The Mahabharata

"Everyone has a different idea of what the key epic of a place is, but I would say yes. For me, it is more important than the Ramayana because the philosophical questions it asks are more complex and because in spite of its complexity and the sheer number of Gods and humans involved, everybody in India knows the story, or parts of it, usually, because they’ve heard them being told by an aunt or grandmother. The Mahabharat is interesting for me because cause and consequence is very, very clearly established in the many intertwining stories of the different characters. I think that’s something you find in a novel too. One of the reasons why we enjoy reading novels is because you want to be able to follow that thread of how one event leads to another — how a chance encounter or a missed opportunity can lead to a war. The Mahabharata is not about gods and heroes. In the end, it is about this. For example, the story of the hero Karna. Kunti, his mother, falls in love with Surya, the sun god, has his child out of wedlock, and then puts the child into a little rush basket. Karna then ends up fighting his own half-brothers and when he finds out who he is, he orchestrates his own death at the hands of his brothers. What can be more heart-rending and relatable than this? Then there are the backstories and the backstories of backstories. The Mahabharata becomes this fantastic forest of stories that you can dip in and out of forever, each time coming up with a new philosophical problem to ponder. It’s a story about a war. In that sense, it is like the Iliad . It’s a story about a very, very long war that’s fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, cousins all, over a kingdom that was divided into two equal parts and given to the two groups. The Kauravas invite the Pandavas over for a game of dice and in that game, the Pandavas lose their kingdom and everything they own, including Draupadi, their wife. What the Pandavas don’t know is that the dice were magic, made from the bones of Shakuni’s father, the great dice player from the Kaurav side, who had been wronged by the Pandavas. Again, there’s this fantastic chain of causality. It’s always very interesting and complicated and goes through generations and comes into the present. The past is very much there in the present, in the form of the magic dice made from the father’s bones. I love all these details and there is so much to think about in these stories. The Mahabharata can also be seen as a war which starts off as a war about justice because the Pandavs are trying to get their kingdom, which was wrongfully taken from them in this game of dice, back. Then, as things go on, there is no good side and no bad side, because to win this very long and sad war, everybody compromises their morals, their humanity – everybody cheats. As the number of the dead mount, the pain and the anger, and then the thirst for revenge, grow. You start the story and then, as you go on and on through it, you see how all the elements of what we think of as a civilized life, of family, of mercy, of protection, start falling away. In the end, there is just one thing, and that is the need to win — which destroys pretty much everything. I find it eternally relevant, this idea of the fragility of morality. There are many ways to approach it. There are the literal translations of the Sanskrit text. The one that I have and always use is the J.A.B. van Buitenen. It’s a three-volume translation of the Mahabharat and it’s wonderful. I studied it in college, in a class by Wendy Doniger. But that isn’t the only way to approach the text. You can approach it through film, (there was a great serial made by Doordarshan about 25 years ago) through theatre (Peter Brook’s adaptation of it), through dance, through contemporary novelists’ retellings, or just ask some Indian to tell you the story. Why the Mahabharata is important to the art of storytelling as it developed in India and why mythology is so important to us is explained in the Upanishads which say that complex philosophical ideas are best explained to laymen through a story. This can clearly be seen in the many stories in the Mahabharata. There is always a philosophical idea and the story is built around it to give it flesh. I use the van Buitenen version when I am choreographing a dance for example, when I want to know the exact word used in the Sanskrit text. It’s a great translation because it captures the rhythm of the text rather well or something about it, I am not quite sure what exactly, but it feels right. I also love the Peter Brook version of the Mahabharata . I think he really brings out the universality of the Mahabharata. The text, which was done by Jean-Claude Carriere, is brilliant and a good place to start. I know, both are written by non-Indians. But that just shows how universal the Mahabharata is."

"It’s one of the world’s great myths, an epic poem. It’s eight times the length of the Bible , one of the great works of literature of mankind. I came to it via the Peter Brook film, and read the script subsequently, and it is every bit as good as it’s made out to be. A very rare thing. It has a sort of Shakespearian ambiguity; you feel as much for the baddies as for the goodies. No one is pure. The bad guys aren’t entirely bad, the good guys aren’t entirely good. It’s brilliantly done, and the most gripping story ever told. I worked my way through – slowly – the 15-volume translation from the Sanskrit. It’s a great introduction to ancient India. This was Jean-Claude Carriere’s last great script – nothing he’s done subsequently comes anywhere near this. It’s an extraordinary, slim introduction to Indian mythology. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It really is worth going on Amazon and getting the DVD of the Peter Brook version. I watched it for the third time recently, all nine hours of it, and it’s not in the least had its brilliance diminished. It’s one of the greatest works of mythology translated into one of the greatest films, by one of the great masters of both screen-writing and direction. And it’s also a good entry into Hindu thought and ancient India. It opens up a whole range of India which is usually closed to a Western audience, particularly to a casual reader. Yes. The Interior Landscape is a very slim book of utterly beautiful ancient Indian poetry, much of which is surprisingly and wonderfully erotic: again, this incredibly rich ancient Indian culture which we have no inkling of in the British education system – at no point in my education, certainly. This is a series of translations from largely Tamil, but also Sanskrit, texts, by one of the great modern poets of India, who was the greatest translator of ancient Indian poetry into modern English. It’s equivalent to Ted Hughes doing his translations from Ovid, the same sort of thing. A great modern poet taking on ancient poetry and making modern literature. It’s a very slim text – you can savour it and get the essence of it in half an hour; it’s a very quick way of getting into something extraordinary."