- Courtesy Random House India
Writers and film-makers looking to tell stories about modern India turn again and again to the past, and in particular, to one ancient epic: the "Mahabharat."
A new novel about contemporary Delhi, “Leela's Book,” uses one particular episode—the transcribing of the epic by the elephant-headed god Ganesh—as a framing device.
The author, Alice Albinia, also mimics oddities of the epic itself. Ved Vyasa, the sage who is supposed to have composed and recited its thousands of verses to Ganesh and who is also a personage in the epic—the father of the half-brothers Dhritrashtra and Pandav, whose sons waged the war at the heart of the epic—also appears in her novel as the modern-day Sanskrit academic Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi.
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