Between 1982 and 1985, stage and film director Peter Brook made three extensive journeys through India, searching for a way in which to dramatize "The Mahabharata," one of India's great epic poems, written around 200 B.C.
He took along the scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, with whom he had often worked, and together they eventually hammered out a stage version, then a film adaptation and finally a TV series of the poem. During all this travel, Carriere kept notes of their progress.
If it was slow work, that was because both he and Brook were determined to find a way to achieve their objective without violating the nature of the poem. They had, he later said, only "the advantage of knowing nothing." They could thus find the subcontinent identified by a book and ask themselves: "Does the complexity of India correspond to the complexity of the poem? And vice-versa?" But to find an answer they had to see India.
First, they looked at and discarded other modern dramatizations of the poem. One in Madras presented the whole thing in less than two hours: "Really kitsch, ultra-fast and truly bad." They went to see a Hindi film version that adapted itself easily into the modern world: "Two families of bankers destroy each other. Not for us." Film director Satyajit Ray wondered about a film version: "Can you imagine Kirk Douglas as Arjuna?"
Then they went into the countryside and saw traditional versions. In Kerala the traditions were most faithfully preserved in the Kathakali (classical Indian dance) version. In this village, it seemed, the gods were still about: "Peter goes for a walk alone [and] comes back marveling at the peace, the silence, the solitude. Just before leaving he is told that the fields are full of particularly dangerous snakes. Hence, the solitude and the peace!"
The small group of searchers moved from place to place, yet "each time we think we have found the thread and pull on it, it becomes unending." Still they search on. The problem was not their foreigness but their foreign assumptions. "What is a foreigner?" the scriptwriter asks himself. "A country, a land, ceases to be foreign, the moment one puts one's foot on it." Their problem, rather, is to keep their foreigness out of their adaptation.
Carriere finds his very vocabulary restricted. Such words as "noble" are too connected with European history; "javelin" is inseparable from thoughts of Roman legionaries; a horse cannot be a "mount" because there was no cavalry, and "prophet" is just too Biblical. Yet when a proper word is found, "dharma," for example, it is impossible to translate.
This way of working, tentative and enormously scrupulous, came by now naturally to the scriptwriter. Not only was this Brooke's habitual way of going about things, but also Carriere had long worked with Luis Bunuel, a director as scrupulous as they come. He had written "Belle de Jour," "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "That Obscure Object of Desire" with the great Spanish director and knew the advantages of looking and waiting.
He also knew that the body knows more than the mind does. "What the body can express, when one forces it, of another culture -- something of which the man cannot conceive." Consequently, village enactments of the epic drama sometimes found the scriptwriter himself playing a part. And probably doing it well. One may watch his skill in creating the unctuous priest in Bunuel's 1964 "Diary of a Chambermaid."
This way of working, so different from the ordinary way of film crews in foreign climes, resulted in a memorable stage version (it played Japan in 1987) and an even more memorable 171-minute film version (which was never released here). In both the 4,000-year-old narrative retains its ancient integrity and yet at the same time speaks directly to us, its distant descendents.
"What has India given us?" asks the author of these notes. "Impossible to say. A secret dimension that will probably remain forever secret -- beyond wonder, charm, irritation, repulsion. The pulsating energy, above all else. And the mixture of things . . . to travel in order not to see; travel to do, or to be."
This record of these journeys in pursuit of an ideal was originally published in French in 1997. This English version, beautifully crafted by Aruna Vasudev, now brings us the full story of the saga -- a sane, balanced, brave search for truth.
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