrying; on Prem Panicker's Bhimsen; The Palace of Illusions; Groucho Marx as Krishna; Irawati Karve's Yuganta; a long piece for Caravan about perspective tellings; Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King]

Mini-review: Zero Dark Thirty

Saw this film yesterday. It is apparently a true story about the killing of a terrorist leader who knocked down some buildings in America a decade ago. This makes it sound modern and topical, but I thought it most intriguing for its use of tropes from the old epics. The protagonist, a young CIA agent, gets so personal and obsessive about her mission that when presented with Osama bin Laden’s mutilated corpse, she does a Draupadi and washes her lustrous amber tresses in his blood (and yes, the film is generally very fond of her hair). Then she does an Achilles and drags him around the military camp behind her Lamborghini until his dad shows up and says please can I have his body back. Then she quietly weeps as classical heroes do when, having vanquished their arch-enemies and fulfilled their life’s great purpose, they realise it's all downhill from here and that even the in-flight sandwiches on the trip home will be stale. I can’t guarantee that these are all accurate representations of what occurred in the film, but they were the interpretations my good friend Shougat and I preferred as we sat giggling through the final 15 minutes. Which can only mean one thing: expect Oscars to be bestowed.

(Okay, seriously? Didn’t think the film was too bad – some good moments in the midsection along with some almost-too-conscientious non-Hollywoodising – but it got a little trite in the end. Plus, watching a film with Shougat is a good way of ensuring that you spend much of your time laughing at it regardless of its overall quality. This is the same boy who savaged my Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King experience a decade ago by repeatedly imploring Frodo and Samwise to get down to actual making out instead of just looking chastely into each other’s eyes.)

Days of their lives

I’ve been carrying on about Ekta’s Mahabharata, but the other day I came across a show titled Draupadi, on Sahara One. Saw just 15-20 minutes of the episode (think it was a one-hour slot) and though it looked quite dreadful in many ways – with the usual garish Amar Chitra Katha-style costumes, over-decorated sets and actors with Colgate smiles – I thought it was interesting for the way it turns the great epic into a languidly paced, long-drawn-out daytime soap.

For one thing, this show doesn’t seem too concerned with the “big picture” of the Mahabharata. Instead, it spends a lot of time showing the everyday details of the characters’ lives, especially the women’s – in that sense, it reminded me of Pratibha Ray’s intimate novel Yajnaseni. The episode I saw was set sometime after the Pandavas and Draupadi return to Hastinapur after her swayamvara, and it was full of homely conversations – between Draupadi and Duhshala (the Kauravas’ sister), and between Bhanumati (Duryodhana’s wife) and Rituvati (Karna’s wife). The talking point was that the visiting Karna has just sent Draupadi a bouquet of yellow roses, which she is known to have a preference for. What could this mean?

I’ve often wondered what might result if someone were to fully exploit the Mahabharata’s obvious possibilities as a never-ending daytime serial – to stretch it out for years, emphasizing the characters’ interactions and daily routines rather than simply moving from one dramatic setpiece to another. Such treatment would necessarily have the effect of humanising all the people; for example, it would be difficult to think of Duryodhana as a cardboard-cutout villain after you’ve seen him having a relaxed, post-dinner conversation with his wife and children, discussing nothing more important than their Math homework. In fact, the Draupadi episode I saw had a scene where Bhanumati asks Duryodhana what he thinks of Jayadratha. “You know he’s my friend,” he replies. I meant, what do you think of him as a suitor for Duhshala, she asks, whereupon Duryodhana turns to her, his face softening. “I never thought of him in that light before,” he says thoughtfully, and she replies that it’s usually the women of the house who think of these little details while the men are preoccupied with grander matters. I haven’t seen anything like this scene in any other mythological serial.

Note: meanwhile, Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabhaarat Ki (which I had thought was going to be an endless soap) is currently in such a mad rush to get to the story of Krishna’s birth and childhood in time for this month's Janmashtmi that it has fast-tracked its way through three generations of Kuru princes, not even bothering to depict the births of Yudhisthira and Bheema. An excited Vishnu, reclining on his snake mount, turns to the viewer and announces that He is ready to take earthly form, and Kamsa maama’s personal background theme includes the mooing of a cow in obvious pain. Exciting times lie ahead.

The Palace of Illusions: the good, the bad and the Titanic

I was a bit harsh with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions when I mentioned it in an earlier post. Having sped-read it at the time (out of idle curiosity, not for a review), my rough impression was that the narrative lacked intensity, which one doesn’t expect when the narrator is someone like Draupadi (or Panchaali, the name she prefers here). Haven’t changed my view about this, but reading the book more thoroughly I could appreciate its strong points - it’s possible that as a Mahabharata-pedant, I underestimate the value of an accessible, reasonably well-written version. Divakaruni’s book should be given that much credit.

