IndiaStar:The Great Bharata War in Recent Film and Fiction by Robert
P. Goldman
The Great Bharata War in Recent Film and Fiction
by Robert P. Goldman
[Editor's intro: Robert P. Goldman, a noted
Sanskrit scholar, is chair of the South Asia Studies department at the University
of California, Berkeley, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences.]
It is interesting that the same period that has witnessed the phenomenon
of the Hindu epic as a popular Indian TV series, has also seen a variety
of other reworkings and revaluations of these texts, the Mahabharata in
particular, in various media both in India and the West. Two recent examples
of this are of particular interest. One renders the epic as a light-hearted
if caustic contemporary historical novel and a modern political roman-a-clef
while the other makes it a rather brooding and almost Gothic universalist
"epic of all manhood." The former is Shashi Tharoor's entertainng
The Great Indian Novel and the latter, Peter Brook and Jean-Claude
Carriere's ponderous and gloomy ten-hour drama become three-hour film.
Tharoor's 400-page novel is constructed as an epic dictated by an aged politician
and poet, Ved Vyas, to a scribe, Ganapathi, in which every significant individual
in the Indian freedom struggle and post-Independence political arena from
Gandhi and Jinnah to Lord Mountbatten, Indira Gandhi, and Morarji Desai
is cleverly represented by a more or less appropriate character from the
ancient epic while their historic actions and interactions are made to conform
to the poem's well-known episodes.
At the same time, Tharoor manages to send up practically every modern writer
on India from Kipling and Forster to Paul Scott, Salman Rushdie, and even
M.M. Kaye with chapter titles such as "The Duel With the Crown",
"Midnight's Parents", "The Far Power-Villain", "Passages
Through India", and "The Bungle Book", giving free rein to
a cheerful irreverence that does not spare even the sacred texts of the
Indian tradition as chapters like "The Rigged Veda" and indeed
the theme of the whole work make clear.
In many cases the characterizations (often caricatures) are wickedly amusing.
Thus the central figure Gangaji, the ascetic patriarch of the Nationalist
movement is a telling parody of Gandhi as Bhishma, a shrewd political operator
as obsessed with his own enemas as with his country's freedom while Tharoor's
Dhritarashtra, a snobbish, aloof Anglophile, blind to the realities around
him, makes an unfairly caustic caricature of Nehru.
Some of Tharoor's portraits cum character assassinations seem excessive.
An example is his rendering of Subhash Chandra Bose as a Pandu who persuades
his wife Kunti to engage in a series of amatory adventures to ensure him
heirs and who goes down in flames in a Japanese plane after a fatal heart
attack brought on by his sexual exertions with the unwilling Madri. But
he is perhaps most savage in his portrayal of Indira Gandhi as the heartless
and scheming Priya Duryodhini who embodies in her malicious person the evil
of all the hundred sons of the epic Dhritarashtra. Although in this case
he carries the bitter joke so far that his wit is dulled by animus, his
caricatures of most figures, notably Karna (Jinnah) whose foppish and aristocratic
airs conceal his lowly origins and of the unbearably self-righteous urine-quaffing
Yudhistir (Morarji Desai) as well as his renditions of many historical events
such as Gangaji's epic Mango March make for entertaining reading.
At the same time, Tharoor occasionally abandons his caustic parody to write
movingly about the triumphs and tragedies of the freedom movement as in
his finely sketched and uncharacteristically reverential account of Gandhi's
successful satyagraha on behalf of the ryots of Champaran here rendered
as the plantation laborers of "Motihar", and his rendering of
Dyer's infamous Jallianwalla Bagh massacre as an Indian Guernica perpetuated
by one "Col. Rudyard" in the "Bibigarh Gardens."
Toward the end of the book, Tharoor permits his indignation at Mrs. Gandhi's
suspension of India's democracy during the Emergency and his bitter animosity
toward her to distract him from his generally witty style while he preaches
about the problems of contemporary India. Indeed in the closing chapters
of the novel, after a roguish account of the birth of India's "Draupadi
Mokrasi" as the child of the illicit union of Dhritarashtra and the
wife of the Viceroy, his fight for skillful parody seems to fail him and
he lapses into a hurried series of characterizations and vignettes involving
the Pandavas and the poorly realized character of Krishna (Krishna Menon)
that generally lack the deftness of the earlier portions of the work. After
a certain point one feels that the joke--and the novel--have gone too far
and have become rather leaden. I must also confess that I found the author's
occasional foray into protracted rhymed verse as in the tale of Pandu somewhat
tedious despite my intellectual sympathy for his efforts to represent his
modern Ved Vyas, like his ancient namesake, as a poet rather than a novelist.
Even with this protracted joke's tendency to sag under his own weight and
that of its author's moral earnestness, I found The Great Indian Novel
an entertaining and occasionally moving book that will certainly repay the
time of anyone interested in and moderately knowledgeable about two somewhat
disparate subjects, the Mahabharata and the history of modern India, which
are so cleverly and pointedly intertwined in this remarkable book.
That the Mahabharata continues to exert a peculiar fascination for both
Indians and Westerners is no doubt most amply demonstrated by the production,
within the past five years of two large scale and successful performative
versions of the epic; one an elaborate Indian TV serialization with over
one hundred half-hour episodes, and the other a celebrated ten-hour marathon
stage version of the innovative British playwright Peter Brook and the French
scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carriere. The latter piece was subsequently transformed
into a three-hour film and it is in this version that I will consider.
