INDIANS APPLAUD FESTIVAL’S ‘THE MAHABHARATA’

Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carriere make no apologies for not bringing India to the West in their nine-hour adaptation of “The Mahabharata.” As Brook notes in the introduction to the newly published English translation, after making many trips to India and steeping themselves in the country’s myriad performance traditions, the company “returned from India knowing that our work was not to imitate but to suggest.”

Los Angeles-based Indians contacted by The Times not only think that was a wise decision on Brook’s part, but that, on the whole, the work is a success.

“It felt like an Indian play to me,” said Mamti Bhattar, who works with her husband, Shashi, in the accounting department of the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

This thought raises a hard-to-resolve question: Is a work like “The Mahabharata,” so thoroughly fundamental to Indian religion and culture, the property of India? Especially when one considers that “The Bhagavad-Gita,” Krishna’s reflections on war that preface the epic’s climactic battle, is the country’s bible?

“No,” said film director Jag Mundhra. “No one owns ‘The Mahabharata.’ No person, no culture, can keep a work of art. I liked the fact that a British director was doing it, and casting it with an almost non-Indian, international group of actors. Seeing a completely new interpretation from what we were raised with is part of the excitement of art.”

Pratapaditya Pal, curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was troubled, though, by part of Brooks’ multicultural strategy.

“I’m all for this internationalization of the cast. But if this production were taken to India (something Brook has said he eventually intends to do), it wouldn’t be highly praised, because Indians cannot accept a white man (Bruce Myers) as Krishna (the god-man and earthly incarnation of the great god Vishnu, who possesses unlimited spiritual powers). Traditionally, he’s a very black-skinned figure.”

Pal also noticed that many Americans in the audience were surprised to see a very different, human Krishna than the one associated (“Quite negatively, understandably,” he added) with the Hare Krishna religious movement in this country.

The Westerners were also amused, Mundhra and Shashi Bhattar noted, at the markedly pre-feminist treatment of women in the play. “When Kunti (the mother of the epic’s five Pandava brothers) warns her sons to share their new wife (Draupadi) and make sure that she mustn’t suffer in any way,” Bhattar remarked, “everyone except we Indians laughed.

“To us, this was no big thing. Besides, this kind of marriage no longer exists in India. I think this was an example of how the show cannot do the job of exposing Western audiences to Indian culture and traditions.”

Pal agreed, adding that “Brook’s project seems not to be one of transmission or even of education, but of fusing several theatrical styles continents apart.”

“Perhaps a more important influence here than Hindu drama is Japanese Noh theater, especially the gestures and the uncluttered, brilliantly simple scenic design.”

For Pal, the Bhattars and Mundhra, memories of village performances of what Shashi referred to as “The Masterpiece” flooded back as they sat recently in the bleachers of Raleigh Studios. “This company obviously immersed (itself) in that tradition,” Mundhra said. “In the villages, when Krishna appeared, villagers would go into devotional hysteria. That, of course, was missing this time. . . . “

Memories of a big-budget Indian movie version were more of a problem.

“The third section (‘War’) didn’t succeed,” Mamti said, “because you simply can’t show a battle on stage like you can in a movie. This is the war that destroys the world, but that didn’t come across.”

Shashi: “The movie linked various events together better than this new version. Yet Brook held my interest all the way, and that is a real tribute.”

Mundhra, a veteran of the Indian film industry, dismissed comparisons of play to film. “They’re two different media. In fact, if Brook had aped movie conventions and done it more ‘realistically,’ that would have ruined it for me.”

“We’re left with two remarkable notions in this staging,” Pal summarized. “The threat of Pasupata (the weapon that can destroy the world) clearly presages the atom bomb. And the idea that a character’s destiny is a given is shown here as a problem. I believe that the fatalistic preoccupation with fate and destiny is the fundamental problem of Indian civilization, but it’s ironic that it took British and French artists (Brook and Carriere) to fully dramatize it.”