The Dharma Forest
volume 1, The Dharma Cycle
Gurucharan Das, author and commentator
‘I was charmed by this sparkling, imaginative feast of a mythological novel set in the last days of the great war in the Mahabharata. An inspired debut!’
Bibek Debroy, author and economist
‘The Mahabharata itself is Dharmaranya, as individuals wander around in a mysterious forest, searching for their meaning of dharma. In the first book of a trilogy, with a conversation between Jara and Krishna as the mooring, Keerthik Sasidharan weaves a fascinating tapestry, with Bhishma, Draupadi and Arjuna as warp and woof.’
Shashi Tharoor, author and parliamentarian
‘In The Dharma Forest, Keerthik Sasidharan tells a luminous narrative of the final days of the Kurukshetra War. Brilliantly evoked in fluid and elegant prose, the familiar story of the Mahabharata here reads like a great war novel, filled with magical stories, suffused with the qualms and complexities of human beings alongside the divine wisdom of the gods. Powerful and bewitching, beautifully-written and profoundly steeped in the lore of the ancients, ‘The Dharma Forest’ moved me deeply.’
Arundhati Subramaniam, poet and essayist
‘In densely wooded prose, this novel leads us into the thickets of an ancient human story of love and catastrophe, where moral ambiguity, psychological complexity and soul-darkness spin on the edge of sudden illumination. A remarkable debut that combines imaginative heft with luminous insight.’
A Ring of Endless Light
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
The Indian Express, June 6, 2021
The most clairvoyant moment in Keerthik Sasidharan’s The Dharma Forest, an incandescent and profound retelling of the Mahabharata, comes in a short conversation between the two sweet demons, Virochana and Virupaksha, who are unencumbered by the passions, frailties and self-importance that make humans and the gods partial and self-deluded. They see reality for what it is in a way that escapes all those with loftier ambitions and heavier souls.
As Virupaksha says, “Both Arjuna and Duryodhana, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and their descendants too, are all condemned to repeat this futile struggle in different forms. The sins of the fathers become the sins of the sons.”
And, in a familial sense, the Mahabharata is the playing out of the sins of the fathers; there is not a single father who does right by their children, not burdening them with sins and promises which they have to clean up. “In their blessings lay our undoing,” as the novel says at another point.
Jara then promises to retell Krishna’s experience through the stories of nine characters. This, the first volume of a proposed trilogy, tells the story through three characters who are, arguably, the closest to Krishna in the deepest sense: Bhishma, Draupadi and Arjuna. Sasidharan, like Rahi Masoom Raza, is luminous in understanding that the central tension in Bhishma’s life is that its end is the attainment of Vasudeva. He is the greatest Krishna bhakta in the Mahabharata, but his finite life is encumbered by the dark steely and violent imperatives of Hastinapura. Arjuna, of course, uses Krishna as the receptacle of all his doubts. Draupadi is Krishna’s alter ego: the doubts he can never answer. These three relationships are done with a literary finesse, psychological subtlety and a pathos that is unparalleled in modern Indian literature. This is writing of the highest order, with words that have an evocative and propulsive power that literally light the world they create alight.
But the structure of this retelling is even more inventive. A full reckoning of each of these lives, in turn, requires a retelling of how this life is viewed by all those who encounter them, so the novel then bursts with many resplendent characters. For instance, Bhishma is imagined through the eyes of Amba, among others. She sees in him both a great soul, but one whose greatness has been shrouded by the impassive, omnipotent state he chose to favour. As Sasidharan puts it, “He chose force, she (Amba) thought because he was too weak to choose any other. It was as if he could not trust time to allow for alternate worlds to birth and take shape.”
In an act of even greater daring, Sasidharan imagines the particularity of Draupadi’s relationship to the five brothers, each with its distinctive hue. Or, offers Bhishma finally understanding both his and Krishna’s truth. “To rule effectively he had learnt after many mistakes and as he aged, was to rule with the threat of violence rather than with violence itself. To rule as a great ruler, however, was to let people have enough freedoms so that they saw the wisdom of returning to the fold after their experimentations. He had never been this sort of ruler. He had heard Krishna was such a rare leader among men. Krishna let them, and their love for him emerged through those freedoms. While thinking of Krishna, his mind suddenly stilled, and he experienced a scintilla of peace, the sort of quietude that made him smile.” There are deeper truths hidden in this paragraph than in tomes of psychology, politics and religion. Keerthik Sasidharan has created an unquestionable masterpiece.
(Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a political scientist and contributing editor, The Indian Express)
https://indianexpress.com/article/books-and-literature/how-the-dharma-forest-a-retelling-of-the-mahabharata-deep-dives-into-the-question-of-meaning-and-futility-7345877/
