The India of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata has changed

The British-born theatre director Peter Brook, who lived and worked in France and died last week at 97, could create a mesmerizing experience on stage, reducing it to its bare essentials. Also, ‘immediate theatre’, where viewers would react to what they saw, but with each reaction different and hard to predict, as it was formed by the person’s own life experiences: some would laugh, some cry, some remained indifferent, some got angry and some felt transformed. The stage had been a prisoner of the proscenium arch for a long time; Bertolt Brecht discarded the norm and talked directly to the audience; Badal Sircar’s characters walked among the audience, engaging them and rattling them by tearing down barriers; Samuel Beckett placed a bare tree on a country road and had two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for Mr Godot in a stark comment on our absurd times. Those complexities, where there were heroic acts but few heroes, made it a rather more interesting work, and as I grew older, I saw its other manifestations: allegories like Dharmavir Bharati’s play Andha Yug, set on the last day of the 18-day battle in Kurukshetra, and Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, and Shyam Benegal’s film Kalyug, which showed how modernity does not hide ancient truths. For this is the new, muscular India, where Hanuman’s face no longer smiles, but stares angrily off car stickers; where Rama’s compassionate eyes reveal a saffron glare; and the nation’s symbol, those reassuring lions of Sarnath from Emperor Ashoka’s time, perched on an inverted lotus, have been turned into enraged-looking beasts, baring fangs and growling like MGM’s lion, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.