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.]

Quick thoughts on the pulping of The Hindus (and the benevolent bully)

Some thoughts in connection with the depressing - but not, in our times, very surprising - news about the “pulping” of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus by Penguin India (after a petition that, among other things, alleges that Doniger’s “approach is that of a woman hungry of sex”, that a Shiva linga can only be a cigar, so to speak, and that the idea of Krishna having an erotic life is unthinkable and un-Hindu).

I have written before about the smug certitudes that so often accompany religious belief, and the sophistry/cherry-picking inherent in the thought process that goes: “THIS is what the scriptures really meant, and it’s all good and clean and pure and exactly as I want it to be. Anything else – anything that makes me uncomfortable, or doesn’t fit the accepted moralities of today, or makes the Gods seem imperfect, or even vaguely suggests that those old books may have been a product of their age rather than containing unassailable wisdom and truth for all time – any such thing HAS to be a flawed reading, or a later corruption of the text. Or, wait, it can be interpreted THIS way, which makes everything okay again.”

This thought process isn’t limited to those whom we can conveniently label “fanatics”. Some generally intelligent people I know, including some who aren't especially religious, often bring up that beautiful, soothing – and nonsensical – idea that all religions “in essence” or “in their original form” teach love, universal brotherhood, tolerance and non-violence. A cursory reading of the major works of ancient literature shows how bizarre this claim is. But of course, once you know, with absolute certainty, that they really are all divine texts, that so-and-so really WAS a God, and that Gods by definition are good and all-knowing and so on, it becomes easy to rationalise anything.

I had an email conversation with a friend today – it touched briefly on the Doniger episode, but it began as a discussion of the new TV Mahabharat, which (no surprise) depicts Krishna as a forever-in-control avatar, constantly manipulating events towards the Greater Good, interfering in every scene to such a degree that you feel all the other characters could easily have been played by mannequins with little strings attached to them. Compared to this beacon in man-shape, even the Krishna of the B R Chopra serial – a fairly populist show in its time – was a flawed, sometimes conflicted, likably human character.

Anyway, I was telling my friend about the new show’s whitewashing of nearly every dubious action performed by the “good guys”, the Pandavas and Draupadi, how it glibly stacks the cards in their favour, and against those who are on the side of “adharma”. There is a scene at Draupadi’s swayamvara where Krishna meets Karna for the first time and tells him something like, “If you don't get respect – sammaan – it means you have not followed the path of dharma.” Karna asks “But what about someone who has never known respect, right from his earliest days?” and to this Krishna smiles sweetly and wags his finger and says “Oh, in that case, you must strive all your life for respect. But don't do it by siding with adharma.”

One gets the gist of what is being said, and even buys into it to a degree if one is hung up on the Bhakti Tradition Krishna and the Mahabharata-as-Morality-Tale. And I’m not suggesting that the injustices done to Karna be used to justify or even gloss over the wrongs he participates in. But this scene (and there are others like it) presents such a simple-minded view of what is good and what is bad, and such an undermining of lived experience. As I told my friend on email, if this Krishna travelled to modern-day Delhi and met an autorickshaw driver who had just been smacked hard by a rich kid in a BMW because their vehicles had grazed each other, he'd probably say the same thing with the same expression.

She replied: “That is what I find so fearfully disturbing about the […] discourses of today: they all conspire (consciously or otherwise) to vindicate a certain hierarchy by transforming it into benevolent, enlightened patriarchy, striving to achieve everyone's well-being. Poppycock.” Well said. There are so many versions of this benevolent patriarchy. (“Yes, yes, we believe in freedom of speech too,” they say with indulgent smiles, “But, you know, this will hurt so many feelings. Couldn't you avoid writing it?”) And we see a form of it in the objections to books like Doniger’s, by people who want a single, standardised, comforting version of things, with nothing that will rock any boats.

