The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s “Orientalism”

THE MAHABHARATA Peter Brook's "Orientalism" Gautam Dasgupta July 16, 1945, Jornada del Muerto, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Indra was not yet fully awake from his night of lengthy repose under the eastern skies. Yet the horizons were ablaze, irradiated by the lethal rays of "a thousand suns in the sky." With these words from the Bhagavad-Gita, J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the architects of this conflagration, anointed the birth of the Kali-yuga, our nuclear age. How fitting, indeed, that when the sun rose from the east to gaze upon the charred and stillborn sandy plains of a New Mexico desert, it brought in its wake a wisdom from the ancient land of the Bharatas. Now, forty-three years later, when the life-sustaining light of Indra is no match for the thousands of genocidal suns we possess, comes yet another warning from the land of Shiva and Kali. The howls of doom and terror cry out from within the cavernous walls of the BAM Majestic Theatre as the Pandavas and the Kurus line up under Peter Brook's direction on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The Mahabharata, an Indian epic of immense prolixity , adapted for the stage by Jean-Claude Carriere, draws to a close after nine hours, its climactic image one of bloody carnage and tragic desolation . The Mahabharata is a compilation, in over 90,000 stanzas, of vast Brahamanic lore. The dates of its composition cannot be fixed with certainty , but scholars generally agree to place it somewhere between 400 B.C. and 200 A.D. Although tradition has it that the creator of this vast poem was the sage Vyasa, it betrays the handiwork of a succession of priests who, during the course of their storytelling sessions, interpolated sections on 9 morality, ethics, theology, and statecraft into what may have been, essentially and originally, a secular tale of war and strife. In any case, the epic in our time has come to symbolize, through its interconnected tales and legends and the morals attached to each, a virtual exegesis on the Hindu way of life. The Mahabharata I grew up with in India is a vital source of nourishment, a measure of one's thoughts and deeds. It is no mere epic constrained by literary and narrative strategies, but a revelatory injunction, ethical and theological in purpose, that determines and defines the social and personal interactions of millions of Indians. Given the scope of the epic, it goes without saying that any attempt to dramatize The Mahabharata is a task worthy of admiration. It is also a far more ambitious undertaking than Brook's earlier intercultural adaptations -Orghast, Conference of the Birds, The 1k, and Ubu. In all instances, he has drawn upon an international cast of actors, employed diverse acting styles and a variety of theatrical modes of representation. Underlying all this experimentation is, I suspect, a belief in a syncretic cultural universe, where the stage is all the world. A grand and perhaps even a noble vision, granted, but one that inevitably raises the problematic specter of what Edward Said has termed "Orientalism." It is from this perspective that the Brook Mahabharata assumes an air of equivocation I find hard to dismiss. Obviously, all cross-cultural work would have to confront the idea of representing the Other. But as Said had argued in his book Orientalism, interest in the Orient and the field of study labeled "Orientalist" discourse was generated by Occidental scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to accompany ongoing political incursions into the Orient. The Orient, according to Said's study, was not allowed to represent itself, but had to be represented by the Occident. In other words, it had to be re-presented in a manner so as to align itself within the prevailing hierarchy, with the imperial powers on top, the Orient at the bottom, of the political, social, and cultural scale. Although such political hegemonic divisions do not prevail in our time, the question to be posed is whether the thematics of "Orientalism" nonetheless still continue to haunt us. On the political level, it cannot be denied that such thinking continues to play a role in international affairs...