Time has come to introspect and pose queries to ourselves on “who we are and not just who I am,” says Legislator and Communist Party of India leader Mullakkara Retnakaran, who has brought out ‘Mahabharathathiloode,’ a compilation of his discourses on the epic.
Such probing questions assume significance when legions of fellow countrymen are facing the threat of being stripped of their citizenship and nationhood and resistance is precipitating across the country.
Lecture series
When the Soorya Dance and Music Society invited Mr. Retnakaran to deliver a lecture series on on Mahabharatha, he critically evaluated all characters and resolved not to approach them with awe but discover their human traits.
The stories rendered by his grandmother Gourikutty gushed through his mind, but apparently without the delusions of grandeur on which they were moulded. He would go on to delineate their inherent strengths and frailties. After an initial resistance, his audience accepted it with interesting queries.
“The strife for wresting power and the insatiable greed for wealth, lust for women, and authority will recur eternally, only the settings and trappings change. We can still see Karna, Bhima, and Gandhari among us. But for their demeanour, the inner-self is all the same and hence the epic could be defined as a mirror held to the society for all ages,” he says.
The best instance in this regard is Karna, who is often depicted as an epitome of supreme sacrifice. In an age when progeny politics thrives, Mr. Retnakaran reminds how wards could, at the same time, be a bane and blessing for some.
“A mother relishes only her child’s first cry. That moment when ecstasy complements pain and marks the birth of a child,” he says and poignantly narrates in the book the woes Kunthi, who is forced to discard her child, had to bear and the pangs of shame and mental trauma that haunts Karna all through his life.
Mr. Retnakaran blames the upper strata of society for creating such characters again and again and one could come across them easily even now.
His publisher friend Asramam Bhasi evinced interest to compile and publish the lectures and now is open for more critical evaluation.
“I strongly hold the view that the Left and the progressive should lay due accent on our equanimity and secular nature, which is attributed to the concept of God, so that He will not be appropriated by vested interests to create caste and communal divisions among us,” he says.
