Sons of Gods: The Mahabharata Retold

(Original year of posting: 2006.) I first read the Mahabharata in 1973, in India. The version I read was the big fat book by Kamala Subramaniam. I stayed up all night to finish it, and when it was over I decided then and there that this was the Book to end all Books. It was simply amazing. I've been a voracious reader all my life, but never had I been so floored by a story. I could say this in spite of the less than stellar writing. Subramaniam tends to write in short, jerky sentences, using an abundance of adjectives and adverbs. She spills the melodrama left right and centre, and is not afraid to overdo it in the emotional sector. In a way, the book seems written for children. But the story she tells in that book is simply magnificent. The Mahabharata is Hinduism's great epic story. It may be the oldest written story in the world, and certainly the longest. It tells the tale of kings and queens, gods and demons. It goes off on tangents lasting hundreds of pages, yet al...

Sons of Gods is now available in Print -- at last! It's available on Amazon and other retailers, in paperback. I've planned this for so many years -- I can't believe it's happened! And to celebrate, I have a new review, and a great one at that, by Shelley Schanfield  a Goodreads member, There are many retellings of the Mahabharata, India's classic epic. I have read several and would recommend Sons of Gods for anyone not already familiar with this ancient tale. Taken as a whole, the Mahabharata is unwieldy, to say the least. It is filled with digressions and stories within stories that resist linear narrative. Sharon Maas's version is admirably streamlined for readers who want to get a grounding in the basic story before exploring in more detail the rambling conglomeration of myths, legends, and history that make up this massive tale. The greatest strength of Sons of Gods lies in its introduction to the complex Kuru-Pandava lineage. Understanding the com...

A few days ago, Hindu Blog posted an interview with me on Sons of Gods. A couple of the questions concerned a subject I was planning to write about in the near future, so let’s see  what I said there: Who do you think is the most tragic woman character in the Mahabharata?  The Mahabharata is a book about men, yet the few female characters are powerful indeed: the goddess Ganga, the Pandava’s mother Kunti, the Princess Amba, and of course the Pandavas common wife, Draupadi. Of them all, I find Amba the most tragic, as well as the most interesting, and I tend to identify with her. As a woman, how do you see the treatment of women in Mahabharat? Is your view reflected in the book? When we consider the women in the Mahabharata and their treatment,  it’s important not to see them through the prism of Western feminism. This is a story set in an age and a place far removed from our own world. Different standards were valid in that age, and it wouldn’t be fair to ...

Recently a friend asked me why I had done this; why rewrite a work that already has so many versions out there? What, if anything, makes this English Mahabharata different? Playing devil's advocate, she asked: surely it's idle vanity to put yet a new edition into the mix -- with a new author and even a new title? (image: Karna's chariot wheel sinks into the earth.) I'll answer the first question first, and give you a task: look up any current edition of the Mahabharata and seek a synopsis of the story. Inevitably you will find some version of the following: "The Mahabharata is the story of a family feud in ancient India, culminating in a terrible war. The five Pandava brothers, under the protection of Krishna, an Incarnation of God, have been cheated of the kingdom that is rightly theirs, and must fight not only to win it back but to reestablish righteousness in the world. " And that is, indeed, the core story in a nutshell. But it's no...