Revelations from retellings

New Indian Express

08-07-2025

The evening was punctuated with dialogues between the audience and the writer. While the audience was eager to know about the significance of the title, she explained, 'Footnotes, on the page, visually, seem to be the least important part, unless you are a scholar. Footnotes can be like a digression, can be like a rabbit hole in which you fall, and you discover other things.' Clearly, she alludes to the invisibility of women in literature. Her experiments could be seen on different tangents. While she is unapologetic about using creative freedom in her works, it's distinctly seen in the way she melds Tamil literature into the mainstream narrative. The character Alli, who she mentioned is her favourite, comes from the Tamil tradition. Alli Kadhai is a part of the performative traditions, Villu paatu, and folklores. 'I wanted to deliberately have a Tamil twist to the whole thing. Alli is not part of the so-called mainstream Mahabharata. And one must not worry about it, the more the better,' she said.
Unbothered about the discussion on what is authorised and considered the original, the writer said, 'I just flowed where my imagination took me. It took me to the direction of these wonderful retellings. I approached it as a poet. One main reason one should read the Mahabharata is that it's an open, porous text; it was always meant to be a text without one truck; that spirit should be the approach.'
Applauding this bold attempt of carving out a piece of work, Balakrishnan said, 'A long time has passed from the context of the Mahabharata. When you bring your poetry, it just adds itself to the multiverse of Mahabharata.'
'Footnotes to the Mahabharata' is priced at Rs 350.