MAHABHARATA CONDENSED INTO ENGLISH ... - Mandhata Global
MAHABHARATA CONDENSED INTO ENGLISH ... - Mandhata Global
MAHABHARATA CONDENSED INTO ENGLISH ... - Mandhata Global
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principal actors, and, as is invariably the case in India, the thread of a high moral purpose,<br />
of the triumph of virtue and the subjugation of vice, was woven into the fabric of the<br />
great Epic.<br />
We should have been thankful if this Epic, as it was thus originally put together some<br />
centuries before the Christian era, had been preserved to us. But this was not to be. The<br />
Epic became so popular that it went on growing with the growth of centuries. Every<br />
generation of poets had something to add; every distant nation in Northern India was<br />
anxious to interpolate some account of its deeds in the old record of the international war;<br />
every preacher of a new creed desired to have in the old Epic some sanction for the new<br />
truths he inculcated. Passages from legal and moral codes were incorporated in the work<br />
which appealed to the nation much more effectively than dry codes; and rules about the<br />
different castes and about the different stages of the human life were included for the<br />
same purpose. All the floating mass of tales, traditions, legends, and myths, for which<br />
ancient India was famous, found a shelter under the expanding wings of this wonderful<br />
Epic; and as Krishna-worship became the prevailing religion of India after the decay of<br />
Buddhism, the old Epic caught the complexion of the times, and Krishna-cult is its<br />
dominating religious idea in its present shape. It is thus that the work went on growing<br />
for a thousand years after it was first compiled and put together in the form of an Epic;<br />
until the crystal rill of the Epic itself was all but lost in an unending morass of religious<br />
and didactic episodes, legends, tales, and traditions.<br />
When the mischief had been done, and the Epic had nearly assumed its present<br />
proportions, a few centuries after Christ according to the late Dr. Bühler, an attempt was<br />
made to prevent the further expansion of the work. The contents of the Epic were<br />
described in some prefatory verses, and the number of couplets in each Book was stated.<br />
The total number of couplets, according to this metrical preface, is about eighty-five<br />
thousand. But the limit so fixed has been exceeded in still later centuries; further<br />
additions and interpolations have been made; and the Epic as printed and published in<br />
Calcutta in this century contains over ninety thousand couplets, excluding the<br />
Supplement about the Race of Hari.<br />
The modern reader will now understand the reason why this great Epic-the greatest work<br />
of imagination that Asia has produced-has never yet been put before the European reader<br />
in a readable form. A poem of ninety thousand couplets, about seven times the size of the<br />
Iliad and the Odyssey put together, is more than what the average reader can stand; and<br />
the heterogeneous nature of its contents does not add to the interest of the work. If the<br />
religious works of Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, the<br />
commentaries of Blackstone and the ballads of Percy, together with the tractarian<br />
writings of Newman, Keble, and Pusey, were all thrown into blank verse and<br />
incorporated with the Paradise Lost, the reader would scarcely be much to blame if he<br />
failed to appreciate that delectable compound. A complete translation of the Mahabharata<br />
therefore into English verse is neither possible nor desirable, but portions of it<br />
have now and then been placed before English readers by distinguished writers. Dean<br />
Milman's graceful rendering of the story of Nala and Damayanti is still read and<br />
appreciated by a select circle of readers; and Sir Edwin Arnold's beautiful translation of