Book review: 'The Great Golden Sacrifice Of The Mahabharata'

Book: The Great Golden Sacrifice Of The Mahabharata
Maggi
Lidchi-Grassi
Random House
934 pages
Rs999

We have named our children after characters in the Mahabharata; the brave feats of the epic’s warriors still shape our dreams and inspire our films. I’ve spent many hours debating with friends even minute details, the names and relationships of cameo characters. So, whenever a new version of this epic comes out, the question is — what makes this retelling different?

The title of Maggi Lidchi-Grassi’s three-volume version of the epic points to one of the significant features that distinguish this version. The Great Golden Sacrifice Of The Mahabharata emphasises sacrifice, in multiple situations and aspects. For example, fire-born Draupadi, herself born of a sacrifice, must endure many sacrifices; her sons and brother die fiery, sacrifice-like deaths. The war itself, Lidchi-Grassi suggests, is a sacrifice that resets the world and establishes a new dharma.

The war ends a little over mid-way in Grassi’s work. Victory extracts its price, or sacrifice: the Pandavas must share a home with the widows and parents of the cousins they have killed. War has emptied the coffers of their kingdoms. As the Pandavas age, they must come to terms with the loss of their famed skills and strength. The Vrishnis (Krishna’s clan) are exterminated, and the Pandavas lose their friends and kinsmen.

In many retellings, the events that occur after the war are squeezed together. For example, in Kamala Subramaniam’s voluminous Mahabharata, the ‘After War’ section takes up less than seventy pages. Grassi uses over four hundred pages to describe the post war-world. Only one other work that I know of, Dharamvir Bharati’s play Andha Yug, displays such detail and concern in depicting the post-apocalyptic world after Kurukshetra.
But The Great Golden Sacrifice... isn’t quite as bleak as Andha Yug. As Lidchi-Grassi’s Arjuna declares, “Greatfather’s [Bheeshma’s] Dharma was the iron prison Krishna had come to free us from.” One of Lidchi-Grassi’s aims is to describe the new fluid Dharma birthed after Kurukshetra: Arjuna, her narrator, in the course of the ‘great golden sacrifice’ — the Ashwamedha sacrifice — is instrumental in defining this changed dharma; one of peace, which values all life.

But this focus on a post-war world isn’t the only distinctive feature of Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling. An intriguing, marked departure is her choice of narrators. Most retellings are narrated by Vyasa, grandfather of the Pandavas and composer of the epic, and Sanjaya, gifted with divine sight that allows him to perceive all the events of the war. Instead, Grassi’s narrators are Ashwathama and Arjuna — a heroic pair bound by friendship, who end up on opposing sides.

Ashwatthama is a fascinating character, one of the three that survives the obliteration of the Kaurava army and is responsible for the deaths of the sons of the Pandavas. Krishna, famously, curses Ashwatthama to live to immortality, his flesh constantly festering. I was interested to see how Lidchi-Grassi would explain Ashwatthama’s actions from his point of view. But instead, she abandons Ashwatthama as a principal narrator much before the war, in favour of Arjuna. The explanation that she gives for Ashwatthama’s actions can be found in her introduction, where she describes “Drona, Ashwatthama and Greatfather Bheeshma…[as] possessed by demonic powers,” and parallels them with “Hitler and his chief lieutenants Goering and Gobbels.”

The Paris-born Maggi Lidchi-Grassi was drawn to Aurobindo’s Essays On The Gita in the wake of World War II. A teenager at the time of WWII, Lidchi-Grassi, who has been a resident of the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, devotes her introduction to the “uncanny parallels” she finds between “the events and figures of the Mahabharata” and the “rise and fall of Nazism.”

I find this problematic, for although the Mahabharata is about war, and therefore resonates with every experience of war, Lidchi-Grassi’s analogies are rather far-fetched. For instance, she even parallels Krishna with Winston Churchill, calling both “champions of light.” These comparisons advocate a black-and-white, good-and-evil perspective on the Mahabharata war. But we still revere many of the heroes, like Drona and Bheeshma, who fought on the ‘wrong’ side; and children are still named Karan after Karna. Even Lidchi-Grassi’s own retelling does not bear out such a black-and-white perspective.

Every retelling and re-reading of the Mahabharata, for me, offers a new, striking revelation. In The Great Golden Sacrifice..., Grassi adds a nuanced, feminist angle to the war. Arjuna recounts Kunthi’s view on the necessity of the war, “The message from my mother was that she did not want peace. Her words were that death would shock her less than that Draupadi had been dragged into the Sabha… Only our mother had known what it was to be Draupadi dragged before the Sabha by her hair, in her period.”
In the hands of (often male or prudish) writers who side-step, or quickly slide past the details of Draupadi’s humiliation — sometimes avoiding any mention of her period and favouring archaic-sounding phrases like ‘disrobe’ —  the episode loses it’s power. Lidchi-Grassi’s is the most compelling description of Draupadi’s humiliation that I have ever read. It makes the war seem more necessary, and Draupadi’s pain, more immediate. It’s clear, here and elsewhere, that Lidchi-Grassi feels deeply for these characters, and imagines their world with startling immediacy.

— Samhita Arni is the Bangalore-based author of The Mahabharata: A Child’s View