Minimalist epic

The Mahabharata belongs to everyone

One of my prized DVD buys in recent months is Sony Pictures’ two-disc set of Peter Brook’s Mahabharat. It was a touch expensive (as most legitimate DVDs are in the Indian market), but the packaging and the print transfer were beautiful, and the viewing experience transported me back around 20 years, to when I first saw this six-hour film.

For the uninitiated, this Mahabharat is the film version of one of the most ambitious theatrical ventures of the 1980s — a nine-hour play that was performed in over a dozen countries all over the world, with the characters played by actors of different nationalities and skin colours.

I first saw the film in my early teens, already a huge Mahabharata buff — having read several different translations — and still reeling from having watched the elaborate television version over two years on Doordarshan. After B R Chopra’s grand opus, Brook’s Mahabharat was a refreshing change. It pared the story down to its bare bones (naturally, given its limited running time) and the sets and costumes were minimalist — no glittering jewellery, no cardboard crowns or flaming arrows. And the language was English, spoken in a variety of accents, for the performers included Frenchmen, Germans, Jamaicans, Poles, Nigerians and a host of others.

Which means that this film can pose problems for the literal-minded viewer who is hung up on the idea of ‘authenticity’. But then it’s tricky to go down such a road anyway when you’re talking about a work of uncertain origin, containing many fantastical elements, most of which have been added and altered over the centuries. The idea that the Amar Chitra Katha comic-inspired look of the Chopra television series represented the way people really looked like in those days is simplistic, to say the least. Besides, harping on ‘authenticity’ in costumes or language can result in missing the forest for the trees; the real worth of the Mahabharata lies in its understanding of the ambiguities of human experience.

A few years ago, I interviewed the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, who had helped Brook adapt the epic for the stage. “The thing that appealed to me,” he said, “was the poem’s beauty and complexity, and the many questions it raises about our existence. It’s always possible to read it as if it were being written today, for the contemporary situation.” Little wonder then that Carriere and Brook used a sutradhaar figure who doesn’t come from the original text — a young boy who represents the modern Everyman, asking questions about the history of mankind. The film begins with this boy encountering the writer Vyasa dictating the story to Ganesha; it’s a wonderfully poetic scene.

The Brook Mahabharata isn’t a flawless film — since it was produced for an international audience, entire characters and scenes are done away with in order to streamline the narrative, and on occasion complex philosophical ideas are condensed in such a way that they come close to sounding like mumbo-jumbo. But by and large, this is a classy production with a real feel for the source text, and a recognition that the Mahabharata belongs to everyone.

P.S. At the other end of the spectrum is the brilliantly cheesy 1965 Hindi film version of the epic, which is basically a collection of audience-pleasing setpieces about the heroics of Bheema and Arjuna, played by Dara Singh and Pradeep Kumar respectively. This is a simplified, good-vs-evil story that owes more to the prevalent Bollywood idiom than to the epic — it spends a lot of time on “whistle at the screen” moments such as Bheema dressing up as Draupadi to fool Keechaka before killing him. (Dara Singh gets to wear a pallu and talk in a squeaky voice!) But it’s great fun, and a reminder that the Mahabharata has a facetious side as well. n

[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer]