Big Bhishma in Madras: In Search of the Mahabharata with Peter Brook by Carrière Jean-Claude

Author:Carrière, Jean-Claude [Carrière, Jean-Claude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

In Delhi, the circle is complete. Physical exhaustion. The shaded charm of the Imperial Hotel. Even a swimming pool.

We stay four very full days. Lots of meetings, films, visits, parties. Finally, even a little shopping. I write a few bits of scenes, I read, I talk. What sort of adventure is it that have we embarked upon?

The tenacious presence of the Mahabharata . It is everywhere, in all forms, even in the piles of comic books (in Hindi and in English). It is perhaps the only really common point between different cultures and languages. Very well known, even among the tribals. More than the gods, more than the laws.

A subcontinent identified by a book. The greatest poem in the world. The most complete? A phrase, arrogant in its way, in the middle of the poem goes: ‘All that is in the Mahabharata exists in the world. What is not in it, does not exist.’

No point then, in looking anywhere else.

The extreme ambition of the work. The physical effects that it implies (to be seen).

Does the complexity of India correspond to the complexity of the poem? And vice versa? Here nothing is simple, but it can all be analysed. The philosophy does not forbid any tunnel, any jungle. To go even towards darkness (necessary). Contradictions even in our own reactions. It could be compressed into one sentence, ‘But what horror, what abasement, never seen such filth.... What marvels!’

The Mahabharata : it is also a mixture of emotions; of disquiet, with no sign of light; of shocks, of precise and sometimes cynical descriptions—like a prodigiously ambitious pattern that a genius of a poet (or was it several poets?) attempted to apply to the world, the world that he knew, the India of antiquity.

Make of India of the past, the world of today. But how? In juxtaposing scenes of different colours. Or introducing different colours in the same scenes? And how not to abandon the action on the way? Is it possible?

In Kerala today, children are still given names from the poem. Avoiding those which bode ill, like Karna, a bastard rejected by his mother although the son of the Sun. Superb warrior with a huge heart, but so uneasy in the shadows.

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