Explosion
in front, I could see other works of “myth lit” — Amish’s books front and centre, yes, but also next to him a whole cluster: Devdutt Pattanaik, Bibek Debroy, children’s versions, collections of short stories, management tales, graphic novels, there seems to be a Mahabharata explosion in literature right now, and it’s not slowing down at all.
“It’s the vastest story ever told,” says Jai Arjun Singh, freelance writer and author, who frequently writes about the Mahabharata in popular culture and fiction, “(Authors are drawn to it) because of the potential it carries. When you have a story like that, it becomes natural to turn to it.” Just looking at the results page on Amazon after searching for ‘Mahabharata’ is daunting. Twenty pages of results, most of them fiction and differing points of view. Take these descriptions:
FROM
After The Pandavas by Trisha Das: “Draupadi is bored of Heaven. Yes, it’s beautiful and perfumed and perfect, but it’s been a few thousand years of the same thing every day. There is only one way to escape: Krishna. He can never say no to her. So she gets her gang of women together — Amba, Kunti and frenemy Gandhari — and off they go to New Delhi, on Earth, where so much has changed and so much remains the same.”
FROM
The Unfallen Pandava by Mallar Chatterjee: “In the process of narrating the story, he examines his extremely complicated marriage and relationship with brothers turned co-husbands, tries to understand the mysterious personality of his mother in a slightly mother-fixated way, conducts manic and depressive evaluation of his own self and reveals his secret darkness and philosophical confusions with an innate urge to submit to a supreme soul.”
“Some writers have done a very lazy version of it,” says Singh, “They already have a story so they just sex it up or modernise it or whatever. Then you get books that are derivative in a bad way.” But since Indian readers don’t seem to be tiring of the myth, even stretching out their hands like so many Oliver Twists, there isn’t a shortage of choices for them.
But this need to tell an ancient story from a different point of view is not a new phenomenon. It’s been happening across epics and across literary canons, internationally authors like Rick Riordan take Greek or Norse myths and turn them into young adult phenomenons. Closer home, Draupadi is a favourite, for example. Both Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni and earlier, Pratibha Ray have used her as a central character, spinning off from the question: what was it like to have five husbands? Both come to the same answer: that Draupadi would look for some sort of spiritual satisfaction outside her marriage: Divakaruni’s princess turns to Karna, Ray’s Yajnaseni to Krishna.
Why then does it suddenly feel like we’re having a mythological literature explosion? Why now instead of a decade or two ago? I asked Karthika Nair, author of Until The Lions, a version of the Mahabharata done in verse and through the eyes of several sidelined characters. “I don’t think that the phenomenon is one of a new market so much as of greater media spotlight currently on the mythologybased literature,” she says.”
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