Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  But Mik came back to mind the other day when a literary controversy erupted in America over the proposed publication of a novel called The Wind Done Gone, which would seek to do to Gone with the Wind what I had wanted to do to Kim. The estate of Margaret Mitchell, whose only novel, Gone with the Wind, remains one of the most successful books (and movies) of all time, sued to prevent the publication of The Wind Done Gone, in which the same events are narrated from the point of view of a slave, the illegitimate half sister of Scarlett O'Hara. The author of The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall, consciously sought to counter Mitchell's romanticized white-plantation South with an account from the perspective of the enslaved blacks who made the planters’ prosperity possible. The Mitchell estate succeeded only briefly in getting a federal court to block publication of The Wind Done Gone, but the issue the case raises is an intriguing one. To the extent that literature captures our imagination with a version of experience that privileges a particular point of view, isn't it desirable, even essential, that others give voice to those who were voiceless, silent, marginal, even absent, in the original narrative?

  Tom Stoppard, the brilliantly inventive British playwright, did precisely this in his early play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which he took two minor characters from Hamlet and, in effect, rewrote Shakespeare by imagining the scenes the Bard left out, from the confused viewpoint of two hangers-on at Elsinore. Others, more recently, have done similar things. John Updike also reinvented Hamlet in his recent novel Gertrude and Claudius. In Mary Reilly, Valerie Martin retold Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the point of view of the transformational doctor's maid. Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick, with the obsessive Captain Ahab relentlessly pursuing the great white whale, underwent a feminist retelling in Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife.

  Shakespeare, Melville, and Stevenson are not merely safely dead, but gone so long that copyright on their stories has expired, which, alas for poor Ms. Randall, is not yet the case with Gone with the Wind. Indeed, a hugely controversial Italian novel by Pia Pera called Lo's Diary — which reimagines the tale of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from the point of view of the fourteen-year-old nymphet rather than that of the older man, Humbert, who was Nabokov's principal protagonist — is impossible to find in English. An attempted American edition was successfully killed off by the Nabokov estate, which went to court before the book was released commercially and had every copy pulped before it could be sold. The literary executors of authors usually claim to be acting to preserve the artistic integrity of the original work, which is certainly fair from a writer's point of view. But in the Mitchell case the argument is more legal than literary. It seems the Mitchell estate wants to assert its exclusive right to market spin-offs of the well-known characters, and might not be averse to licensing its own version of Gone with the Wind retold from a slave's point of view. It just doesn't want someone else cashing in on the idea.

  The lethargy of our own courts aside, India strikes one at first glance as fertile soil for such reimaginings. When I took the liberty of reinventing the Mahabharata as a twentieth-century political satire in The Great Indian Novel, I rapidly learned of the many impeccable works in Indian languages that have already recast the epic, notably those that tell the tale from Draupadi's point of view rather than through the male gaze of the Pandavas. The Ramayana from Sita's perspective might tremble on the brink of sacrilege to some, and certainly one from Ravana's would bring the Bajrang Dal onto the streets, but how about more recent classics? That is where one stops short. So much of great Indian literature was already written to subvert the established order, to challenge the ruling narrative, that such an exercise seems otiose. The Kipling view of India was already countered in the 1930s by Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie and Untouchable and by Raja Rao's immortal Kanthapura, not to mention a host of works in Indian languages by Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Subramania Bharati, and others too numerous to list, who used their writings explicitly to give a voice to those who had been marginalized by the imperial narrative. India's is already a literature of subversion, with the added distinction that the stories our great writers have told were entirely their own — they did not need to borrow from the canon to subvert it. We do not need to retell John Masters from the point of view of Mangal Pandey. We have already done better than John Masters ever could.

  So I shall put Mik to rest for good. There are more interesting stories to be told, and they are always ours to tell.

  3

  Mining the Mahabharata:

  Whose Culture Is It Anyway?

  CONSIDER THE EVIDENCE. A television series retelling the Mahabharata is the most successful Indian TV program ever, drawing an audience of over 200 million and paralyzing life during the hours of its weekly telecast. The Western world's leading avant-garde theater director makes a nine-hour play of the epic, which a multinational cast performs to enthusiastic acclaim across the globe, from Avignon to Ayers Rock. Shorter TV and film versions of the play are also successfully distributed worldwide. The best-selling book in the history of Indian publishing in English is not some steamy potboiler, but the venerable C. Rajagopalachari (“Rajaji”)’s episodic translation of the Mahabharata. (If the sales of other translations were added, the Mahabharata would probably eclipse the next few Indian best-sellers put together.) Obviously, the two-thousand-year-old epic is still flourishing: why, an American professor in Washington, D.C., offers a “multimedia” course in the Mahabharata, with students examining it from a dozen different contemporary perspectives, including those of Bollywood, Peter Brook — and yours truly.

