Religion is a sensitive subject. Merely talking about it in a public space could land you in trouble. But then there is Anand Neelakantan, not simply expressing his thoughts on epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, but actually writing them, and from the villain’s perspective. After taking on Ravana’s side in the story for the Ramayana, he had chosen to write in parts, the Mahabharata from the Kauravas’ point of view. The second of these is now ready — Rise of Kali — continuing the story from where it had ended (the moment before Draupadi is about to be dragged to the sabha) in Ajaya, his second book and the first in the Mahabharata series.
Anand has repeatedly said that he finds it easy to identify with the villains, and he says it again: “People are just people, with their own share of nobility and vices. Ultimately, it is all about which side the storyteller is taking.” And that side he chose, with a simple thought in mind — ‘Why should an evil age called Kaliyug come to a world where the good had won over evil, why does it begin from the end of the Mahabharata war?’ If it was a victory of good over evil, shouldn’t it have been a golden age, he wondered, through Rise of Kali. “How the concept of right and wrong change in the entire Mahabharata war if the story is told from the other side. Was Duryodhana a villain or a victim?” he asks.
“Similarly,” he says, “Ravana lived, fought and died like a king, whereas Rama, for all his life of sacrifices and following the path of dharma, lived a life of exile, lost his wife and had to fight a big war to win her back, was not able to accept her after his victory, had to abandon her again to the womb of earth and finally had to sacrifice himself in Sarayu. And, on a lighter vein, though people pay lip service to the high ideals of Rama, the majority of people follow the thought process of Ravana. Both achieved immortality. So, who was the real victor and who was the vanquished?”
Such questions used to earn him frowns from his conservative relatives in his childhood. It was a highly religious atmosphere at his family home in Tripoonithura, and there would be rebel children including Anand asking uncomfortable questions during the Saptahams or Bhagawatham recitals.
Kamsa deserved to die, they would say, as he did not have the common sense of keeping Devaki and Vasudeva in two different cells instead of murdering all the baby girls born to them. “Another incident that comes to my mind is about the gramophone record of the temple. The priest would keep the record on the gramophone and go to his ritual bath. The verse went something like this, ‘unless you surrender to Bhagawaan, you all will go to hell’. The tape used to get stuck at the second part and would repeat endlessly, ‘you all will go to hell, you all will go to hell...’ until the whole village woke up with this ‘blessings’ from the temple and alerted the deaf priest.
Fed up of this wake-up call everyday morning at 4.30 am, one of my uncles threw the gramophone and the record into the temple pond.” Such incidents helped him not to take religion too seriously. This is what he says of them: “Religions are like tricycles that babies use to learn cycling, and rituals are the bells and ribbons attached to it. It is good at a period of our life and may even be necessary at that time. The problem starts when we insist that we have to use the same tricycle even after growing up. Tragically, unlike children’s fights, arguments over which religious tricycle is faster or which ribbons are most colourful often turns deadly.”
He further adds, “There is nothing called blasphemy in Hinduism (I use this not in its narrow sense, but as our culture) as there are no organised churches or clergy. All the religious texts are essentially debates, including the Gita. The Upanishads are collections of thoughts, some contradicting to each other. My books have been translated into most of the Indian languages and lakhs of people have read them. The criticism on denigrating the Gods have been far and few in between. I have made it clear that it is a work of fiction and also, since the book is written from the other side, it would be ridiculous to write that Duryodhana or Ravana were bhakts of Krishna or Rama respectively. An open society is a confident society and I believe in our country there is space for all shades of thoughts.”
