Beyond Right and Wrong: Reinterpreting the Mahabharata's Mythic Universe in Pattanaik's Jaya

Abstract

This paper analyses Devdutt Pattanaik’s Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata (2010) as a deliberate re-visioning of the epic's mythic universe, one that resists the urge to reduce its moral conflicts to a neat binary of heroism and villainy. Popular retellings of the Mahabharata tend to flatten the vast narrative into a simple contest between righteous Pandavas and wicked Kauravas. This study argues that Pattanaik’s method, which combines conversational prose, symbolic illustration, and a deliberate embrace of narrative plurality, reconstructs the epic as a space in which ethical clarity is consistently withheld rather than delivered. The paper starts by analysing Pattanaik’s narrative strategy and how, by situating Jaya as one voice among many in the regional and oral traditions, he makes the myth itself multiple rather than singular or authoritative. It then examines Pattanaik’s discussion of dharma, arguing that his treatment of morally ambivalent characters, especially Bhishma and Karna, reveals a notion of righteousness that is empathetic and self-directed rather than rule-bound or externally adjudicated. In this last analytical section, the argument is extended more generally to the other gods, heroes and villains in Pattanaik’s pantheon. It shows how the gods are often acting with compromised wisdom, the legendary heroes have major unresolved failures, and the common villains are offered valid grievances that implicate the very heroes who oppose them. This paper argues that Jaya is not simply a retelling of the Mahabharata. It is still a reconstruction of its ethical architecture, replacing binary moral judgement with a sustained vision of dharma as irreducibly complex, based on a close reading of the text and recent scholarship on Pattanaik’s narrative and visual strategies. Ultimately, the study places Jaya in the context of larger contemporary practices of mythological retelling as a text that exemplifies how ancient narratives can continue to be meaningful precisely through the preservation, not resolution, of their inherent moral ambiguity.