Exploring the many Mahabharatas

Dharamvir Bharti captured the crisis in a drama in blank verse from 1953, Andha Yug. It is a story about the end and set on the last day of the battle when the palace learns of the crushing defeat suffered by the Kauravas. Satyadev Dubey first staged the play in 1960 and Ebrahim Alkazi presented it in the ruins of Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi in 1963, following the India-China war. In 2017, Joy Maisnam from conflict-ridden Manipur, turned to Andha Yug to show grief in a new light.

Bhasa, the earliest known Sanskrit playwright, retold episodes from the Mahabharata in Panch Ratra, Madhyamavyayoga, Dutavakya Dutaghatotkaca, Karnabhara and Urubhangam. These inspired theatre directors across the country, with the late KN Panikkar from Kerala and Manipur’s Ratan Thiyam presenting iconic productions of Urubhangam, a tragedy that ends with a dying Duryodhana saying, “Death has sent an aerial car, the wain of heroes, drawn by a thousand horses, to fetch me.”

In Draupadi (1978), Mahasweta Devi tells the story of a rebel tribal woman in police custody. To theatre-goers, the story is owned by Heisnam Sabitri Devi, the Manipuri performer, who gave the play a shocking last scene. Few plays in India have depicted gender oppression so powerfully. Rabindranath Tagore wrote about another woman’s struggle to accept her identity in Chitrangada, a dance drama from 1892 about a warrior princess who falls in love with Arjuna.

Girish Karnad gave us the myth in his first play, Yayati (1960), about a king cursed with old age and his youngest son, Puru, who gives him his own youth. Karnad wrote Yayati as a 22-year-old student of Oxford University. Another play, Agni Mattu Malé, or The Fire and the Rain, is based on the Yavakrita myth of the Mahabharata. The late KS Rajendran, who had directed the play, called it “a complex story with several threads of the plot working at various levels of consciousness and bringing about transformation in the minds of audiences”.