Brook is to be congratulated for his effort to render the Mahabharata into
a dramatic version accessible to Western audiences though I am not convinced
that he has done so successfully. The poem, like the Ramayana, has always
lent itself gracefully to revision at the hands of poets and performers
representing virtually all of the regional, linguistic, sectarian, and performative
traditions of South and Southeast Asia. In principle, there is no reason
why a version comprehensible and entertaining to a Western sensibility and
yet reasonably representative of the ethos of the Indian poem cannot be
achieved. In practice, however this is no easy task and Brook has been unsuccessful
in accomplishing it.
Even leaving the issue of authenticity aside, I cannot say I found the film
very impressive. It is long by western cinematic standards and that, it
seems to me, obliges a director to involve the viewer both intellectually
and aesthetically more fully than Brook was able to involve me.
Brook's Mahabharata is clearly a filmed version of a staged play and it
felt too cramped and spare. This is, after all, an epic of gigantic proportions,
of vast landscapes, opulent courts, brilliant princes, and the clash of
huge armies. Brook's small cast, scant props, drab costumes, and generally
Spartan production failed to convince me that this is the world conjured
up by the poetic imagination of Vyasa. Then too, the mood of the gloom that
hovers over the original seems too malevolent and, with the spareness of
the production, gave me the impression of an amateurish amalgam of Greek
tragedy, Shakespeare, and Sartre.
Brook's casting of the play is interesting for it is a concrete representation
of his stated purpose of presenting the Mahabharata as "the universal
epic of mankind." One of the ways in which he seeks to accomplish this
purpose is through the assembly of a visibly diverse and internatioanal
cast of players. It is an interesting strategy but it is also somewhat confusing
to have characters of so many ethnicities reciting their English lines in
such a variety of accents represented as members of the same clan. The mere
selection of an ethnically diverse set of players, is not, in and of itself,
sufficient to universalize the Mahabharata.
Brook's efforts to disengage the Mahabharata from its specifically Indian
cultural matrix seem to me to be inadequately realized so that rather than
having a story that makes sense in an Indian cultural context like his source,
or a thoroughgoing reacculturation such as the Old Javanese Bharatayuddha,
Brook has produced an intermediate creature that seems sometimes to have
one leg in India and the other in the West. As a result, I found that unless
one already knew many elements of the Mahabharate story, the actions and
events in Brook's film were sometimes difficult to comprehend.
A striking example is Brook's treatment of the story of Amba, the princess
who, deprived of her role as wife and mother through Bhishma's ill-fated
abduction, vows to be born as a man to destroy him. This strange tale is
central to the development of the epic story and it derives its power and
logic from deeply rooted and characteristically Indian notions of gender,
sexuality, and power. In Brook's rendition Amba's fixation on Bhishma seems
difficult to fathom and comes across as almost Victorian romance, a kind
of Wuthering Heights East with a touch of Fatal Attraction. Most
peculiar of all is Brook's representation of the famous ishushayya
the bed of arrows upon which the mortally wounded Bhishma lies as he delivers
his final, lengthy lectures to the Kaurava heroes. In Vyasa, the "bed"
is a metaphor. Bhishma does not lie on a real bed such as would comfort
a lesser man but instead rests suspended on the very shafts of the myriad
arrows that have pierced him. Through this device the poet is able to show,
one last time, the extraordinary stoicism of the greatest of warriors and
the power of his renunciation whereby he has acquired the power to defer
his death to the time of his own choosing. In Brook's film the stricken
warrior is carried onstage lying on a wooden cot whose frame bristles with
arrows, making it literally a bed of arrows. Spectators unfamiliar with
the Mahabharata can only wonder why Bhishma would have been in bed while
people were shooting at him; those who know the poem can only snicker.
While Brook was courageous to take on the Mahabharata and he deserves a
great deal of credit for trying to make this important work accessible to
a general audience in the West, his product, at least in the three-hour
filmed format fails to make the epic drama either comprehensible or entertainng.
It is possible that its longer formats, the ten hours on stage or the six-hour
video, the piece may be less plagued by the film's obscurities. On the other
hand, having sat through the film, the thought of a presentation two or
three times as long is daunting to say the least. Brook's Mahabharata presents
an unusual case study in the problems besetting the translation and transposition
of a work deeply rooted in a particular culture. It would be hard to recommend
it as an instructive exposition of the great Indian epic.
The question of the representation of culture and the limits of a cultural
area is interestingly illuminated by a comparison of Brook's Mahabharata
with the popular Indian television Mahabharata produced by B.R. Chopra.
The series differs therefore from the Brook piece not only in the nationality
and cultural orientaion of its intended audience, but in terms of that audience's
perceived cultural "level." For while Brook is targetting an elite
and sophisticated audience in producing a film that can be shown only on
a limited basis in what used to be called an "art house" in the
movie world and on viewer-supported television, Chopra has produced a piece
of popular culture with a mass appeal for audiences in South and Southeast
Asia. Thus the works differ on a mimetic as well as cultural-stylistic level.
Where Brook excludes the existentialist gloom of the off-Broadway play and
the novelle vague cinema, Chopra employs the pop-cultural filmi glitz--the
playback singers included--of the Bombay-Hindi movie studio. Thus, although
it is somewhat quicker paced and a little less sentimental than Sagar's
Ramayana, Chopra's version is unlikely to have appeal, even in a subtitled
version, for a general audience in the West.
Despite a pace that is glacial compared to American half-hour action-adventure
series, special effects reminiscent of 1950's sci fi films, and an acting
style that Westerners will find schmaltzy to say the least, the Chopra series
brings to life the characters of the Mahabharata and accurately renders
several of the poem's complex emotional, moral, and ethical dilemmas while
providing a level of action adequate to sustain most people's interest.
Although it would be a hard sell to interest most Western audiences in the
series, I do recommend it to people familiar with Indian culture and literature
both as an instructive and entertaining bit of contemporary popular Indian
culture.
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