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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Myth and the making of Star Wars
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Myth and the making of Star Wars

Like everything else, the West 'stole' from our myths to make a blockbuster. But wait, what about Gilgamesh?

A still from ‘A New Hope’ (1977)Premium
A still from ‘A New Hope’ (1977)

Here is a rough outline of a story. A beautiful princess is kidnapped by a diabolical villain and a young handsome hero rescues her, aided in no small part by an army of anthropomorphic beings and one particular half-human sidekick of immense strength. If you guessed Han Solo, aided by Chewbacca, rescuing Princess Leia from Darth Vader, you would be right; but if you guessed Ram, aided by Hanuman, rescuing Sita from Ravana, you would be right too.

The august and magisterial voice of Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan-Kenobi tells us: “Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together." The Sanskrit word prana means “life force" or vital principle. In Hindu philosophy, the term refers to the cosmic energy that permeates the entire universe at all levels, including both animate and inanimate objects.

A guru teaches a doubtful disciple the importance of restraining the senses. A true warrior, he says, must overcome desire and anger. He also tells him that his strength must come from the ultimate cosmic force that is both the origin and dissolution of everything that was, is and will be. Is that Krishna advising Arjun at Kurukshetra or is it Yoda teaching Luke to become a Jedi? It almost sounds like Yoda had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on the swamp planet of Dagobah. Gita 4.39 tells us that “A faithful man who is absorbed in transcendental knowledge and who subdues his senses quickly attains the supreme spiritual peace"; and 5.23 that “Before giving up this present body, if one is able to tolerate the urges of the material senses and check the force of desire and anger, he is well situated and is happy in this world".

But before you rush to join the global desi outrage against Western appropriation of all things gloriously Indian and add this to the list that includes yoga, chicken tikka masala and large diamonds previously owned by wily Sikh kings, let me tell you another story.

There is this guy, an egotistic, arrogant, self-absorbed, renegade chap who decides to go on this difficult and challenging quest for very materialistic and selfish reasons. While on this journey, he unwittingly stumbles into a larger conflict between opposing powers, but his companion and teacher eventually helps him change his perspective on life, recognize his flaws and discover the inner strength required to eventually transform into an altruistic hero.

Sound familiar? Or are you slightly confused now? Does this sound like Han Solo, who is originally hired by Luke, Obi-Wan and Co. to provide passage for money? He is, quite obviously, unaware that he is getting himself into a larger galactic conflict, and over time, Luke inspires him to become a genuine hero. Or does it sound like Arjun getting into a conflict over property and kingdom and eventually being taught by Krishna that the war isn’t about his property but about duty? But here’s the real kicker. Many of you may not realize that it also sounds exactly like the story of this Akkadian bloke named Gilgamesh, who decides to go on this epic quest with his friend Enkidu for nothing more than cheap fame but then quickly realizes that he is now embroiled in a battle between temperamental Mesopotamian gods. Along the way, Enkidu humanizes Gilgamesh and helps him conquer more than just temperamental deities.

The interesting thing is that the epic of Gilgamesh is dated to about 2500 BC by historians, which makes it approximately 1,500 years older than the Mahabharat, so perhaps we should join the Western appropriation complaints queue behind the Iraqis.

So rather than dwell on this simplistic idea that Star Wars stole ideas from Indian myths, let’s consider the idea that all enduring stories tend to use the same mythological devices.

For some reason, most profound Western models about the human mind tend to come from German-speaking peoples. Perhaps there is something quintessentially German in thinking about thinking, methods about methods and dead animals stuffed inside their own intestines.

Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), an anthropologist, who, like many of his era, had fantastic facial hair, was among the first to realize that myths from every part of the world seem to be built from the same building blocks. Another German-speaking chap, with distinctly less impressive facial hair, Carl Gustav Jung, called these building blocks “archetypes", which he believed to be part of humanity’s “collective unconscious". In less Deepak Chopra-esque terms, he believed that no matter where we’re born in the world, we share an extraordinarily common idea of what a “hero", “mentor" or a “quest" is. And this, he surmised, is why we enjoy the same kind of stories despite speaking a thousand different languages.

Now the actual Jungian archetypes themselves have staunch critics who believe they are a bit reductionistic; and more recently, there are feminist critiques that focus on the tendency these archetypes have to provide a stereotyped view of femininity and masculinity. For starters, why are all the heroes male and why is the person who needs rescuing always female, and so on?

Joseph Campbell (1904-87), for a change not a German-speaking person, took Jungian archetypes and used them to build a common underlying framework for all religions and mythologies. He explores this in his stunning Hero With A Thousand Faces, where he documents examples of myths from every corner of the globe. Pretty soon you realize that there is a Ramayan from the Navajo tribe as much as there is a Gilgamesh in Sumatra. When you think about it, this is actually an astounding fact, something we don’t take the pain to realize regularly enough when we disagree with someone from another faith.

Campbell’s fundamental story pattern was the monomyth, or the “hero’s journey". All myths, he argued, were ultimately just slight variations of the hero’s journey. Yes, even Salman Khan movies.

