Mahabharata on a string: How Anurupa Roy developed powerful version of epic

One hour. Five artistes. And, at the end, thunderous applause and a standing ovation from the packed theatre. That’s the rapturous welcome Anurupa Roy’s Mahabharata got at the recent Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) in Delhi. In keeping with audience appreciation, the play also won three awards at the festival.

While the festival brought together a series of interesting theatre performances, what puts Mahabharata on a pedestal is the amalgamation of several forms of art – Japanese Bunraku inspired puppets, shadow puppetry, masks and animation.

The script incorporates a version of the Silleyakayata Mahabharata, an oral version of the epic heard and told in Karnataka. The performance continuously asks if the war could have been avoided and points to the ugly truth of every war – destruction.

“The way I look at my Mahabharata, it is only a deja-vu of the epic and the idea is to stimulate certain feelings among people. We want people to feel true disgust for war, to understand that war is not glamorous and the sudden death of young soldiers is painful,” says Roy, who bagged the best director award at the event and had won the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar in Puppetry in 2006. She has directed over 15 shows for children and adults; these include the Ramayana and a Shakespearean comedy. Her latest, the Mahabharata, was three years in the making.

Like countless others, Roy says she, too, found the Mahabharata fascinating, and it had been running like a refrain at the back of her mind. In 2002, her team had performed Her Voice, which was Draupadi’s version of the epic, in collaboration with Bharatanatyam dancer Geeta Chandran. However, the recent production took a very different approach.

 “It was largely a response to the world at large with increased polarities, conflict, arms race and war mongering in several countries including ours,” says the puppeteer who founded her company Katkatha in 1998.

Roy, who studied history at Delhi University, started working on the play three years ago. She read various forms of the epic, its Sanskrit renderings, its recreation and re-recreation. Then in June last year, she met Gundu Raju, master puppeteer from Karnataka, while he was conducting a workshop in Mussoorie. That’s where she heard the Silleyakayata Mahabharata.

“Every evening I would sit with him around 8 pm and hear him narrating till 4 am without realising the time. This version was not the mainstream one which we were fed through the television series or the one we read in textbooks but it was a traditional form that was communicated through leather shadow puppetry in Karnataka,” she says.

His version of the epic had several characters who donned multiple hats with a reasoning behind each one.  “In our performance, several questions were raised through clowns just as it happened to us while working on the script.” 

The preparation of the script for an hour-long version of a lengthy epic like Mahabharata wasn’t easy. Roy and scriptwriter Anamika Mishra read several versions, including the ones by Bhandarkar and C Rajagopalachari, the feminist take by Irawati Karve and popular versions like the one by Devdutt Pattanaik. Drama therapist Vikramjeet Sinha joined them to work on each character from various “archetypes”.

“Sinha conducted a session focusing on archetypes – the actor/doer, the friend, the judge, the rescuer/protector, the dreamer, the mediator and the beckoner using guided imaginary. We started seeing our characters from the lens of these archetypes and questioned them for their decisions. For example, I chose the character of Gandhari from two archetypes – the judge and the protector,” Roy says.

“Her eldest son Duryodhana, who was seeing himself as the victim, questions her for pushing him towards the war. Gandhari (the judge) says that even though she had asked her sons to fight for his rights, it was he who chose war over conversation as a medium for resolution,” she adds.

The cast started practicing using puppets and masks from the early days itself, the reason behind the sync between performers, characters, and puppets.

The script underwent several changes but certain aspects remained unchanged, including the climax scene where Gandhari is shown with the heads of her sons on her clothes to mark the apocalyptic nature of the war.  It was an accomplished production in so many ways. However, there is one challenge that did not seem to have been met adequately – making it comprehensible in a duration of one hour.

Short is better than too long, Roy says. “Narrative is still a challenge and we are constantly working on it. When we started, there were 27 characters, which we later brought down to 13. We also introduce every character in the beginning to make it more comprehensible. Our audience is very varied, while some question why do we give the introduction for every character since they believe everybody knows the epic, some are vaguely aware of it.”