In V Raghunathan’s Duryodhana, the defeated prince tells his side of the story and says the storyteller of the Mahabharata has treated him unfairly
Notwithstanding their enduring popularity, the epics have garnered an astonishing number of renditions in the last few years with the most celebrated ones being Jaya by Devdutt Pattanaik and Namita Gokhale’s retelling for young adults. Never was there a story more shrouded in grey and fraught with moral ambiguity than the Mahabharata. It is both the source text of Mahatma Gandhi ’s ‘spiritual dictionary’— The Bhagwad Gita, as well as a tale where a teacher asks for a thumb as payment from a student, a mother requests her sons to share a wife and a parrot carries a packet of semen that is eaten by a fish who gives birth to a girl child. All the while we’re rooting for five boys who seem to have been dealt a losing hand, quite literally in one instance. But what about the ‘100’ who lost? Many have wondered about the other side to this story and that is the crux of V Raghunathan’s Duryodhana.
Raghunathan’s book is a first-person narrative of the young prince’s story beginning with his childhood, moving on to his turbulent adolescence right up to the trigger for the ‘Great War’—Draupadi’s public disrobing. Part One introduces his family, his ninety-nine brothers and one sister, their abnormal conception and their first meeting with the Pandavas as well as Kunti’s sublime powers of manipulation. He makes the argument that the Pandavas’ obvious lack of lineage meant their claim was already invalid. Part Two is a justification for his first attempt to murder Bhima as well as peek into Drona’s elite Gurukul and Karna’s humiliation at the hands of the infamous teacher. The rest of the book is a pontification of a king’s duty as the protagonist narrates the major turns of the epic leading up to the beginning of the war.
The most striking thing about the novel, Raghunathan’s narrative style, also becomes its most problematic element. We have an omniscient Duryodhana who has time travelled, acquired a strong command of the English language yet chooses to be overtly casual in his narration, an imitation of a whiny Russell Brand—cue the references to Maxim De Winter from Rebecca—and the unfairness of it all. The need for novelty is understandable. Looking at the epic from the eldest Kaurava’s point of view is not new. Urubhanga, the Sanskrit play about Duryodhana after his fight with Bhima, was written by Bhasa in the 2nd century. In 2012, S Vijayakumar, the author the Tamil book Oru Vazhakku Duryodhananai Adharithu, discussed how Duryodhana fought only for what rightly belonged to him. Raghunathan’s premise is similar and the narrative style helps bring the story into the modern world. But having Duryodhana call his grandmother ‘granny’ only diminishes what the young prince has to say. Raghunathan deftly verbalizes Duryodhana’s demons as he justifies his actions as a king’s duty through extensive internal monologue. Yet the novel might have worked better interspersed with dialogue and description. There is too much telling and not enough showing.
Duryodhana makes it clear that the power lies with the storyteller and the story has treated him unfairly. Vyasa could have easily told the story from the Kaurava perspective and the Pandavas might have been branded the villains instead. This makes us go back to the heart of the epic, which focuses on duty and fairness; someone needs to tell Duryodhana something we all know too well: life, young prince, is terribly unfair.