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Indian Theatre or Otherwise:
Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata─A Revisit
Tsu-Chung Su
National Taiwan Normal University
Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985) was one of the most stimulating and yet
most controversial productions in the last century. It had its premiere at the 1985
Avignon Festival. Later, it was staged at the Bouffes du Nord, Brook’s base in Paris,
and at the Majestic Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, in the autumn of 1987. Brook’s
production of The Mahabharata caused a stir and received critical acclaim from some
theatre critics but was vehemently criticized by some theatre scholars. The debate is
well-documented in the book edited by David Williams. In this book, Part One
analyzes the production in the context of the work Brook has done at the International
Centre of Theatre Research in Paris. Part Two provides first-hand accounts by some of
those involved in the collaborative process─designers, actors, musicians. Part Three
gives a detailed analysis of the staging. Part Four discusses criticisms of the
production, and Part Five the production and tour details.
Brook’s The Mahabharata is often accused as “an instance not of intercultural
exchange…but of wholesale plunder or rape, for behind his ‘mask’ of tolerant
liberalism Brook is authoritarian and self-serving” (Williams 24). For Rustom
Bharucha, it exemplifies “one of the most blatant (and accomplished) appropriations
of Indian culture in recent years” (1991: 229). He also attacks the production for its
simplification of characterization and plot, its attenuation of a Hindu world view, its
downplaying of caste and its avoidance of “a confrontation of the historical context of
Indian culture” (1991: 232). Moreover, it is denounced as a production of cultural
hegemony and outright orientalism.
On the other hand, it is highly praised by Vijay Mishra as “the theatre spectacle
of the century, nine hours of sheer theatre unsurpassed in the known history of The
Mahabharata…a theatre event of such epic proportions that it will change the
Mahabharata-as-world-text forever” (201). Adapting and appropriating the Indian
Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata using an international cast, Brook’s production has
caused heated debates. There is simply no meeting ground between the two
contending and irreconcilable positions—that of the colonialist or post-colonialist vs.
that of the post-structuralist or the inter/trans-culturalist—about Brook’s The
Mahabharata and the film adaptation of the production (1989).
Can Brook’s production be considered a performance of “Indian theatre” when it
is criticized that it decontextualizes The Mahabharata, mis-represents Indian culture,
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and reduces “Hindu philosophy to platitudes” (Bharucha, 2005: 4)? Is his adaptation a
theft/rape/abuse or a dissemination/promotion/use of the Indian literature and culture?
Is Brook a neo-colonialist who practices cultural hegemony and treats Indian
performing arts as yet another commodity to be objectified, extracted, dissected, and
marketed to the world? What is the ethics of interculturalism? Is Brook a villain or an
irresponsible agent in the face-to-face encounter with the Other? Or Brook is just yet
another interpreter of The Mahabharata who continues “a process that has recurred
throughout the lifespan of the Epic, a process of transposition and reinterpretation that
has not only explicitly celebrated the material and brought it to a wider audience, but
also infused the material with a new vitality” (Williams 24)?
This paper focuses on interrogating Brook’s production of The Mahabharata and
the subsequent film adaptation of the production released in 1989. It attempts to
(re-)appraise Brook’s production and address the demands of cultural fidelity by
Indian scholars such as Rustom Bharucha from the perspective of cultural translation.
The problematic of cultural translation here directs two different stages: first, the
adaptation of The Mahabharata from the original text to the production script;
second, the translation from the written text to the dramatized/mediatized text. Many
criticisms directed at theatre practitioners such as Schechner and Brook spring from a
reflexive and postcolonial distrust of their (inter-)cultural translation. Translation from
one culture to another raises many theoretical and practical issues which require
careful and patient analysis. One relatively straightforward issue is the potential abuse
and loss of much that is considered to be essential to the form and substance of the
“original” Indian text and culture.