[Related thoughts in these posts: Arun Shourie on innocents in a Godless world; divine savages and “real” truth; tales from a crematorium; Chetan Bhagat and “liberal extremism”]

Rafa the low-born (tennis at Kurukshetra)

Had to share this. I wrote a piece for the magazine Indian Quarterly recently, about a new crop of epic retellings being done in popular genres such as young romance and the underworld thriller. The piece – which centred on two new books about Karna, one of my childhood literary heroes – ended with a jokey line about how, if I ever did a Mahabharata-retelling myself, I would merge my personal obsessions and present the Kurukshetra war as a series of Grand Slam tennis matches: 128 warriors, falling by the wayside one by one (over 18 days, or over a fortnight), all of it leading up to a grand finale - the decisive Arjuna-Karna battle, cast as a meeting between Roger Federer and my favourite sportsperson Rafael Nadal.

It was a throwaway reference, not central to the piece in any way, so imagine my surprise when I saw a PDF of the story and found that the illustration done for it brought together Karna and Rafa (dressed in Wimbledon whites, including the sleeveless kavacha he wore until a few years ago) in one surreal, bow-and-bandana juxtaposition. I didn't have anything to do with planning the image, so this was most fortuitous, and I must thank the illustrator Salil Sojwal. Here’s the picture:

Illustration: SALIL SOJWAL

Of course, one is now tempted to make Nadal: Federer = Karna: Arjuna analogies, based on nothing more concrete than the facile perceptions we form of sportspeople. Thus, Roger as the privileged prince and favoured son, all grace and artistry, seemingly born to conquer the world, his destiny pre-written in stone; and Rafa as the dark cloud on his horizon, the upstart shaking up the fraternity with his unconventional style of play and his apparently uncouth mien (which conceals a sweet but defensive nature). Roger pirouetting his way across tennis courts with a sense of entitlement, while Rafa plays catch-up, struggling with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: chronic injuries, a style of play that doesn’t meet the aesthetic demands of people who want their tennis to be like ballet, and an inability to make himself properly understood – which in one famous case after the 2006 French Open led to public booing because he had been mistranslated. (“Chale jao, suta-putra,” yells the Hastinapura crowd.)

I could go on, but I won’t. Instead here are two photos of cho-chweet bonding between rivals. The first is from the great years of the Roger-Rafa bromance (more on that in this post); the second is from a recent episode of the Star Plus Mahabharat where Karna helps Arjuna (disguised here as a brahmin) lift a chariot wheel out of the mud (!!). Can't see the resemblance? Either there is no poetry in your soul, or you have better things to do with your time.

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"VAMOS!!!"

Notes from the Star Plus Mahabharata: Kryptonite Karna

I have been following the new Star Plus Mahabharata fairly closely, a process made easier by the fact that each episode is uploaded on YouTube a day after the telecast (though the more flamboyant action scenes are better seen on H-D TV). The show has its problems – as any five-day-a-week Mahabharata would – but it definitely isn’t bad, or unintentionally funny, in the way that Ekta Kapoor’s shoddy Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki was***. Hope to do an extended post about it at some point (have written something in an essay for a magazine, which I will put up here soon), but for now a quick note about certain inventive things they have done to Karna. His impenetrable kavacha (armour) isn't permanently attached to his body, as in the original epic. Instead it appears only in specific moments of crisis – when an arrow is headed for his chest, for instance. In this episode, you can see this happen twice: first, with the teenage Karna, around the four-minute mark; then with the first appearance of the adult Karna at the end of the episode, when a flaming thing comes at him out of the artificial sun he has created with his astra. (Yes!)

