Well begun: two princes and a mischievous God in Maya Bazar

I have started a new column for First Post, which centres on opening scenes (or establishing sequences). The first entry is about a film that I properly discovered while preparing for the online Mahabharata course that Karthika Nair and I taught a few months ago: the 1957 Maya Bazar, a magnificent musical-comedy-fantasy that is as good as anything Indian cinema gave us in that very important decade. I still revisit its songs often on YouTube, especially “Aha Naa Pelliyanta”, which has Savitri’s superb performance as Ghatotkacha disguised as a princess, and "Vivaha Bhojanambu” (which borrows its tune from the music-hall classic "The Laughing Policeman".
Here is the piece.
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The opening credits begin, and you can tell that a period epic is about to unfold. But first there is a brief, mood-setting interlude: a confrontation between an earthbound archer and a burly, mace-wielding fellow in the sky. They launch their weapons; the arrow and the mace race towards each other and collide in mid-air, as these things tend to do in our mythological films.

And then the main title appears.

Maya Bazar.

A few months ago, while teaching an online course about the Mahabharata, I re-watched KV Reddy’s magnificent 1957 film (made in both Tamil and Telugu), and was again enthralled – by the humour, the visual grandness, the music, the performances, the ceaseless sense of wonder. But I was also struck by that opening moment, which is a taster of an important later scene.

A viewer who doesn’t know about the plot of Maya Bazar might – on the basis of visual cues accumulated from other mythological films and TV shows, or the iconography of Amar Chitra Katha comics – conjecture what is going on here thus: the archer is the hero; the heavily moustached mace man (who slightly resembles the Ravana of the 1980s television Ramayana) is the antagonist; perhaps even a wicked asura.

But as it happens, these combatants are both the progeny of the heroic Pandavas, both destined to play key roles much later in the great epic. Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna and Subhadra, has strayed into the enchanted realm of Ghatotkacha, the son of Bheema and Hidimbi. They don’t yet recognise each other, but when they do a joyous brotherly reconciliation will take place – and their mothers, one a Yadava princess, the other a rakshasi who rules over a forest, will greet each other as sisters. Like cousins going to a film together during the summer holidays, Abhimanyu and Ghatotkacha will even settle down to watch a stage performance of a famous Puranic story (the one about the asura who acquires the boon that he can destroy anyone by placing his hand on their head).

Shortly after this, Ghatotkacha will use his powers to help Abhimanyu reunite with his love Sasirekha – and this becomes the pretext for a delightful comedy involving action and impersonation and a lavish wedding feast.

All that comes later, though. The first narrative scene of Maya Bazar (after those opening credits) is set in Dwaraka, the abode of Lord Krishna, who is the other magician or “maya-vi” figure in this film. The early scenes will stress both the magic in the air (a box-shaped device, which can be opened to communicate with people who are far away, is like a bejewelled prototype for an online video-call) and Krishna’s divinity – most notably in a beautiful sequence that points to how he has been mythologised in his own lifetime. But these scenes are also about family politics, romance, and the casual chatter that takes place in everyday life, even when the people involved are legendary figures like Krishna or Balarama. 

If you grew up watching Tamil or Telugu films anytime from the 1950s onward – or even had some knowledge of these cinemas – you would know Maya Bazar, and its towering reputation, in the same way that Hindi-film viewers know of Sholay or Mughal-e-Azam. Apart from its exceptional qualities as a musical-comedy-fantasy, it brings together some of the most notable names in south Indian cinema – starting with NT Rama Rao in the first (and possibly the most endearing) of his many performances as Krishna, and SV Ranga Rao as Ghatotkacha, who goes from being fearsome to childlike in the blink of an eye. The young Savitri is superb as the heroine Sasirekha (known as Vatsala in the Tamil version), particularly in the scenes where Ghatotkacha, disguised as the princess, shifts from daintiness to demoniac swagger and back again. And across the two versions of the film, the role of Abhimanyu is played by two major stars: Akkineni Nageswara Rao in Telugu and Gemini Ganesan in Tamil.

On the other hand, if you did not grow up with those languages and cinemas, you might go decades as a movie buff without knowing much about Maya Bazar. I was in my late thirties when I got to watch a good print with subtitles, and halfway through I knew I was in the presence of cinematic brilliance. For me it now ranks alongside any of Indian cinema’s finest achievements of that decade, from Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy to the best work of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy.

To some degree, this has to do with my Mahabharata-love; to be able to appreciate Maya Bazar in all its dimensions, one has to appreciate its fresh, whimsical slant on characters who are already familiar from the great epic. It is based on the folk-tale Sasirekha Parinayam, which had been filmed as far back as the 1930s, and the ways in which the story departs from the canonical Mahabharata are very telling.

For instance, it might seem strange to say that this is a comforting, heart-warming film, considering that in the mainstream Mahabharata both Ghatotkacha and Abhimanyu end up dying in tragic circumstances – it might even be said that both of them are sacrificed as a gambit by Krishna. (Ghatotkacha’s death is the one that is explicitly presented as a ploy – Krishna wants Karna to use his lethal weapon against the dispensable rakshasa rather than against Arjuna – but Abhimanyu’s killing also serves the function of harnessing Arjuna’s fury and raising the stakes and intensity of the war.) Watching the interaction of the central characters in Maya Bazar – especially the camaraderie between Krishna and Ghatotkacha – it is hard to imagine these same people in that distant, calculated scenario on the Kurukshetra battlefield.

But the thing is, Maya Bazar exists in its own bubble or vacuum. It is unconcerned with what is to come in an uncertain future, it is rooted in a fantasy present where all the good guys will emerge unscathed after having had some fun with the bad guys. Viewed in isolation, it plays a bit like a moralistic but comical and (mostly) non-violent version of the Mahabharata. The Pandavas never even appear in this three-hour film; Draupadi only appears in one fleeting moment early on, which provides a signpost for the depth of the Kauravas’ evil.

As Vamsee Juluri put it in his book Bollywood Nation: India Through its Cinema, “Some of the most popular [Telugu] mythological films of this time focus not on a pedagogic panorama of well-known episodes, but instead on minor, seemingly unimportant tales […] they are less about the whims and fancies of the Gods, and more about what happens when they are enmeshed in the web of human relationships.”

