Book: BHIMA’S WIFE
Author: Kavita Kané
Published by: Ebury
Price: Rs 399
A palpable sense of hurt peering through stern eyes confronts us on the cover of Kavita Kané’s new book, which narrates not Draupadi’s tale but Hidimbi’s, Bhima’s first wife, the demon-wife in colloquial terms, adding to Kané’s exploration of peripheralised, invisibilised lives from this Indian epic.
The Mahabharata’s curious status as lore, philosophy, religious text, even itihas, has allowed its continuous resurfacing in everyday lives, thereby opening up avenues for constant re-visitations vis-à-vis contemporary sensibilities. The grand narrative of the Mahabharata has, therefore, been broken down to accommodate multiple voices, endowing nuances to Vyasa’s perspective. For Kané, the rewriting involves rethinking the marginalised women characters from a modern perspective. While resurrecting Hidimbi’s tale from the Adi Parva, Kané portrays Hidimbi’s life using a gendered lens in which she appears like a modern woman, conscious of the binaries, deprivations, strengths and vulnerabilities at play. While this might seem like a jibe at the outdated nature of the classical tale, one wonders whether the seed of such a perception was sown within the original tale itself, even if submerged by innumerable misinterpretations.
Kané unravels Hidimba’s engagement with complexities as she contrives her brother’s death, chooses to be Bhima’s unrecognised wife, evolves as an able ruler of Kamyakavan, fumes at Indraprastha’s ignominy of her, feels helpless at Ghatotkacha’s death in Kurukshetra, resurrects hope through Barbarik, her grandson, who, in Kané’s story, is not a witness to the battle, as Barbarik is elsewhere. A conglomerate of contradictions, Hidimbi is not seen much in action but through a tapestry of words as the narrative gives voice to her desire, despair, disillusionment, rendering her character humane despite her mythical, even deified, status (a Hidimba temple exists in Manali).
In its commitment to a perspective from the ‘Other’, Bhima’s Wife offers Hidimbi’s view of the Pandavas, Kunti, Draupadi, and the political stratagem that drives the Mahabharata. Strewn within the narrative are notions of the sentience of the forest, often attenuating the binaries of lives in the city and in the forest, of civilisation and what lies outside. The book thus attests to an indigenous perspective that launches a forceful retaliation from the periphery to the mainstream. Such re-tellings, while creating a vision of a rightful world, often run the risk of over-telling. But Kané’s economy of visualisation has deftly avoided this trap.