The Mahabharata: Between Love and Retaliation
In The Mahabharata: Between Love and Retaliation, poet Navamalati Neog Chakraborty rehumanizes the epic through seven contemplative poems. Reviewer Navanita Varadpande highlights how this anthology shifts focus from grand war spectacles to the raw, intimate, and silent psychological landscapes of its characters.
Navamalati Neog Chakraborty is an academic, a translator and a poet. Her recent anthology of poems titled, The Mahabharata: Between Love and Retaliation is an analysis of some of the most interesting episodes in the epic, deftly rendered in the form of seven long poems. The poet successfully navigates through emotions, feelings, sensitivities that are relatable and will remain relevant eternally, through the stories of the Mahabharata. The verses flow with magical dexterity, and never seem to lack rhythm and tone, as even marginalized characters find themselves woven in, within the lyrical flow of incidents and issues that have infested our society since time immemorial: patriarchy, casteism, mental health and the complexities of human emotions and behaviour. The poet rehumanizes the epic, shifting focus from spectacle to consciousness.
The Mahabharata is an epic that has been told, retold, analysed, scrutinised, studied and dissected countless times through centuries. And yet, every return to it reveals something new-something that unsettles us, teaches us, or mirrors our own lives in diverse ways. What makes this collection of poems different is that it doesn’t approach the Mahabharata as a spectacle of war or heroism. It approaches it like a tale that’s unfolding around us cautiously, as the poet tiptoes within scenes around the characters. There’s a gripping reversal of time and emotions. The anthology enters the epic through pauses, through silences, through the inner lives of characters watching things fall apart long before they actually did.
She writes in the opening lines of the first poem “The Game of Dice”:
It was ages and ages ago but time has not let go
To piece together all those truths that peer out
From old eyes that look piercingly at dying fires;
For fires of the mind do not contain such belligerence
As does such events churned of planned magnitude.
Of immense hate on the rough pitted roads of life.
The skies were blue and minds were eager
To catch up with memories of Hastinapur
Where the Pandavas had left behind their thoughts
Of childhood memories, of minds and people.
Our lives have metaphorically turned into such a game. We all know what happens. But here, the dice are almost secondary. What stays with us is the waiting, the unease. Gandhari sensing something deeply wrong. Draupadi waiting alone, knowing too well how men’s games often end up becoming women’s wounds. Long before the dice are cast, the damage is already done.
The poet explores the emotional landscapes and silent suffering of women in the Mahabharata with great compassion. She writes about the plight of Gandhari:
Even when a woman loses her husband to death
It shall amount to the loss of company for a lifetime;
But what about the angst of a dark world as hers…
Where love is alien and passion mere lust in darkness
Women are thus compelled to suffer in silence!
She feels for Bhanumati, Duryodhan’s wife, the woman who is often subjected to erasure, and writes about her, as she readies herself to welcome the Pandavas in Hastinapur:
She realised that to be a part of the dialogue
She needed to be involved, for the roads of life
That she feared shall have to be traversed and
Silence sat quietly within her all unsettled
Just to be… her thoughts gradually hardened.
Unable to expunge her bitterness and hurts
Which refused to heal at her husband’s ways.
She now stepped forward to welcome Draupadi
With events and pieces of time she caught at,
Clubbing and floating about with her sadness.
These lines of the poem reflect the psychoanalytical mind of the poet. Her style is contemplative and emotionally textured, turning myth into an intimate human experience. The poem concludes with the poet’s fervent plea to all that instead of resorting to the evil machinations that take root in evil minds of arrogant men, in a world where there’s no end to pain and grief, “Let us marvel at the smallest of God’s gift, the rainbow in the sky…”.
The poem “Between Mother and Son”, about the meeting between Kunti and Karna, tugs at the heartstring the most as the poet expresses the timeless ache of separation, between a mother and a child, about love that exists even when words fail, when time has already done its damage.
They stood weaving a patch of silence, both unknowing
How to handle the rawness of that defining moment.
What do people seek when truth with the spectrum
Of details on their shoulders leave them bewildered
Tone dying down before one can seek its depth.
Is life ever short of challenges
Like a pointless exercise.
From a distant past between a mother
And a mewling new born infant son,
Parted and separated painfully.
She writes not about an epic hero, but of a mother and a son standing before each other not in royal robes but with silence between them. In these lines, Karna becomes a child yearning to belong. And Kunti is no longer a queen, but a mother carrying the weight of a choice that time can never undo. Perhaps that is what the poet’s pen does so beautifully, it finds the human heartbeat within the epic. It reminds us that behind every grand story are fragile emotions: longing, regret, tenderness and love.
Across all the prose-poems- Asvathama and the Owl, The Curse of Urvashi, Karna’s Chariot Wheel, Bhisma’s Bed of Arrows, Dronacharya’s Dilemma, there is a recurring ache. A sense that retaliation is never sudden. It is slow. It grows quietly in silences, in moral compromises, in people choosing comfort over courage.
What touches the depth of the soul most is how the poet instils a sense of relevance into each poem, we are able to relate to emotions and reactions of characters; even long after reading the poems our minds reverberate with the pathos and poignancy woven into each word in the book. These poems do not glorify suffering, nor do they romanticise endurance. They simply acknowledge a truth many of us recognise instinctively, that we often know when something is about to go wrong, and yet are asked to wait, to endure, to remain dignified while others gamble with our destiny.
This anthology feels less like the retelling of an epic and more like a journey through life itself, through love, restraint, anger, and the painful necessity of self-awareness. It reminds us that the Mahabharata is not a closed text from the past. It is still unfolding around us, in families, in institutions, in everyday choices between conscience and convenience.
The last stanza of the poem “Dronacharya’s Dilemma” captures the essence of the anthology:
The Kurukshetra is a revelation of the love of honour on the one hand and retaliation
On the other, in a sad epic tale that collude with the silence of the years, so that
Man may impute judgement to doughty human rights issues, of Bhisma’s resolution,
Of Drona’s injustices, of Vidura’s wise aura of goodness, of the blink of the splendid
Morning sunshine of truth in our lives with Vasudeva’s presence. Subtly dented, the world
Of man has to be a Kurukshetra of sorts, to teach valorous acquiescence to mankind
Till the shadows shall retreat and in the hands of death, man shall sleep, the sleep of the repentant.
As we read the last verse of this anthology of poems, it’s not just the stories of the Mahabharata that stay with us but it provides an unsettling recognition of our own selves within it. The poems remind us that the Mahabharata is not just a story from the past but a mirror of our society. We live in our own world of Mahabharata, with each turn of the dice, it is our choice as to how we act, how we retaliate and how we hold our ground, that define who we become.
Book Details:
- Title: The Mahabharata: Between Love and Retaliation (… A Journey Through Life!)
- Author: Navamalati Neog Chakraborty
- Publisher: Authorspress
- Release Date: 6 February 2026
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 174 pages
- Price: 395 INR
- Where to buy: https://www.amazon.in/Mahabharata-Between-Retaliation-Journey-Through
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