In critical renderings of the Mahabharata – the ones that are concerned with the big picture – Ghatotkacha and Abhimanyu occupy very different positions when it comes to the question of legitimacy. Despite Ghatotkacha being the oldest child of a Pandava, and the many references to their affection for him, it is clear that he is not an official heir; he exists on the margins of their kingdom. (“I live in another world, and I must go back with my mother,” he tells his father Bheema in a poignant scene in Peter Brook’s film version of the epic, “But if one day you need me, I’ll hear your call.”) Yet the effect of folk-takes like Sasirekha Parinayam – and other similar variations on the main Mahabharata story – is to reclaim this “rakshasa” prince as a member of the inner circle.

One of the themes of Maya Bazar is that appearances can be deceptive and that identity can be fluid (a princess celebrating her upcoming wedding through a song might make un-ladylike expressions and “manspreading” gestures) – and we are prepared for this theme by that opening scene, which briefly places Abhimanyu and Ghatotkacha in opposition, then unites them. Here they are, one the legitimate Pandava heir, the other an outsider who (in conventional Mahabharata tellings) is treated as a distant ally summoned to make a sacrifice; and yet here is a moment where they are enjoined together in genuine kinship, all boundaries falling away. It is one of the loveliest conceits of this film about a marketplace of illusions where anything can happen.

"I wanted to write a Mahabharata novel about men dealing with society’s idea of manhood"

[Did this interview with author Aditya Iyengar for Scroll.in]

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Introduction: Aditya Iyengar’s debut novel The Thirteenth Day dealt with one of the Mahabharata’s most dramatic episodes – the death of Abhimanyu – but treated it in a deglamorized, largely unsentimental way. His just-published sequel A Broken Sun continues the Kurukshetra-war trilogy and is told in a range of voices, including those of the grieving Arjuna, the introspective Yudhisthira and the tribal prince Ghatotkacha, unclear about what he is even doing in this war.

Iyengar demythologizes familiar stories (Arjuna’s vow to kill Jayadratha is depicted as a public-relations strategy retrospectively engineered by Krishna) while capturing something comically human and relatable about them: senior warriors in the Pandava camp squabble like petulant children during a conference; after a battle has briefly been interrupted, warriors look hesitantly at each other, wondering whether to resume fighting as if nothing had happened. The practical aspects of surviving a messy, chaotic war are dealt with, as are questions of masculinity and heroism.

Iyengar isn’t limiting himself to the Mahabharata, though; in a short but prolific novelistic career, he has had two other books published and is simultaneously working on other projects.

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A notable thing about your two Mahabharata books is that there doesn’t seem to be a political or ideological agenda – you’re focused on telling a bare-bones story about fighting and strategizing, through the eyes of different people. There is little moralizing, no dwelling on dharma or adharma, and you have removed the narrative’s supernatural elements. What has your relationship with the epic been like, and what approach did you try to bring to it as a writer?

I believe I belong to perhaps the first generation of novelists that was introduced to the Mahabharata on screen first, rather than through literature. I must have been four or five years old when I saw the TV show on Doordarshan, so I suppose the first version I was ever exposed to was Rahi Masoom Reza’s brilliant screen version. Over the years, of course, I read CR Rajagopalachari’s, Kamala Subramaniam’s, and RK Narayan’s versions among others. And while I’m sure the debates on dharma have in some way shaped my understanding of the world, I’ve always loved the more surface attractions of the Mahabharata. Details like the old warrior Bhagadatta having to tie his forehead with cloth so that the wrinkles don’t fall over his eyes; or Bhima being able to eat all the food of the world but deciding not to, and earning the name Vrikodara for the slimness of his waist. It tapped a childlike sense of wonder within me.

As a writer, I wanted to tell a different kind of story, one that spoke about the nature of masculinity. I took out the supernatural details so that the reader could focus more on the internal conflicts of the characters rather than the ‘coolness’ of the weapons. I wanted to bring out the horror of the war and the sheer nightmare of having to kill your own family, which I feel gets lost in some modern retellings. In the translation of the Mahabharata I’ve read (KM Ganguli’s fine version) the descriptions of war are very stylized. Arrows are described as rays of sunlight, the bloody wound of a warrior is described as a flower in bloom. I wanted to take away the veneer of glory from this violence.

And I never really wanted to do a straight retelling: what’s the fun in that? There are so many writers who’ve done it better than I ever could. I was actually inspired by Balzac. Or more specifically, Patrick Rambaud who was inspired by Balzac. He’s a French author who wrote a trilogy about the Napoleonic wars. Balzac, it seemed, wanted to write a book on war where a reader would feel himself present in it. He never completed the work, but Rambaud was sufficiently enthused by the concept to create his own trilogy about Napoleonic battles.

I wanted to try something similar, where the setting of the battleground would be a place where a reader can truly see a character’s personality. It is a place of intense emotion, anger, and stress; and I felt that as a setting, it acted as a catalyst for the actions of the characters. The humour is a consequence of the absurdity of it all - of having to fight in circumstances like these, alongside people you normally would not agree with.

You have narrators as disparate as Bheema’s son Ghatotkacha (usually described as a “rakshasa” in the mainstream Mahabharata tellings, here presented as a tribal chief) and Duryodhana’s brother Duhshasana (here given the more benevolent name Sushasana). How does the multiple-narrator technique aid you as a writer?

The multiple-narrator technique was filched from Colleen McCullough’s stunning retelling of the Iliad – The Song of Troy. I’m more comfortable writing in the First Person than the Third Person, and also I felt it would be more interesting as a writer to try different narrators – especially lesser known ones from the epic. I wish I could say there was some grand thematic reason for using different voices, but I’ll stick to the truth: I got greedy, and wanted to get in the heads of all these people.

You seem particularly interested in the mundane aspects of fighting a large-scale war: the accumulation of gore and grime, the need for interpreters for warriors from other regions (and the practical question of how to communicate when an interpreter is killed mid-battle). What war literature has influenced your work?

I’m a huge fan of historical fiction and war literature in particular. ‘Fan’ is probably understating it. I’m more a history nerd than anything, and I’ve read historical fiction and non-fiction about everyone from the ancient Egyptians and Hittites and the Greeks; all the way down to Edo era literature, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and the World Wars.

