Between 1982 and 1985, stage and film director Peter Brook made three extensive journeys through India, searching for a way in which to dramatize "The Mahabharata," one of India's great epic poems, written around 200 B.C.
He took along the scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, with whom he had often worked, and together they eventually hammered out a stage version, then a film adaptation and finally a TV series of the poem. During all this travel, Carriere kept notes of their progress.
If it was slow work, that was because both he and Brook were determined to find a way to achieve their objective without violating the nature of the poem. They had, he later said, only "the advantage of knowing nothing." They could thus find the subcontinent identified by a book and ask themselves: "Does the complexity of India correspond to the complexity of the poem? And vice-versa?" But to find an answer they had to see India.