Chapter:-1 Yes, and you've chosen an epic as one of the books for this list, which seems like a good place to start. Let's turn to the Mahabharata. Is it the key epic for India?
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.
For those of us who haven't read it, could you maybe take a step back and explain what The Mahabharata is about and what happens in it?
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.
The Mahabharat was written more than 2,000 years ago in Sanskrit. What's the best way to approach it? Is there a translation that you think is good or a particular edition?
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.
Do you have a favorite among them?
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 .