Brook's ways

The death of Peter Brook has brought forth a stack of obituaries and a voluminous desk of memories. Some recount his theatrical genius, while others talk of his minimalism and his innovative and amazing oeuvre. In India, much of the reminiscing has veered towards his nine-hour long adaptation of the Mahabharata that had Mallika Sarabhai playing Draupadi alongside a cast that spanned 16 different countries.

When Brook staged his Mahabharata in 1985, the epic was not known to too many outside the country. The labyrinthine multi-generational saga of war between cousins and a struggle between good and evil hadn’t found the currency that other classics of its kind, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, or even its domestic counterpart, the Ramayana had gathered in their global sojourn.

Brook’s Mahabharata found new audiences in new lands and among new age groups. He contemporised the complex arguments of the epic and moved away from the opulent and grand structures that the story was woven around, deliberately choosing to relocate the epic into a new, modern and spare setting.

His rendition had his fair share of detractors; everything, from Brook’s casting decisions to the treatment of the story, was critiqued and censured. But there were no calls for a ban on the play. It ran to full capacity for months on end and was even made into a film. And last year, he was awarded the Padma Shri for his efforts.

It would be impossible to imagine a version such as this being conceptualised today—a dark-skinned Bhima, a white Ganesha mask on stage and a white Krishna with a hooked nose, all of this would have been unacceptable to a country that is rapidly giving up its multicultural ethos for a singular, uniform identity.

Interestingly, Brook was not the first person to break down the Mahabharata and offer up a very different insight into its story. Sanskrit playwright Bhasa, working in the second century (BCE) had done the same.

Bhasa cast Duryodhana as the wronged hero in his plays. He showed the Pandavas to be weak and needy, and Krishna as a manipulative string-pulling political force in the epic. His plays Dutavakyam and Urubhangam shocked many at the time. But Bhasa was not cancelled from the history books. He won acclaim and respect (the playwright Kalidasa was said to have acknowledged his greatness too).

Another character-led retelling of the stories of the Mahabharata was done by author and academic, Irawati Karve in the late 1960s. From raising the possibility of Vidura being the father of Yudhishthira to drawing readers into the vortex of helpless rage that Gandhari felt, at being married off to a blind king, Karve’s book Yuganta humanised the characters of the Mahabharata and did not shy away from controversial interpretations. She found a huge audience for her ideas and even today, there are dancers and actors reinterpreting Karve’s version of the Mahabharata.

Retelling, reimagining, versioning — call it what you will, it was an accepted practice. And what Brook, Bhasa and Karve were doing, may have been unconventional, but it was not new, nor was it considered disrespectful. And it was definitely not the outcome of a colonised mindset, as many have termed such experiments today.

The epics were never inviolable texts. Orally transmitted, they belonged to the people and were tweaked with every retelling. Everyone sought to cast the story in a frame of their choosing. The Bhil community in Gujarat, for instance, have a version where Kunti is kidnapped by the Kauravas and rescued by Bhima. Here Draupadi is a bloodthirsty demoness in disguise and is seduced/attacked by Vasuki, the king of the serpents.

In the Konkani version of the Mahabharata, Hanuman (a character from the Ramayana) has a major role and Dhritarashtra, is not the weak prevaricating king that he is portrayed in the Sanskrit version. He constantly admonishes his son and reminds him of the dangers of crossing the Pandavas.

The epics were told and retold, leading people to find many ways of looking at the same story. A K Ramanujan and Paula Richman have documented the process in great detail in their work on the Ramayana where they recorded hundreds of versions, each with a different insight into the hero and the meaning of heroism.

Many argue that the multiple retellings of the epic have helped them survive and stay relevant. It lets new readers and viewers find new meanings in an ancient tale. As Ganesh Devy writes in his recent book on Mahabharata, people always look for a slice of themselves in the story and the tellers of the story were aware of this need. This led to the open, interpretative nature of the text. Engaging with the stories leads to questioning and that further gives rise to multiple versions.

This is an age-old tradition, one that predated colonisation and the birth of the colonial mindset. To disregard these methods and instead, treat the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the mythologies about heroes and gods and goddesses like narratives cast in stone is truly the colonial approach. The ancient traditions didn't look at diversity as a threat. Culture was not a monochromatic monolith in the subcontinent.