It’s the poetical history of mankind - Jean-Claude Carriére's Mahabharata - it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted

The third India-related book I read was The Mahabharata, not the ancient Indian epic itself, of course, since it is endlessly long and also bears a curse, but the superb French theatrical adaptation by Jean-Claude Carriére (1985) written for and with Peter Brook (who is also the translator).  I was a bit too young to remember the excitement when Brook brought the play to New York in 1987, but I do remember reading about, in The New Republic (RIP), and never finding, the 1989 film (Carriére is best known as a screenwriter).  The film is three hours long, cut down from a six hour television version, itself reduced from the play’s nine hours.

So of course this is really A Mahabharata, maybe even Several Mahabharatas.  The scale is reduced, although I can fill in what Carriére and Brook cannot.  He can say that an army of millions is fighting and dying, but onstage he has a dozen or two.  I have millions, and dozens, too.  I imagine what is in the theater; I imagine what I want.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What’s this flame that’s devouring the world?  Elephants are howling in terror, snakes are hurling themselves into the sky.

BHIMA:  Aswatthaman has just released his father’s sacred weapon.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What can we do?  Men, animals, the earth itself – all are shriveling to ashes.

GANDHARI:  I see a white heat.  (199)

The detonation of a mystical nuclear weapon by the desperate Kauravas is just one of the visual opportunities for a theater director, and one of the many surprises for the reader.  I have read versions of the epic before, yet it is so rich that I am always surprised.

The war that ends the play – by ends, I mean fills the last third – including the difficult argument of the Bhagavad-Gita is outstanding, and the myths, origin stories, and heroic deeds that occupy the early two-thirds are just as exciting, but what is really makes the play effective, and is an innovation of Carriére’s, is the narrator figure Vyasa, by tradition author of The Mahabharata, who wanders in and out of the action.  Here is how the play begins:

A boy of about twelve enters.  He goes toward a little pool.  Then a man appears.  He is thin, wearing a muddy loincloth, his feet bare and dirty.  He sits thoughtfully on the ground and, noticing the boy, he signals him to come closer.  The boy approaches, slightly fearful.  The man asks him:VYASA:  Do you know how to write?

BOY:  No, why?  The man is silent for a moment before saying:

VYASA:  I’ve composed a great poem.  I’ve composed it all, but nothing is written.  I need someone to write down what I know.

BOY:  What’s your name?

VYASA:  Vyasa.

BOY:  What’s your poem about?

VYASA:  It’s about you.
[skip a bit]
It’s the poetical history of mankind.  If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else.  For it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted.  It washes away faults, it sharpens the brain and it gives long life.  (3)

I was pretty much captured several lines earlier, even before I learned about all the prize I would win.  And at this point, Ganesha appears, offering his services as a scribe.  These three wander through the rest of the play which it turns out has not only not been written but not performed, or the history has been imagined but has not happened.  We watch it happen along with its author.

There are other good ways to read The Mahabharata.  R. K. Narayan’s prose retelling, for example, or William Buck’s.  Maybe not better ways, though.

The journey was uncomfortable - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust

I wonder if Ruth Prawer Jhabvala read Eliza Fay’s book.  Her narrator in Heat and Dust (1975) seems to have read it:

2 February.  Arrival in Bombay today.  Not what I had imagined at all.  Of course I had always thought of arrival by ship, had forgotten how different it would be by plane.  All those memoirs and letters I’ve read, all those prints I’ve seen.  I really must forget about them.  Everything is different now.  (2)

Funny coincidence at least.

Jhabvala, unlike Fay, spends her novel writing about India – Bombay in this case.  The young woman who narrates goes to India during hippie days – various Beatlesque spiritual seekers are wandering about, and there is some good comedy at the expense of one of them – to search for information about “Grandfather’s first wife, who had eloped with an Indian prince” (2). This gives Jhabvala two levels to work with, the present of the narrator, and the 1920s of her great-aunt Olivia.  Independent versus colonial India; ordinary Indians in the present compared to the prince and his court in the past; a modern woman of one time compared to a modern woman of another.