Since this is a ‘gritty’ retelling, I thought it would be interesting to see the Mahabharata in granular detail, with all the thumb tacks visible. Interestingly enough, the original text (I’ve read parts of the KM Ganguli translation) has enough of these details from different kinds of arrows to the effects of different astras. However, most retellings avoid these details to focus on the higher-level messaging which I feel takes away from the fun of the story.

For me, the practical stuff (most of which I had to re-imagine to fit my narrative) is really the most interesting part of it, since these details make the war more relatable to readers. How do you communicate when you suddenly can’t understand what the soldier next to you is saying? And how do you keep your balance when the mud is slippery under your sandal? And does a battlefield full of corpses impede a chariot’s path?

At the heart of it, the Mahabharata is just such a great story. An eighteen-day war. A thirteen-year-long exile. An attempted rape. An abandoned child. Murder, arson, subterfuge, humiliation, revenge, and the great human truth—nothing is permanent, everyone’s time will come. While I love the philosophy it expounds, I do wish more people would just stand back and be amazed at the quality of imagination in the epic.

The earlier book, The Thirteenth Day, was largely about the death of Abhimanyu. In this follow-up, the voice that is most soaked with sorrow and introspection is that of Arjuna, who addresses his narrative to his dead son. It is also the only voice that is in the present tense. Was there a specific reason for that? Did you want to convey a dazed, stream-of-consciousness effect that would be notably different from the other voices?

Yes, absolutely. I wasn’t sure how to write that kind of grief effectively so I used as many literary devices I could to multiply that emotion. So the present tense is used to add urgency to the situation. I wanted to create an effective stream-of-consciousness but with an element of surrealness. Arjuna is present in the moment, but is doing as he is told rather than taking his own decisions. He is almost an observer - an outsider or bystander - to his own life, and he needs to be one in order to deal with the grief and keep it at a distance. 

Different notions about masculinity and heroism run through the voices in these two books – from the chest-thumping warrior (Abhimanyu) to the more unsure, less battle-suited narrator (Yudhisthira) to someone who admits to losing control over his bowels on the battlefield (Sushasana). Since you focus much more on the men and their interior struggles than on the women, these books might seem to be “macho” – but on another level, they are constantly undercutting our ideas about what a man “should be”. Is this something you intended?

I did want the novels to be about the interior lives of men, since I haven’t read too many novels that actually bring out the insecurities of men effectively. Cinema does it better. Take for example the works of Scorsese or Bertolucci who have influenced my reading of male insecurity heavily, or Bicycle Thieves, that inspired Ray and Scorsese and perhaps most filmmakers in the world. It is, at its heart, a story of male insecurity. Closer home, one grew up seeing the work of Yash Chopra, Basu Chatterjee, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and so many others and that certainly shaped one’s view of how a man should be or what notions he must have. Mr Chopra’s depiction of Amitabh Bachchan’s character in Kaala Patthar as a man who is struggling with his own perceived cowardice is exquisite. And not all these depictions are so serious; take Utpal Dutt’s character in Golmaal.

I feel that this generation; i.e. born post 1979 at least has learned more about what it is to be a man through cinema, which is more raw and visceral than novels. Perhaps we had more access to cinema than previous generations and began preferring them to novels for entertainment. Or perhaps this is my shortcoming as a reader rather than the non-existence of such novels.

But what is the Bicycle Thieves/Goodfellas/Raging Bull/ Jalsaghar/ Golmaal equivalent in literature? Are there any novels than really bring out men at their vulnerable worst, without making villains of them, instead trying to evoke sympathy for their complete helplessness in the face of the rigid requirements of society? The closest answer I have is Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold. Maybe JM Coetzee’s Disgrace too.

As a man, I can talk about my own problems with the idea of masculinity though it has taken me time to articulate it. A big part of being a man is posturing, being macho as you’ve said, but go behind the scenes and look at his innermost thoughts, and you realize that every man is essentially petrified of losing control over their circumstances. Some are able to mask it, others take it out on those vulnerable next to them either by bossing them around and showing they are in control or being violent or mean to them. I wanted to create a novel about men dealing with society’s ideas of manhood, and how these characters are trying to live up to them; or not in some cases.

For a long time I wasn’t sure whether I had adequate insight into the interior lives of women to be able to attempt a novel about women. Thankfully, something went off in my head last year, and I was able to write my upcoming novel, Bhumika. I’m still not sure if I’ve succeeded in understanding other men or women (I come from the space that I can truly only attempt to understand myself as an individual), but one can only try.    

Closely tied to the masculinity theme is the relationship between fathers and sons – and how fathers very often don’t know how to deal with their sons as they grow away from them, or become extensions of them. You explore this through the Arjuna-Abhimanyu, Bheema-Ghatotkacha and Yudhisthira-Prativindhya relationships, among others.

The Mahabharata is essentially a story of parents and parent figures and how they eventually move further from their children. It is, like all great sprawling works of literature, about the generation gap, though no one is ever going to put it that way.  I’m very fascinated by the idea of what qualifies as ‘masculine’ and how it is almost completely linked with the idea of domination. To be masculine, one needs to be in control. But what happens when one can’t control what is happening? Does one become less of a man if he can’t impose his will on a situation? And what happens when one is put in a situation of chaos, and has to accommodate other people’s wills? These were questions I wanted to explore in this trilogy.

Interestingly, some readers have complained that Yudhisthira is a ‘wuss’ and a coward in my interpretation since he is not a great fighter like his brothers and hates having to live in their shadow. On the contrary, for me, he is the only man who is trying to see the war as the horrible situation that it is rather than a logical extension of a man’s masculinity. In a sense, it’s a little like Wilfred Owens or Siegfried Sassoon writing about the First World War.

A cynical question: over the past few years, mythological retellings have become a cottage industry within Indian publishing. I think your books are strikingly good additions to modern Mahabharata literature, but as an author do you feel it is risky to work in this field, because of the dangers of saturation? Do marketing teams, bookstore owners and browsing customers find it hard to distinguish between one “epic” novel and another?

