The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata By Maggi Lidchi-Grassi, Random House, Rs 999

They were all present, the great rishis, in the Naimisa forest. They had just greeted the well-known storyteller, Ugrasrava, who had arrived from the court of King Janamayjaya, the son of Parikshita. Ugrasrava had heard there, in the presence of Vyasa himself, the telling of the Mahabharata by Vyasa’s pupil, Vaisampayana. The rishis requested Ugrasrava to narrate to them what he had heard. Ugrasrava’s retelling of the story is finished when into that opening within the Naimisa forest steps a modern intruder. She confesses that she has eavesdropped over time. Following the custom, she introduces herself. She says her name is Maggi Lidchi-Grassi and that she is a writer. She begs the permission of the gathering, very humbly indeed, to retell the story of the Mahabharata in a somewhat different way.

Lidchi-Grassi’s way of telling the story is startling. She begins with the voice of Ashwatthama, who recounts his own childhood and how it overlapped with the childhood of the Kauravas and the Pandavas because his father, Dronacharya, had been employed as the teacher of the children in Hastinapura. The choice is startling for more than one reason. First, Drona’s only son, who was cursed never to die, is by no means a central or even an important character in the epic. He is a side player who suddenly acquires a hideous importance only in Sauptika parva and then disappears completely from the narrative. There is an attempt, while telling the story through Ashwatthama’s voice, to gain the reader’s sympathy for the character who carries out one of the most brutal killings in an epic that is full of blood and gore. Ashwatthama kills the five sons of the Pandavas and Dhrishtadyumna (Draupadi’s brother and the slayer of Drona in the battlefield) at night while they are sleeping. There is no parallel to this in the great war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. In his narrative, Ashwatthama tries to suggest that he was a great friend of Arjuna and was a supporter, if a closet one, of the Pandavas. Any writer is free to exercise her imagination, but it is worth remembering that there is very little in Vyasa’s original story, as it has come to us, to suggest that Ashwatthama was a noble soul or that he was a friend of Arjuna and the Pandavas.

The bulk of the book is narrated through the voice of Arjuna. This is not surprising since, conventionally, the third Pandava is often seen as the hero of the epic, especially because of his close proximity to Krishna. The problem with such a choice is that it tends to reduce the Mahabharata to a story only about war and heroism. The Mahabharata is of course much more than that and Lidchi-Grassi admits this. Arjuna, except for that moment before the great battle which leads to the revelation of the Bhagavad Gita, faces no major moral dilemma.

Most of the great moral questions of the epic are addressed to Yudhishthira. These questions pursue Yudhishthira even as he is about to enter heaven. (The adoption of the voice of Arjuna means that the entire episode about entering heaven is left out of Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling of the story.)

Dharma, Yudhishthira says in answer to the Yaksha’s question at the end of Vana parva, lies in a dark cave. Lidchi-Grassi’s retelling of parts of the Mahabharata story is delightful but she takes us nowhere near the dark cave.