1. The Mahabharata and Its Adaptations
The Mahabharata is the longest known epic poem and has been described as the
longest poem ever written. Of the many versions, the epic’s longest version consists
of over 100,000 shloka (couplet) or over 200,000 individual verse lines and long
prose passages.1 As a literary text with many intriguing stories, The Mahabharata has
been regarded as an ideal source material for adaptation and the whole epic has been
parceled out in episodic forms for performances, recited or enacted by professional
bards, musicians, dancers, and actors. Due to the length of the story, unsurprisingly,
the whole epic is rarely performed in theatre in its entirety. Also many scholars
consider the epic as unstructured and chaotic. The adaptation of the epic text into a
theatrical production is inevitably at the expense of some of the most cherished
features of the original.
According to Wikipedia, the Mahabharata has about “1.8 million words in total” and “is roughly ten
times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the
Ramayana.”
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Like the myriad adaptations of the Ramayana in different length and art forms,
the same applies to the case of the Mahabharata. There is an extraordinary plurality
of texts and re-tellings, transmitted, transformed, and translated through a bountiful
array of performance genres both within and beyond India. Drawing upon stories
from the Mahabharata cycle, the performing arts of different kinds in India often
radically simplify characterization and plot, and sometimes can hardly demonstrate
the Hindu world view. As for the case outside India, especially in southeast Asia,
people more or less have over the years localized the grand epic and turned it into
stories with local and ethnic flavors.
…………………………………..
Brook took one of India’s most significant texts and turned it into a marketable
commodity for the audiences not just in the West but also in Asia as well. Other than
the above point,
Will the production of The Mahabharata be avowedly denounced as orientalist simply
because of any perceived infidelity to the original?
2. Good faith or Bad Faith:
Brook’s Adaptation in Question
Even though cultural fluidity and hybridity are deemed global driving forces of
both the avant-garde and popular arts nowadays, Brook’s The Mahabharata is still
considered by some the theft and rape of the original. Bharucha and his many
followers condemn Brook for appropriating The Mahabharata, Indian theatrical ideas,
and religious traditions to make his signature “original” and “innovative” work, which
in turn is defining the world’s arts markets, both economically and conceptually. With
the production of The Mahabharata, Brook is enacting a neo-colonial cycle in the arts
market, using and stealing raw materials from India at a cheap price and then
manufacturing the product to market around the world and even sell back to India at a
higher price.
In his article “A View from India,” Rustom Bharucha denounces the production’s
orientalism and focuses upon the exposure of Brook’s neo-colonialist appropriation of
the Indian text. Bharucha critiques Brook for his “selling of the Orient” as an
aggressive cultural invasion and a usurpation of religious territory. His unmasking of
Brook’s orientalist and imperialist mindset is an act of mission and passion. He
defends the integrity of the “original” and exposes the weightlessness and the
falseness of Brook’s representation. The Mahabharata, the “original,” is established
as foundational, profound, and meaningful, directing and sustaining Indian culture. By
contrast, the Brook/Carrière version is seen as excluding and trivializing Indian
culture. As Bharucha argues, “The Mahabharata is not merely a great narrative poem;
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it is our itihasa, the fundamental source of knowledge for our literature, dance,
painting, sculpture, theology, state craft, sociology, ecology—in short, our history in
all its detail and density” (230).
Bharucha’s demand to use cultural fidelity and “the ethics of representation” to
examine Brook’s adaptation has a firm ground. At this point, I do identify with
Bharucha’s argument because Brook’s The Mahabharata is not yet another adaptation
of the work in the world, nor a mere play like Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Henry IV,
or any of Shakespeare’s plays which can be freely adapted and does not cause any stir
at all. The original Mahabharata is indeed India’s itihasa, “the fundamental source of
knowledge” as claimed by Bharucha. Bharucha also criticizes Brook for the loss of
Hindu cosmology,2 for the sacrifice of depth and complexity because of
accessibility,3 for the production’s “chronological sequence of episodes,4 and for the
erasure of characters because of plot.5 Gautam Dasgupta also points out that the main
fault of Brook’s project is that it “shockingly truncated Bhagavad Gita sequence, the
epicenter of the poem” and presented the sequence in “whispered words never
revealed to the audience” (264). By doing so, Brook is accused of turning The
Mahabharata into “nothing, an empty shell…a compendium of martial legends, of
revenge, valour and bravura” (264). In other words, whereas the original
Mahabharata speaks to Indian audience through its deeply ingrained structure of
ritual beliefs and ethical codes of conduct intrinsic to its audience, Brook’s adaptation
rids the epic of its Hindu religious world view by catering to its non-Indian audience
the general values of human kind.