What I liked

The lighter passages (e.g. the badinage between Krishna and Panchaali when they discuss their past lives) are well-handled. Also, the device of the childhood game between Panchaali and her brother Dhrishtadyumna (Dhri), where one of them starts telling a story (about other characters in the epic), the other continues it and so on – it’s a nicely intimate scene and a creative way of filling gaps in the narrative.

Were the stories we told each other true? Who knows? At the best of times, a story is a slippery thing. We’d had to cobble this one together from rumours and lies, dark hints Dhai Ma let fall, and our own agitated imaginings. Perhaps that was why it changed with each telling. Or is that the nature of all stories, the reason for their power?

Some of the character analyses go beyond the clichés found in basic translations of the Mahabharata. For instance, conventional tellings regard Bheeshma among the most unblemished characters (along with the less interesting Yudhisthira and Vidura), but one can argue that in his rigid adherence to his principles and his famous vow, he often disregards basic, common-sense humanity. (Even Satyavati, in whose interests Bheeshma took the vow in the first place, begs him to break it for the common good. His refusal to do so reminds me of the uncompromising "righteousness" of the very religious – people who are more interested in staying on the good side of their personal God than in their dealings with human beings.) In The Palace of Illusions, here’s Panchaali on Bheeshma:

I wanted to warn my husbands that one couldn’t depend on a man who plucked frailty and desire so easily out of his heart. How could he have compassion for the faults of others, or understand their needs? Protecting a [dead vow] was more important to him than a human life.

(For more on this side of Bheeshma, see Iravati Karve’s reading of the character as someone who, having voluntarily renounced many of the pleasures of worldly life, occupied a higher ground than everyone else and saw himself as being accountable to no one.)

I also liked some of Divakaruni’s turns of phrase, such as when Panchaali expresses the cruel futility of the Kurukshetra war in her descriptions of dead bodies on the battlefield (“My father, his mouth drawn back in a grimace of disappointment, for he did not live to see the vengeance he had spent his entire life planning...the blood-encrusted face of Duryodhana’s son Lakshman Kumar, his eyes wide with surprise as though he hadn’t expected death to win this game of tag, blurred into the face of one of my boys.”)

What I didn’t like

One advantage of a point-of-view telling of the Mahabharata should be that it shows us how much greater the epic is than the sum of its parts (the 10-year-old who hero-worships Karna or Arjuna might disagree with this, but most of us do grow up). In such retellings, we get to see people and events through the (naturally biased) perspective of a particular character, and once we have enough of these perspectives, they add up to complete a fascinating tapestry. One problem I had with The Palace of Illusions is that the book doesn’t always acknowledge the subjectivity of Panchaali’s viewpoint. Too often, she becomes an all-knowing sutradhar figure, not very different from Vyasa himself, and we’re expected to believe that she has the real inside dope on many things, including other characters’ motivations and struggles.

An illustration of this. Duryodhana is a completely unsympathetic character in this book, which would be perfectly all right if it were made clear that this is because Panchaali sees him that way: that she deeply fears and loathes the man who did her so much harm, and has had no occasion to see his good side. The problem is when the narrative feigns objectivity: at one point, Panchaali relates a conversation in the Kaurava camp, conveyed to her by her spies, and the Duryodhana we get here is a one-dimensional Hindi-film villain. (There is the implication that Balarama is his friend only because he once sent him a cartload of alcohol. In other passages, we gather that Karna isn’t so much genuinely attached to Duryodhana as obligated to him. Gone is the multi-dimensional Kaurava prince who was a generous, sympathetic ruler once he had got the Pandavas out of the way, and who earned – rather than purchased – the friendships of some of the noblest characters in the epic.)

The Panchaali-Karna relationship (specifically, their secret feelings for each other and her lifelong questioning of whether she did the right thing by humiliating him at her swayamvara) is tritely handled. I thought it was reductive to take two enormously complex characters and define them primarily in terms of their forbidden love for one another – don’t want to sound like a purist, but I didn't care for the scene where Kunti tries to persuade Karna to join the Pandavas and he is briefly swayed only when she tells him Draupadi will be his wife. I didn't think it was consistent with his character. (By the by, it might have been more fun if Divakaruni had retained the original version of this episode, which had Krishna making this offer to Karna, and turned it into a nudge-wink frat-boy dialogue: "Join the Pandavas, dude, you'll totally score!")

Karna and Draupadi as Jack and Rose

When Karna dies, something happens that (as Panchaali solemnly tells us) Vyasa didn’t put down in his version. The glow from the fallen warrior’s body travels straight to the weeping Draupadi: “It grew into a great radiance around me. A feeling emanated from it that I have no words for. It wasn’t sorrow or rage. Perhaps, freed of its mortal bondage, Karna’s spirit knew what I hadn’t ever been able to tell him.”