These scenes put me in mind of modern comic-book superheroes with their secret powers – Clark Kent turning into Superman in the phone booth – and tight costumes worn over muscular abdomens. But there are parallels anyway: the Superman back-story has baby Kal-El being encased in a protective bubble by his father, much like Karna gets his kavacha from his divine daddy Surya. Watch this scene from the 1978 Superman and tell me you don’t recognise other rudiments of the story: the child being sent away by tearful parents (Marlon Brando as Kunti, who would’ve thunk?); the foster-parents being unable to come to grips with the apparently superhuman gifts of the infant they have raised in their humble home. And the armour will also turn out to be Karna’s Kryptonite when he has to give it away later in the tale. Another reminder that modern mythologies are so often derivative of ancient ones.

P.S. that episode I linked to also features Puneet Issar as Parashurama, allowing doddering folks of my vintage to feel deeply nostalgic about his performance as Duryodhana 25 years ago. 

*** Some posts about Kahaani Hamaaray Mahabharat Ki: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Also, an old post that ponders the important question: why did Karna need to borrow vinegar from hairy and characterless women?

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]

Epic fictions: the Rashomon-like world of the Mahabharata

[This is the “extended mix” of an essay I wrote for the August issue of Caravan magazine – a look at perspective tellings of a very complex epic, with Maggi Lidchi-Grassi’s book The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata as the focal point. In the magazine version - which you can read here - we left out the bits about Lidchi-Grassi’s comparison of the Kurukshetra battle to the Second World War, since we thought that slightly diluted the focus of the piece. But I’ve included it here] 

My first stab at literary censorship came 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 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. And the Abhimanyu killing was toned down somewhat.

By that age I had devoured at least three other Mahabharata translations (the ones by RK Narayan, P Lal and William Buck) along with uncounted Amar Chitra Katha comics, and 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 the 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.

The adoration and the attendant defensiveness reached proportions that are easy to smile about today. I felt a sense of vindication while reading passages that stressed Karna’s virtues — such as an introduction to Shanta Rameshwar Rao’s translation, 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 deeper engagement with the Mahabharata as well as with 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 as 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 Nhan Urangatte (“And Now Let me Sleep”; Malayalam) leave the stage to the Pandavas’ queen Draupadi. Even non-Indian writers who 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 Randamoozham, 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.

Reading this narrative, one must constantly remember that each incident is filtered through the prism of Bhima’s biases and prejudices. This isn’t always an easy idea to process. On his blog, where his transcreation was initially serialised, Panicker has often been asked to elaborate on events that Bhima has no firsthand knowledge of. (If I had read "Bhimsen" at age 10, I would have been incensed by it, for Karna is portrayed almost throughout as an arrogant, mean-spirited man constantly trying to rise above his station in life. But then, Bhima has no reason to view “the suta” in any other terms.) It’s easy to see that if you gather together enough retellings of the calibre of Randamoozham and Mrityunjay, you get a tantalising, Rashomon-like collection of conflicting perspectives on the same events.

Such retellings are also important reminders of how malleable old stories are, especially in a country as culturally and socially diverse as India. As you travel from one region to another, plot specifics vary, as do people’s perceptions of different characters. Duryodhana might be the villain-in-chief in any conventional version of the Mahabharata, but there are temples in Kerala and Uttaranchal where he is worshipped as a just ruler. And not all Mahabharata traditions subscribe to a misty-eyed view of the Pandavas as heroes. Tribal communities who revere Ekalavya as a folk-hero — cruelly denied the status of the world’s greatest archer — are likely to think of Arjuna and Drona as privileged schemers.

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Now we have Maggi Lidchi-Grassi’s The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata, which is described as a “reinterpretation of Vyasa’s epic from Arjuna’s point of view”. This is misleading on two fronts. First, Arjuna isn’t the book’s only narrator: the initial hundred or so pages of the story are narrated in the voice of Drona’s son Ashwatthama, who is a relatively peripheral character until the end of the war (when he puts the finishing touches to the macabre ritual sacrifice of Kurukshetra). And second, for most of their narratives, Arjuna and Ashwatthama serve the function of all-knowing storytellers rather than individuals with limited perspectives.