And yet on my second thought, to shift my perspective, I also think that Brook’s
adaptation does have its merits as well, even though his attempt to stage the vast
Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata bespeaks his artistic ambition to master the Indian
other and makes himself susceptible to the accusation of cultural hegemony, outright
orientalism, and a colonialist mindset. One can see that Brook and Carrière make
efforts to penetrate into the inner layers of the epic and try to reach the core and soul
of the Bharata story and Indian culture in their own way. It is a herculean task to
condense the vastness of the epic and to boil down its hard core narrative to an
agreeable, presentable, and sensible version. Since each person has his or her own
ideas of what is essential and what is tangential regarding the newly
“What is The Mahabharata without Hindu philosophy?...There is no framework of reference in
Brook’s production that provides a Hindu perspective on action in the larger, cosmic context” (232).
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“Accessibility is the determining principle of this adaptation…Carrière…has reduced The Epic to a
chronological sequence of episodes... the intricate structure of storytelling reduced to a line of action"
(236-7).
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For Bharucha, the linear sequence is “structurally linked to the well-made play tradition of Scribe
and Sardou” (237).
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“Brook erases some characters altogether. The contemplative Vidura is cut, because, as Carrière
claims, ‘his effect on the plot is minor.’ ‘Plot’: that’s just the problem” (241).
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adapted/translated version, it is quite understandable that Brook’s production is not
able to please everyone. I personally don’t think that the style of Brook’s the
Mahabharata is in any way coming close to the style of well-made play or any kind
of the Western drama as Bharucha points out. In what follows, I want to address
another question that bogs down Brook’s production, that is, the question of
Indianness.
3. Transcultural vs. Intercultural
The Question of Indianness and Brook’s Universal Claim:
Judging from their criticisms, Dasgupta and Bharucha are the so-called purists
who insist on preserving the Indianness in any reproduction. Both of them demand an
ethics of representation and bear upon the question of cultural property. For them,
Brook did not respect the “Indianness” of his source material; he silenced or muted
the Indian voice or voices of The Mahabharata and practiced a kind of cultural
imperialism in this production. Is Brook’s troubled and controversial production a
testimony to the fact that non-Indian artists are liable to be biased and then attacked
by the (post-)colonial outcry and criticism when they adapt any major Indian work or
itihasa, especially under the circumstance that they fail to capture the soul or
Indianness of any particular work. Or the works like The Mahabharata and The
Ramayana are simply taboo literary works for the non-Indian artists to deal with.
The case of Brook’s The Mahabharata reminds us to be mindful and careful
about one’s subject position. Do the rules governing borrowings differ depending on
whether one is a Western or non-Western artist, or whether one is an artist of the first
world or an artist of color or subaltern? Most of the accusations directed to Brook are
mainly because he is a white Western/British/former colonialist artist. What might
happen if Brook is an artist of color or a non-Western, perhaps a Thai, an Indonesian,
or even a Taiwanese?
Basicly spectators go to Brook’s production or watch the movie to find out how
he interprets the Indian epic. For Patrice Pavis, Brook’s creation is not driven by “an
ethnological respect for an authenticity of reproductions” (80) and his The
Mahabharata is “the root of all of the misunderstandings about intercultural theatre”
(79). His theatre is “not ethnological, folkloric or ‘touristic’.” It constitutes “a genre
that is hybrid by its very nature, within which the origins and perspectives of adaptors
are assumed rather than denied” (Pavis 79). As for Marvin Carlson, he points out that
the style of The Mahabharata “continued the traditional Western appropriation of
Oriental material for purposes of exoticism, spectacle or making indirect political
reference, without any attempt to discover the voice of the material itself” (88). It is
evident that Brook had found in this great epic a global or universal voice, accessible
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to all humanity. His intention and interpretation filtered the otherness of the original
story and gave his version a new focus and a new version of Indianness. Brook and
Carrière embraced simplification and precision rather than descriptive elaboration in
their script.
