One war, two existential heroes

[1]

By Maggi Lidchi-Grassi [2]

Rs 999

Since its original narration by Ved Vyasa, this story has been retold “many and many a time again in many guises, in many climes, and what follows now is one of them, written far into Kali Yuga, in its birthplace, Bharatvarsha, right on the cusp of history, as the Light prepares to spread over the earth that has resisted for long”. That is how Maggi Lidchi-Grassi introduces her rendering of the Mahabharata, a dramatic and lyrical retelling of the great epic.

Her unrelenting focus is on the Kurukshetra war; the origins of the conflict, the devastating carnage, its aftermath and finally the sacrificial cleansing that follows.
There is a fascinating back story to the writing of the book. Lidchi-Grassi was 17 years old when she returned from South Africa to Paris, the city of her birth. This was immediately after the Second World War. The revelations about the horrors of the war, including the genocide in the Nazi extermination camps, were destroying all previously-held conceptions of the limits to which human evil could extend. It was then that she discovered a French translation of Sri Aurobindo’s Essay on the Gita. “In a world that had lost its bearings it was the only thing that made sense to me.” Some years later she went to live in Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry. It was there that she first read, in 12 thick volumes, the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, and understood the context of the Gita. As she read the epic, she found close parallels between the catastrophic battle of Kurukshetra and the terrible events that engulfed Europe during the Second World War. It is this intensely-felt connection that gives Lidchi-Grassi’s rendering of the Mahabharata its poignancy and immediacy.
How the story of an ancient fratricidal war between the sons of Dhritarashtra and Pandu gradually expanded into an epic poem of 100,000 stanzas, making it the longest single composition ever, remains the subject of a continuing scholarly debate. But over centuries, it has provided ethical, religious and spiritual sustenance for the people of India and lands beyond its shores. It is said that no Indian ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time nor can anything exist that cannot be found in it and yet the question that remains unanswered is: What is it really about? This then is the curiously amorphous but rich and complex character of the epic, involving hundreds of characters and seemingly endless stories within stories, which remains one of the more significant binding forces of Indian society. The device of frame tales (story within story) is employed in several ancient Indian literary works, including the Mahabharata. It gives flexibility to the narrative by integrating smaller storylines with the main account. It also creates a distance between the listener and the subject of the narration, facilitating in building the heroic dramatic personae of the epic.
The Mahabharata is not mythology for Lidchi-Grassi. It is a vividly lived experience and her narration is intensely personal, not stories of a distant age. There are two narrators in her rendering. First is Ashwatthama, son of Drona, the Brahmin military instructor to the Kaurava and Pandava children, and the second and longer section is told by Arjuna, the invincible Pandava hero, the troubled wanderer and, as Prof. P. Lal described him (perhaps to make a point strongly), “the world’s first pacifist”. The mention of P. Lal takes us back to the publishing history of Lidchi-Grassi’s work. It was first published in three volumes between 1989 and 2002 by that venerable publishing house of Kolkata, Writers’ Workshop, that Prof. Lal had so lovingly created. Prof. Lal himself was in the process of “transcreating” sloka by sloka, the entire epic. His purpose was to search for answers to the moral riddles that the Mahabharata presented. To some extent he found a partial solution in Lidchi-Grassi’s version. As he writes in the Afterword to the first volume, she explores the psychological motivation of the two narrators who in some ways are “strangers” and come closest to the model of the Hindu existentialist hero.
To return to Lidchi-Grassi’s narration. It begins with a horrific and recurring dream of Ashwatthama after the Kurukshetra war has ended. He sees King Bhoorishravas, the Kaurava warrior, sitting in meditation with both his hands sliced off and the stumps of his arms bleeding to the earth as the battle rages on around him. Ashwatthama, as we know, is cursed to immortality for his crimes, to roam the earth carrying his heavy burden of guilt. His narration continues with the boyhood and youth of the royal sons and, as rivalry and envy sharpen between the cousins, Arjuna takes up the narrative. It is with Arjuna that we participate in and witness the battle of Kurukshetra and later we travel with him across the length and breadth of Bharatvarsha as Yudhishthira prepares for the Ashwamedha sacrifice.
There are moments in Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling that this reviewer is unlikely to ever forget. One such comes early in the book. When Ekalavya gives his right thumb to Drona as his guru-dakshina, Ashwatthama is watching nearby. This is how he describes the experience: “I may live for ever and I am beginning to understand many things but I know I will never understand why my father did it”. Once the offering is made, “the birds stopped singing, the breeze died. The terrible and beautiful moment will forever be etched in my memory. It was Ekalavya who was beautiful. I turned away from my father”.
The pace of all great epics is swift, focusing on action rather than characterisation. In fact, most epics tend to create unidimensional characters. Achilles is always the heroic warrior, Ulysses is remembered for his cleverness, Lakshman is the faithful brother. The distinctive feature of Lidchi-Grassi’s interpretation is the multifaceted nature of the key personae, as the narrators perceive the paradoxes and contradictions in the characters and those with whom they interact. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the entire Mahabharata is when, at daybreak, the battle of Kurukshetra is about to begin. Arjuna surveys the formations of the two armies as deafening martial music crashes around him. Suddenly, “the drums no longer upheld my blood; it ebbed and what rose were my tears. My vision blurred. My mouth was dry and I could not swallow”. It is the terror of killing those he loves that seizes Arjuna. Trembling and stuttering he turns to his charioteer, Krishna, and asks, “What would victory mean? I do not want this victory, Krishna. It means killing Greatfather (Bheeshma), our uncle, our cousin brothers, their sons who are our sons. And what for, Krishna? What for? A piece of earth?” Soon after, the most sacred sermon of the Hindus would begin. But at that moment, Arjuna is no longer the demi-god, the mythical hero. He is a man and when that man speaks to us directly, the poignancy of the moment increases tenfold. That is how Lidchi-Grassi takes us through the heart of the epic, episode by episode, till the cathartic end when the expiation is done, all passions spent.
The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata is a work of rare grace and beauty. The author’s style is guileless and yet deep, and brings more than just the story. It will appeal to the mature reader who wishes for something more than the abridged versions usually available. The publisher must be congratulated on bringing out this work in a single volume (though weighty at over 900 pages).

Aloke Roy Chowdhury can be contacted at alokeroy@hotmail.com [3]