Mahabharata, a hollywood treatment ?

With the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy at the box office, I cannot help but wonder why someone in Holloywood has not jumped on to the idea of giving the Hindu fable known as the 'Mahabharata', a Hollywood treatment and turn it into a blockbuster of a movie.

Before I start ranting, let's take a look at a brief overview of the story.


The Mahabharata has the honor of being the longest epic in world literature ( about 100,000 2-line stanzas, and about 3 times as long as the Bible ). About a third of these lines relate to the main story, everything else is additional myths and teachings. The Mahabharata is also known as the Hindu bible and has been called the national epic of India. It is the story of a great war that ended one age and began another.

It is said that Whatever is here is found elsewhere. But whatever is not here is nowhere else. It's easy to see how such a story can easily become the guiding beacon behind a religion.

Mahabharata means “great story of the Bharatas.” Bharata was an early ancestor of both the Pandavas and Kauravas who fight each other in an epic war, but the word is also used generically for the Indian race, so the Mahabharata sometimes is referred to as “the great story of India.”

The Mahabharata is not a random collection of tales like the Bible. Every story arc in the Mahabharata is there to shed light onto a central story. The core event of that story is the great battle that was fought on the field of Kurukshetra between the five sons of King Pandu and their allies on the one side and the hundred sons of King Dhritarashtra, with their allies, on the other side. The battle was the culmination of a long history of struggle and diplomatic maneuvering. It was a tragic war, that pitted brothers against brothers, sons against fathers and uncles, brave noble men against brave noble men. Nearly all of the best men died in the long battle. The Pandavas, the sons of King Pandu, survived, but there was no victory, for the war had destroyed the world that they knew, and the emptiness of what they had won colored the rest of their lives.

To say that the Mahabharata is the story of a great battle is to say that Lord of the Rings is story of little men called hobbits trying to destory an evil ring. Hindu cosmology is sweeping, and the story of the Mahabharata war has a lot of significance, in that it marks the end of one yuga ( Era ) and the beginning of another. Hindu cosmology states that there are four yugas in every great cycle of existence. The yuga that ended with the Mahabharata war was the dvapara yuga - the age of heros, during which noble values still prevailed and men remained faithful to the principles. The age that follows the battle is the Kali yuga. In this yoga, all values are reduced, law becomes fragmented and powerless, and evil prevails. We live in this yuga.

The depth and breadth of the story is one of the things that makes it one of the best tales I know. The story has a riveting plot. Its characters are extremely complex and real, with depth of personality that is unmatched in any other epic or biblical story I have heard. Lastley, the story is full of wisdom.

Back to why started this blog. Why is it so hard to give this story a blockbuster treatment ? To list some of the more difficult task that that any script writer/director/producer :-

• How would the entire indian continent and Hindu religion follows react ?
• English or Sanskrit ( with subtitles ) ?. Personally I'd like it to be English.
• The story to those who have heard it narrated not as a single story but a whole bunch of stories, each of which is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. We hear the stories at different times, and being familiar with the skeleton of the epic, fit the pieces as we see fit. One of the biggest challenge is how to bring this onto the screen or to even script it out.
  
• Cast. It's so large that the budget would be out of this world.
• Special effects, yes everything can be digitally recreated, but once again, the budget would be enormous.
• A pure western cast or a mix of eastern and western cast ? ( A lot of the Bollywood actors speak excellent english. Imagine a movie with high powered, industry strength actors/actresses from 2 of the largest movie industries in the world ).
• Lost in translation. I'd hate to see the script loose the quality of the sanskrit verses and their deep meaning, which is why the script has to be spot on.
  

Lastly ...

• Try and NOT churn out a religious drama and stick to a movie purely meant to entertain. One which you can walk out and say ... good special effects, good story, thought provoking, good ethics and moral values and fun to watch over and over again.

Despite all these difficulties, I dream that someday in my lifetime, this script gets written and a movie gets made.

While we are on the subject I wonder why Albert Einsteins life has not been portrayed on screen. I'm sure it would make a fabulous movie. But I digress, so lets live this argument for another day :-)