Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about the Mahabharata, I find the great epic least interesting when it’s presented as a straightforward morality tale with a God-figure in the lead role, a puppet-master showing the good guys the Right Way. Comic books, short translations and TV soaps have done their best to simplify/sanitise matters (as they have with most ancient texts), but when you draw deeper into the vast well of stories that make up this sprawling work, you realise just how rich and complex it is – full of moral ambiguity, constantly raising questions about the contradictions in human nature without providing any easy answers. As Amartya Sen points out in one of his essays in The Argumentative Indian, even when we’re submerged in the authoritative wisdom of the Bhagwad Gita, the pacifist argument Arjuna makes to Krishna is never quite lost; in our own age, when we know something about the dangers of righteous certitude, it may be even more relevant.

Among the many lesser-known sub-stories in the Mahabharata is one told by the sage Lomasha to the exiled Pandavas, about a king named Yuvanashva who drinks a potion meant for his barren queens and ends up pregnant himself. For Devdutt Pattanaik, a medical doctor, marketing consultant and mythologist (!) deeply interested in the relevance of old myths in modern times, this was an instantly intriguing story. Pattanaik has written several books on myths and rituals already, but The Pregnant King is his first work of fiction, a retelling of the Yuvanashva tale to examine gender roles, the blurring of lines between parental duties and the malleability of Dharma to fit a given situation. The result is a sporadically successful book that tells an engrossing, subversive story but meanders a little too much.

According to the Mahabharata, Yuvanashva, king of Vallabhi, lived many generations before the Kurukshetra war. The Pregnant King situates the story at the same time as the central narrative of the epic, making him a contemporary of the Pandavas and Kauravas, and one of the few kings who doesn’t participate in the war (because he’s preoccupied with the more important business of siring an heir). This shift in chronology allows Pattanaik to use episodes in the epic as parallels or counterpoints for the Yuvanashva story. The characters in this book make chatty references to the lives of their more famous contemporaries in Hastinapur, and the effect is a little like Delhi Times readers discussing the latest on Aishwarya-Abhishek or Saif-Kareena (“ooh, did you know Kunti is rumoured to have had a son out of wedlock?”). The question of whether the impotent Pandu and the blind Dhritrashtra were fit to become king are set against similar dilemmas involving characters in Vallabhi. Shikhandi, who was born a woman but procured a penis from a yaksha later in life, has a small but important role. There is some healthy irreverence on view: when a messenger arrives with the momentous news that the war is over, no one in the kingdom is particularly interested, being more concerned about internal matters. When the hero Arjuna makes what amounts to a guest appearance and is asked about a story Bhishma narrated to the Pandavas before he died, his reply is a curt, “I’m sorry but I remember no such story. He said so many things” – a neat dismissal of the ponderous Shanti Parva, Bhishma’s long deathbed discourse about a king’s duties.

Expectedly, wry humour runs through the story. Long before Yuvanashva finds himself in the family way, the kingdom has had to permit the bending of convention: his mother Shilavati, widowed at a young age, is a proxy ruler, and the Brahmana elders are disturbed because “they were not used to a leader who nursed a child while discussing matters of dharma”. (It’s notable that the unconventionality of Shilavati’s own life doesn’t make her any more tolerant of her son’s situation later on, which underlines the point that non-conformity/anti-tradition can take many shapes, and these aren’t always kindred spirits.) There are multiple references to bulls, fields, soil and seeds as euphemisms for sex and conception, and to illuminate the vexing question of “ownership” that arises when a woman is made pregnant by someone other than her husband. And then there are those troublesome dead ancestors, the “pitrs”, waiting for the arrival of a child so they can be reborn in the land of the living. Taking the form of crows, they perch outside bedchambers, waiting for quick results, flapping their wings impatiently when foreplay goes on for too long. (“Does it not bother you that your son’s seed is weak?” one of them indelicately asks Shilavati.)

The Pregnant King isn’t a consistently satisfying work – it is overlong, full of staccato sentences (“That’s what they were. Vehicles of an idea. Two ideas. No. One idea, two expressions. Two halves of the same idea. Mutually interdependent”), the occasional forced attempt at informality, and some philosophical mumbo-jumbo towards the end (“Within you is your soul, Adi-natha as Shiva, silent, observant, still. Around you is matter, Adi-natha as Shakti, ever-changing, enchanting, enlightening, enriching, empowering”). Also, readers whose engagement with ancient texts runs along orthodox lines might not be too interested in a modern myth about the amorphous nature of the world and its laws. But in a sense, this book is meant for just such readers. At its best this story about “the imperfection of the human condition, and our stubborn refusal to make room for all those in between” is a cautionary tale for our own times. If only it had been a hundred or so pages shorter. (You know what they say about attention spans in our Kalyug.)

[A version of this review appears in this week’s Tehelka]