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1 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, 2 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.” 1 3 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; 4 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). 3 “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). 4 For Bharucha, the linear sequence is “structurally linked to the well-made play tradition of Scribe and Sardou” (237). 5 “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). 2 5 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 6 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). 6 7 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 8 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 9 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.