This is a giggle-out-loud moment to compare with the best of them, but nothing trumps the book’s ending, when (I hope this doesn’t require a spoiler alert) Draupadi reaches heaven and is reunited with her great love. Remember the lavish final scene of James Cameron’s Titanic, with the spirits of the doomed lovers Jack and Rose finding validation in a shimmering afterlife? Remember them kissing in the ship’s ballroom while people of all classes, including those who used to call Jack sutaputra (or something) stand around and applaud lustily? In The Palace of Illusions, Jack and Rose go by the names Karna and Panchaali, and their great big ship is heaven itself. They don’t actually kiss, this being against Indian culture, but as an enthusiastic Panchaali puts it, “Karna is no longer the forbidden one. I can take his arm in view of everyone. If I wish I can embrace him with all of myself.” In heaven, you can frolic for all eternity. The great war was worth it after all.

[Earlier posts on the Mahabharata: Karna and the Madrakas; how Rukmi avoided the war; astonishing births; Yuganta; Bhasa's plays; old tales, new renderings]

Matrubhoomi review

I didn’t know much about Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi before I entered the hall to see it. I knew it was set in a dystopian society where there were hardly any women left, and that it involved a dark, twisted take on the Draupadi story - one woman shared by five men. I knew too that Time magazine had named it one of the 10 best films of the year, but that didn’t count for much (these being the same guys who put Devdas in their top 5 list for 2002, mentioning the "pretty, colourful frocks" worn by Madhuri and Aishwarya among the notable things about that movie).

Matrubhoomi starts quite well, with a number of striking scenes: the grotesquely effective image, for instance, of a man dancing in drag for the benefit of a group of sex-starved males (the mere image of a woman enough to inflame their senses); men falling over each other at a wedding for a glimpse of the 12-year-old "bride", who then turns out to be a little boy; a much-anticipated weekly porn film screening, with the all-male audience gazing at the screen as much in fascination as in lust (this scene reminded me of the 1980s cult film Cafe Flesh, set in a post-Holocaust world where "Sex Positives" - the few remaining people who can have sex without falling violently ill - perform onstage for the majority of "Sex Negatives).

After the porn screening one of the men gets up and enters a nearby barnyard to expend his lust on a cow. This metaphor - a holy animal, a supposed object of veneration, becoming a vent for frustrated sexuality – resurfaces through the film, and is particularly relevant in a story where a woman is subjected to repeated abuse in a household where the garlanded portrait of another woman (the deceased mother) occupies pride of place. It’s an old motif - the woman as Mother vs the woman as Whore.

But Matrubhoomi starts to go downhill when it moves from the general to the particular. We are introduced to a family headed by a corpulent sethji (Sudhir Pandey), looking worriedly for a bride for the eldest of his five sons. A young girl, Kalki (Tulip Joshi), is discovered by the village pandit: we first see her singing in the forest, dressed in white, plucking and polishing fruit, the picture of glowing innocence, and we just know her fate is to be defiled, and defiled again.

From this moment on the film enters a realm filled with cardboard-cutout sterotypes, and it never recovers. Kalki is effectively sold into "marriage" to all five brothers. Four of the brothers are leering beasts and see her as nothing more than property to be sexually divided amongst themselves (their father wants a share of the spoils too). The fifth brother, the youngest, is painfully noble and teaches her how to read, write and most importantly love; the scene where he enters the bedroom when it’s "his turn" and, instead of forcing himself on her, covers her head with her pallu, is as cringe-inducing in its own way as the rapes that preceded it were. He seems to have come not just from a different gene pool from that of his brothers but from a different planet altogether; we are never given any sort of explanation why he is so Good while the rest of them are so Bad (unless it has to do with the fact that he’s the only clean-shaven one of the lot). It’s a lazy bit of scripting, and the problem is it makes it impossible to take the film seriously. None of the characters (good or bad) is believable, so why care?

I was annoyed when, after several scenes of gratuitous violence, Matrubhoomi finally ended with a solemn, self-congratulatory title disclosing statistics about the abuse of women in India. This isn’t a bad film but it’s an irresponsible one. It does try to address a serious issue (an issue that must be addressed) and make statements about the hypocrisies of Indian society and its attitude to women. But for the most part it does this in such a synthetic, superficial, overwrought way that it defeats its own purpose; it makes it all too easy for people to look away, shrug and say "well, that isn’t a story about us, it doesn’t apply to our lives in any way."

What I found sad was that most of the things the film depicts aren’t as hyperbolic as the fantasy setting might suggest. But the treatment makes it seem like they are.

P.S. Here’s another blog review of the film.

P.P.S. I’m a little surprised that so many people think the film was too visceral and difficult to watch. Quite the contrary, I thought it did a sugar-coating job precisely when it shouldn’t have. Tulip Joshi manages to look luminous even when she’s chained to a post in the cowshed, surrounded by dirt and waste.