The Palace of Illusions; by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

I have generally liked this writer and enjoyed her works, especially Sister Of My Heart. This time she takes up a Himaalaya to resculpture, so to speak. And Himaalaya retains its beauty and grandeur but the resculpturing leaves highly bad taste. Fortunately one can read this without much of that and still enjoy it much like a bath in Gangaa in Himaalaya surroundings.

A reworking of Mahaabhaarata in the writer's fancy, of suspecting there could be more added to the already very rich, deep, complex and extensive tale, is this book. It is good and great in many or most parts, where it does not tamper with the original - but where she writes about things that are not there it is clearly another story, and its being stuck on to Mahaabhaarata does not improve the latter.

But Mahaabhaarata written in any language, by any writer, nevertheless retains its beauty and grandeur to the extent one sees the events and characters as they originally were. As for the reworked Karna, he retains his place in hearts in the original version too.

What is clearly out of place is the feeling of the heroine of being unwanted or less than tremendously beautiful. Association of beauty with skin colour came late to the culture this epic belongs to and lives in, with colonial era.

It never was an equation in minds of those that wrote our earlier works, Ramaayana or Mahaabhaarata. That clearly is because it was not a factor as far as choice of a new member of family was concerned, as late as my grandparents' generation, just about a century ago.

Other factors - family, culture, and abilities of the new member to satisfy the requirements needed for life - were paramount. Elders chose partners for young and the young grew up with their spouses, as unable to ever think of a separation as one would from parents or siblings or children.

So this colour complex is really extremely out of place in the epic that is at the very heart of Indian culture, and this political inserting that complex and the whole discussion about it in the epic it does not belong to is like a thorn inserted in petals of a rose for an artisitic expression of a florist making a statement about a completely different topic. It might have been far better to write one's own story to work out this colour and love affair with an unattainable relative thread that is inserted and looks as out of place as a hemp thread embroidery on a Pashminaa (Cashmere) shawl.

And for that matter this colour preference, to whatever extent it exists, still remains within the culture - few of Indian origin would actually "prefer" someone of another culture over a well chosen one of their own, for the sake of a mere superficial "whitewashing" of next generations; in fact one can safely bet almost none would.

All things being equal people still prefer the choices that go along their own culture, language, and with a clear preference for other important qualities, abilities of educational and professional sort with higher qualifications thrown in. Those latter usually outweigh skin colour to a large extent even within the nation.

There is an anxiety often in some people to look at other nations, especially west, and try to imbibe their values and their ways, even to the extent of taking their wrong ways and beating ourselves raw with false and completely unnecessary whippings and lashings, of pointing at what we do too that is similar. It is a highly false, sadomasochistic impulse; and one really should be better rooted in one's own culture, to know better, from within - or else not turn to whip it for faults of others, at least.

A colonial legacy is just that - a colonial legacy, and while it might make us more familiar with Europe, it has failed to create a preference for new relatives from Europe over those of our own for mere colour. I daresay we would have been just as impressed and friendly with an African colonial rule as we were with British and would then have prefered to consort with the dark foreigners over pale ones for the reason of familiarity - and it still would have not changed the basic values that are strong. And still would have prefered our own people as relatives of choice.