‘Dance of Shadows’: Violence and glory abound in this Mahabharata-inspired fantasy novel

The Mahabharata, a sprawling epic written in more than two million words, has seen several reimaginings in fiction, especially in the last decade. Reimagining the war and its consequences through the eyes of its male and female characters is all the rage. In his latest novel, Dance of Shadows, Gourav Mohanty expands his grimdark universe that began with Sons of Darkness.

A different Mahabharata

In the content warning for The Goddess of the River, Vaishnavi Patel writes that the Mahabharata has every horrifying act one can imagine. In Dance of Shadows, the second novel in The Raag of RTA series, Mohanty expounds this argument. This, of course, is not a faithful rendition of the events that happened in the epic. Mohanty has taken familiar characters from the epic and dunked them into a cauldron boiling with blood, war, revenge, plotting, murders, coercion, and everything else. He adds a disclaimer at the beginning: This is not the Mahabharata. It indeed is not and how fun is that!

Divided into 18 books, the Mahabharata has more than 75,000 verses. The first 11 of these books are about the royal clan of Kuru. The 12th and 13th books elaborate views on religion, morality, duty and so on. This is the part where Bhishma, on his deathbed, shares stories with Yudhishthira. It also...

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