J. Robert Oppenheimer allegedly said, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” To commemorate the release of Oppenheimer (the movie), I have decided to review an adaptation of the religious text Oppenheimer (the man) was quoting. It wasn’t the last time a white boy appropriated The Mahabharata! As always, I am open to your suggestions. Two slots are still open for 2024!
On the night of March 20, 2021, Sophie McDowell, aged one and one half, was not feeling her best self. Maybe it was the milk she had for dinner, or the milk she had as a chaser, or the milk she took as the hair of the dog. Whatever the case, she had consumed her body weight in dairy, and her digestive system was not taking it well.
Meanwhile, Sophie’s father snuck out of his bedroom where his wife lay sleeping so he could watch his DC cartoon movies in the family room like a responsible adult. Zack Snyder had just released his version of Justice League. Snyder is not Jewish and, indeed, this baby was uncut. It is eleventy hundred hours long, and every stupid thing that could be conceivably put into one of these films is in this one, from the Flash chasing after a hot dog in slow-motion to Jared Leto’s Joker teasing Batman about a wraparound. Everything except that one line about brunch.
About halfway through this opus, the McDowell household started smelling like cow intestines. This, plus Sophie wailing, alerted her father that something was dreadfully wrong. He paused the movie and investigated immediately. Having been raised in a monotheist household, instead of invoking all the heavenly powers, he opted for the same one repeatedly.
“Lord! Lord! Lord! Sophie, what the HELL happened?” It was, in fact, abundantly clear what had happened. A half hour and a full change of… everything… later, Sophie’s Dad plopped down again and looked at the screen. This is what he saw.
This, if you do not know, is Serious Actor Ciarán Hinds, caked in CGI makeup that has put his fake face in a horned helmet. “What life decisions does one have to make to end up here?” Sophie’s Dad thought. “And also, what else has this guy been in?” A short Letterboxd search later, he discovered the existence of an English-language version of the Mahabharata by renowned stage director Peter Brook, starring, among many other people, Ciarán Hinds. “Ho boy, I have got to watch this!” he said.
Two and half years later, he did just that. Here is his story.
Sects!
The Mahabharata is one of the great Sanskrit epics, a title it shares with the Ramayana. It is also one of the longest books in the world. How long? Eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Or twice as long as the collected works of Balzac. Or, if you need a precise number, about 7,035 pages in English translation. That’s pretty darn long.
While the text may be long, the story boils down to a simple dynastic conflict. On one side are the Pandavas, five brothers, of which only three are of any importance: Yudhishthira, the Donatello of the group; Bhima, the Raphael; and Arjuna, who does not have a simple Ninja Turtle equivalent.
They are opposed by their cousins, the Kauravas, hekatontuplets led by their eldest brother, the scheming Duryodhana.
Duryodhana’s refusal to share the kingdom leads to the mother of all wars, an eighteen-day bloodbath where the Pandavas ultimately emerge victorious, if not exactly happy.
The journey to that war is wild, filled with nesting stories, sermons, and various other digressions. It’s hard to decide where the story proper even begins. Peter Brook’s movie chooses as its starting point the miraculous birth of Satyavati, a woman cut from the same cloth as Helen of Troy.
Having met a sage who likes her very, very much, she gives birth, first of all, to Vyasa, the poet who composed the Mahabharata and is also a major character in the story.
She then marries a king on the condition that her sons inherit the throne. For this to happen, the king’s son Bhishma renounces his own claim to the throne… and also women, a feat so impressive that the gods grant him a boon—he can determine the hour of his own death.
Satyavati’s sons marry but die young. Vyasa himself must step in to continue his mother’s lineage. He begets two sons, Dhritarashtra and Pandu, who are the fathers of the heroes and villains. So we’re getting there! Dhritarashtra is the firstborn, but he is congenitally blind and cannot inherit.
Pandu has a different problem. He cannot have children because he killed a sage and his wife while they were copulating in the form of deer. They used their dying breaths to curse him with death the next time he finds himself in their (ahem) position.
Therefore, Pandu’s wife Kunti takes it upon herself to produce heirs for Pandu. She has a boon whereupon she can invoke the name of a god, and he will immediately (ahem) come. And so Yudhishthira, Bhima, and Arjuna are born from, respectively, the Vedic gods Dharma, Vayu, and Indra. Meanwhile, Dhritarashtra’s wife gives birth to a giant mound of flesh that is carved up into the 100 Kauravas.
When Pandu can no longer keep it in his pants, he dies and triggers a succession crisis… after a bunch of other stuff happens.
So there’s our cast of characters. Now—oh, wait, I forgot about Drona, the jar-born brahmin-turned-warrior who trains the 105 princes in the martial arts.