  Which immodest reference brings me to the book at hand, my first novel, immodestly (but not entirely immodestly, as I shall explain) titled The Great Indian Novel. It is precisely the epic's appeal to non-Sanskrit scholars that has ensured the Mahabharata's present-day relevance and given me material for my novel. I am no expert on the great epic, but The Great Indian Novel draws extensively from it. (Including its name: as I explain in an author's note at the very beginning of the book, its title is not a reflection of my estimate of its contents, but a reference to this source of inspiration — for since maha means “great” and Bharat is the Hindi name for India, Mahabharata, after all, can be read to mean “Great India.”) I have, to put it simply, used the Mahabharata as a vehicle for an attempt to retell the political history of twentieth-century India, through a fictional recasting of its events, episodes, and characters.

  The Great Indian Novel is preceded by three epigraphs that frame and underpin this endeavor: the first from the eminent Mahabharata scholar C. R. Deshpande, attesting to the importance of the epic in the Indian consciousness (“it has moulded the very character of the Indian people”); the second from its most creative translator, P. Lal, reiterating the case for its contemporary relevance (and quoted more fully below); and the third from a non-Indian writer, Günter Grass, urging that “writers experience another view of history” and that “literature must refresh memory.” My novel stands at the intersection of these three ideas.

  There is a considerable basis for Deshpande's view amongst Sanskrit scholars in the classical canon. The grand old man of Mahabharata studies, V. S. Sukthankar, put it un-compromisingly: “The Mahabharata,” he wrote, “is the content of our collective unconscious…. We must therefore grasp this great book with both hands and face it squarely. Then we shall recognize that it is our past which has prolonged itself into the present. We are it.” Another eminent scholar, R. N. Dandekar, pointed out that “men and women in India from one end of the country to the other, whether young or old, whether rich or poor, whether high or low, whether simple or sophisticated, still derive entertainment, inspiration, and guidance from the Mahabharata…. There is indeed no department of Indian life, public or private, which is not effectively influenced by the great epic. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the people of India have learnt to think and act in terms of the Mahabharata.”

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p; Lal takes this a crucial step further:

  The epic of Vyasa is not a literary masterpiece out there, somewhere in the past, or tucked away in air-conditioned museums and libraries. Its characters still walk the Indian streets, its animals populate our forests, its legends and myths haunt and inspire the Indian imagination, its events are the disturbing warp and woof of our age…. The essential Mahabharata is whatever is relevant to us in the second half of the twentieth century; whatever helps us understand and live better our own Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha [faith, wealth, pleasure and salvation]…. No epic, no work of art, is sacred by itself; if it does not have meaning for me now, it is nothing, it is dead.

  Lal's view underscores, rather than undermines, the traditionalists’ position. The Mahabharata has come to stand for so much in the popular consciousness of Indians: the issues the epic raises, as well as the values it seeks to promote, are central to an understanding of what makes India India. And yet the Mahabharata is a tale of the real world, one whose heroes have feet of clay, whose stories have ambiguous ends, whose events range from great feats of honor and valor to dubious compromises, broken promises, dishonorable battles, expedient lies, dispensable morality. That made it ideal for my own purposes as a novelist. To take characters and situations that are laden with epic resonance, and to alter and shape them to tell a contemporary story, was a challenge that offered a rare opportunity to strike familiar chords while playing an unfamiliar tune.

  In my view the Mahabharata is an ideal vehicle for my own modest efforts to affirm and enhance an Indian cultural identity, not as a closed or self-limiting construct, but as a reflection of the pluralism, diversity, and openness of India's kaleidoscopic culture. In the process it aims to broaden understanding of the Indian cultural and historical heritage while reclaiming for Indians the story of India's experience with foreign rule and its nationalist reassertion, including the triumphs and disappointments of freedom.

  In making this case, I am conscious of the need for a key caveat. This relates to my use of the terms India and Indians. In his magisterial essay on life and culture in Mexico, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz observed that his thoughts were not concerned with the entire Mexican population but rather with those among them “who are conscious of themselves, for one reason or another, as Mexicans.” The same applies, for comparable reasons, today, for I speak of an India that exists in the awareness of most, but not all, of my countrymen and -women. Paz went on to serve as Mexico's ambassador to India in the 1960s, and I imagine he saw that, as in the Mexico he was writing about in 1950, several historical epochs and states of development coexist simultaneously in India. This is still the case, and it would be foolish as well as presumptuous to seek to speak for them all in a general notion of Indianness. In the last fifty years not all Indians have learned to think of themselves as Indians, and to speak of an Indian cultural identity is really to subsume a number of identities, varying depending upon class, caste, region, and language. But this variety is in itself integral to my idea of Indianness: the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. Given the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India embraces, India is fundamentally a pluralist state: its pluralism emerges from its geography, is reflected in its history, and is confirmed by its ethnography. Indian culture is therefore by definition a culture of multiplicities, a culture of differences.