With regard to the question of Indianness, Brook’s answer was to selectively
“suggest” the Indian context, and not to represent it. As Brook argues, “we’re not
trying to show, but to suggest. We are telling a story which, on the one hand, is
universal, but on the other, would never have existed without India. To tell this story,
we had to avoid allowing the suggestion of India to be so strong as to inhibit human
identification to too great an extent, while, at the same time telling it as a story with
its roots in the earth of India” (qtd. in Banu 46). As the script writer, Jean-Claude
Carrière, explains, “We settled on a simple, precise, restrained language which gave
us the means to oppose or juxtapose words which ordinarily are never used together.
This careful choice of language led us to a problem which would be repeated in the
stage decor, the music, the costumes, the colors and the props: one might call it ‘the
Indian-ness.’ I had to open my language to rhythms and images of Asia without being
caught up in the other trap, the opposite one, of merely providing local color or the
picturesque” (64).
Brook and Carrière’s strategy was to translate the Mahabharata in a meaningful
way so that it would be presented in a theatrical language they had developed and
received by international audiences. They chose to maximize accessibility and
identification by widening the focus of the story itself, expanding its frame of
reference from its being the poetical history of India to its being the “The Great
History of Mankind.”6 For the casting, an international selection of actors was
intentionally chosen, to show that the nature of the Indian epic is the story of all
humanity. Brook’s The Mahabharata is a product of his experimental enterprise. He
himself has often spoken of his “international theatre” whose goal is “to articulate a
universal art that transcends narrow nationalism in its attempt to achieve human
essence” (qtd. in Carlson 89). Carlson points out that “The fact that nineteen nations
are represented by the actors of The Mahabharata, Brook sees as both a metaphorical
and physical indication of the international voice of his theatre” (89). Carlson
maintains that Brook’s intention and strategy are clear (88) and argues that the accents
of Brook’s international cast create “a Tower of Babel quality in Brook’s
Mahabharata” (89). In his conclusion, Carlson states that the Mahabharata “may be
seen less as attempts to deal specifically with India or even what the concept of India
means to us in terms of difference or otherness than as attempts to utilize images
As Carrière explains in his article “What is not in The Mahabharata is Nowhere,” “So the title can be
understood as ‘The Great History of the Bharatas.’ But in an extended meaning, bharata means Hindu,
and, even more generally, man. So it can also be interpreted as ‘The Great History of Mankind’” (61).
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drawn from the Indian experience to construct a theatrical celebration of human
brotherhood” (90).
Is it justifiable for us to accept Brook and Carrière’s universal claim? If it is
justifiable, the otherness of the Mahabharata and the Indian culture can be subsumed
under the rubric of universality. Indianness is not an issue anymore because to
preserve the integrity of Indianness is not Brook’s ultimate goal. For Marvin Carlson,
to criticize Brook “for failing to speak with the authentic voice of India” is to place
upon him an expectation quite incompatible with his goals. Carlson points out that
“Brook’s Mahabharata is absolutely faithful to his entire experimental enterprise…,
but which has from the beginning sought expression which could most properly be
characterized not as intercultural but as transcultural….The search for the
transcultural theatrical experience has occupied Brook’s Centre International de
Recherche Théâtrale since its inception” (88, 89). Brook’s goal is to explore the
creative possibilities of playing across national, cultural, artistic, and personal borders.
The whole Mahabharata project is therefore more transcultural than intercultural in
aim.
4. Epilogue—Dharma at Work:
Brook’s The Mahabharata—Evasion of Responsibility or Call to Responsibility
Bharucha deems Brook’s avoidance of Indianness and Indian tradition an
“evasion of responsibility.” He argues that “When Brook says in the foreword to his
play that ‘we have tried to suggest the flavour of India without pretending to be what
we are not,’ he is gracefully evading a confrontation of the historical context of Indian
culture” (232). He argues that Brook’s “story” could not be “rooted in Indian earth”
and “it had to float in some kind of a make-believe India, somewhere between
imagination and reality, neither here nor there” (247).