Lidchi-Grassi’s Ashwatthama begins on a genuinely personal note: in the very first sentence, he wonders if his childhood yearning for the taste of milk — and the effect this had on his father’s life — directly caused the war. This is a pertinent thought in a story where the competing desires and weaknesses of different characters build towards a cataclysm. But the intimate tone doesn’t last long; Ashwatthama soon becomes a practically omniscient narrator. He knows the secret of Karna’s birth from the outset, because Kunti had conveniently confided in Ashwatthama’s mother Kripi (and Kripi had passed the story on to her son). He knows that the Pandavas did not perish in the house of lac because he chances to overhear Vidura whisper the truth to Bheeshma. More improbably, after Draupadi’s swayamvara, when Krishna and Balarama follow the five Pandavas (dressed as Brahmins) back to their hut, Ashwatthama simply tags along — thus witnessing firsthand a historic meeting between cousins as well as the consequence of Kunti asking her sons to share their “alms”.

Thus, a straightforward retelling (and one that is often very good on its own terms) masquerades as something it isn’t. An effective perspective telling must have immediacy — the narrator should focus on relating his own reaction to each event as it occurs — but this one often refuses to stay in the moment, because the storytellers are too conscious of how well-known their story already is. “Uncle Vidura came from Hastinapura with Duryodhana’s now-famous invitation,” (italics mine) says Arjuna. In Nair’s Randaamoozham, Bhima too occasionally breaks the fourth wall between himself and the reader, but it’s done for a good reason: to de-mythologise some of the stories that have been told about the Pandavas. (The bards who sang about us had colourful imaginations, he often says wryly — we weren’t really that glamorous.) But when Arjuna in Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling begins narrating episodes with “Everybody knows the story of how...”, this serves no useful purpose, and even has the effect of diluting the value of his perspective. Some episodes are also strangely inert and passionless — when Arjuna goes to fetch water in the forest and discovers Nakula and Sahadeva lying dead near the lake, we don’t get a real sense of his grief at the sight.

That said, there is much to appreciate in Lidchi-Grassi’s book. I thought it particularly noteworthy that nearly half of its 900 pages deal with the period after the war, as the Pandavas come to terms with their pyrrhic victory, and face the ambiguous consequences of having performed their dharma. Her prose is elegant and vivid — comparable to that of Ramesh Menon’s fine two-part The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering — and there are little moments of creative inspiration that humanise the characters (as when Yudhisthira wryly tells his dog Raja to consider himself lucky: “you don’t even know who your cousins are”). There are also many fine character sketches, such as this one of the self-deceiving king Dhritarashtra welcoming the Pandavas to Hastinapura for the ruinous game of dice:

“He played the overjoyed uncle — and he was overjoyed. There were tears in his eyes as he fumbled to embrace us and ceremoniously take the perfume from our hair. Yes, real tears, and I doubt not that one in three ran in affection and remorse, the other two in joyful foresight of grabbing all we had for Duryodhana. Uncle Dhritarashtra was the most muddled old fool in the world, and never had his mixture of sentimentality and guile been so grotesque.”

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What I found most provocative about this book, however, is the Preface where Lidchi-Grassi allows herself a personal aside. Recalling her youth in post-WWII Paris, having recently learnt about the horrors of the concentration camps, she mentions her discovery of Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita – a source of comfort in a world gone insane. Describing Arjuna’s famous dilemma as the Pandava and Kaurava armies face each other on the battlefield, she writes, “What finally releases him is something from another dimension, a vision in which the terrifying ambiguities of morality are somehow resolved. I cannot begin to describe the catharsis this passage produced in me [...] I became convinced that the answers I sought could only come from another plane.”

To the irreligious mind this is a vague-sounding passage (contrast it with Amartya Sen’s thesis that the Gita can be read as a conversation between equals and that Arjuna’s pacifist argument is never lost), but it can at least be understood in terms of one person’s spiritual epiphany. However, Lidchi-Grassi then goes on to draw whimsical parallels between Kurukshetra and the Second World War, saying that the events leading up to the latter represented “a tremendous clash between the forces of darkness and the forces of light such as takes place in a time of changing Dharma”.

