Vishwas P. Govitrikar

The Cousins: a New Retelling of the Central Story of the Mahabharata Vishwas P. Govitrikar

The Cousins tells one of the great stories of the world, set in northwestern India some 3,000 years ago. This is a world in which fisher girls become queens, kingdoms are staked in dicing matches, and military high-tech is the horse-drawn chariot -- an exotic world certainly but a very human one once you're in it. The book is a fictional re-imagining of the central story of the Indian epic Mahabharata. Despite the word "epic", the Mahabharata is actually a vast collection of stories and sermons and learned expositions, with the central story constituting only a small part. But this small part IS an epic tale, of a family feud in a royal house that eventually leads to war -- the 18-day war of the 18 armies. This is quite unlike the many re-tellings of the Mahabharata in print. First, because it's fiction and, second, because it's a story of people and politics, with no digressions into the theological or the supernatural. But although The Cousins is fiction, it is a reliable rendering of the basic story. The characters in it are the central characters in the original; the events in it are the principal events in the original; and the order in which they appear is the order in which they happen in the original.