{"id":6156,"date":"2016-03-09T22:18:17","date_gmt":"2016-03-09T21:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6156"},"modified":"2016-03-10T13:17:29","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T12:17:29","slug":"karthika-nair-until-the-lions-echoes-from-the-mahabharata-arc-12-99-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6156","title":{"rendered":"Karthika Nair, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata<\/em> (Arc) \u00a312.99, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

London has just been through one of its public engagements with the Mahabharata<\/em>.\u00a0 Thirty years after his acclaimed nine-hour version of the original text, Peter Brook has just brought a short play called \u2018Battle\u2019 to the Young Vic;\u00a0 the reviews were very mixed.\u00a0 In January, at London\u2019s Round House, the choreographer Akram Khan staged his ballet Until the Lions,<\/em> based on the text under review here.\u00a0 The reviews of Khan\u2019s ballet were uniformly ecstatic.<\/p>\n

In the introduction to her book, Karthika Nair states that the aim of the text was originally to be \u2018a re-imagining of the Mahabharata through the voices of eighteen women\u2019.\u00a0 Nair\u2019s final version offers the monologues of nineteen characters, three of them male, and a couple of them wolves.\u00a0 There is a dazzling range of forms from pantoums and ghazals, to Spanish glosa and sestinas; all of which is carried off with considerable aplomb and bravura technique.\u00a0 In addition, there is an introduction with outlines the genesis and development of the text;\u00a0 a family tree and a dramatis personae. At the end, there is a lengthy bibliography and five pages of acknowledgements.\u00a0 All in all, a very weighty text indeed.<\/p>\n

The contents are carefully divided into those voices, of which two, in particular, interleave the text:\u00a0 Satyavati introduced as \u2018The fisher princess whose beauty and determination change the course of the Kuru destiny\u2019, Kuru being the dynasty\u00a0 whose history the Mahabharata <\/em>\u2018explores\u2019.\u00a0 Satyavati\u2019s eleven sections are all called \u2018Fault lines\u2019.\u00a0 And the second set of voices is called Spouses, Lovers, and they have six interleaving sections.\u00a0 The \u2018Fault lines\u2019 section often begin with and usually contain the exhortation \u2018Listen, listen\u2019 and narrate the stories of two particular characters, Bheeshma, an elemental god condemned to a lifetime on earth, and Vyaasa, son of Satyavati, and the author of the original Mahabharata<\/em>. In these sections, Bheeshma and Vyaasa trade insults, in particular about what Vyaasa might or might not include in the story.<\/p>\n

All of this might sound rather schematic and it is true that this book is both \u2018heavily researched\u2019 in Nair\u2019s own words, and very tightly organised.\u00a0 But within that there is a seething energy.\u00a0 On the one hand, the relationships are often very violent and violently portrayed;\u00a0 thus the portrayal of war in the original Mahabharata <\/em>is maintained and replicated here.\u00a0 On the other hand, the notion of the story within the story which is so crucial to the original is built in to Nair\u2019s layering of the story into the sections.<\/p>\n

A seething energy is also present in the language, which is impacted and adjectival.\u00a0 But Nair is also not afraid to use anachronisms such as \u2018my stepson could be a real prune\u2019, or \u2018he spoke when I called him a quisling\u2019.\u00a0 Such is Nair\u2019s skill that these anachronisms do not seem to jar.<\/p>\n

The title of Nair\u2019s book is taken from an interview with Chinua Achebe in which he comments, \u2018There is that great proverb \u2013 that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.\u2019 Achebe also famously wrote \u201cthe price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.\u2019 Here, Achebe writes as a Nigerian writer writing in English.\u00a0 Perhaps that particular post-colonialist battle has been won; post-colonial writers don\u2019t have to defend their choice of language in a way that once they might.\u00a0 But what Nair has done in Until the Lions<\/em> is recast the Mahabharata <\/em>in language which reaches deep into the core of the original and makes it triumphantly, vibrantly new.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

London has just been through one of its public engagements with the Mahabharata.\u00a0 Thirty years after his acclaimed nine-hour version of the original text, Peter Brook has just brought a short play called \u2018Battle\u2019 to the Young Vic;\u00a0 the reviews were very mixed.\u00a0 In January, at London\u2019s Round House, the choreographer Akram Khan staged his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nKarthika Nair, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Arc) \u00a312.99, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6156\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Karthika Nair, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Arc) \u00a312.99, reviewed by Ian Pople - 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