The untold stories

Creativity defies tradition. There would have been no discoveries if our scientists had accepted the status quo in their times. The very essence of a creative mind is that it refuses to be tied down to a routine, it strives to push the envelope and wants to awe the world by thinking out of the box. Two new plays to be performed in the city during Theatre in Motion festival this month are results of such creative minds. The story of Mahabharata has been told and retold innumerable times since time immemorial. Now two directors will retell the story, but on a different note.

Prior to that
Beginning before the birth of Dhritarashtra and Pandu, Manoj Mitra’s Bengali play Ja Nei Bharatey traces the cross currents of aims and desires which shape the time. The play questions the miraculous birth of the Pandavas and the Kauravas and what makes Dhritarashtra take up weapons or rush into leaping flames. “The new angle in this play is that I am talking about all the lapses which people ignored — genuinely or intentionally — in the story of Mahabharata,” says Mitra adding that, “I want to fill the blank portions in our epic. There are logical justifications to the most unbelievable portions of the Mahabharata.”

The unwritten code
The Bengali proverb ja nei Bharatey ta nei Bharatey means ‘whatever is not in the Mahabharata, does not exist in India. In Ja Nei Bharatey, it also means ‘All that remains unsaid in the Mahabharata’. Without distorting the epic text, the play looks rationally at all that led to the great conflict, taking the side of nature, wilderness and the neglected outcasts of society.

The play raps the ancient roots of our culture, testing the knowledge embedded in the Puranas with the new awareness in the age of globalisation and scientific progress. In this new perspective, stereotype characters like Shakuni, Pandu, Ambika, Gandhari and others acquire new lives, and a  few new characters step out of the shadows. 

A different viewpoint
There would be many supporters of Karna, Bheeshma and even Dhritarshtra but in Shamshan Mahabharat talks about an unconventional hero — Duryodhan.

“I am trying to portray Duryodhan’s point of view in the play. The villain is my hero,” says director Tariq Daad but denies that he is taking side of adharm. “I am not justifying his deeds. My nayak (hero) is still Krishna, yet I am just trying to know what went through that man’s mind who was a good friend, a good husband, a good father and also a good son.”

The Hindi play is an adaptation of two works Mahabharat Ki Antim Saanjh by Bharat Bhushan Agarwal and Shamshan Kurukshetra by Malyalam writer Kuvempu.