35 years later, Mallika Sarabhai recalls playing Draupadi in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata

As I stood slightly lost, recognising no one, a gruff voice said, “Salut, Mallika”. I spun around.

Towering over me, but with a face that I instantly recognised, was Antona, one of the little boys who alternated as Janmejay, the child that anchors the play in its telling by Vyasa, last seen as a 10-year-old. And then one by one there were others, Ken, another of the little boys; Chloe Obelansky, the remarkable costume designer; Corinne Jaber, Amba and Sikhandi, whom I hardly knew, and my dear friend Georges Corraface, the Duryodhana of the film. There was Simon, of course, looking like a splitting image of Peter, even with the pink shirt he wore, someone I knew not at all. But it was a thin crowd. I learnt of more people having passed.

So many memories. The Mahabharata (1990), an international production of the epic by Peter, toured for four years globally and was turned into a film and a TV series in 1990. Its restored version will be released worldwide after January 2025.

Seeing the restored film was interesting and thrilling. Simon spoke of how he had spent the last few years retrieving the reels of film from the many places where they had been stuck as payments were due, how he had gone to the best lab to restore it to 8K, and how it was the first European film to be thus restored. He also mentioned that it was exactly 35 years earlier that the film had been released at this very festival. A moving evening filled with nostalgia.

Director Peter Brook surrounded by his cast on the set of the Brooklyn Academy of Music production of the play The Mahabharata (Courtesy: New York public Library)

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In March 1984, I was pregnant with my first child and in bed with a bad case of jaundice. In the local English newspapers, such as The Indian Express and The Times of India, I followed the path Peter and his entourage, being led by Pupul Jayakar, then considered the czarina of culture, took in his search for Krishna or Draupadi for his international production of the epic. He did the usual circuit of metro cities. The newspaper listed the film stars and theatre bigwigs who auditioned. Then the news went cold. At the end of March, my doctors gave me permission to travel. I was headed for New York, still yellow from the jaundice. One morning, four days before my trip, I received a telegram from my friend, the cultural attaché at the French embassy. Are you in Ahmedabad, it asked. Peter wants to fly there tomorrow to meet you. Meet me? What on earth for? I wasn’t a professional theatre actor. Maybe some small part. Amma made me say yes.

They arrived early next morning, five of them — Peter and his assistant Marie-Hélène Estienne, writer Jean-Claude Carriere, designer Chole and her assistant Pippa. Amma sat them down in my living room. Five months pregnant, thin as a rake, yellow, in a green Kutchhi embroidery dress, hair down to below my thighs, I walked in, awkward and intimidated. Five minutes of polite conversation.

Did I speak French? No. Had I done theatre? Yes, a lot in school and college. When was I due? The beginning of September. Pause. Looks exchanged. Then Peter: “We would like you to audition for Draupadi”. Draupadi? What? How? And I was about to leave for NYC. “That is fine. My assistant is looking after my Carmen production at the Lincoln Center and he can audition you.”

A flurry of activities. Doubts. Temptation to accept. Anxiousness. More doubts. What about the baby? What about the publishing house I had just launched with my then-husband? What about my blossoming dance career? To cut a long story short, I accepted. A two-year contract to play Draupadi in French. Which I did not speak.

Revanta was born September 2, the day the rehearsals started in Paris. I joined five weeks later, having organised and completed the biggest-ever international folk festival in India, in Ahmedabad, Mahotsav 84.

I had never lived without my family. Even living in the hostel at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, meant being four km from home. And here I was, going off to live in a country whose language I didn’t speak, with a baby, to manage a home alone, and deal with five husbands, all of whom were great actors from their own country. I was petrified.

For a few months before I left, I had been working on Jean Claude’s script with Achille Forler, dear friend and founder, Alliance Francaise d’Ahmedabad. I had managed to memorise bits of my role. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I arrived at the first rehearsal, walking up eight floors in a cold and unfinished building in Paris. To be told that the script I had had been changed. The next few months were a nightmare. I hated working with Peter and the actors. I was treated as some exotica, resented for being Indian, envied, looked down upon for not being a professional actor, not wanting to be a Peter groupie. I was breast-feeding Revanta and would disappear every couple of hours to an ante-room, also freezing, where he and his nanny stayed during the 14-hour rehearsals.

