The Mahabharata

While The Ramayana was ubiquitous when I was growing up, I only remember The Mahabharata in bits and pieces. Yes, I knew most of the characters, but I was never exposed to the whole epic. Maybe it was because it was much longer than the Ramayana, and the Ramayana also had many different adaptations, some of them really good. I was quite fond of watching Ramlila when I was a kid, and then there was the Japanese adaptation by Yugo Sako that was hugely popular.

After all these years, the thought of properly reading/listening to the Mahabharata came to my mind while I was reading about the provenance of Delhi—then Indraprastha—in William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. He briefly mentions why the Pandavas chose Indraprastha to set up their kingdom, and it got me curious about Indraprastha, the Pandavas, and inevitably, The Mahabharata.

I ended up listening to Sudipta Bhawmik’s amazing retelling of the epic, it’s of course abridged, and nowhere close to some other, much more extensive ones. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was refreshing to give backstories to a lot of names I had heard throughout my life, characters like Dhritarashtra, Drona, Karna, etc. These divine humans portrayed in the Mahabharata were not pillars of righteousness, as I had come to misunderstand; they were fallible. They gambled, they took part in trickery and deceit. They were more human-like, less God-like. Perhaps that was an attempt to make the epic more relatable, and with chapters like The Gita, easier for readers to adopt. I thought it worked, for the most part.

I couldn’t help but compare it to Game of Thrones, but it was only after I had finished reading that I realized that The Mahabharata was written ages ago. So I had to take another look at my notes, my criticism of certain stories in the epic, and allow myself to form an opinion that was then vastly different than the original, mostly positive. To be able to piece together such a storytelling masterpiece roughly 2000 years ago is simply genius. Each character has a nuanced and deep backstory, and if you consider the time period the epic was penned, the plot was great too. I wish to see a screen adaptation of this great epic, similar to other great mythical adaptations; Game of Thrones readily comes to mind. I’m afraid we’ll never get to see that, or at least not the true adaptation, because as I mentioned, a lot of the characters are fallible and are depicted committing acts that won’t make it past the censor board, unfortunately. A great read.