Lesson from TV Mahabharata: How to Sentimentalise Your Heroes So They Look Like Imbeciles

by Jai Arjun Singh

In episode 235 of the Star Plus Mahabharata, as the Kurukshetra War entered half-time, the wicked Kauravas commenced the entrapment and killing of the young hero Abhimanyu. Three episodes later, the killing was still underway. That may not sound like something to joke about, but this is why intent is such a different thing from execution. One of the occasional lessons of this TV show is that what was meant to be tragic and heart-wrenching may, through the endless milking of emotion, be transformed into something profoundly comical.

In the 1968 comedy The Party, Peter Sellers plays an Indian actor named Hrundi V Bakshi (!!) and spends most of the film using the sort of accent that can raise the hackles of the easily offended. But even amidst the broad caricature, there are things any Indian should be able to relate to. In the opening scene, Hrundi, having bungled his way about a film set, blowing costly things up by mistake, must perform a death scene (he is cast as a Gunga Din-like bugle-player on a hillside, trapped between two sets of warring soldiers). Bullets toss him hither and thither, he falls down, gets up again, continuing to puff away heroically at his instrument. He. Simply. Refuses. To. Give Up. The. Ghost. The scene plays like an anticipation of the climactic action scenes in 1980s Hindi films where neither villains nor heroes could be trusted to expire quickly and efficiently.

And so it was with young Abhimanyu, a.k.a. the inflatable, wobbly-man doll that uprights itself each time it is knocked over. Beaming all the while.

I should clarify that there were some good, stimulating things in this TV version of the Mahabharata over the past year, especially if you make allowances for the six-day-a-week format (which can turn into a logistical nightmare for a show involving elaborate sets, costumes and battle sequences) and if you can digest the simplified, populist view of the Mahabharata as a Good-vs-Evil fable, complete with Krishna as the smug God preaching directly to the viewer (“vichaar kijiye”) and explaining the errors of their ways to all the characters in turn.

Given those simplifications, and the need to cater to the forever-tremulous emotions of the daily-soap audience, it was inevitable that the Abhimanyu story (a stirring one even in the original) would be stretched out for all its worth. And so, the premise here is that the evil Duryodhana — leering away like a Dwapara Yuga ( third of the four yugas) version of Gabbar Singh playing Russian roulette — wants his maharathis (great warriors) to cause the trapped boy as much peeda (suffering) as possible. Meanwhile such is the staging of the scene that Abhimanyu’s despairing uncles the Pandavas, unable to break through the chakravyuha to aid him, get to watch from outside it and can see everything clearly as if on a plasma HD TV. Everything is in place for high drama and for tragedy so intense you can barely watch it.

But this is where the mismatch of intent and execution comes in. Attacked from various directions (by a bunch of people who look more like clumsy sidekicks than seasoned warriors), Abhimanyu continues to smile, like the college fresher who is undergoing a spell of mild ragging and knows he will come out of it having influenced people and won new (grown-up) friends. Stabbed in the back, he looks straight into the camera, saying this feels like he is being blessed by his enemies. (Seven reaction shots.) Duryodhana smashes the boy’s head with his mace. Surely that’s that, you think. But no, he springs up again,still grinning and making grand speeches about how proud he knows his mother and father will be. (Twelve reaction shots.)

Midway through this alleged carnage, a friend and I began joking on email about how each of next week’s episodes would be dedicated to the chopping off of a digit from the boy’s right hand, with the episode-ending cliffhanger on Friday night being the discovery (20 reaction shots!) that he has an extra thumb, like Hrithik Roshan, so it will have to continue. Eventually, if Project Interminable Slaughter went on for long enough, the show’s sponsors could get in on the act and have Abhimanyu’s wounds suitably plugged with logos. “Arm doesn’t stay in socket? Here’s Fevikwik.” “Zandu balm. Peeda dur kare.” On his forehead could be a trailer for the next Salman Khan movie, playing on loop.

Anyway, here’s the nub: the show’s writers are so insistent that Abhimanyu shouldn’t give his assassins the satisfaction of seeing him in pain that they take it to the other, ludicrous extreme, and one barely gets the sense that this chubby, helmeted version of Alfred E Neuman is suffering at all. He isso happy to have this chance at making a balidaan (sacrifice) for the greater good. And perhaps here, the writers unintentionally tapped into something truthful about the Abhimanyu character that generations of teary-eyed Mahabharata readers have missed: that he is a swollen-headed — if insanely talented — 16-year-old boy with a highly romantic view of war, who doesn’t quite understand the implications of it all. To me, Abhimanyu’s real tragedy has always been that by dying so young he remains a one-dimensional character: he never gets the chance to become a fully developed person with a life trajectory and accumulated good and bad experiences, the way the older, more compelling characters in the epic do. But the way this show depicts him, it makes me think that even if he had lived to a ripe old age, he may not have amounted to much.

Having blown his own trumpet to heart’s content — much like Peter Sellers’s Bakshi — Abhimanyu finally does shuffle off his mortal coil and puts us all out of his misery. But they couldn’t bring themselves to say bye-bye to the young actor playing the role: shortly afterwards, Abhimanyu reappears as a hologram elsewhere in the battlefield, for a final spectral reunion with his tearful father Arjuna. By the time the Pandavas got around to cremating him, I was terrified he would leap up from his chitta (funeral pyre) for one last round of applause.

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Speaking of Tearful Arjuna: the Pandava hero was the main recipient of the misguided largesse of the show’s writers — the sort of largesse that insists the good guys be whitewashed so much, they cease to be interesting on any human level. Arjuna in this serial spent much of his time weeping about his enemies’ misfortunes. In the scene where his arch-rival Karna gives away his divine kavacha (armour) to Arjuna’s godly father Indra, a twist in the script has Arjuna realising this adharmi act was going to happen and making a beeline to prevent it. Arriving too late, he makes many sad faces and chastises Indra thus: “Now the world will judge ME because my father weakened my enemy. I’m feeling just as bad as I was when Ekalavya was made to cut off his thumb.

Give back his kavacha! GIVE IT BACK!! Boo hoo hoo.”

Upon which Indra just shakes his head and flees back to heaven clutching the armour. While Karna collapses, perhaps out of sheer annoyance at Arjuna’s caterwauling.

I exaggerate (very slightly), but here is the basic take-away from this scene: other people lose their body parts, or things that are attached to their bodies, but poor noble Arjuna is the ultimate victim. When you are a pre-designated good guy on this show, it seems being a half-brain is part of the deal.