To an extent such hyperbole is understandable coming from someone who was at an impressionable age in post-war Europe and had a second-hand brush with the Holocaust (one of Lidchi-Grassi’s cousins was an Auschwitz survivor). But when she casts Winston Churchill in the role of the “champion of the Light” (with Hitler as the “Asura’s agent”) and remarks that his war speeches “had the unmistakeable ring of an inspired mystic” – implying that he was guided by an otherworldly power much the same way Arjuna was guided by Krishna – it’s possible to wonder if an analogy has been stretched too far.

This is not to gloss over the dangers posed by fascist Germany. You don’t have to be a moral absolutist to see that Nazism was a tremendous evil that had to be fought to preserve ideals of equality and freedom, and there is a certain poetic sense in which it can be said, with hindsight, that the things we most value in human civilisation were on the brink in the 1930s – that a German victory might have ushered in something resembling a Kaliyug. But simplistic talk about “light and darkness” is never a useful way of examining the vicissitudes of history, and on another level it’s a disservice to the Mahabharata too. It’s also typical of the many attempts to make ancient texts relevant to our own lives and times in very specific – and occasionally contrived – ways.

It’s no secret that religious leaders around the world constantly reinterpret their texts to bring them in line with modern thought. (A venerable old book has a passage recommending that a husband horse-whip his wife for a transgression like mismanaging the household funds? How embarrassing – but never mind. What it can mean is that he make the symbolic gesture of whipping, perhaps by lightly brushing her with a feather or whatever useful implement is at hand.)

But the Mahabharata presents a special case study: its mercilessly questioning tone is very different from that of most other ancient literature, and it has a bleak sense of humour – which is one reason why much of the contemporary reference-making is done in a playful, tongue-in-cheek vein. The day after Baba Ramdev was arrested while disguised in a woman’s salwar-kameez, a leading newspaper offered a humorous edit quoting the epic on the subject of cross-dressing. (“Arjuna wearing red silk, long hair and bangles as Brihannala hid his ‘masculine glory’ without eclipsing it ‘like Ketu covering the full moon’.”) Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (literally “The Maha Bharat Novel”) invented characters who were amalgams of Bheeshma and Mahatma Gandhi, Karna and Jinnah, Duryodhana and Indira Gandhi, but it didn’t feign a direct connection between the epic and contemporary politics; the tone was ironic rather than pedantic.

There are, of course, more solemn, scholarly attempts such as Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good, which brings the lessons of Vyasa’s epic to bear on such aspects of modern life as corporate governance and ethics (even likening Anil Ambani’s feelings about his elder brother to Duryodhana’s envy). But even Das’s book does acknowledge the many moral ambiguities of the epic. “[The concept of] Dharma is at the heart of the poem; it is not only untranslatable, but the Mahabharata’s characters are still trying to figure it out at the end.”

The contemporary reader would do well to remember that the Mahabharata can be read as a work completely shorn of supernatural elements; in fact, it’s highly probable that that’s how it was first read. There are references in medieval literature to a much shorter critical text called the Jaya, which made no mention of such miracles as the vastra haran incident, and in which Krishna is a shrewd Yadav chieftain, not the Vishnu avatar with a beatific smile. Bhasa’s plays and contemporary books like Randamoozham draw on this text, fleshing out the quotidian aspects of the story, stressing the human conflicts.

Read in this way, the Mahabharata is a fluid work of literature, with interpretations that can range from Kamala Subramaniam’s sentimental-idealistic view of the characters to Iravati Karve’s anthropological take in Yuganta, which analyses the ulterior motives of the most revered figures, placing even Krishna under the microscope. Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling repeatedly informs us that Krishna is “beyond Dharma”, but I think he becomes much more interesting if one sees him not as a smug God — forever in control, a puppet-master — but as a man with godlike qualities and a powerful understanding of the hearts and minds of other people; or even an avatar who has only a dim view of the role he must play in the larger picture, and who is frequently swayed by the human dramas around him. (Ramesh Menon’s retelling portrays a lonely, almost frightened Krishna preparing to impart the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna, knowing that this is the test his whole life has led up to.)

