ABSTRACT
Peter Brook’s Mahabharata exemplifies one of the most blatant (and accomplished) appropriations of Indian culture in recent years. Very different in tone from the Raj revivals, it nonetheless suggests the bad old days of the British Raj, not in its direct allusions to colonial history-the Mahabharata, after all, deals with our ‘ancient’ past, our ‘authentic’ record of traditional Hindu culture. For Brook’s Vyasa, it is nothing less than ‘the poetical history of mankind’. Within such a grandiose span of time, where does the Raj fit? Not thematically or chronologically, I would argue, but through the very enterprise of the work itself: its appropriation and reordering of non-western material within an orientalist framework of thought and action, which has been specifically designed for the international market.
