TV REVIEW : ‘The Mahabharata’ a Rich Telling of the Story of Mankind on PBS

In a classic case of lousy timing, Peter Brook’s six-hour miniseries of “The Mahabharata” airs tonight through Wednesday in two-hour increments on “Great Performances” (9-11 p.m., Channels 28 and 15), its opening segment virtually guaranteed to collide with the end of the Academy Awards. (In the Midwest and East it collides squarely.)

Those who opt for the Oscars this evening may pray to Krishna for a VCR that can simultaneously record “The Mahabharata.” Or you may tune in for a Saturday marathon on KCET Channel 28, when the six hours will repeat, 6 p.m. to midnight. But ignore “The Mahabharata” only at your own risk.

It is both splendid adventure and close encounter of the richest kind. The nine-hour stage version, created at Avignon in 1985, was seen here during the 1987 L.A. Festival. Later it was filmed for TV and motion-picture release. We admired the three-hour film last year. But this televised edition, which rightfully won an international Emmy for best performing arts program, represents the cream of the play with the same intensification of experience that the camera exerted on the movie.

Based on the 2,000-year-old Indian poem that is the basis of Indian religion, history and thought, it is described by Brook, in brief introductions to each segment of the miniseries, as the Story of the Family of Man (“Maha” means great, “Bharata” was the name of the first ruling family of India).

It was written in 100,000 Sanskrit couplets, at a length 17 times that of the Bible. Shrinking this “historical fact transformed into myth” without shrinking its message or its scope was a massive undertaking for screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere (assisted for the miniseries by Brook and co-writer Marie-Helene Estienne).

This endlessly imaginative trilogy about the well-meaning Pandavas and their darker, angrier cousins, the Kauravas (born of a blind king and fatally blind to their function in the universe), methodically and dispassionately examines the essence of human nature.

Told by a sage to a young boy through the ministrations of a god--replicating the Holy Trinity?--it is quite simply a monumental parable on the conduct of life. The magnificent and unexpurgated story of ourselves.

The first part, or the Big Cheat (airing tonight), is a cliffhanger in which the dissenting cousins play a fateful game of dice.

The second part (Tuesday), which could be subtitled “Who Really Won?,” finds the Pandavas exiled to the forest, where time abounds for philosophical reflection (“silence is necessary for the harmony of the world”), while the Kauravas, who stole the game, are troubled enough to quell their fears by plotting further vengeance. Part 3 (Wednesday) brings on the inevitable: war, death, destruction and spiritual rebirth.

All the cycles of Man.

At best, this is a telescopic view of one of the world’s wisest, most poetic, perceptive, exotic, balanced and thrilling masterworks, laced with humor and divine meddling, aphoristically distilled in Carriere’s text, and delicately framed and directed by Brook. Its sounds are the haunting strains of Indian music. Its images are red earth and snow-capped mountains, obscured by mist, whipped and purified by flame. Earth, water, wind and fire.

“ ‘The Mahabharata,’ ” Carriere said in an interview with The Times, “tells us that we are what we are, in contrast to Occidental thought, which has been telling us for centuries that by changing the circumstances of our lives we can change human nature.

“It offers no ideology or religion, no conceptual or intellectual vision of the world. It repudiates any notion of a hierarchical order of human emotion. We are grotesque, pathetic, spiritual, violent, brutal, vulgar, elegant all at once.”

When Carriere and Brook approached the work in 1974, they arranged for the story to be told to them, first by a French storyteller, later by others--Indian, French and English. Carriere took notes and, a year later, wrote a draft, “trying to see if a theatrical piece was even possible,” he said.

In 1975, he began plowing through the “Mahabharata” and, by 1978, joined Brook and Estienne in a comparative reading of the English and French versions, consulting with a Sanskrit specialist over discrepancies. At the same time they started to combine repetitive scenes and toss out all parallel or tangential stories, cutting its length roughly by half.

A series of trips to India followed, to soak up images, work with Indian interpreters and look at dance, song and storytelling versions of “The Mahabharata.” Crucially, while production designer Chloe Obolensky started her search for the proper Indian fabrics, Carriere began his for the vocabulary he knew was essential to transposing the poem into another culture.

“Words,” he said, “are never innocent. They’re loaded with a shrewd subconscious imagery. Buddha describes the subconscious as something like our sympathetic nervous system. The word is defined in ‘The Mahabharata’ as the secret movement of the atman-- very difficult to translate. To try to explain the atman would take me an hour. It’s neither soul, nor spirit, but means at once the moral value of an individual and his place within a group. It’s a very Indian, very complicated idea.”

It took Carriere weeks to resolve this writing problem until, in the work of an African writer named Hampate-Ba, he came across the expression le coeur profond-- the deep heart. “Simple words,” he said, “but rarely used together in French. I wanted to regenerate a linguistic richness by forming uncommon alliances. I leaned heavily on five or six short French words layered with meaning, such as the word sang , meaning blood as in coursing through your veins, but also meaning family or race--people of the same blood.

“I made lists of hundreds of words that I forbade myself to use. I made attempts at dialogue. There are key scenes in ‘The Mahabharata’ that I wrote up in different styles, even before I had any real sense of what I was ultimately going to do. It seemed such an impossible task. But Peter had told me something at the start that was enormously helpful. On the corner of Rue Saint-Andre-Des-Arts, at 3 o’clock one morning, we shook hands and he said, ‘Don’t get discouraged because we’ll do it. We’ll do it when it’s ready, and it will take as long as it has to.’ ”

It took 10 years. Carriere pinpoints the start of the serious work to “one truly inspirational moment” that came when he was having trouble coming up with the right structure for the play. “At 3 a.m., alone in the South of France, in a house that wasn’t mine, on a very hot summer night, with the start of rehearsals only a month away, I suddenly ‘saw’ and ‘heard’ the first 20 minutes of the play. I got up, wrote them down, called Peter and he said, ‘That’s it!’ ”

It rested on a phrase: When in answer to the young boy’s question at the start, “What is this poem about?,” the storyteller Vyasa answers simply, “It’s about you.” That gave Carriere his play.

“The great wisdom of ‘The Mahabharata,’ ” he said, “is that it is couched in terms that the most ignorant peasant can understand. This democracy of culture may be the only true democracy we have.”