Making the ‘Mahabharata’: How do you bring a 4,000-year-old Sanskrit epic to the stage?

For the million-plus members of the South Asian diaspora living in the Greater Toronto Area, the “Mahabharata” will be familiar. Over 4,000 years old, the Sanskrit poem is one of the great epics of world literature.

But many others will struggle to even pronounce the word.

Ravi Jain, director and co-writer of a landmark new theatrical production of “Mahabharata,” said he’s been “both of these people; I am the person who knows it and the person who doesn’t know how to pronounce it.”

Both Jain and co-writer Miriam Fernandes are Canadian-born children of parents from India. For Jain, characters from “Mahabharata” (which, for the record, is pronounced “ma-ha-BAR-ah-tha”) were part of family life growing up, even if the context wasn’t yet familiar: “When we were playing superheroes, I wanted to be Arjun and I didn’t know why. I just knew he was a great archer,” he said.

The stories were less a part of the Fernandes household because they’re Catholics from Goa and the “Mahabharata” is central to Hinduism. All the same “my parents grew up with the famous ‘Mahabharata’ comic book series by Amar Chitra Katha in the ’70s,” said Fernandes.

“My dad’s (from) a family of five boys and a girl, so he and his brothers were always called the Pandavas”: the family of five brothers that goes to war in “Mahabharata” against the 100-strong Kauravas.

This version of “Mahabharata,” opening this week in a Why Not Theatre production at the Shaw Festival, upholds the material’s epic scale: it’s told in two parts, “Karma” and “Dharma,” each over two hours long including intermission. On days when both parts are performed, there’s also a meal break with storytelling called “Khana.”

Acknowledging that these are complex concepts, Jain explained that “Karma” corresponds to “the life we inherit”: that section of the show tells the story of the run-up to the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. “Dharma” is “the life we choose,” and tells the story of the war and its aftermath.

The “Khana” dinner break is a nod to the way in which Jain and many others first started to know the epic, with an elder talking through one of the stories over a meal.

While the “Mahabharata” has been recounted in countless media forms, from storytelling to temple dances to a famous animated TV series to a strand of nearly 2,700 Tweets, the epic came into focus for Jain during university when he watched the video of a 1980s stage version directed by Peter Brook, who was from England.

“I was like, ‘Wow, here’s this story from India that he told really well,’” recalled Jain.

Jain already had hopes of forming a large international theatre company and Brook’s International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris became a touchstone, “always this thing in the far vision of what I wanted to be,” he said.

Fernandes’ adult connection to the epic happened while studying yoga, when she encountered the “Bhagavad Gita,” a “Mahabharata” episode that is a foundational text of yoga philosophy. The “Gita,” as it’s commonly called, echoed with another of Fernandes’ passions. “It’s written as a play. It’s a dialogue, a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna,” she said. “I recognized it as theatre.”

Jain came a step closer to “Mahabharata” when, for the 2015 Pan Am Games, he and Jenny Koons created the one-man show “Gimme Shelter,” inspired by the epic and focused on climate change.

“To make that show, we had to dive into the ‘Gita’ and it was really profound,” said Jain. “It was full of interesting, touching, meaningful, relevant, contemporary ideas. And in that process we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we did the whole thing one day?’”

Why Not Theatre successfully applied for a New Chapter grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, which supplied major funding for big dream projects.

Jain brought Fernandes into the creative process of “Mahabharata” early on and she eventually became its co-writer as well as Why Not Theatre’s co-artistic director. The show has been commissioned by the Shaw Festival in association with London’s Barbican Centre and there is considerable interest in international touring: producers will fly in from the States, the U.K. and elsewhere to catch the Shaw world premiere.

(I can attest that Jain, Fernandes and their collaborators have dug deeply to find the right storytelling foothold for this complex tale: with University of Toronto professor Lawrence Switzky I’ve been following the creation of the show since before the pandemic and we’re working with Coach House Books on the publication of the text of the play.)

“We’ve constantly been in this struggle of, what is the story itself?” said Jain. “For the people who know it, what is the story in its purest sense and how do we give that satisfaction to the audience?”

And how to bring the uninitiated into the fold?

Working through this material over five-plus years with so many world-changing events happening — the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, the climate emergency — Fernandes said their perspective was constantly changing. “For a while it was really about feminism and about #MeToo,” she said.

“Why are we telling the story of the disrobing of Draupadi if nothing’s changing?” — a reference to a key episode involving the female character Draupadi, who in most versions of the story is married to all five Pandava brothers.

Fernandes said it was a “gift of COVID” that she and Jain were able to take a step back and ask bigger-picture questions about what they were trying to say. They also received a welcome intervention in early 2022 from the senior Indian dramatist and scholar Rustom Bharucha, who agreed to read their script.

Bharucha “just said ‘Guys, it’s good. Be free … let go of that political idea. What are you trying to say? What do you want to do?’” recalled Jain. With Bharucha’s encouragement, Jain and Fernandes created space in their storytelling for “the audience to have their point of view. Before it was very didactic in a way.”

What makes this “Mahabharata” very much of its era is that the cast is entirely made up of members of the South Asian diaspora. “To be Indian Canadian in Ontario versus B.C. versus Winnipeg; to be British Indian, Australian Indian, Malaysian Indian, all these different kinds of Indian and your own journey with your own relationship to your culture … all those nuances are so rich,” said Jain.

The cast also brings a wide range of traditions to the storytelling, from Kathakali and Odissi dance to the physical theatre training that Jain, Fernandes and several other company members received at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

This “Mahabharata” does not hold back on spectacle. It features large-scale projections, original music by Suba Sankaran and John Gzowski played live onstage by a six-person ensemble, and a cast of 14 including singer Meher Pavri, who performs the “Gita” as an opera along with actor Neil D’Souza.

“It’s the kind of work I’ve always wanted to make and never had the chance to do,” said Jain. “The only barrier was resources and support. Hopefully more people can get this kind of opportunity to just play in another league.”

Speaking a few days after preview performances began, Fernandes said she was “really struck by the emotion that the show has brought out in people. I think like Ravi said, it feels like we’re part of something bigger than the sum of its parts.”

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