© 1999 VNN
|
EUROPE August 17, 1999 VNN4517 Comment on this story Guardian Spotlights Mahabharata And London Ratha Yatra BY LORI ERBS LONDON, Aug 17 (VNN) — 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 http://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. I'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. Comment on this story  Contact VNN about this storySend this story to a friend
|
