If you have read epic poetry from ancient Greece or India, whether in translation or in the original, you’d know that the heroes in these great epic poems have their vulnerabilities. I’m not talking about physical vulnerabilities that ultimately prove fatal for them: Achilles’ heel or Duryodhana’s thighs, for example. No, but I point to the heroes’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses, understood within broader psychological, behavioural, emotional, and social contexts, arising primarily from their many attachments as human beings. Also, by ‘hero’, I mean that which is commonly understood: A brave, charismatic leader of men, the first and foremost among many; followed, respected, even feared, owing to their strength, courage, skill, and wisdom. Bleeding Heroes We find Lord Rama, the hero of Valmiki’s Ramayana, crying inconsolably when he discovers that his beloved wife Sita has been abducted in the forest in his absence. We see Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, quite unable to hold back tears at the mention of events of the Trojan War in a bard’s song during his stop in Phaeacia. The British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan, in his latest offering based on Homer’s Odyssey, emphasises this particular aspect of the ancient Greek epic. Nolan interprets Odysseus in a way that leaves us with an impression of the legendary Achaean hero as a star-crossed, struggling, almost modern man; albeit an important one who once held a powerful position – perhaps the inner life of a significant modern-day politician or a Fortune 500 CEO. Tossed about by the elements, Nolan’s Odysseus jostles with his fate, fighting temptations within himself to regain the position he has lost. The choice of Matt Damon to portray Odysseus’s character seems particularly deliberate in this light, because Damon has the characteristically glum and introverted modern countenance to pull off a brilliant The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Nolan seems to have little interest in the Odysseus that the ancient bard Homer highlights throughout his epic poem – the wise and wily strategist Odysseus, the princely Odysseus, the godlike Odysseus. His choices align with a typical modern tendency to render ancient literatures and histories ‘relatable’ to us Moderns. But do we Moderns probe into ancient lore only to ‘relate’ to its characters and events in our own way? Do we just look to map our personal frailties, failings, or follies onto those of the epic heroes, thereby deriving some psychological reassurance, affirmation, or even consolation by leaning on them? Do we watch a film or TV adaptation of Valmiki’s Ramayana, or Homer’s Iliad, to see a reflection of our own vulnerabilities in the conduct of a Rama in exile or an Achilles at war? Maybe some of us do, and maybe all of us do so to a certain extent; but it doesn’t seem likely that this affirmation-seeking and consolation-searching is the be-all and end-all of our craving for ancient epics. For if that were our primary expectation, we need look no further than nineteenth-century literary monuments for TV and film adaptations. From that century onwards, we have a literal explosion of both narrative fiction and fine historical accounts of epic scale, centred on individuals and nations much closer to our own times, propensities, and value systems – and therefore much more prone to our vulnerabilities, and more thoroughly relatable to conditions familiar to us. Many such modern epic-scale fictional and historical works have been adapted for films and TV with great commercial and critical success: Les Misérables, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, All Quiet on the Western Front, Gandhi, and many more. We should have been satisfied with these alone, without ever bothering to wonder how the heroes of the Bronze Age – or perhaps even further back in time – lived, loved, and led their lot. Film and TV adaptations of modern classics like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali would have been sufficient if our needs from narratives had been limited to looking into the story-mirror and discovering only ourselves there, even if merely a part of us was reflected. Neither does it suffice to say that the human condition and its existential challenges have remained more or less the same across vast swathes of time and space, despite a sea change in our material and social conditions. Those who think it sufficient imagine that Achilles’s wrath at Agamemnon, or Rama’s anger at Samudra the sea-god, is nothing more than a natural reaction to their wounded ego or honour, or a frustrated objective they held dear – much in the same way our contemporary celebrities or leaders, would react under similar practical circumstances. Therefore, they claim, we watch adaptations of these epics to compare and exchange notes, unidirectionally as it were, with the ancients. If indeed this were true and sufficient to satisfy our hankering for stories, we would bother ourselves with nothing more than biographies of a Napoleon or a Churchill, or popular historical works on a Netaji Subhas or a Messi, turned into some clever feature film or a documentary TV adaptation. In fact, there is no dearth of such material out there. Mind you, it is several degrees more difficult to construct the world of a Treta-Dvapara Yuga, or the Bronze Age for that matter, than creating a nineteenth- or twentieth-century setup, even with cutting-edge VFX, AR/VR and AI tools at one’s disposal. And yet, several filmmakers have ‘heroically’ ventured to adapt ancient epics and legend-laced histories. Nolan’s The Odyssey is by no means a unique specimen of its kind, just the latest one in a long succession of live-action and animated films and TV series based on epics. Epics Matter What, then, do we Moderns really seek in a screen adaptation of an ancient epic? What is it that still makes us so deeply invested in them, that we get agitated if they fail to meet our expectations? Two things above all: Firstly, we look for that trait in the epic hero’s character, which, despite all his vulnerabilities, would redeem him, and in turn redeem us, the modern viewers. Secondly, we look for a certain quality in the way an epic has been narrated, either on paper or on the screen (but especially on the screen), that would capture our imagination, our very being, and allow even the most rational reader or viewer among us to suspend all disbelief for as long as we engage with the story – leaving us with an exalted, high-spirited feeling by the end. We Moderns are in no way unique in expecting these things from ancient epic. In every age, people have lent an eager ear to these epics, even in their adapted versions. This is why we find a Kalidasa composing long poems and plays based on Valmiki’s Ramayana and Vyasa’s Mahabharata, a Shakespeare producing the tragedy of Troilus and Cressida against the backdrop of the Iliad, a Goethe penning Achilles and Iphigenia in Tauris, a Nikos Kazantzakis authoring a modern epic sequel to the Odyssey, and a Rabindranath composing odes to Valmiki and Rama, as well as plays and dramatic dialogues based on subplots and characters of the Mahabharata. Each of these adaptations is a milestone in the world’s literary landscape, attesting to their wide popularity across generations. More importantly, each of these works is an interlocutor in an ongoing conversation between the past and the present within its respective literary, theatrical or filmmaking tradition. They are proof that ancient epics are no dead scrolls, but very much alive and kicking. Despite an overabundance of great literary works produced in the last two centuries, people’s thirst for ancient epic narratives remains unquenched. The tremendous box-office success of Nolan’s The Odyssey, and the mixed yet intense public reaction it has generated, ranging from adulation to outright denunciation, testifies to this public thirst for epic narratives. Redeeming one’s humanity by hearing or watching how the epic hero of yore once redeemed himself, and lifting one’s spirit from a state of hopelessness and meaninglessness to a more vigorous plane of existence – epics are unique in serving these deeply spiritual needs of all humans, no matter how many times those epic plots may have been told and retold. (The writer is a Kolkata-based educator, writer, researcher and musician who discourses through the spoken and written word with the aim of rekindling the Indic consciousness in a postmodern, neoliberal world. Views personal.)
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