Hindustan Times inaugura una nuova rubrica nella sezione letteraria: alcuni noti autori indiani in lingua inglese recensiranno un'opera (altrui) redatta nella loro lingua madre. Si parte con Aravind Adiga che presenta Parva (1979) di S.L. Bhyrappa, in lingua kannada, una sorta di rivisitazione in prosa del leggendario Mahābhārata.
An epic without heroes, Aravind Adiga, 27 gennaio 2012, Hindustan Times:
'Parva (...) is probably the most successful attempt made to tell the story of the Mahābhārata in the form of a novel. It is a book without gods or heroes; anthropology and psychology shape its events. (...) Bhyrappa’s Pandavas are not semi-divine heroes, but middle-aged men slowed by regret for their wasted lives. (...) Six-hundred and nineteen pages (in the Kannada original text) of such vivid detail: paragraphs that run on for pages without a break. Parva is a psychological epic, darkened by Freudian awareness. The novel moves from one interior monologue to another, getting into the minds of men and women paralysed by subconscious needs. (...) Some portraits are tragic; others are the stuff of black comedy. (...) The Pandavas win, but win nothing: their children are dead, their kingdom is ruined. Parva ends in a rhapsodic, nine-page long block of prose. Fires burn in a forest, it rains in the city, a horde of women raped during the war come to the Pandavas to ask who will look after their illegitimate children; the new king does not know how to answer. The world of the Mahābhārata is being destroyed, and if hope for renewal exists, it does so only ambiguously. Bhyrappa is a polarising figure in Karnataka. In recent years, he has been accused of Hindutva sympathies. His pronouncements on Muslim rulers and Christian missionaries have alienated many of his admirers and contributed to his obscurity outside his home state. (Little of his work has been translated into English.) Back in 1979, however, this gifted novelist’s reverence for his cultural inheritance was balanced by his ambition to modernise it. Thirty-three years after its publication, Parva dazzles: its strangeness seems fresh, and its originality permanent'.