It is risky if you are planning to stick only to one genre, and also if you view your writing career as a progression within a single, defined genre – like, say, Bernard Cornwell or Conn Iggulden, who only write historical fiction. There is a real problem of making your work stand out. Franchise bookstores, that have obvious advantages of distribution over independent book stores, are becoming less about books these days, and Amazon’s algorithm may not always benefit the sales of your work. 

There is also very little to differentiate one mythological fiction writer from another in terms of story since let’s face it, everyone knows what’s going to happen at the end of the Mahabharata/Ramayana/any other epic anyway. Social media and marketing can only go so far in convincing potential readers to buy the book. Still one feels that one’s style and perspective set one apart, and I guess that’s the reason, most myth writers try their hand at it; though as you’ve said, it may not be enough of a differentiator in the market.

Is there a solution? The only one I can tell is to create a culture of book appreciation and reviewing that creates a canon of sorts. Perhaps Indian myth fiction writing in English is too nascent a genre. Maybe, over time, there will be strong literary standards that writers and readers will have to guide them.

Also, writing episodic or character-driven novels about the epic is a more recent phenomenon within the genre. More writers are picking and choosing the stories they want to tell from the epics. There is no compulsion to tell the epic from start to finish like there used to be before.  Perhaps that has set us all free?

Apart from this war trilogy, you have begun work on a series about the Chola dynasty, and have also written The Palace of Assassins, an original plot centred on another Mahabharata character, Ashwatthama. What is your writing discipline like, and how do you balance the writing with your day job?

I began my career as a copywriter in advertising. As a consequence, I have now been conditioned to work within short and nearly unrealistic deadlines. I guess that accounts for the prolificness. I set myself very hard deadlines and keep to them mostly. When I write, I work every morning from around 6 to 8 AM, before going to the office. Most of my writing happens over weekends where I work from the morning till around five in the evening. It sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is though. In many ways, I’m also fortunate to live, and to have lived in situations where I can devote myself to writing without having too many other real responsibilities that can take up my time. More than discipline, I suppose circumstances maketh the writer.   

Tell us something about your plans for those other books – the Chola series, for example. Also, do you see yourself writing a story with a contemporary setting at some point? Or does history and mythology have enough to occupy you?

I’m a fan of many genres of literature. It is both a blessing and a curse. A curse because one wants to attempt as many genres as possible. My novel Palace of Assassins, which released last year, is actually the first part of a planned octet where Ashwatthama goes across the world over several centuries seeking the Syamantaka gem that only materialises during times of war. The Syamantaka can finally rid him of his curse and allow him to die. It can also rid him of Krishna, who is present as a voice in his head till the end of time - or till Ashwatthama ends his own life. It’s a mad quest series with Ashwatthama and Krishna that (if I can pull it off) melds various genres - historical fiction, picaresque adventure, gothic horror, etc. But it’s still a work in progress. The next part has Ashwatthama in the Trojan war, but I’ve still not begun writing it.

The Conqueror is my first foray into historical fiction, which is perhaps my favourite genre as a reader. It deals with Rajendra Chola’s conquest of Indonesia. I’m trying to follow it up with two other novels of historical fiction, but I’m still in the middle of researching these books. My next novel, due next year, is called Bhumika, and is inspired by liberal interpretations of the Ramayana by Volga and others. In my novel, the sage Vishwamitra shows Sita how her life may have been if she had never met Rama.

So I guess I do instinctively gravitate towards myth and history but I am trying a contemporary novels too. I’m fascinated by the Indian bureaucracy, and I’m trying to write a novel about modern-day bureaucrats. I feel there is something about mundane, boring office spaces that could potentially – like war – bring out the worst and most interesting aspects of us.

Rajinikanth as Karna, Mammootty as Duryodhana: Thalapathi revisited

[Did this piece about Mani Ratnam’s 1991 Thalapathi for Mint Lounge. Much, much more to say about this remarkable film – possibly as part of a collaborative project with my Mahabharata-obsessive friend Karthika Nair – but here’s the short version]

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Contrary to what you’ve been hearing from some quarters, airplanes and internet technology are almost certainly not a bequest from the days of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. However, mythology has other, softer ways of affecting our contemporary lives – by supplying the tropes and archetypes of our popular culture, for instance.

Take the celebration of male friendship in Hindi cinema, which draws heavily on mythological relationships such as Krishna-Sudama (a parable about true love being eternal and transcending the class divide), Krishna-Arjuna (two good guys combine philosophical wisdom and fighting skills to defeat evil), and even deity-devotee friendships like Rama-Hanumana.

But one of the most striking examples of male bonding – especially the sort that plays out in dramatic, morally ambiguous circumstances – is the one between Karna and Duryodhana in the Mahabharata. And I can’t think of a better cinematic treatment of this relationship than in Mani Ratnam’s 1991 film Thalapathi, where Rajinikanth plays Surya, a modern-day Karna who is abandoned as an infant, grows up in penury and becomes regent and friend to the ganglord Devraj (Mammootty).

Notably, the two men start as adversaries and their friendship begins as a result of Devraj recognizing that one of his minions had transgressed and that Surya did the right thing in punishing him. “I am not a virtuous man,” he tells Surya when he first extends the hand of friendship, “but I value justice.” Devraj belongs to the (perhaps overworked) tradition of cinematic crime bosses who have their own moral codes which they scrupulously adhere to – but the film is less concerned in giving us the details of his underground activities than in examining his friendship with Surya; it's enough to know that the two men operate in a deeply unjust world where many official lawmakers, including policemen, are corrupt and predatory, and that they provide an alternate means of justice to underprivileged people.

As with anything else in the Mahabharata, there are many possible perspectives on Karna and Duryodhana. Some tellings and analyses treat the relationship as purely one of convenience – two men brought together by hatred of a common enemy – or interpret it cynically: the “good” Karna feels bounden for life to his benefactor, while the “bad” Duryodhana is simply exploiting the skills of the great warrior he has unexpectedly discovered. The anthropologist Iravati Karve, for instance, scoffed at the idea that such a friendship would be possible between such social non-equals.

But even in the more sentimental-emotional renditions of the epic, which treat the friendship as wholly genuine, Duryodhana is mostly the story’s main antagonist or “villain”, with Karna as the person who humanizes him.

