The Cousins at Kurukshetra

Meanwhile modern re-tellings of the great epics have come up as vigorous acts of repossession by Macaulay’s children, of turning English around to take back the landscapes of their inner life as Indians. From Aubrey Menon’s critical Rama Retold that was banned in the first decade of Independence it’s been a long timecurve through Ashok Banker’s The Prince of Ayodhya, released last year, to the latest effort: The Mahabharata in two fat, heavy volumes by Ramesh Menon (who has previously retold both the Ramayana and Krishna’s story). Translating and re-telling the Great Epics are not for the fainthearted, especially because the Ramayana and Mahabharata are living tradition, not dead stories of dead gods like those of Greece, Rome or Egypt. Indeed they are the only epics living and the original Mahabharata in Sanskrit is a poem of 100,000 couplets, “seven times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined”. Step back from the politics of recent times and the pre-Independence millennium and we see a story grander than all of us, a story that time could never efface. Is that because, hidden in the epic like a jewel, is the point of the story, the reason for the Krishnavatra: the Bhagvad Gita?

The Song of God kept the Hindu heart stout and ticking through the centuries, giving it a richly peopled inner world to retreat to and Menon translates it well, adding Arjuna’s responses, including us all in the Revelation as unborn generations. For did not the Gita inspire Gandhiji to fight for what had to be fought for? Perhaps it is no coincidence that Gandhi was born on the coast of Dwaraka.

With this enormous weight of political, spiritual and emotional baggage to heft, only a very brave person can tackle a grown-up retelling of the living epic. Ashok Banker did well with his first volume of the Ramayana but lost soul with the second, under the strain of writing a commercial fantasy for the West. Ramesh Menon is more at ease. A reader from another culture should have no problems with his straight but never dull text, while an Indian reader will have high comfort levels.

Menon has sourced his story from detailed versions of Vyasa’s original epic: mainly Kamala Subramaniam’s English Mahabharata and Kishori Mohan Ganguli’s 12-volume translation of Vyasa. The thought does occur that some of the words favoured by Menon are now lost: oread (mountain nymph), lucent (transparent), Manticore (Narasimha). But in an epic about supermen, a few superwords are allowed. For otherwise, these books are unputdownable in their pace and detail, with lots of texture woven in and interesting appendices attached, like the names of all 100 Kauravas, the 108 names of the Sun and Arjuna’s hymn to Durga, while the characters are very sensitively developed. The Avatara and everyone who haunts us (Karna, Draupadi, Sikhandin, Abhimanyu) are unsparingly yet lovingly re-lived. Not a book for the fainthearted reader either. Read, just to enjoy a great story well told. They say of the Mahabharata: if it’s not in there, it doesn’t exist.