The Mahabharata Review

Imagine Game of Thrones taken to biblical and Shakespearean heights and suddenly transformed into a spiritual guide to extinguishing one’s ego.

This is Peter Brook’s Mahabharata.

I watched this epic movie almost twenty years ago and was mesmerized again after recently watching this five-hour movie in almost one sitting.

The cast is multi-racial and kicks butt.

The Mahabharata is the greatest spiritual poem in history with over two hundred thousand lines of verse and nearly two million words.

There is war, farce, romance, fantasy and even memoir.

Two clans go to war after a game of dice is rigged and one of the clans is banished to the forest.

What else could be lurking underneath?

The forces of light and darkness fiercely collide, but the subtle psychological shadings of the warring characters make the battle a little ambiguous.

Something deeper is hinted at.

There is a cosmic harmony that is constantly under threat, and each individual plays their part in disrupting it.

Every ego is an agent of chaos.

All egos must tame themselves.

The spiritual message of the Mahabharata is inside a book within a book and certainly belongs to all humanity.

Brook’s movie may have been slammed by many Indian critics as too superficial and an appropriation of Indian culture, but for those who are open to it, Brook’s work still has a sublime flavor.

Will the Mahabharata ever be read by most Westerners?

Absolutely not.

Will Brook’s meditative movie ever be seen by a mass audience?

Forget it.

But if Earth one day becomes a devastated wasteland where aliens ransack its ruins.

This epic will surely be the human race’s spiritual high-water mark.