LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

The Mahabharata, although neither the greatest nor the richest masterpiece of the secular literature of India, is at the same time its most considerable and important body of poetry. Being so, it is the pivot on which the history of Sanskrit literature and incidentally the history of Aryan civilisation in India, must perforce turn.2

      Sri Aurobindo

Whether we realize it nor not, it remains a fact that we in India still stand under the spell of the Mahābhārata. There is many a different strand that is woven in the thread of our civilization, reaching back into hoary antiquity. Amidst the deepest of them there is more than one that is drawn originally from the ancient Bhāratavarṣa and the Sanskrit literature. And well in the centre of this vast pile of Sanskrit literature stands this monumental book of divine inspiration, unapproachable and far removed from possibilities of human competition.3

      V.S. Sukthankar

Vyasa’s epic is a mirror in which the Indian sees himself undeceived.4

      P. Lal

With the Greeks the dominant passion was the conscious quest of ideal beauty: with the Indians it has invariably been the quest of ideal life.5

      V.S. Sukthankar

      The Mahābhārata is one of the most impressive creations of the Indian mind. If it cannot compare with the Upaniṣads in philosophic depth, with Kālidāsa’s poetry in refinement and splendour, it yet has a quality of its own and is unequalled in its comprehensiveness, the mass of material offered and the variety of subjects discussed – ranging from history, philosophy and law to yoga, spirituality and psychology.

      Indeed, the volume of knowledge expounded in this epic is so immense that most critics have rightly assumed that it can hardly be the product of a single brain howsoever gifted. Some great scholars of the Mahābhārata such as a modern translator of the text, J.A.B. van Buitenen, and India’s great yogi-poet Sri Aurobindo, agree that the Mahābhārata was originally a smaller epic of about 24,000 verses, and that this nucleus was subsequently enhanced by an endless series of later additions made by authors who deemed Vyāsa’s genial creation a fit vehicle for their own less inspired poetic expressions, philosophic ideas, dogmatic teachings and religious beliefs.

      If this nucleus has had the power to attract such a mass of material which exceeds three to four times the volume of its original body, then this fact speaks for itself. Whilst some popular editions of the epic contain up to 100,000 stanzas, the Critical Edition prepared by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, confines itself to about 73,900 couplets, presented by the editors as the “constituted text” which does not claim to be the nucleus, but the most authentic text established on the basis of a comparison of all important recensions and manuscripts.

Even while the Critical Edition, which has been used for this study, presents an excellent tool for any scholar of the epic, we are still faced with the difficulty of separating – like the mythical swans of Indian poets – Vyāsa’s milk from the water of the plagiators. Only a poetic genius like Sri Aurobindo could confidently propose to disengage the nucleus on the basis of an analysis of the poetic quality of the verses.6 Unfortunately, he could not find time to work out this idea and provide the complete text as he believed it to be the original.

As for ourselves, we choose a different approach, focussing on texts which appear to have a high quality from the point of view of content. Approaching the epic with an open mind, we try to learn as much as possible about traditional Indian culture and spirituality, great personalities and important principles governing the life of those days. In fact, the Mahābhārata with its boundless wealth and manifold content is an ideal field for such an approach. “Whatever is here on dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa, is also found elsewhere. But what is not here, is found nowhere else,” says the epic on itself.7 Anyone who has gone through its complete text, will probably agree that this claim, though slightly exaggerated, has some truth in it.