So now… oh, wait, wait, I forgot about Karna, the lost Pandava brother (the son of the sun) who becomes an ally of Duryodhana.
Now we can move on to… oh, how could I forget Draupadi, the common wife of all five Pandavas? She’s like their April O’Neil!
Anyone else? Maybe one more. Arjuna’s best bud. His Casey Jones. His name is Krishna. He agrees to serve as Arjuna’s charioteer in the great war, on the condition that he does not fight himself. This would give the Pandavas an unfair advantage, since Krishna is God incarnate, an avatar of Vishnu, the preserver of life.
The most famous part of the Mahabharata is undoubtedly the speech Krishna delivers to Arjuna on the eve of battle, a little something called the Bhagavad-Gita, the “Song of God.”
The entire war takes place on only one battlefield over the course of eighteen days (but only four of the eighteen books of the Mahabharata). The Pandavas are not merely fighting against Duryodhana, who is a proper rat bastard, but against friends and family, including Bhishma and Drona, who raised them, and their estranged brother Karna. Once those opponents are overcome—based on the not-entirely-honest stratagems of Krishna (who can’t fight but can still advise)—Bhima and Duryodhana duel to the death, with Bhima emerging victorious after delivering, with Krishna’s blessing, a very illegal low blow to Duryodhana’s thigh. Congratulations, you are now halfway through the Mahabharata!
The second half of the Mahabharata receives much less attention in the adaptations I have read and seen (and Brook’s film is no exception). Three events stand out. Bhishma, who is still alive, though buried under a mountain of arrows, delivers his parting words in a sermon only second in importance to the Bhagavad-Gita.
Next, an ally of the Kauravas goes on a night raid, slaughtering the victorious army and launching a divine weapon to render the women sterile. Finally, the Pandavas, after retiring from public life, die one by one, until only Yudhishthira is left. He is put to one final test. His father Dharma invites him to enter heaven, where he sees Duryodhana and the other Kauravas rejoicing, while his brothers languish in hell. He opts to join his brothers. And they lived happily ever after!
Lies!
Peter Brook’s Mahabharata is not only an adaptation of the 7,000-page epic poem. It is also an adaptation of a nine-hour stage play, which Brook co-authored with French writer Jean-Claude Carrière over a period of eight years. This insightful Letterboxd review gives an idea of what watching the play was like. It was performed over the course of three nights, with a great deal of pageantry and spectacle during the scene transitions. Frankly, it sounds like it was just as much a concert as a film.
The filmed adaptation is a little more than half that length, a mere five-and-a-half hours. It originally aired on television (PBS in the USA). Like the play, it was divided into three parts. The first part is all table-setting to establish the central characters and the conflict. The second part corresponds to a section I couldn’t even fit into the plot summary above, the Pandavas’ adventures in exile after Yudhishthira gambles away all their earthly possessions. The third part, three and a half hours into the movie, is the war. Each of these segments runs between 90 minutes and two hours. It is very easy watching when it is divided into these smaller chunks.
A few years later, the TV version was edited down to three-and-a-half hours for cinemas somewhere. Someday, it will be rebooted as a 150-minute action epic, and then Netflix will remake the film as a nine-hour miniseries. And the circle will be complete.
Brook and Carrière’s vision of the Mahabharata is that it is a great work of world literature and part of the heritage of all humanity. That dubious proposition led to an early and notable example of colorblind casting. The cast is stacked with European, Asian, and African actors, all speaking in Galactic Basic (English). The one ethnic group that seems to be missing is South Asians. This adaptation of the great Indian epic is almost entirely bereft of Indian actors.
Another observation is that the casting is not truly “blind” and might be what the kids today call “Problematic.” Consider the three main Pandavas. Yudhishthira is trustworthy and honorable. Bhima is impulsive and violent. Arjuna is passionate and thirsts for justice. Can you guess which one is played by the Black actor?
The other Black actor of note is Sotigui Kouyaté, who plays the sagacious Bhishma. He is a reverse stereotype. Spike Lee had a name for it. It does not help that the invulnerable Bhishma is literally magic.
Another example is Tuncel Kurtiz as Shakuni, the maternal uncle of the Kauravas. He plays a brief but important role in the story, since he is the one who fleeces Yudhishthira out of all his possessions and forces him and his brothers into exile. Yudhishthira is too honest to do anything but play by the rules, but Shakuni is more like a different “sh” word. Even though the actor is Turkish, he has features that could charitably be described as… how can I put this? In America, F. Murray Abraham would have played his role.
Finally, Drona, the wise warrior, is played by Japanese actor Yoshi Oida. At least it’s clear which TMNT character he is.