The two women visit the same shrines and landmarks; both have affairs with Indian men; both are tormented by the weather:

As the heat and dust storms continue, Ritu’s condition has become worse.  (81)

The journey was uncomfortable, and not only because of heat and dust.  (131)

It’s the title, so I am supposed to notice, right?  The former is in the present, the latter in the past.  I wonder how many “heat and dust”’s I missed.  The European women are supposed to escape into the mountains, to Simla, setting of so many Kipling stories, but Olivia, understandably drawn to the local prince, who is exotic and virile and the usual stuff but most importantly interesting, stays in Bombay to endure the heat and dust, a great act of will that in a novel from an earlier time and a different kind of writer would have destroyed her.  Not anymore.

Jhabvala’s prose is more or less like this:

As the Nawab touched the baize cloth covering the grand piano, a small animal – it looked like a squirrel – came scurrying out and ran for its life.  The Nawab did not seem surprised.  “Do you like my pianos” he asked Olivia; and added apologetically “There is no one to play them.”  (87)

The past section is obviously written by the narrator in the present, but is full of things she could not possibly know, so is her own fiction about her relative; thus the parallels between the stories are to a large degree her invention.  Or it is not written by the narrator, but rather by the omniscient narrator who is aware of all sorts of big and little correspondence about which the young woman in the present knows nothing.  Choose your metafiction.

Abortions, or their possibility, feature in both stories.  Ah, I thought, I am reading a novel from 1975, working with feminist issues of its time.  Why did this narrator go to India, what was she looking for in this old family story?  These questions give Heat and Dust its less political, more psychological or even metaphysical interest.  The narrator turns out to be one of the spiritual seekers drawn to India.  What does she seek?  What does she find?  Jhabvala does not tell, not directly.

yet this story must be told in my own way - Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India

I read some books related to India. One of the was Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay (1816), which is exactly what it says it is.  And yet the title is deceptive.  The content of the book is almost entirely about Fay’s travels to and from India – to Calcutta, specifically – beginning in 1779 rather than her intermittent life in India.

E. M. Forster discovered Fay’s book while researching A Passage to India.  I doubt it was much help to him, given that it is from a century before his own book and is only barely, see above, about India, but he loved it, especially the flavorful, demanding voice of the author (“Eliza Fay is a work of art,” 7), a Strong Female Character if I have ever seen one, so Forster got the Hogarth Press to put his edition in 1925.

The ways of Providence are inscrutable!  But to revert to my main subject, – glad shall I be when it is concluded; for I detest matter of fact writing, almost as much as matter of fact conversation: – yet this story must be told in my own way, or not at all.  (129)

Other than the unusually eventful voyages themselves, the reason the book exists is that Fay and her husband, arriving in India, were seized by a warlord as hostages in some game he was playing with the English and French, who were currently at war.  Their captivity is described in indignant detail:

… here we lay down, comparatively happy in the hope of enjoying a tolerable nights rest; my husband being provided with a long pole to keep off the rats; but surely never were poor mortals so completely disappointed and for my own part I may add, terrified…  The rats also acted their part in the Comedy; every now and then jumping towards the beds, as we could hear; however Mr. F–  on these occasions laid about him stoutly with his pole, and thus kept them at bay; but our winged adversaries were not so easily foiled…  (135-6)

I have cheated a bit by quoting a bit that could almost come from a Gothic novel, although one with an unusually resourceful heroine.  She does faint on occasion, though.  That Gothic heroine fainting is drawn from life.  Tight clothes, I suppose.  Regardless, an extraordinary woman.  She seems to have spent much of her life working as a speculative trader in India, a high risk occupation, but she was the sort of person who relished risk.

A good part of the fun of Forster’s edition of Eliza Fay’s book is in his notes:

JOHN HARE.  How she loathes this chattering mannikin!...  We must never forget that she herself was a most trying woman, particularly on a boat, and that Mr. Hare would not have found her table manners funny, or appreciated her contempt for the violin.  (note 17, p. 276)

Or maybe this is the best note:

FOOD.  From various passages it is clear that our heroine was of the hungry type.  People who write long letters often are.  That very June “the Surgeon of an Indiaman fell dead after eating a hearty dinner of beef, thermometre being 98°”… but the warning did not deter her.  She ate and ate till the end – asparagus, pork, tunny, turtle, preserved peaches, ghi.  (note 28, 280)

Eliza Fay is my new gluttonous role model.

Page numbers refer to the 2010 NYRB reprint of Fay and Forster’s book.