One epic, multiple tales

Trisha Das's latest novel, Ms Draupadi Kuru, is a wacky take, which begins where the ancient epic ends, in heaven. Remember, the Pandavas and Draupadi go to heaven some years after the war ends? In Das' imagining, Draupadi is bored with heaven's monotonous perfection. And so she and her girl pals, Amba, Kunti and Gandhari, go down to Earth for a month, "just to see how things are".

They "appear" in modern-day Delhi — after all, this is where Indraprastha, the Pandav capital, used to be — where Draupadi finds work in a TV studio, Kunti takes a shine to a street urchin, Amba has an affair, and so on.

Then there was Akshat Verma's short film, Mama's Boys, based on one of the best known passages in the epic — Arjun bringing Draupadi home and Kunti telling him to share her with his five brothers. How do the other Pandavas react to the idea of "sharing" a wife, how does Draupadi reconcile to having five husbands, and how does a jealous Arjun react — that's the territory Verma covers. Mama's Boys is a mish-mash — the characters wear garish costumes and jewellery like in TV mythologies, but they speak in Hinglish, drink from goblets, tease Kunti about her tinda ki sabzi, wear sunglasses and have TVs and refrigerators at home.

The film raised the hackles of conservatives but Verma has said that he was exploring the possible psychological dimensions to the epic. "There are many possible motivations and desires within a situation. Mama's Boys is one version of this," Verma has said.

While these are just a couple of examples of reinterpretation, and there are many more (see box), what is interesting is how Ved Vyasa's epic continues to inspire writers, artists and filmmakers. "Vernacular Literature has long had a tradition of re-inventing and re-imagining the Mahabharata," says Das. Her own treatment of the epic, she says, was inspired by Marie Phillips's Gods Behaving Badly. "I loved the way she put the Greek gods in humorous situations on earth." But what if readers take offence to seeing the gods in unconventional settings? "If you love something, you also need to keep an open mind about it, a sense of humour," she says.

Michel Danino, the French-origin Indologist who's worked extensively on the Vedic civilisation,connects the spate of recent pop-culture adaptions of the Mahabharata to the fact that Hinduism has never been centralised or had a power structure.

"There is an inherent organic freedom to change the texts (except for the shruti texts- Vedas and Upanishads), comment on them, expand them, etc. The Mahabharata and Ramayana not only have enthralling plots but great pathos. And they are not stories of good guys vs bad guys – the bad guys have their heroic sides, and the good guys considerable shortcomings and failings."

Kavita Kane, author of Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen, attributes the epic's continued popularity to the "fortunate" fact that we have a "living' mythology". "It's everywhere around us — art, music, our temples and dance," says Kane. "They provide a creative and fascinating canvas and continue to have great spiritual and philosophical influence. Far from being ancient tales, they are a part of us."

Translator Arshia Sattar points out how the epic is full of possibilities. "The Mahabharata," says Arshia Sattar, who has translated and written several books that take off from the Ramayana, "is a magnificent story that has everything — love, hate, revenge, greed, lust, doubt, god. These stories form the bedrock of majority culture in India — everyone knows them, everyone has an opinion about them, everyone has a favourite character. They're the equivalent of comfort food. Writers and directors know that audiences and readers will respond instinctively to these stories."

The Mahabharata Redux

• Karthika Nair's Until the Lions, gives voice to minor characters from the epic — Vrishali, Karna's wife; the Padavits footsoldiers who died by the thousands at Kurukshetra; Poorna, the maid Amba and Ambika send to have sex with Vyasa in their stead; Arjuna's lovers — Ulupi and Chitrangada, and so on.
   
• Gautam Chikermane's The Tunnel of Varanavat, tells the story of the man who dug the tunnel from the house of lac, saving the lives of the Pandavas — a character so marginal few of us have ever thought of him.
   
• Aditya Iyengar's The Thirteenth Day, an account of three eventful days of the Kurukshetra war, culminating in Abhimanyu's death, told by Yudhisthira, Karna and Abhimanyu.
   
• Kavita Kane's Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen, has Uruvi, Karna's wife, telling the story of her husband's life.
   
• Chitra Banerji Dvakaruni's The Palace of Illusions is a version of the Mahabharata told through Draupadi's eyes
   
• Shyam Benegal's Kalyug
   
• Prakash Jha's Rajneeti
   
• MF Husain's Mahabharata series
   
• Raja Ravi Varma depicted various characters from the epic