The Strange Power of Mahabharata’s Simplified Characters

I recently finished watching an 18-episode Mahabharata series, and something struck me almost immediately. Despite its sweeping scale, despite its dozens of characters, despite the story zig-zagging across kingdoms, curses, vows, and wars — the characters in the show were surprisingly unidimensional.

Each one seemed to be built on a single dominant trait:

Yudhishthira was morality.
Arjuna was skill.
Bhima was strength.
Draupadi was fire.
Duryodhana was anger.
Shakuni was cunning.

And yet… I was completely engrossed.

This puzzled me at first. In most modern storytelling, flat characters kill engagement. If a character doesn’t carry layers, contradictions, or inner conflict — the narrative usually collapses. But here, even when characters were reduced to archetypes, the story held together with astonishing force.

Why?

I realised it’s because Mahabharata’s power doesn’t lie only in psychology. It lies in its design.

The story moves like a web, not a line — constantly expanding outward, gathering histories, grudges, alliances, vows, and moral tensions. Something is always happening. A relationship shifts, an old curse resurfaces, and a political decision explodes into personal grief. The epic generates drama through the structure of events, not just through the inner lives of its characters.

And even when simplified, the characters still carry contradictions built into their fate.
Bhishma’s vow traps him.
Karna’s loyalty ruins him.
Draupadi’s pride both wounds and strengthens her.
Arjuna’s brilliance coexists with doubt.
Duryodhana’s generosity cohabits with ego.

Even in their flattened versions, these contradictions survive. And contradiction is drama.

There is also the matter of cultural memory. For many of us in this part of the world, these characters don’t arrive as strangers. We carry traces of them already — from childhood stories, temple walls, fragments of family conversations. A retelling feels like returning to a familiar room with new light falling on old corners.

But more than anything, watching the series made me realise that Mahabharata remains engaging because its situations hold deep emotional voltage, even when character depth is softened.
A wife shared by five brothers.
A prince denied because of caste.
A king who chooses vows over love.
A mother who seals her son’s fate with her silence.
A teacher forced to betray his favourite pupil.

These are mythic situations — heavy, contradictory, and morally charged. They pull you in whether or not the characters are psychologically layered.

So while the series may not have captured the full interiority of Vyasa’s text — the guilt, shame, ambition, longing, and self-doubt that run underneath — it still carried the architecture of the epic. And that architecture is nearly indestructible.

What years of modern screenwriting teaches us is this:
A story with a strong spine can survive simplified characters.
A story with weak structure cannot survive even the deepest characters.

Mahabharata’s spine is ancient, enormous, and enduring.

Perhaps that’s why every retelling — whether literary, theatrical, or cinematic — still grips us, even when interpreted through the limitations of time, medium, or imagination. The characters may shrink, but the story never does.

— SM