An intriguing aspect of Ratnam’s film, then, is how sympathetic and conscientious it makes its Duryodhana, who is an exemplar of friendship and justice. “You are making me a better person,” he tells Surya, “People used to fear me earlier, but now they respect me.” But both men benefit from the relationship: Surya is also made more stable and responsible by Devraj’s guiding presence.

In an interview with critic Baradwaj Rangan, Ratnam said he wanted to give his Karna a happy ending because “I’ve always wished that he lived on [in the Mahabharata] … there’s so much stacked against him.” This need to reverse a doomed hero’s destiny, to give him a ray of hope, fits well with this film’s tone. Rajinikanth’s Surya, though a fine performance with some very moving moments – such as when he learns his mother’s identity – is different from other Karna-inspired suffering heroes: Amitabh Bachchan’s intense, brooding Vijay in Deewaar, or the reticent and melancholy Karan played by Shashi Kapoor in Kalyug (a much more sombre Mahabharata updating).

Surya might not perform any cigarette-flicking tricks, but in some ways he is very much a Rajinikanth hero. Within the first 15 minutes of his onscreen appearance, we see him beat up a hoodlum in an action sequence, and shake his hips in a raunchy song (the great Ilaiyaraaja composition “Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu”). Thalapathi is a reminder that the Mahabharata lends itself to “masala” treatment just as much as a Shakespeare play does; that loud, dramatic moments can coexist with small, subtle gestures and revelations of character; that an “item number” where Rajinikanth and Sonu Walia and their backup dancers shake their hips at each other can exist in the same space (literally in this case) as a more restrained interlude that introduces one of the film’s women protagonists (Subbalakshmi, played by Shobhana).

During the Bhogi festival, Surya and Devraj sing undying love to each other, in the time-honoured tradition of Hindi-film buddies like Veeru-Jai and Dharam-Veer. There is even a lighthearted comic take on the idea of “daan veer” (generous) Karna, who can never refuse anyone anything: at one point Surya, who doesn’t have money on him, orders a young woman to hand over her bangle – to pay for someone’s hospital treatment – with the assurance that he’ll get it back to her.

And yet there is also a bittersweet tinge throughout the film, a dramatic heft and a final sense of loss – notwithstanding the relatively “happy” ending – that comes in large part from the Devraj character.

A pivotal scene in the original Mahabharata is the one where Krishna tells Karna the truth about his birth and invites him to join his brothers, the Pandavas; Karna declines, citing his loyalty to Duryodhana and saying that even if he were offered kingship of the world, he would pass it to his friend. In its climactic passages, Thalapathi offers us a rarely glimpsed possibility of what might have happened if the truth had come out. So deep is Devraj’s love that on learning that his nemesis, an upright district collector, is Surya’s brother, he promptly declares a stop to hostilities, says that Surya’s family is like his own family, and decides to end his illegal activities.

It is a classic example of cinema as wish-fulfilment: such is Ratnam’s craft, the power of this film’s narrative arc, and Mammootty’s stirring performance that one is, temporarily at least, seduced into thinking that this could have been an apt alternate ending for the epic: that a great friendship could have helped avert a cataclysmic war, and the Duryodhana-Karna relationship could have received as much positive press as the Krishna-Arjuna one.

A rude, gritty Mahabharata - on Aditya Iyengar's The Thirteenth Day

[Did this for Scroll]

What need for another Mahabharata-inspired novel, you ask? Our bookstores are spilling over with them, and that’s if you include only the re-imaginings and perspective tellings published in the past few years. One way of looking at this is that “epic lit” has become a profitable little cottage industry for mediocre writers and lazy publishers. But when depth of knowledge aligns with imagination, the story’s many possibilities can still be given fresh life – as in Aditya Iyengar’s sharp new book, which uses for its canvas a brief mid-war period where mind-games are lost and won.

Any Mahabharata buff knows that the 18 days of the Kurukshetra war don’t carry equal heft. Far from it. The fighting in the first dozen days is relatively low-intensity (but don’t tell that to the thousands of “ordinary” soldiers who have their heads lopped off), with only one major dramatic occurrence, the fall of the grand-patriarch Bheeshma on the tenth day. It is from day 13, with young Abhimanyu leading the charge into the Kauravas’ Chakravyuha formation, that things really heat up. Iyengar’s The Thirteenth Day spans the period – three nights, three days – between these two events.

Three is in fact is the book’s talismanic number, since that’s how many interweaving voices tell the story. There is the Pandava prince Yudhisthira, for whose claim to the throne the war is being fought; his voice has the introspective timbre of a man aware that he is one of history’s foils, never quite a hero in the sense that the people around him would want him to be, always in the shadow of – and dependent on – his brothers Bhima and Arjuna. The second narrator is the Kauravas’ lynchpin Radheya – better known as Karna in the epic’s mainstream renderings – who was brought up by a low-caste family but has lately learnt that he is the Pandavas’ elder brother. Cynical, often rough-edged and rude, this is the voice of someone who was raised in horse-stables and continues to be jeered at as a “suta”, even after being admitted into the warrior class.

While staying mostly faithful to the events described in the original, Iyengar reinterprets the Kaurava attempt to capture Yudhisthira as a stratagem that will allow Radheya to take the throne for himself by revealing his real status and overseeing a truce. But it is Abhimanyu – the book’s third narrator, full of teenage bluster and impatience, and obsessed with posterity – whose actions will determine the result of that game.

A notable thing about this book is that “dharma” goes unmentioned. There is no moralizing about good and evil, or suggesting that the Pandavas represent the former and the Kauravas the latter. At the same time, unlike many revisionist tellings, The Thirteenth Day doesn’t try to highlight the Pandavas’ flaws or the good qualities of Duryodhana (known here as Suyodhana); it simply doesn’t bother with the moral angle. Realpolitik is the meat of this story – its characters are hardened warriors concerned with winning a war, that’s all. Most of the action takes place either on the battlefield or in the army camps at the end of each day. And most of it is fuelled by masculine ego and swagger. The women in these protagonists’ lives – Draupadi, Subhadra, Uttaraa – are on the fringes, only sometimes alluded to. (“I wrote some rubbish to Mother and went to bed,” Abhimanyu says in the manner of the college kid who has more important things on his mind than parents.) The most pronounced female presence is that of the melancholy Shikhandi, who was used on the battlefield as the pawn to bring Bheeshma down; her unenthusiastic attitude to the war serves as an effective counterpoint to Abhimanyu’s.

