So Why the Mahābhārata?

The Mahābhārata has been on my list of a thousand books that I want to read before I die. This list is constantly in flux as I read some works and move on to others. Thus far, I have not attempted to read the entire Mahābhārata. I find the sheer number of subjects with which one needs to be conversant in order to get the most out this work a bit daunting. If you're an expert, please feel free to join. If you're like I am, join also and we can feel daunted in good company.

I haven't attempted to read the whole thing either. I've recently begun the tenth book, the Sauptikaparvan (available from Penguin, translated by W.J. Johnson), but have really only just begun. And I've read the Bhagavad Gita.

I've found just getting insight into the different translations daunting. NYU has a project now to translate the Bharata: http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/index.php , and the University of Chicago has picked up a long-dormant project, but I'd appreciate any insight people have into particular translations. Both translations are incomplete. The complete ones seem to be either dusty old versions or a recent verse translation by P. Lal, which I don't know much about either.

Do we want to organize this more methodically, and start somewhere, or just set up threads for the different books people are starting to read and go from there?

As to why the Mahabharata (I've got to figure out how to do the diacriticals!), I'm copying over a post from the Reading Globally group:

A while ago, I had the pleasure of getting a tour of a local museum's South Asian collection with the curator and a group of Indian entrepreneurs. Almost every work harkened back to the Mahabharata in some way shape or form, and everyone but me was well versed in it. It's one of those works, like Genji in Japan or the Odyssey in Frangia, that you need as a base to get so much of later art and literature.

It's a daunting task, to be sure. I've dipped into it, but have never really taken the plunge. The Gita is one of my favorite spiritual books. I will have to look up the portion mentioned in #2.

Back in the 90's, Peter Brook did an excellent 6 or 8 hour television adaptation of the Mahabharata.

I looked for a good review of Brook's work, and came up with a number of blistering reviews, usually from Indian sources, and a number of glowing, falling over-themselves reviews, usually from the West. A good review that covers both sides and raises a lot of interesting questions is here: http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1990/10/1990-10-02.shtml

Brooks was great. Perhaps, we might pick one book at a time, collect a short working bibliography for that text that covers religious, linguistic, philosophical, historical, and artistic contexts. Each of us could commit to reading one of the secondary sources and fill in the group with our insights. I've got a few acquaintances/colleagues/friends who are comparative religion experts. I can shoot them an e-mail asking for recommendations.

I have an old friend who has done some Sanskrit-English translation; I'm actually seeing him at the end of the month and will pick his brain.

5
Thanks for the interesting article. I remember the production, in addition to being multi-racial, being staged almost like a ballet.

While perhaps making the epic more accessible to those of us in the west, I can understand a certain consternation among Indians with what is essentially a deconstruction of the national epic.

I may still have my old VHS tapes of the production - might be a good idea to bring them out again.

Count me among the daunted. I've been interested ever since seeing the Brook version, but can't see where I'd ever have time this side of retirement for such a huge work. Would need not just a translation, but annotations, or I'd miss allusions everywhere.

I have an Indian friend (long time in the US) who liked the three-hour movie version of the Brook when we saw it. The DVD version I have runs 6 hours, and I understand there's a version done by Indian television some years back that runs 150 hours, in episodes.

I think this is one of those projects that you take on over a long period, without any feeling that it will ever be done. We're dealing with a work longer than the entire Bible. I think the way to attack it is to think of it more like a reading of "18th Century English Novels" - we may all read some, few if any will read all, but there is enough to talk about within the field as a whole.

If anyone else wants to start reading part of it together, I will happily pick up and read any book within the Mahabharata with them; as I noted above, I am reading the Sauptikaparvan right now, which is the story of the great battle and the use of a weapond of mass destruction ("I am the destroyer of worlds"...) if anyone wants to join me. I just started (and, indeed, not going fast yet since I've been side-tracked on a couple other reads).

Okay,

Let's start with the Sauptikaparvan. I've ordered a copy.

A_musing #10,

Do you mean the W. J. Johnson translation specifically? Does anyone know anything about the
Kisari Mohan Ganguli translation that Project Gutenberg has?

Here's what Wikipedia says about it: "Until these three projects Clay Sanskrit, Chicago, Lal are available in full, the only available complete English translations remain the Victorian prose versions by Kisari Mohan Ganguli,24 published between 1883 and 1896 (Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers) and by M. N. Dutt (Motilal Banarsidass Publishers). Most critics consider the translation by Ganguli to be faithful to the original text. The complete text of Ganguli's translation is available online (see External Links)."

I don't know enough about the different versions to have a preference - while I'm reading the W.J. Johnson, I think different versions can often give different insights (as long as a translation is not just bad) and so reading different versions simultaneously may help us all.

Guys, please do check out `Mahabharata: An Inquiry Into the Human Condition' by Badrinath Chaturvedi...Abs must read scholarly piece of work for those who have read or are planning to read the Mahabharata...

I'm with the others who have dipped into the book but feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the undertaking. I feel like I'd need a university course to give me some guidance and direction. Every time I start reading the book, I lose heart.