As many critics have pointed out, Brook’s shift of the paradigm in The
Mahabharata from being a history of India to a history of mankind is deliberate and
purposeful. For Brook, the responsibility of the theatre is to translate the
untranslatable. “Here lies the responsibility of the theatre: what a book cannot convey,
what no philosopher can truly explain, can be brought into our understanding by the
theatre. Translating the untranslatable is one of its roles” (164), he writes. Thus as a
theatre artist, his mission is to call to responsibility what an artist cannot escape, that
is, to make invisible visible. Is he evasive or true to his vision? For Patrice Pavis,
Brook is no doubt an honest artist, true to his incessant artistic research (1996: 79). He
has been searching to articulate the theatre’s truth and to fulfill theatre’s responsibility
for decades but never before with such a passion as shown in his The Mahabharata.
Through interrogating Brook’s project, this paper intends to find a way out of the
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dead end or deadlock of the exploration/exploitation or Indianness/universal humanity
binary and search for alternative perspectives. I argue that the conflicting viewpoints
incurred by Brook’s The Mahabharata can be seen as a dialogue between diverging
attitudes concerning the dharma toward the attainment of rightful interpretation. Just
like the battlefield setting in the Bhagavad Gita, it can be interpreted as an allegory
for the ethical struggles of the human life. In like manner, the argument between the
two camps about Brook’s production can be viewed as a reenactment of the moral
struggle with regard to Brook’s transcultural practice.
In his book, The Shifting Point, Brook explains the essence of the Mahabharata.
He believes that the work “brings back something immense, powerful and radiant—
the idea of an incessant conflict within every person and every group, in
every expression of the universe; a conflict between a possibility, which is called
‘dharma,’ and the negation of that possibility. The Mahabharata does not attempt to
explain the secret of dharma, but lets it become a living presence. It does this through
dramatic situations which force dharma into the open” (184). In a similar fashion, we
can say that Brook is compelled to do the epic project by virtue of his swadharma, or
life task. I can see that this epic project somehow realizes Brook’s destiny as a theatre
director. His project is the outcome of his dharma. His conviction and action are in
accord with his ordained fate and destiny as a director which makes his life and
universe meaningful, including duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues, responsibility
and right way of living as a practitioner. Brook’s The Mahabharata is neither the act
nor the result; some kind of intercultural or transcultural urge or law that guides the
act and creates the result. Brook’s innate characteristic or his personal and secret order
makes this epic project what it is. This epic production is thus the pursuit and
execution of Brook’s nature and true calling, enacting his role in cosmic concert. The
same applies to Bharucha’s critical stand toward Brook’s production.
Is the Indian epic less significant because of Brook’s adaptation/appropriation?
Clearly, like many other things, an epic like The Mahabharata can be transmitted and
radically transformed from one culture to another. Brook’s production of The
Mahabharata and its film version have inspired discussion, stimulated debate and set
in motion radical lines of questioning, concerning cultural translation, the ethics of
representation, and the transformation of material through different media. Brook’s
appropriation for sure asserts Brook and his partners’ social aspirations, ideological
concerns, and theatrical conceptions. It changes the conceptualization of an Indian
epic as a whole but it does not make The Mahabharata less significant.
Works Cited
Banu, Georges. “The Language of Stories: Peter Brook interviewed by Georges
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Banu.” Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives. Ed. David
Williams. London: Routledge, 1991. 45-51.
Bharucha, Rustom. “A View From India.” Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical
Perspectives. Ed. David Williams. London: Routledge, 1991. 228-52.
---. The Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. London:
Routledge, 2005.
Brook, Peter. The Shifting Point, 1946-1987. New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 1987. 1994.
Carlson, Marvin. “Brook and Mnouchkine: Passages to India?” The Intercultural
Performance Reader. Ed. Patrice Pavis. London: Routledge, 1996. 79-92.
Carrière, Jean-Claude. “What is not in The Mahabharata is Nowhere.” Peter Brook
and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives. Ed. David Williams. London:
Routledge, 1991. 59-64.
Dasgupta, Gautam. “Peter Brook’s ‘Orientalism’.” Peter Brook and the Mahabharata:
Critical Perspectives. Ed. David Williams. London: Routledge, 1991. 262-267.
Pavis, Patrice, ed. The Intercultural Performance Reader. London: Routledge, 1996.
Williams, David, ed. Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives.
London: Routledge, 1991.