Amish Does 'Self-Help'

The author’s new book is, at best, an advertisement for his oeuvre

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

Gargi and her husband Nachiket sit down to eat with her parents, Lopamudra and Dharma Raj. They have wine with their missal pav. As they banter, they quote Sigmund Freud and Jaggi Vasudev. There’s something artificial about the way they speak, something contrived about how their conversations shift from the Chinese Communist Party to Icarus and then to the Mahabharata. The imagined exchanges of this family—hammy as they are—make up the pages of Dharma, a book the author Amish has written with his sister Bhavna Roy. Aimed for self-help shelves, the book aims to decode the epics and give our life meaning. Sadly, it patronises you so much in the process, you only feel irate.

The Hindutva project has for long reduced the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to a set of convenient edicts we are expected to live by. Dharma does something similar. Stories don’t satisfy Amish and Roy. They want to penetrate the surface and find “wisdom” that lurks below. Characters like Bhishma and Yudhishthira are summarily castigated. Rather than accept the limits of their moral and literary universe, the authors impose on their actions a structure of modern virtue that seems pedantic and supercilious. Blame often flies thick and fast. Gandhari, for instance, is even declared “adharmic” once.