  A British friend, asked to explain to a foreigner what made England England, replied, “cricket, Shakespeare, the BBC.” Though so concise an answer would be difficult for an Indian, it is impossible to imagine any similar attempt to describe India that omits the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata declares, “What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.” Few other works in world literature could make such an extravagant claim, but in doing so, the two-thousand-year-old Indian epic poem is not defending a closed structure: rather, the Mahabharata has had so many accretions over the years in constant retellings that there is practically no subject it does not cover. Its characters and personages still march triumphantly in Indian minds, its myths and legends still inspire the Indian imagination, its events still speak to Indians with a contemporary resonance rare in many twentieth-century works. The basic story, if the tale of the dynastic rivalry between the Pandava and Kaurava clans may be called that, has been so thoroughly the object of adaptation, interpolation, and reinterpretation that the Mahabharata as we now have it overflows with myths and legends of all sorts, didactic tales exalting the Brahmins, fables and stories that teach moral and existential lessons, bardic poetry extolling historical dynasties, and meandering digressions on everything from law to lechery and politics to philosophy. Whenever a particular social or political message was sought to be imparted to Indians at large, it was simply inserted into a retelling of the Mahabharata. As Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) dryly put it, “Interpolation in a recognized classic seemed to correspond to inclusion in the national library.” This elasticity through the ages adds to the timelessness of the epic's appeal.

  But Lal's proposition raises a larger question: what exactly in the Mahabharata is “relevant to us in the second half of the twentieth century”?

  Lal himself has an intriguing answer. Vyasa, he says, “posits an intricate dharma, where right and wrong are bewilderingly mixed…. [His] epic is a mirror in which the Indian sees himself undeceived.” The Mahabharata is a tale of the real world, one whose heroes have feet of clay. “The anguished intensity of the Indian's involvement with the Mahabharata can be seen in the way reference is made to the epic in public life. The Ramayana is cited generally when ethical ideals are expected; the Mahabharata is referred to when compromises are made, shady deals struck, promises dishonored, battles fought, disasters lamented.” And indeed, which Indian, perusing the incessant political reports that dominate our national newspapers, has not come across references to great conflicts as Kurukshetras, heroes as Arjuns, villains as Kauravas? The Mahabharata is an unending source of metaphor for the rhetoric of our public debate. Indian politicians are ever ready to portray themselves as Yudhishtira, to warn overbold rivals that they are Abhimanyus trapped in padmavyuhams (lotus rings) of their own making, or to depict misguided senior statesmen as Bhishmas (men who provide, as Mrs. Gandhi said of Morarji Desai's stand on the abolition of privy purses, “a moral facade to an indefensible case.”)

  But Lal's argument is not merely at the metaphorical level, though he dwells with great relish on these and similar examples. The Mahabharata, he says, “is our Doomsday Epic,” depicting a period of “moral collapse” comparable to that of our times: “The Mahabharata is recommended reading for an age that breeds dry thoughts in a Waste Land, speculates fascinatedly on the paradoxical Black Holes of interstellar space, and cannot be sure if there will indeed be a 2001 for mankind beyond the Holocaust.”

  Lal finds interesting support for this view in the French dramatist who wrote Peter Brook's “international” version of the epic, Jean-Claude Carrière. “This immense poem,” Carrière wrote in 1985, “which flows with the majesty of a great river, carries an inexhaustible richness which defies all structural, thematic, historical or psychological analysis…. Layers of ramifications, sometimes contradictory, follow up on one another and are interwoven without losing the central theme. That theme is a threat: we live in a time of destruction — everything points in the same direction.”

  Carrière may well have been thinking of the Cold War still raging at the time, but his point is fair enough even today: in an India of erupting caste and communal conflict, terrorist and secessionist strife, police “encounters” and an alarming daily toll of human lives in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid or the near-pogroms in Gujarat, any work that speaks of a “time of destruction” cannot but be considered relevant. No wonder that so m
any contemporary poets, dramatists, and novelists, writing in every Indian language, have found inspiration in episodes of the Mahabharata, which they have retold in a variety of ways. But the message is not a purely negative one. In the face of destruction, the Mahabharata offers a valid response, in the Bhagavad Gita's affirmation of disinterested action. Lal, indeed, argues that “the Mahabharata is an epic of action” and that its “core moral… is to show the primacy of action.”

  The events of the epic, as they unfold, offer other straws for drowning modern optimists to clutch. Rajaji saw the epic as pointing to “the vanity of ambition and the evil and futility of anger and hatred.” C. V. Narasimhan, then a senior United Nations official, went further, identifying a “theme of peace and reconciliation” in the Mahabharata that had “a special application” in the days of the Cold War (and perhaps even more so in an era in which a hot peace, littered with little wars, has broken out at the end of the Cold War). Professor Barbara Stoler Miller, Peter Brook's scholarly consultant on the play, declared that “the purpose of the Mahabharata is to teach that good ultimately triumphs, even in a time of cosmic destructiveness.” Lal himself, after focusing on the didacticism of the Bhagavad Gita, added to his analysis the point that “the end of the Mahabharata underlines the futility of revengeful warfare and restores the validity of Arjuna's compassion.”