There is no sentimentalizing either, which is intriguing given that two of these narrators are among the Mahabharata’s most hero-worshipped characters, with a large dewy-eyed fan following built up among listeners and readers over the yugas. In scores of other books, Karna’s battles against misfortune and Abhimanyu’s gallantry have been milked for every drop of emotion (and I don’t mean that as a putdown; there have been superb sentimental-humanist renditions of the Mahabharata, such as the ones by Kamala Subramanian and Ramesh Menon). In Iyengar’s novel though, there is a detachment even in the accounts of Radheya meeting his real mother Kunti, or the wounded Abhimanyu having his head smashed in. Sentiment is trumped by cool self-analysis: when he thinks Bhima has been killed, Radheya wonders if he should be feeling sad about the death of a younger brother. The book’s most tender moment involves the death of an elephant.

In other words, The Thirteenth Day belongs to a tradition that tells us the Mahabharata in its core form – called “Jaya” – was grittier and sparer than the version most of us know today. And godless too, the original epic’s Yadava chief Krishna not having yet been conflated with the Vishnu-avatar of the Bhakti Tradition. (In The Thirteenth Day, Krishna performs some splendid chariot-manouevering in one scene and is respected as a strategist, but otherwise stays mostly in the background.) This tradition includes Iravati Karve’s critical analysis Yuganta, MT Vasudevan Nair’s Randaamoozham, told in Bhima’s voice, and Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay, all of which – to varying degrees – treat the epic in realist terms.

Explored here are the practical workings of a world where titles such as “Maharathi” can be bought or transferred (much like examinations being given by proxy in our own present day); the settling of personal scores, even among people fighting the same side; the necessity of being tactful once in a while (even if you have had a good day, you mustn’t show much celebratory emotion in the presence of a colleague who lost a kin); the impossibility of properly disposing of hundreds of decomposing bodies each day. That Iyengar knows the Mahabharata well is obvious in his treatment of peripheral figures such as the old King Bhagadatta. There is attention to detail – especially in the descriptions of combat – and a ring of truth in many of the character portraits, such as the suggestion that Suyodhana’s skill as a mace-fighter is linked to his pride about his looks. And there is humour: in one passage, after hearing that the soldiers consider Bhima the army’s heart and Arjuna its brain, Yudhisthira makes the mistake of asking which part of the human anatomy he is deemed to be in this analogy. Soldiers are a crude lot, comes the reply, so let’s not go there.

And crude they are. Most of the voices we hear in conversation are not those of genteel nobles, but the bawdy ones of men in war, inured to wine-drinking sessions even as the stench of carcasses drifts across to them. (“Don’t say I didn’t warn you when Radheya is riding our boys like a bull in heat,” someone says.) Which leads me to a minor quibble: given that Iyengar’s descriptive prose is assured and elegant (this is one of the two best-written Mahabharata novels I have read recently, the other being Sharath Komarraju’s The Winds of Hastinapura), some of the slang in the actual dialogues – or the way “putra” and “my boy” are both used at different times – feels a little incongruous.

But since demythologizing is the buzzword here, with characters and incidents constantly having the sheen of epic romance removed from them (Bheeshma on his famed bed of arrows is likened to a cockroach on its back), perhaps slang is an acceptable mode. As the author observes in an introductory note, in our own “Selfie Yuga” we have all become our own bards and myth-creators through social media. Perhaps it was ever so. The book ends with a minstrel’s lament where we see that the process of legend-creation has already begun, with hundreds of thousands of deaths ascribed to the slain Abhimanyu; there will no doubt be further exaggeration in other ornate verses to come. But an earlier description is more in keeping with this narrative’s earthy, matter-of-fact tone: “The boy had balls. Great, big ones."

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[This blog is of course littered with Mahabharata posts, most of which you'll find here. Some pieces about recent novelisations: Sandipan Deb's The Last War; Karna's Wife/Draupadi in High Heels]

Connecting dots (and being underwhelmed by Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug)

Usually, when adapting a book into a film, the scriptwriters don’t take it for granted that their viewers have read the source text; the movie should work on its own terms. But it gets trickier when a film tries to do new things with the template of a very well-known tale and a degree of familiarity is presumed. I enjoyed Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hamlet adaptation Haider when I saw it two months ago, but since then I have wondered how I would have felt if I had watched it knowing nothing about Shakespeare’s play. Because the thrill of connecting the dots was central to my viewing experience – noting how Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer had turned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into buffoons who idolise Salman Khan, or anticipating the famous grave-digger scene, complete with the “Aha!” moment where Haider holds up a skull, and the goofy little song (“So Jao” – a take on the recurring links between sleep and death in Hamlet?) that would probably have delighted Shakespeare’s own, plebeian heart.

Would the descent into madness of Haider’s girlfriend Arshia have been credible if one weren’t prepared for it by knowledge of Ophelia’s tragedy? Possibly not: the film is cantering along at this stage, and the abrupt cut to the scene where Haider sees Arshia’s funeral procession might puzzle an unprepared viewer – I remember a few murmurings in the hall – especially since being reduced so quickly to a nervous wreck doesn’t seem consistent with Arshia’s personality (unlike the sheltered Ophelia, she is a journalist working in Kashmir, accustomed to seeing bad things happening).

To some extent the question “How important is pre-knowledge?” applies to all of Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare adaptations (even if the answer to the question is unclear or variable). The first and still arguably the best of them, Maqbool (Macbeth), began with a brilliantly atmospheric scene where two crooked cops gossip about the Bombay underworld and use astrology to predict a gangster’s rise and fall. The scene works well by itself, but gains a new dimension once you realise these are versions of Shakespeare’s witches, commenting from the sidelines while also helping to engineer and direct events. And who can forget Maqbool’s pitiful “Main bachunga ya maroonga?” followed by the witch/cop’s reassurance that he is safe until the “dariya” comes right up to his house, a Birnam Wood drifting to Dunsinane.