If others are actually reading through it, let me know and I might just try to pick it up again.

Some of us are beginning with the Sauptikaparvan, and there is another thread opening the discussing. Just starting now!

I will look for the Chaturvedi. (FYI, the name, Chaturvedi, means "speaker of the vedas", an old Brahmin name).

Why? Because (and I LOVE this definitive quote):

"Mightier than any mountain, the Mahabharata stands alone"

- Haven O'More (yogin, poet, THE book collector)

Join us benwaugh. I started the group hoping at least one lonesome Sanskrit scholar would join us and make plain the way. By the way, I love the quotation.

14> mashed, the book is not available new from BN.COM although they show used copies available from $34.66. Can you tell us more about it?

Robert

Interestingly, the name chaturvedi (the author in #14) is an old Brahmin name meaning reciter of the vedas. A bit of trivia learned along the way....

I find it fascinating that the word "chatter" is thought to be echoic in English, yet has a near-equivalent in Sanskrit.

What makes the quote so ponderable, at least for me, is that I have always thought of mountains as more in the way of large and inert obstructions. So what is he saying about the Mahabharata? Perhaps that is best answered by an enigma:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3AhxmkxhkM

I'm about two thirds into book 1 in P. Lāl's translation and thought I'd post some superficial observations, since there are so few comments around about it.

There are lots of typognaphical crrors, most irritatingly missing periods and periods erroneously inserted mid-sentence at ends of lines or slokas that sometimes are very confusing. It's a bit of a shame, since Lāl's language itself flows very well aside from the occasional hyphenated-before-the-noun adjective construction which I guess is just fussy fidelity to original word order. I hope the typesetting got more solid with later volumes because otherwise I'm very happy reading the translation. Ganguli made my head hurt.

As far as my motivation behind this undertaking goes—I have a birds-eye view and fond memory of the work from Rajagopalachari's retelling which is readily available in Finnish translation. Now I'm after the sprawl outside the storyline, the fabric of mythology and digressions only fleetingly glimpsed at in that short abrigdement. I'm determined to read through the Book of the Forest in the near future, but probably not beyond unless I get a new kick to follow the actual plot. I have already noticed that my understanding of various characters (notably Drona and his affection to Arjuna) was gravely incomplete when I read Rajagopalachari and I couldn't possibly have understood everything that the battle meant.

Just adding another note about the typesetting of the Lāl translation, lest the previous one needlessly scare people away—in the second volume it is of high quality and the errata of the first are acknowledged.

My first introduction to the Mahabharata was Peter Brook's amazing 9 hour film version of his play. There is a book about the making of this film "The Mahabharata: Peter Brook's Epic in the Making". I had read the Bhagavad-Gita before but I was inspired by the film to look for an English language translation to read. Unable to find a translation at the time, I initially read William Buck's retelling which further inspired me to want to read the real thing.

It was in the introduction to this book that I found that Buck had based his interpretation on a translation published by Pratap Chandra Roy and so this was the version I wanted to read.

This is where my confusion began. Searching for this version on various online book shops, there were always a few volumes of the Mahabharata "translated" by Pratap Chandra Roy but never a complete set. I gave up eventually and ordered the full Kisari Mohan Ganguli translation of Mahabharata from Munshiram Manoharlal.

It is in the publisher's preface to this work (1998) that my confusion is resolved. The translation published by Pratap Chandra Roy was originally serially released as each section was completed. To avoid scholarly controversy which had scuttled previous attempts at a full translation, the name of the translator (or translators) was not released until the translation was completed. The translator was Kisari Mohan Ganguli.

However, another Culcutta publisher published a version using copies of the original releases and siting Pratap Chandra Roy as the translator. It must be this version that appears rarely and incompletely in online book stores.

So in the end, I do have the version that William Buck used i.e. the Kisari Mohan Ganguli translation originally published by Pratap Chandra Roy.

I was up to volume 6 (of 12) when I moved house and now spend 15 minutes on the trains to work instead of 90 minutes previously (I live in Sydney Australia but used to live in Wollongong and commute). That was 3 years ago and I still have not got back to reading Mahabharata without so much reading time on my hands. I am going to start on it again soon.

I remember however that one of the books had many more footnotes than the others and the style was quite different to the others. To thicken the plot, I do believe that not ALL of the "Ganguli" translation was actually translated by him.

I am currently reading William Bucks retelling of Ramayana which I am enjoying very much but not nearly as much as C. Rajagopalachari's version which frequently moved me to tears of joy.

I just learned that P. Lāl has died at 81 last month, leaving his translation incomplete.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/p-lal-obituary

Thanks - it looks like he had a very interesting life.

Better news: there is apparently a new unabridged prose translation in the pipeline, by Bibek Debroy and published by Penguin India. The first two volumes were published last year.

http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/category/Non_Fiction/Mahabharata_Vol_2_97801431...

I like the cover art. Vol. 2 hardcover is $45 at Amazon but vol. 1 is "currently unavailable".