Why I decided to retell Mahabharata

Greed, ambition, hate. Love, lust, loss. Envy, doubt, belief. Fear, anger, forgiveness. In short, everything that it has ever meant to be human. That’s the stuff the Mahabharata deals in, using emotions as paints that it splashes liberally on a canvas called life.

Generations may come and go and technology may undergo multiple revolutions, but some settings remain hardwired into the Homo Sapiens.

And that’s precisely why India’s greatest epic has a timelessness that continues to make it riveting, so many millenia after it was first narrated.

Also read: How Yudhishthira won over the God of Death

Unlike what fanatics and ideologues would have you believe, life does not come in black and white. It throws up multiple shades of grey (well beyond the 50 made famous by EL James!) The Mahabharata finds room to encompass every one of those shades.

There is arguably no nobler character in the epic than Bhishma, but his insistence on following the straight, narrow and virtuous path sets in motion a chain of events that eventually ends with the cataclysmic war.

The Pandavas are supposed to be the side fighting to uphold dharma, but they breach the ethical rules of war far more often than the ostensible bad guys.

Also read: How Mahabharata predicted the people of Kalyug are doomed

The Mahabharata contains the most stirring call to arms ever issued, as Krishna exhorts Arjun to do his duty. But it also highlights the prohibitive cost of war. There can be no greater human tragedy than for parents to outlive their children. It is a tragedy that befalls every single one of the Pandavas as well as Draupadi, as victory in the Great War extracts a terrible price.

Above all, the Mahabharata grapples with a question that has forever plagued sensitive, conscientious individuals: how exactly can one be good in a world that is falling to pieces all around you?

It is a question that has not only resonated down the ages but seems to be becoming increasingly vexing as time goes by. Every generation needs to find its own answer, which is why every generation rediscovers the Mahabharata.

My reason for retelling the Mahabharata through Bhima’s perspective was simple: I found the conflict he grappled with particularly fascinating.

This, remember, was the demi-god who slaughtered all 100 Kaurava brothers, killed Keechak even though it risked blowing the Pandavas’ cover, and committed arguably the single most brutal act in the Mahabharata when he ripped open Dushasana’s chest, and used the blood to wash Draupadi’s hair.

He did all this for the sake of one woman, and it should be fairly apparent that you have to love someone extremely passionately to commit such actions on his/her behalf.

And yet, there is nothing to suggest in either the original text or its numerous adaptations that Draupadi reciprocated his feelings in the slightest. Depending on whom you choose to believe, the true love of her life was either Arjun or Karna.

So, to sum up, Bhima loved this woman, but she loved someone else.

And he couldn’t do a thing about it, because this someone else (at least in my book) happened to be his own brother, the chivalrous and dashing Arjun. The brother whom Bhima loved dearly, but in whose shadow he was forever fated to live.

A situation like this could easily embitter one and drive him down a self-destructive path.

But I like to think that in Bhima’s case, his unreciprocated love helped him to evolve into a better, more humane person. Unlike Yudhishtira, Bhima was no philosopher-king.

Unlike Arjun, he was not an all-conquering legend who counted god as his best friend and counseller.

What he was, though, was a resolute warrior with a sense of empathy and compassion. Maybe that’s the kind of hero we need for our troubled times.