Contemporary take on the Mahabharata

The past is a foreign country, but not to us Indians. Owing to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, our ‘living’ epics, we grow up on the same cultural influences that nourished our ancestors. In The Discovery of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, “They represent the typical Indian method of catering all together for various degrees of cultural development, from the highest intellectual to the simple unread and untaught villager. They make us understand somewhat the secret of old Indians in holding together a variegated society divided up in many ways and graded in castes, in harmonizing the discords and giving them a common background of heroic tradition and ethical living. Deliberately, they tried to build a unity of outlook among the people, which was to survive and overshadow all diversity.” In short, our epics are timeless and what makes them so is the multiplicity of ways in which they are transmitted.

Rishi Veda Vyasa is said to be the first author of the Mahabharata, but its dissemination has been facilitated, besides elders-turned-storytellers, by innumerable dramatists, sculptors, artists, performers, animated films and television serial-makers, and, lately, Twitter users. Add to the tribe, Amit Majumdar, a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist in the US, who is also an accomplished poet, novelist and essayist. Among his earlier works are Sitayana, a retelling of the Ramayana from the perspectives of its different characters, and Godsong, a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. His latest, The Book of Vows, is the first volume in a trilogy based on the Mahabharata. It “attempts to recreate the ancient epic for a contemporary audience…the feel, though not the form, of its poetry and its fate-haunted, magical air.”

Opening with, “Everything begins with a vow,” the first chapter reminds us that we are entering a different universe, a story world where one’s actions are required to match one’s words.

To reiterate the point, the author declares: “I vow to write the Mahabharata.” (Just as we, the readers, have, presumably, vowed to read it — the perpetuation of an epic being a covenant between the transmitter and the audience.)

Backstories, frame stories, and side stories contribute, like so many rivers, to the Mahabharata’s depth and complexity; it’s left to the storyteller to choose the thematic strands along which he wishes to string his rendering. Majumdar opts for a linear narration of events, but with a diction so refined and refreshing that even the most seasoned aficionado of epic retellings is compelled to read on. Writes Majumdar, “You can see the whole war, its genetic code, its basic raga. Sage on a ferryboat or king on a riverside, it’s always the same thing: desire, desire…”

While the desire-ridden king Shantanu may be less than desirable as an epic hero, Devavrat, his semi-divine son from Ganga, is cast entirely in the heroic mould. For him, “Incarnation is incarceration.’” Indeed.

His famous vow to never “father a king,” denies the world the glories of the Gangaputra Empire and opens the first door to the fratricidal conflict. Enter Veda Vyasa, Satyavati’s secret son, the progenitor par excellence — of the epic and of the two warring bloodlines that feature in it.

Described herein, as a man with a lazy right eye. “Vyasa could not look at anything with both eyes, living or non-living, without reading and transcribing it to his memory, a phrase to be used later. That was why his right eye was lazy, it allowed him to function and go about his day without turning it into literature.”

The volume ends with the dice game and the disrobing of Panchali. All key events and the finale are well-dramatised. The main characters too, are sufficiently nuanced, even if a few of them remain along predictable lines. However, value addition is brought by the author’s perceptive insights and tongue-in-cheek humour. As a narration, it sparkles.