Anyway, what started me on this "adapting an over-familiar tale" subject was a recent re-encounter with Shyam Benegal’s 1981 film Kalyug, a modern-day Mahabharata about a business family split into rival factions. I loved Kalyug when I was 10 (back then it was the only Benegal film I would have touched with a long spoon, much less forced my mother to take me to Palika Bazaar to find a video-cassette of, as I did)... or at least I thought I loved it. Possibly what really stimulated me was the Mahabharata dot-connecting game (then as now, I was obsessed with the epic), and especially seeing my hero Karna sympathetically portrayed by the film’s biggest star (and producer) Shashi Kapoor.

Watching it again now, I was disappointed. It is enjoyable in bits and pieces certainly – the cast is full of interesting people, and the plot is busy enough: the cousins keep raising the stakes passive-aggressively until things get out of control; Amrish Puri plays a Krishna who doesn’t have anything like the agency and influence of the charioteer-God; Kulbhushan Kharbanda is an amusingly priapic Bheema; Rekha and Raj Babbar sleep in separate beds and look unhappy; the smooth Victor Banerjee looks as if he would be perfectly happy sleeping alone forever; Supriya Pathak is sexy. But these elements don’t add up to very much. The film shifts between big-canvas cynicism – with its caution about how, in the machine age, everyone sinks morally into quicksand – and trying to evoke sympathy specifically for one character, the underdog Karan (using Shashi Kapoor’s personality and star-cachet to achieve this without a great deal of help from the actual writing). There is a neither-here-nor-there feel to the whole, which is a reminder of the film’s unusual conception: getting a Serious Director to helm a project that would be backed by money and a cast of well-known names from the mainstream, but would also have the sort of verisimilitude that can be created by Om Puri seething and shaking his fists in a small part as a trade-union rabble-rouser.

Take away the Mahabharata-awareness and this is a confused story with too many characters, most of whom are underdeveloped and don’t get enough screen time. There are tensions and meaningful silences that don’t seem to stem from anything – except, well, as a viewer you are simply supposed to know that Karna was rejected by Draupadi at her swayamvara, or that Yudhisthira is a bit of a non-entity who is over-fond of gambling, or that Abhimanyu may simply have been an overenthusiastic kid who got too involved in adult games. And those who don’t know all this are naturally foxed. A non-Indian friend, who loves old Hindi movies but hasn’t read Vyasa’s epic, had this take on Kalyug: she felt it played like a sort of home video where a viewer has all the relevant information beforehand about the people, and then indolently watches their little dramas play out. Interestingly, in the film itself, there’s a scene where the characters sit together watching a video of themselves at a wedding function. Vanraj Bhatia’s stirring music score aside, I’m not sure that Kalyug on the whole is much more interesting than that footage.

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Update: a follow-up conversation with my erudite friend/fellow Mahabharata nut Karthika Nair helped me articulate another reason why Kalyug didn't work for me this time: the best Benegal films, including the ones that are more "art-house", like Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda or Mammo, are very far from the art-cinema cliche of the "boring", "educative" movie; they are kinetic and have a sense of style, they do interesting things visually (look at Nihalani's cinematography in Bhumika, and how it uses four  different types of film stock to capture different periods in the protagonist Usha's life). Whereas this film, for all its glamorous, "commercial" trappings, is formally static, and content to rest on the Mahabharata references.

[Two old posts about Benegal films I like very much: Trikaal and Charandas Chor. And this one on Junoon, written back when I was trying to sound more knowledgeable about Benegal than I actually was, and which I should probably watch again some time]

Fornit, some Fornus - writers on writing

[From my Forbes Life column]

The American author Stephen King is too prolific to be easily categorised, but most people who know of his work from a distance think of him as a “horror writer” – he has, after all, published bestsellers about a psychotic dog, a homicidal clown, a creepy hotel with a mind of its own, and a girl who wreaks vengeance on her tormentors through her gift of telekinesis. But one of the scariest King stories I have encountered is the novella “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet”, which is about a writer’s personal hell. The story is included in the collection Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, which, along with King’s On Writing, contains many valuable insights into his profession.

The framing device for the flexible-bullet story is a literary party where an aging editor recalls his association with a once-promising novelist named Reg Thorpe. Thorpe became convinced that his typewriter was inhabited by a “Fornit”, a tiny elf that sprinkled magic dust – Fornus – on the machine and was responsible for his creativity. Which sounds outlandish, but is it? As the editor’s account comes to its tragic conclusion and the party winds up, the wife of another young writer nervously asks “There are no Fornits in your typewriter, are there, Paul?” and we get this chilling sentence: And the writer, who had sometimes – often – wondered where the words DID come from, said bravely, “Absolutely not.”

Writers do wonder. Many of them don’t understand their processes – how the “muse” emerges, how quickly it can vanish, leaving no trace of the idea or the turn of phrase that had seemed so brilliant in the middle of the night – and some of them feel a painful disconnect between the thing they had in their minds and what finally emerged on the page. (Was the Fornit responsible for the bungled prose? Could the Fornit be a double agent?) Here is Ann Patchett in her memoir This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, on the conception and gestation of each new novel: “…the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty. […] When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it.” Patchett goes on to write movingly about the experience of seeing the dry husk of her beautiful friend on the writing table, “chipped, dismantled and poorly reassembled. Dead.”

All this can sound pretentious to those who think creative people romanticise their work needlessly rather than just “getting it done” – but nearly any serious writer has experienced these feelings, and their accounts often echo each other. Consider King’s little elf in the typewriter, and then look at Mishi Saran’s description of “the dwarf clamped to my shoulder – a mini-me – hissing into my ear”. This is from an essay in the fine new anthology Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves, edited by Manju Kapur. The book has many candid pieces by novelists such as Anita Nair, Moni Mohsin and Jaishree Misra, and while some of the points made are gender-neutral, they also touch on the specific difficulties of being a woman writer in a conservative society – many of the writers mention Virginia Woolf's famous essay “A Room of One’s Own”, about the financial independence and the emotional and physical space a woman needs in order to write.

Another of the most engrossing self-reflective books I have read in the past year is Vikam Chandra’s Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code, which tries to reconcile his two selves, the fiction writer and the software programmer. Chandra examines his trajectory as a reader and writer: for instance, he recounts how, as a youngster, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling (with their episodic structures, logical discontinuities and narratives nestled within narratives) and the cool, minimalist “realism” of modern American writing (in creative-writing workshops in the US, the model to aspire to was the spare prose of Raymond Carver).