On to the white actors! Every time a new one shows up, I swear to God, I thought he was David Carradine. And he never was! I don’t really have a problem with their performances. I just can’t tell them apart. All these people look the same.
The one casting decision I DO have a gripe about is Bruce Myers as Krishna, which has all the problems that the phrase “And Bruce Myers as Lord Krishna” conjures. First, he looks like David Carradine. Second, he does not look like Krishna. I am no expert in Hindu iconography, but you and I and everyone else all know that Krishna is not white or black or green or pink. He’s blue.
The actor playing him is not blue. He is not even a white actor in blueface. He’s just an everyday cornflake.
It’s not like the idea of putting someone in blueface was off the table, either. Look what they did to this guy!
Why do you think James Cameron called his movie Avatar? Because everyone in it was blue!
The second issue, beyond the casting: Is the Mahabharata really a classic of world literature? “World Literature” is already a pretty specious concept, a product of the European imagination (specifically, Goethe’s) that attempts to put the written works of all times and places under the same aesthetic code of conduct. Not that the Mahabharata isn’t a great story (It is!), but is it a universal story? Does it not need to be historically and culturally oriented precisely because it is so unfamiliar?
In preparation for this column, I read [the introduction of] John D. Smith’s translation of the Mahabharata, which, at 800 pages, covers only 11 percent of the Sanskrit text. He states (uncontroversially) that the central theme of the work is dharma, a concept so culture-specific that he does not even attempt to translate it (something like “the moral duty to act according to one’s caste”).
Even then, he points out the occasions where Krishna breaks dharma, and the other characters call him out for it. Krishna, however, is God and can do whatever he pleases. My own cultural context gives me certain expectations for how an incarnate deity should look and act, and Krishna isn’t it. Of course, in Hinduism, if you don’t like one supreme deity, you can always choose another. Maybe I should give Shaivism a try. Shiva seems like a fun-loving guy.
One thing I will not say against the film is that it is preventing Indians from telling their own stories. The Mahabharata has been filmed numerous times, including a television series in the 80s, concurrent with Brook’s film. I chose Brook’s film because his UNESCO take on the story made it stand out in the crowd. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake. An upcoming film version will be directed by S. S. Rajamouli. If that name is not familiar to you, his most celebrated film—RRR— surely is.
Videotape!
Peter Brook’s Mahabharata was based on a play, and it looks like it. Brook made his name as a stage director but was rather less distinguished as a director of film. His most popular film—says Letterboxd—is an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. Much of the rest of his brief filmography (fourteen films) consists of adaptations of stage works. The Mahabharata is no exception. He brought the cast of the stage play with him and, I presume, the same costumes, props, sets, etc. There’s a real “Let’s film the play for posterity!” energy to the production. I’m glad they did film it. The play sounds like an experience, and I am glad to have access to it in some form.
A play is not a movie, however, and some things just do not translate well. I am frankly astounded how often characters face the camera and just straight up tell us things rather than showing us. Even if the things they are telling us are, occasionally, very strange.
Entire episodes are just narrated. For example, to undermine Drona, the Pandavas contemplate bringing a false report that Drona’s son Ashwatthama has died. Krishna suggests that, to avoid lying, Bhima simply kill an elephant named Ashwatthama. Will we see this elephant? Nope! The night raid takes the classical form of a messenger running in and describing at length all the brutality that he just witnessed (because, in this case, he is also the perpetrator). We have to take his word for it. Krishna narrates his own death, and the Pandavas describe, offscreen, their torments in hell.
Sometimes, the preference for telling over showing takes the form of asking us, “Who do you believe? Me or your own eyes?” For example, when Pandu finally succumbs to his curse, his actions can hardly be described as sex, or even simulated sex.
Towards the end, when Dhritarashtra and his wife Gandhari are at death’s door, the blind Dhritarashtra tells the blindfolded Gandhari (who chose to share her husband’s handicap) to remove her bandages and see the world one last time. She SAYS she does, but you’d have to be blind to believe her, because she DOESN’T. BAFFLING.
The cumulative effect of all this is that it makes the film look cheap when I am certain that it was not. It prevents me from unreservedly recommending it and the 3.5- to 5.5-hour time commitment that it requires. On the whole, though, I found it pretty enjoyable. It is a faithful retelling. It doesn’t try to sanitize the subject matter or accommodate Western viewers. And, if it succeeds in its primary objective of making a sacred text of the world’s most populous country more familiar to outsiders, well, that’s a good thing, right? But if I ever cover this story again, I’m going with the RRR version.
And what about Ciarán Hinds? He plays Ashwatthama, the son of Drona (so, yes, Hinds is Irish, but his father is Japanese). He looks great, though.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.