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Retelling the epic
Highlights
Retelling The Epic.
Karthika Nair was born in India, lives in Paris, and works as a dance producer and curator. She is the author of Bearings, a poetry collection; DESH: Memories, inherited, borrowed, invented, a dance diary; and The Honey Hunter/ Le Tigre de Miel, a children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. Nair was the principal storywriter and scriptwriter of DESH, choreographer Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning dance production.
As a dance producer, Nair has worked in several Parisian cultural centres and with choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Damien Jalet and Mourad Merzouki (Käfig). She is associate programmer of Festival Equilibrio in Rome. In a tête-à-tête she talks about her new book ‘Until the Lions’, in which she retells the epic through multiple voices. The book captures the Mahabharata through the lenses of nameless soldiers, outcast warriors and handmaidens but also abducted princesses, tribal queens and a gender-shifting god.
Excerpts:
You are a poet, writer and dance producer. How hard or easy it is to manage these roles?
Until September last year, poetry was something I fitted into the interstices of time: at railway stations, on flights, in rehearsal studios or in hospital waiting rooms. Dance production is a juggernaut; it can spill over into any hour of the day or night. But it is also a deeply fulfilling, relentlessly challenging profession, and I’ve never regretted how much thought and energy it requires. I also knew when I needed to step away, for reasons of ill health: so the last year was much more centred on different kinds of writing, whether poetry or for stage.
Tell us about your new book ‘Until the Lions’?
It is a retelling of the Mahabharata in 19 voices; the book tries to reflect the epic through the lenses of nameless soldiers, outcast warriors and handmaidens but also abducted princesses, tribal queens and a gender-shifting god.
What is the idea behind using the many voices?
For me, the Mahabharata - not just the war, but the events and episodes that lead to the war - is not only a rousing tale of heroes and gods: it is as much an interrogation of power and the fissures around concepts like justice and duty that give moral sanction to violence and war. And through these peripheral figures and silent catalysts who take centre stage, I wanted to explore the lives and stories that get buried beneath the edifices of god and nation, heroes and victory — to get a glimpse of the price paid for myth and history, all too often interchangeable.
What kind of research went into it?
Reading translations, retellings, adaptations, essays, commentaries and analyses; watching stage and film adaptations and music that was grounded in this epic, and also epics from other traditions; researching multiple narratives.
How much time did it take to complete this book?
Five years of which the first two were entirely devoted - or as much as a day job like mine allowed - to research; I only really began writing around mid-2012.
How easy or difficult was it to get your book published?
HarperCollins India had already published my first book of poetry, ‘Bearings’, in 2009. When I broached the idea of ‘Until the Lions’ to VK Karthika, she was very enthusiastic about it, and quite clear that they were keen on publishing this as well. As for Arc Publications, the UK international publishers of the book, they came on board later. James Byrne, the wonderful poet and editor, had already published some of my work in the journal The Wolf Magazine, and he - as international series editor of Arc - proposed the manuscript to the editorial board there.
Do you think there are readers for poetry these days?
I think there are and always have been readers for poetry. The greatest epics of world literature are in verse, some of the most powerful stories we know were transmitted through poetry. This belief that poetry is elitist is something I consider to be a false and relatively recent phenomenon.
Tell us something about your projects as a dance producer?
That would take up a lot of space. But my favourite experiences range from Damien Jalet’s site responsive Les Médusées, which was a commission from the Louvre Museum to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Olivier-award-winning Puz/zle which premiered in the Avignon Festival of 2012, at the same quarry (Carrière de Boulbon) where Peter Brook’s Mahabharata was staged almost 30 years ago.
Were you an avid reader in your school/ college days? And were there any authors’ influences?
Yes, reading was one of the things that kept me alive and sentient through some very difficult years of hospital, especially as a teen. Too many authors and books have informed, influenced and inspired to cite them exhaustively but among the ones I can return to, time and again, some since my youth, are Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘A Rebel’s Silhouette’ (translated by Agha Shahid Ali); Salman Rushdie’s ‘Shame and Haroun and the Sea of Stories’; Orhan Pamuk’s ‘My Name is Red’, Sadat Hassan Manto’s ‘Mottled Dawn’; Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’; Michael Ondaatje’s ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Shadow Lines’ and Arun Kolatkar’s ‘The Kala Ghoda Poems’ and ‘Sarpa Satra’.
By Navin Pivhal
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