As Chandra knows, the writer as part of his own story – creating and participating at once – is a tradition that goes back a long way in Indian literature. Look at what happens early in the great epic the Mahabharata. A king has died heirless, his wives need children to carry the Kuru lineage forward, but no one with the right pedigree is able or willing to do this. At this point Vyasa himself, the poet and composer, enters the story and fathers the children who will in turn beget the epic’s protagonists the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Now the tale can continue. Did someone say deus ex machina?

Such a narrative arc is facilitated by stories that begin with oral recitations and gradually expand over time. (Picture a spoken story reaching a dead end, the audience impatiently asking “What happened next?” and the storyteller finding a way out by introducing himself as a character.) But some modern classics have also aimed for such an effect. Rabindranath Tagore’s Shey – translated from Bengali into English as He (Shey) by Aparna Chaudhuri – has for its protagonist a man who is made entirely of words. The book was written for Tagore’s granddaughter Pupe, and includes a number of unusual adventures and creatures; but as Chaudhuri points out in her introduction, storytelling is presented here as an interactive process – the tone changes with Tagore’s moods and Pupe’s demands, and also eventually reflects the difference in her personality as she grows from age nine (when the storytelling begins) to age 16 (when it ends).

Among more straightforward, linear fiction that has an author as a protagonist, a personal favourite is Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, in which a writer tries to uncover details about the life of another, deceased writer – in particular, to understand how the latter’s literary output changed with his personal circumstances, and what the contribution of his now-forgotten first wife Rosie was to his art. The result is one of Maugham’s most delicate books, an examination of the wheels behind the creative process and, importantly, a pretty good story in its own right.

Writers do sometimes stop navel-gazing for long enough to write about other, real-life writers. Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché is a fine collection of essays on the methods of old masters (Milton, Donne, Cervantes) as well as contemporary practitioners of popular forms (Thomas Harris). More recently, there is Jonathan Franzen's collection Farther Away, my favourite essay in which – “What makes you so sure you’re not the evil one yourself?” – is a celebration of the great short-story writer Alice Munro. Franzen notes how Munro is sometimes not taken seriously enough because she writes in conversational prose about everyday things, rather than about self-consciously Big Subjects; through a brilliant discussion of a particular short story, he analyses her talent for uncovering layer after painful layer in human character and relationships. So much of writing is implicitly a tribute to other writing (because everyone has been influenced by someone or the other), but this essay is that rare thing, one accomplished writer trying to make acquaintance with another well-known writer’s Fornit.

[More soon on Stephen King's excellent On Writing. And some earlier Forbes Life thematic columns here: popular science, satire, true crime, translations, doubles, time travel]

More from the TV Mahabharat - a stylised blooding

Not that I’ve done any research on this, or intend to, but I wonder if episode 248 of the Star Plus Mahabharat – telecast on Friday night – represents a new frontier in the depiction of violence and gore in the history of Indian television. I suspect it does; I was startled by its vividness, even though one knows that the killing of Dushasana is not something that lends itself to refined, non-bloody treatment. In fact, even the YouTube version of the episode (which you can see here) is censored – some shots, including one where blood bursts like a geyser out of the dying man’s chest, have been excised. (This was also the case in earlier episodes involving the killing of Jarasandha and Shishupala.)

I have had a very complex relationship with this TV show over the months (and I intend to write about this at much greater length in the future sometime) – there have been some brilliantly conceived moments, some fine visuals, good performances and even intelligent writing, but there have also been far too many slack, simplification-riddled scenes, as well as internal inconsistencies and terrible pacing (nearly 10 episodes for the game of dice, followed by a hurried four or five episodes to depict the Pandavas's entire 12-year exile). However, I think there was much in this episode that was extremely well done, especially from around the 16-minute mark where Draupadi enters the battlefield and Bheema – who is practically in a trance at this stage, calling out to her in a hollow, robotic voice – begins the macabre ritual of washing her hair with Dushasana’s blood.

If you don’t like gore, you’re thinking: I don’t want to watch this, or even continue reading this. But (speaking as someone who does like gore, so possibly I’m not the best “objective” judge) I don’t think this scene is as viscerally revolting as it might have been. And the reason is this: it is heavily stylised. Everything about it is excessive and Grand Guignol – even the “blood” glistens and gleams, like the pig’s blood in the climactic scene of Brian DePalma’s Carrie – and while one could have seen that as a flaw in the production, in this case I think it perfectly fits the theatrical mood of the scene.

After all, this IS one of the most brilliantly hyper-dramatic passages in the Mahabharata. Apart from its importance as retribution, it is, from Bheema’s point of view, his moment in the sun – it represents a converging of almost every emotion he has experienced with regard to Draupadi, not just since that terrible day in the dice hall 13 years earlier, but also in larger terms: feeling unappreciated, second best, having to know that she feels much more deeply for Arjuna than for him. And here he is now, and here she is, and he alone is to be the agent of her long-desired vengeance, the one who will get to stroke and bind her hair after all these years of denial, while the other husbands and the other protagonists in this drama – even the puppet-master Krishna – are reduced to mute spectators, watching a performance. At the surface level, this is a depiction of a wronged woman being avenged (and the show has often drawn facile and somewhat problematic parallels between Draupadi’s story and the current public discourses about rape and capital punishment in India) – but at a deeper and darker level it is another vindication of the patriarchy, a depiction of a beast-like man asserting control and possession over a woman. And while this serial has hardly ever been radical about such things, I do feel that this subtext slips through in the scene. 

I never thought I’d say this about an Indian television actor (much less someone who was apparently cast in a role because of his physique and his experience as a wrestler), but I think the actor Saurav Gurjar, who plays Bheema, is pitch-perfect here. And the tone of the scene in general is very close to the many stylised depictions of this episode in our traditional dance forms like Kathakali. You can see one of those performances here, in an old episode of Shyam Benegal’s Bharat ek Khoj, starting around the 2.20 minute mark. It used to give me nightmares as a child.

[Earlier posts on the Star Plus Mahabharat: Bride of Frankenstein; Kryptonite Karna; the benevolent patriarchy]