Abhimanyu: the Warrior Prince - Deepak M.R.

Author: Deepak M.R.

Genre: Mythological Retelling

Rating: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: Started very poorly but to my surprise, the book improved somewhat as it went on. (Or maybe I just got used to its flat writing.) Not bad, but not great as well.

I don’t think I need to provide a Story Synopsis this time. The plot contains some key events in the Mahabharata, as impacted Prince Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna and Subhadra. So you could call it a Mahabharata retelling from Abhimanyu’s perspective, as it goes a little beyond that. The story begins and ends with Abhimanyu.

The main content begins with Krishna speaking to the unborn Abhimanyu in Subhadra’s womb and continues with Abhimanyu’s birth, formative years, warrior training and so on. Abhimanyu's main contribution to the Mahabharata was in his role as a warrior who singlehandedly changed the course of the Great War. No wonder then that more than half the book is dedicated to the war itself. This gets somewhat saturating as we need to go through twelve days of endless battles to understand what happened on the thirteenth day and why Abhimanyu ended up alone in the ‘chakravyuha’. But once the thirteenth day narration begins, the story became interesting to the extent that I forgot all about the average writing and just went with the flow. Again, keeping with the idea of Abhimanyu as the central character, the story ends at his death, with just an epilogue detailing what happens next in the war and in his wife Uttara’s life.

The author mentions that his version is based on the original text of the Mahabharata as well as some of the folk tales. The main source of this story is the translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli. I have just an outsider knowledge of the epic and as such, won’t be able to pass comment on how accurate the overall content is. But as far as I could make out, it matches the story I am familiar with. I hadn't ever read of Abhimanyu going in search of his father during the final year of their exile and meeting Uttara. But the author clarifies that this isn't part of the Mahabharata and is based on a folk legend. I'll take his word for it as I know nothing of this. The book is quick-paced, and I loved the detailed insight it gave about the ‘chakravyuha’ battle formation, including a sketch of how it functioned.

Most of us somewhat familiar with the Mahabharata would know that Abhimanyu died in the Kurukshetra War at sixteen. As such, the main reason you would read a story about a brave life cut tragically short would be to know more about him as a person. And the book does a great job of this. Abhimanyu isn’t presented as the picture-perfect epitome of a prince, but as a real person: young yet knowledgeable, courageous yet overconfident, strong yet naïve, brave yet foolhardy. His character is a study in contrast, and as such, his character provides a great angle for a retelling.

At the same time, there are certain limitations to this narrative viewpoint. The initial part of the Mahabharata doesn’t include Abhimanyu, so most of this content is either skipped or scrunched into minimal chapters. As such, there’s no background detailing to the rest of the characters. Except for Abhimanyu and a couple of other characters, the rest of the character development is completely unidimensional. Of course, there’s a list of “Main Characters Who Appear in the Story” and also a Kuru family tree, but the former is quite brief and the latter would work better only if you are somewhat aware of the characters.

Where I was most disappointed was with the average writing.

• It is repetitive. For example, "It was clear that there was tension in their camp. The tensity in both camps was palpable"; "Krishna's sweet voice sounded like music to Subhadra. [one sentence filler] Her beloved brother's voice was like music to her."
• It is contradictory. For example: Subhadra was “listening with interest” (to Krishna’s narration of battle tactics) but a few paras later, |the intricacies of battle tactics didn't interest her; It declares that hunting for pleasure is a sin but then praises Abhimanyu for hunting wild animals and killing them regularly.
• It has typos. For example: "Some rooms had mirrors that looked like doors. Other doors turned out to be mirrors." (Both sentences mean the same thing).
• The chapter endings are very odd at times. Many end mid-scene and the new chapter begins with the same line in different words.
• It has plenty of info dumping. After all, how do the readers get a plot/character background when the story begins almost midway the epic? Simple solution. One character asks another a question, and the response contains detailed information about what happened before. This works at times, but gets too data-oriented on most occasions.
• It is quite basic. In a few chapters, it feels more like a child’s school essay (This happened, then this happened, then this happened,…) than a published work of fiction. Having better descriptive phrases and a more emotional touch to the words would have broken the monotony.

I expect (and allow some leeway to) such amateurish writing in indie self-published works, but not in a book published by Bloomsbury India. But this is me being my usual Grammar Nazi. If you are a more typical reader who doesn’t analyse text, you might not be as bothered by these technical minutiae.

Overall, it is a decent work, though it would have been much better in the hands of a more established author/editor. Its main shortcoming, other than the utterly foundational-level writing, is that it presupposes a certain familiarity with the epics and its key characters. As such, you would need to be an avid reader of this genre or well-informed of the original epic to pick this up. Paradoxically, if you are already an avid reader of this genre, you will be disappointed by the plain vanilla text that has only words and no literary flourishes. You will also find that it has barely anything new to offer. So I am not really sure whom to recommend this too. Maybe you can take a call based on what I’ve written?

My thanks to the Indic Book Club for a complimentary copy of “Abhimanyu: The Warrior Prince”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.