Guardian spotlights Mahabharata and London Rathayatra

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The August 12th edition of The Guardian featured Krishna Dharma's adaptation

of the Mahabharata in its UK News section (www.guardian.co.uk). The Guardian,

one of the largest Dailies in the UK, concluded the article with a description

of the upcoming London Ratha Yatra parade at Trafalgar Square. Krishna

Dharma's popular translation of India's other great classic Ramayana was

published in 1998 (Torchlight). For more information visit the Torchlight

Publishing website at www.torchlight.com.

 

Novel slant on spreading the word

 

A sacred text of Hinduism has been given the blockbuster treatment by a

popularising British priest

 

James Meek

Thursday August 12, 1999

 

Salman Rushdie was threatened with murder for it. William Tyndale was

strangled and burned for it. Altering, challenging or even translating sacred

texts can be dangerous. But a British Hindu priest expects only praise, high

sales and converts from an epic effort of literary digestion launched next

week: the 100,000-verse Mahabharata, turned by him into a 1,000-page

blockbuster novel.

 

The novelisation of one of Hinduism's holiest texts by the Manchester-based

priest, Krishna Dharma - once Ken Anderson, a merchant navy officer - is

already on sale in the US, where it has sold more than 5,000 copies.

 

"I suppose I didn't expect it to be so successful. It's unique, in the sense

that there aren't any other English versions like it," said Dharma.

 

The Mahabharata, which contains the core text of Hinduism,the

Bhagavad-gita,has been rendered in English before. But previous attempts have

been immense verse-for-verse translations by Sanskrit scholars, or slim,

super-abridged paperbacks.

 

"I want it to become the definitive English version," said Dharma. "I'm pretty

confident it will. There's nothing around to compete."

 

Like the Koran and the Bible, the Mahabharata is believed by Hindus to be

largely the work of God (or gods, as some Hindus consider).

 

Five thousand years ago, the half-divine visionary Vyasadeva is said to have

dictated the verses to the elephant-headed being Ganesh.

 

Hard sell

 

The book's divine origins have not stopped the hard sell. Under the title, the

bookjacket proclaims "The Greatest Spiritual Epic of All Time".

 

The cover illustration shows the saintly Queen Draupadi, lost by her husband

in a dice game, being stripped of her garments by an evil prince as leering

aristos look on and the god Krishna unreels heavenly robes to cover her

virtue. With its intense love scenes, jewelled palaces, vast battles,

superheroes, magical weapons and warring families, the novelised version

resembles a 20th century saga-cum-soap opera, a marriage of Barbara Taylor

Bradford and Arthur Hailey. It has, after all, already been turned into a TV

soap, broadcast earlier in the decade on BBC2.

 

"Ambika peered curiously into the mirror as her maidservants finished adorning

her in preparation for the nuptial bed," the book begins. "She had lost none

of her beauty despite her months of mourning. Her skin was flawless and as

white as milk."

 

Dharma said: "All I wanted to do was present the original as exactly as I

could. 'm not embellishing or interpolating. I'm not adding any of my own

ideas.

 

"There is a message in the original, a profound and sublime message, and I've

tried to convey that. It shows the conflict between two sides and its outcome,

what happens to those who choose to take shelter and surrender to the Lord and

what happens to the others."

 

Gore galore

 

Although the advance publicity for the book, published by the US firm

Torchlight,promotes the Mahabharata's "timeless message of spiritual

enlightenment," and its usefulness for "peace and relaxation", the epic is

remarkably gory, with killings,amputations, banter about weapons, and bloody

mayhem on almost every page.

 

In the Bhagavad-gita, the god Krishna urges a hero to overcome his qualms

about slaughtering his old friends and relatives in an enemy army because it

is his moral duty to correct the error of their ways by killing them and

because they will be reincarnated anyway.

 

Dharma admits there is a lot of war in the Mahabharata.

 

He said the Nazis, fascinated by Hindu mythology, perverted the epic's message

to justify their killing.

 

"It's a story of conflict, no doubt about it. But even the war is fought in a

different way: not, as we have now, a wholesale slaughter of the innocents. In

those days it was always fought between warrior classes only. Ordinary people

were not involved."

 

Dharma, who was ordained as a Hindu priest in the monotheistic Vaishnava

tradition in 1979, runs a Hindu studies centre and a free kitchen for the

homeless in Manchester.

 

The book is to be launched on Sunday to coincide with the annual Krishna

festival parade through London, Rathayatra, which proceeds from Marble Arch to

Trafalgar Square.