The building blocks of the hero’s journey are categorized into three themes—departure/separation, initiation and return. Within departure, let’s take the archetype of the “Call to adventure". In Star Wars, it’s the message from Princess Leia. It reaches the desert planet of Tatooine thanks to R2-D2’s resourcefulness in escaping the destroyed Alderaanian cruiser that was carrying Leia when Lord Vader chased them down in his Imperial Star Destroyer.

In the Wachowski siblings’ film The Matrix, it’s the white rabbit. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, it’s the “ghost" (spoiler alert: it’s the hero himself from another dimension). In Baahubali, it’s the mask that falls from the spectacular waterfall and urges the hero to climb it. In The Hobbit, it’s Gandalf. In Greek mythology, Theseus arrives at Athens and hears stories about the horrors of the Minotaur in Crete.

And in every one of these cases, the hero “refuses the call", which is another archetype. Luke thinks the harvest is more important than running off to rescue princesses in distress. Neo refuses to climb out of the window. Arjun refuses to go into battle.

Theseus of Athens, on the other hand, like me at a buffet that features palak paneer, skips this step and goes straight to the next few patterns: “Supernatural aid" and “Crossing the threshold". Luke escapes Tatooine thanks to Obi-Wan’s use of the Force while Neo exits the Matrix for the first time. Arjun, in the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, sees something brighter than a thousand suns, and Theseus lifts the rock to claim his father’s sword and Bata Hawaii chappals.

As we then step into the Initiation theme, there is the “Belly of the Whale" and the “Road of Trials". Luke is almost crushed by the trash compactor and gets frustrated in his endeavours to learn how to use a lightsaber. Neo undergoes the same thing in the torture room and also spars with Morpheus. The exiles in the Ramayan and the Mahabharat represent examples of the road of trials for the heroes in those myths.

An 1820 watercolour depicting a scene from the Mahabharat. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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An 1820 watercolour depicting a scene from the Mahabharat. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In addition to these common story arcs, Star Wars uses the same mythic elements within these stories. There is the role of the mentor, played by Obi-Wan in Star Wars, Morpheus in The Matrix, Krishna in the Mahabharat and, to an extent, Vishwamitra in the Ramayan. There is also the concept of wearing the enemy’s skin. Luke and Han wear Stormtrooper outfits on the Death Star while rescuing Leia and the five Pandavas go incognito for the final year of their exile.

It therefore turns out that there is a larger common shared human experience that tends to repeat itself over and over again in the stories we have shared with each other, from the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, to Return Of The Jedi. But it’s not just story elements and narrative devices. Star Wars, in my opinion, shares something even deeper with the Mahabharat when you analyse the individual characters themselves.

Let’s draw an X and Y axis in our minds, where X represents the external image and Y the internal image. The external image is how you are perceived by the world—righteous, rascally or diabolical. The internal image is how you truly are on the inside. Perception versus reality, if you will.

Anakin Skywalker (left) and Obi-Wan Kenobi in ‘Revenge Of The Sith’ (2005).
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Anakin Skywalker (left) and Obi-Wan Kenobi in ‘Revenge Of The Sith’ (2005).

Now, when you look at the Mahabharat, Yudhisthir is the righteous man of dharma (like Luke) while Bheem is the angry young man and rebel without a cause (like Amitabh Bachchan or Han Solo).

Here is where it gets interesting. Most of us generally don’t know much about Nakul and Sahadev. It’s almost as if Vyasa liked the sound of “Pancha Pandava" and decided to introduce them as filler characters to make up the numbers, but that is only if our knowledge of the epic comes from B.R. Chopra’s Doordarshan magnum opus or Amar Chitra Katha.

Nakul and Sahadev are quite complex characters by themselves. Leaving aside the smaller details of their prowess in battle, it bears special mention that Nakul had the ability to talk to animals (which explains his incognito disguise as a cowherd during the final year of the exile) and Sahadev was an excellent astrologer. The ability to talk to animals is really just a device for the Mahabharat to symbolize empathy. I would imagine it takes a lot of empathy to communicate with a cow. Sahadev’s astrological skills, in essence the ability to foretell the future, is a device that symbolizes wisdom and insight, both of which are traditionally seen as arising from the ability to introspect deeply. When you think about it, introspection is the exact polar opposite of being extremely tuned to the outside world, like Nakul was.

So Yudhisthir represents a certain kind of polar opposite to Bheem, in much the same way that Nakul represents a polar opposite of Sahadev. This relationship is mirrored in Star Wars. Palpatine is evil-evil while Vader is evil-good and Luke is good-good while Han Solo is bad-good.

But here is where the Mahabharat goes one over George Lucas in sophistication. It introduces these four polar-opposite, one-dimensional characters—the pompous and righteous Yudhisthir, the angry, well-meaning brute Bheem, the animal-loving nice guy Nakul and the scary meditating wise fellow Sahadev—and then goes on to put Arjun at the centre of the tale. He is not only the middle of the five Pandavas, he is also the nuanced, multi-dimensional hero of the story.

And oh, as symbolism goes, guess who Arjun disguised himself as in his final year of exile? Brihannala, a woman.

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Published: 12 Dec 2015, 12:11 AM IST
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