MAHABHARATA CONDENSED INTO ENGLISH ... - Mandhata Global

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