Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of Mahabharata || Book Review

Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of Mahabharata || Book Review

Spoiler: You HAVE to read this book!!!

Mahabharata.

Something by which I have been fascinated with for the entirety of my life.  Our Indian parenting has made sure that we all are aware of its existence if not well versed with the epic. The generation of our parents and our grandparents witnessed the great epic in the serialized form so they have better knowledge than us when it comes to the epic. My parents and aunts and uncles also have read Yayati and later Mrutyunjay while growing up. 

When we talk about our generation, we only had exposure to the epic when it was in our primary education textbooks. But we still used to read stories from the epic in Chandamama, Amar Chitra Katha or other iterations of Mahabharata (the kid-friendly ones). 

Can we say that the current generations of kids are getting the same exposure to the epic the way we or our ancestors got? Not exactly.

Ask your child the names of five Pandavas. I think all of them will fail to do so. Even people of my age will fail to answer this question.

The point is Mahabharta is a cultural heritage of ours and a gift to the world and every Indian needs to have knowledge of the epic. 

I, myself read Mahabharata (Jaya) after 14 years and now my respect and fascination for it have grown more because it makes more sense now. It is an essential part of our culture and needs to be learned to be a better human being.

Enough of me fanboying over it. Let's turn to the review.

Why you need to read Devdutt Pattanaik's Jaya?

The Mahabharata is not a single story. It is a collection of stories crafted beautifully into an epic. Whenever an author tries to put it all together, they fail to do it properly. 

Pattanaik has successfully done the job of bringing all the parts of Vyasa's epic into a single book which is roughly 370 pages. All the characters are given enough space in this book that no character will feel left out. I learned a lot of new stories that I never knew existed in the epic before.

The biggest mistake that authors commit while making a book of Mahabharata is of antagonizing Kauravas while presenting Pandavas and Sri Krishna as protagonists. But, the whole point of the epic is that no one is black or white, no one is completely good or bad, everyone is grey, everyone is a human being and that's what makes it so different from Ramayana (Yes, I know Ramayana is a part of Mahabharta). Pattanaik has nicely put everyone in that grey space in his book where you can see everyone as a human being with faults.

Over the course of the book, the author keeps jumping from one story to another but it never feels as a distinct narrative. All the stories feel connected, stay connected and each and every word has a payback just like an Edgar Wright movie.

Devdutt Pattanaik has given boxes beneath many stories where he tries to provide dates and locations of the respective story. References and meanings of many local folklores, as well as festivals, are also presented in these boxes. In my Olympus review, I stated that these boxes were the cause of my annoyance while reading but here their presence is essential and I found them quite interesting. 

No book on Mahabharata is complete without the inclusion of Bhagwat Gita and it is present in Jaya too. While other pages of the book are normal milky white-colored, the Shri Krishna song or the Bhagwat Gita part is of Grey color and DP has tried to include the meaning of the whole song while keeping its length limited. It's a good attempt but if you want insights on Gita then you have to read Gita.

As it's a DP book, it is bound to have those sweet sweet illustrations and they are here a lot. They serve their purpose well by making the reader's imagination to run the extra mile.

The language used in the book is very simple and makes the book more accessible to a wider set of people.

All in all, it's a great book to get yourself or your child into Mahabharata. I will suggest you to buy or gift it to any Mahabharata fanatic in your circle. They for sure will love it if they haven't read it already.

Buy Jaya on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2QfnJgs

Disclaimer: The Mahabharata is too much for any individual to portray in its entirety.  Artists, writers, poets or directors give artistic flairs to their stories so no iteration of the epic will be true to Vysas's original work. You have to read four to five different iterations and decide on your own which one is true.