Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik

I was looking for a book to bring for a kid who is not familiar with the Hindu epics but has some curiosity about the subject. A nice young lady at the Oxford Bookstore recommended Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik. This was my first visit to Kolkata after fifteen years and a trip I had dreaded for months. For a large part of my life I had remained in self-imposed exile but each year made it harder to return. The connections to friends and family frayed more as did my understanding of the place I once called home. Reading this wonderful retelling of Mahabharat by Dr Pattanaik, upon my return to America was possibly the best and most comforting part of my overdue "homecoming". 

Used to be that there were two paths for the would-be reader of a "serious" English translation of Mahabharat. You could pick up something extremely erudite that was focused on staying true to the original Sanskrit and ended up being very laborious to read. As a reader, you understood you were getting the real deal but chances were you would would not last to the end and even if you did, the experience was not particularly enjoyable.If your first contact with Mahabharat was like mine - hearing the stories told in your native language by family elders, that very scholarly translation left you unsatisfied at an emotional level. 

On the other end of the English translation spectrum, were foreign authors who translated the Mahabharat as a labor of love. While their passion for the subject was easy to appreciate but the lack of roots in Indian culture resulted in a production that lacked life-spark leaving the reader wanting something more. 

To that end most of us grew up hearing the stories told to us by relatives and reading Amar Chitra Katha in our childhood. When we could read more grown up material, the Hindu epics went out of bounds and we wandered away in different directions as readers unmoored from our cultural roots.

Dr Pattanaik has stepped into this void and given the average desi reader like myself something they can actually love and identify with. We don't know any Sanskrit, often lack fluency in our native language to read worthy translations that do exist in those languages and yet we are from the culture and have heard most of the stories growing up.  Readers like me have been craving to create a personal bond with these epics and understand them in ways we did not as children listening to tales of gods and demons told to us by our mothers.

Dr Pattanaik has minimal, uncluttered prose and he tells the stories in English much in the manner I had heard them told my by favorite granduncle in Bengali. It made for an effortless shift from one language to another with nothing lost in translation. The line drawings throughout the book are very charming and only add to the quality of storytelling. The intricate plots, sub-plots and the dense mesh of relationships and loyalties that tie the myriad of characters are parsed out very effectively for a lay reader. We are able to follow the main story-line while having points of reference to keep us tied to the overall context of Mahabharat. The lessons that we can still learn from these stories are wonderful asides included at the end of every chapter.

Reading Jaya reminded me of the time I had opportunity to interview Dr Pattanaik for this blog and recalled how impressed I had been back then. So this quality of Jaya comes as no surprise. I very much look forward to reading many more of his books.