MAHABHARATA
THE GREAT INDIAN EPIC
“There are three gates to self-destruction and hell: Lust, Anger & Greed.”
- Lord Krishna
The Mahabharata is a timeless story. The name 'Mahabharata' means 'great saga of the Bharatas,' the Bharatas being the familial dynasty at the heart of the story. Nevertheless, in many modern Indian contexts, the term 'Mahabharata' refers to a big contention. The epic's narrative climax is warfare. The war that resolves the inheritance disagreement between the Pandavas and the Kauravas engulfs a large portion of the earth. Along with Indian subcontinental peoples, Greeks, Persians, and Chinese deployed armies to stand and fall in battle.
The Mahabharata is one of two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, followed by the Ramayana. With almost 74,000 lines plus extensive prose portions, or roughly 1.8 million words in total, it is the world's largest epic poem and uninterrupted recitation would take close to two weeks. It is nearly seven times the length of the combined Iliad and Odyssey and fifteen times the length of the Christian Bible. The plot spans several generations, and the language occasionally follows side stories for the duration of a modern novel. Despite its narrative breadth and numerous asides, the Mahabharata can be correctly described as a collection of narratives about vice.
This epic was initially penned down in Sanskrit, ancient India's principal literary language, and attributed to a poet named Vyasa about 2,000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years. The epic attempted to document and consequently condemn a new type of ruthless politics permitted by the transition from a clan-based to a state-based civilization in northern India. The ancient Indian epic's narrative revolves around corrosive politics, wicked men, and cruelty. In this grim story, things get progressively worse until the Kali Yuga, an era of unimaginable wickedness, arrives. According to the Mahabharata, we are currently living in the horrifying Kali age, which will continue to wreak new atrocities on us until the end of the planet.
Within the midst of the characters' immoral activities, the Mahabharata purports to demonstrate dharma or good conduct - a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thinking. However, the distinction between virtue and vice, dharma, and adharma, is frequently blurred. The bad guys are occasionally more ethical than the good guys, who are also flawed. The restrictions of society and politics imprison everyone in the epic's polychromatic conscience.
