Jaya was a book I had read about and seen in stores. I saw it, yes, but never felt curious about it, never took it down from a shelf to look at it. It is the Mahabharatha. What could possibly be new? After having read and heard multiple versions of the epic since childhood, I thought I knew it all. But once I started reading, I finished in two sittings for the simple reason that I could not put the book down. For that I give half credit to Devdutt Pattanaik and half to Veda Vyasa.
The book follows the conventional narrative starting with Vyasa and Ganesha, going through the eighteen chapters and ending at Vaanaprastha. But far from being the dashing, romantic epic tale of political intrigue that we are all familiar with, Jaya is extremely clinical. The chapters are structured into three parts - the story, the analysis and the box of facts. One of my favorite aspects of the book is the tagline at the beginning of each main chapter. How Vaisampayana condenses the gist of the chapter into one dialogue “ Janamejaya, in your family...”
The story is all there, in more detail that I have ever seen in one place. But the narrative is crisp to the point of being curt. It is rather disappointing to find the emotions being almost completely eliminated from the telling. While it makes an excellent study with all facts put in order for the analysis, Jaya has nothing of the enormous entertainment value that Mahabharatha always had for me. For me Mahabharatha, Ramayana or Bhagavatha are primarily stories. I remember sitting enthralled as my grandfather read them out to me with ample dramatisation... The blow by blow accounts of battles and tournaments, the colourful descriptions of palaces and the grandiose white lies about divine births are all part and parcel of the great epic. They are what will make you read the Mahabharatha again, tell it to your children and stop scrolling channels on TV when you see the re-run on some obscure station you did not know you subscribed to.
The analysis is what I liked. After rushing through the story, one or two paragraphs the author dedicates to spelling out his thoughts on the motives and machinations of the characters. He looks at them as normal people and tries to explain their actions based on human emotions. All the characters portrayed in Jaya are capable of love, hatred, anger, jealousy, avarice, pride - the full range. They do the things they do for specific and personal reasons. How those actions are publicized is shown either as the character’s own endeavor or that of the people who wrote the stories to suit their respective era’s audiences. It is a refreshing change from morality being stuffed down one’s throat, albeit with the best of intentions.
The box of facts at the end of each chapter is reminiscent of the NCERT text books of our time. The blue boxes with the extra juice - the facts that could not be crammed into the lesson but which would give one perspective if one chose to read. In this, the author speaks of different versions of the tale told in different places, the nuances of names or shares some trivia.
The thing about Jaya is that it manages to be different even when it says nothing new. Devdutt Pattanaik presents different viewpoints on the same scene without sounding biased towards any particular theory. The book comes across as almost academic. It is a breath of fresh air for those who have read the epic, formed their opinions and debated them time and time again; because there are at least a couple of things you wouldn’t have thought about. I really cannot decide whether it is a good thing that I would almost rush through the story to reach the analysis part...But Jaya is not something I would recommend to someone reading the epic for the first time. First time needs to be with all the masala; at least in my opinion.
One last word regarding ‘Illustrated Retelling’... The book is illustrated, yes. But frankly, the illustrations are nothing out of the world. While they give a graphic novel feel to the entire business, I still prefer the old Mathrubhoomi publication’s version or Artist Namboodiri’s drawings for M.T Vasudevan Nair’s Randaamoozham (again Mahabharatha from Bhima’s perspective).
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