There’s an intriguing passage in The Great Golden Sacrifice where Arjuna, sulking because Krishna perceives Karna to be a serious threat (and possibly a greater warrior than himself), wonders:

“For if Arjuna was not the greatest archer in the world, who was he?”

This question — and the related questions of identity, self-doubt and affirmation implicit in it — cuts very close to the true heart of the epic. This is a story about people discovering their potential for good and bad, grappling with duty and conscience. Celestial voices may herald Yudhisthira as the son of Dharma (and hence the embodiment of truth and righteousness) at the moment of his birth, but for the man himself this oppressive responsibility is something he must struggle with all his life. Eventually, he becomes a worthy king — even something resembling a “Dharmaraj” — not by divine right but by slowly, painfully accepting the many weaknesses in his character and finding ways to overcome them.

This makes it possible to read the Mahabharata as the first great literary novel, relevant to us not in a facile, connect-the-dots sense but in a more general, abstract way: for the glimpses it offers into the hearts, minds and personal conflicts of an array of very different individuals – their encounters with their circumstances and how they transcend or succumb to them.

It’s precisely because these characters are so fresh and modern that fine academicians like Karve and Krishna Chaitanya have been able to bring the rigour of contemporary literary criticism to their studies. In The Mahabharata: A Literary Study, Chaitanya treats the epic as a poem where “heterogenous material accumulating over a long time-span was given an unmistakable unity, a focal thrust of meaning” by an editor (or vyasa), and points out that it uses sophisticated literary devices such as foreshadowing and recurring imagery. Karve similarly views the original Jaya as one of the last examples of a pragmatism in Indian literature that was subsequently lost; in later years, she writes, Indian literature became more sentimental, more centered around “the dreamy escapism of the Bhakti tradition”.

This is not to say that a "realist" Mahabharata is inherently superior to the grander, more fantastical one that most readers are familiar with. (Many such tellings, including the ones by Subramaniam, Menon and Lidchi-Grassi, offer powerful insights into the human condition even as they stick with the God-as-charioteer theme.) Both approaches have different strengths and both tell us valuable things about the processes by which stories are generated and acquire new meanings. But at a time when fundamentalism has become almost fashionable, when people take chauvinistic pride in sacred texts that pontificate and preach, it’s important not to undermine the worth of an old story that follows the “show, don’t tell” principle and provides more questions than answers.

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A few years ago I wrote a facetious blog post quoting from Kisara Mohan Ganguli’s translation of an episode where Karna, angry with his charioteer Shalya, launches a surreal attack on the morals of the women of Shalya’s kingdom Madra. Among other things, he denounces the Madraka ladies for “eating beef with garlic and boiled rice”, “singing while drunk obscene songs of diverse kinds” and “in intercourse being absolutely without any restraint”.

Someone commented on the post, expressing deep disappointment that the noble Karna would insult women in this fashion. Whereupon I began a reply: “There are many instances of Karna saying provocative things not because he really believes in them but because it provides an outlet for the anger and resentment that he carries inside him. In any case, don’t make sweeping judgements based on things said in the heat of battle.”

Halfway through the comment, I smiled to myself; here I was, in my thirties, still mounting a defence of a childhood hero! But I also realised that this was the sort of analysis I wouldn’t have been able to conduct at age nine (when I would have been more likely to turn a blind eye to the passage) – as an adult, I had a better understanding of the idea that being a “good” person doesn’t mean that you always say and do “good” things. Time and age do alter the perspective tellings we carry around in our heads, and the Mahabharata is a vast enough work to accommodate them all.