Soon, I began to find other actors also crooning over the baby, a break from being frowned upon. As a result, Revu’s first nursery rhyme was in Polish, (Duryodhana and Dhritarashtra had issues with Peter or Marie-Hélène and often went to the baby) and the second in a nomadic African language. After five years of touring the world with the company, being with every skin tone, every shade of hair and every sound in the spectrum, Revanta could not understand why all the people at home had black hair.

Peter and I got off to a bad start. Perhaps, I believed that he would be some kind of a shield, that knowing I was in foreign territory, literally and figuratively, he would provide some warmth. But I found him an exceedingly cold man. We argued vociferously on interpretations of Draupadi and other women characters. Once, he asked me not to sound like a shrew. My cold response, “We don’t have shrews in India, only Shaktis.” He didn’t like one disagreeing with him in public. If I wanted something said, it had to be in private. Then if he was convinced, he would inform the group. He once said to me, “Working with you is like working with Princess Margaret.” To which my response was, “I didn’t know you had worked with her.” He was not amused. He did, however, think that I had the potential to speak perfect French and sent me off to the laboratory of this extraordinary linguistic trainer, Tomatis. And accent-less French, I certainly speak. Every time he thought he had gone too far, or that I was about to up and quit, he would arrive with a gift for Revanta! Once the play was on, and he and I both realised that I did, in fact, bring something special that held the play together, our relationship changed. It became cordial, warm and teasing. And it remained so till his death.

Amma was my thesaurus, my Google, my AI. Every time I wanted to underline with written proof something I was arguing about, I booked a call to Amma. Three days later, I would get through. She would procure the paper or book and send it by post. Two weeks later, it would arrive. And I would wave it in front of Peter and Claude, who was my saviour. Every time I wanted to quit — and that was at least twice a week in the first few months — I would run to him. Rant, weep, all but bang my head. He would calm me, explain Peter’s ways, tell me how important having me there was for the play, and envelop me in a hug. Every few months, he would send a smoke signal to Amma to pay a visit. And I survived. Five years of living with Draupadi, with the husbands, with the cast, with myself. All umbilical cords ripped. All cultural landscapes bare.

No common scape to share with anyone. That was when I discovered our affinity as Indians to the two groups of people we all but ignore. The Africans and the Asians. As time passed, I realised that our sense of self and family, our sense of the sacred, of respect, of being connected to nature and to spirituality and a larger belief, was reflected in my fellow actors from these areas. Most Whites looked with disdain and incomprehension when I explained why we mustn’t sit with our feet stuck out towards the Dagar Brothers. Or why paper represented Saraswati and one didn’t stamp on it. (I speak of 40 years ago. Today, most young Indians would probably also look at me with incomprehension).

I became myself during those years of anguish, self exploration, loneliness, being at the edge, facing the world’s audience, defenceless except for what I offered in my interpretation of my favourite woman. I truly became the woman and the person I am. I watched as women who had little in common with each other reacted to my Draupadi. Fat mamas in Harlem, sexy 20-somethings from the Sorbonne, aboriginal women in Perth. Draupadi touched them. They understood they wanted to be like her. What was I doing right? I came out of The Mahabharata five years older, light years more experienced and resilient, with the knowledge that I had to create my own material to touch lives, that our myths were a treasure to be reinterpreted. That if I wanted to give people courage to live their own truths, to find their own truths through my work, I now had the courage and tools to do it. Peter had taught me how to peel a character like an onion, till you find the shunya at the centre. And much of my work in the last 40 years has solidified that belief.

Twenty years after we played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, I walked out of a department store in the city, now with closely cropped hair. Behind me I heard a shout, Madame Draupadi. A woman dropped the packages in her hand and gave me a long hug. “I have never been the same since I saw you. And I would have recognised you anywhere”. The hearts and minds that were touched, remain touched. And The Mahabharata lives on.