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A Brief Description of the Mahabharata
The Mahabharata has existed
in various forms for well over two thousand years:
- First,
starting in the middle of the first millennium BCE, it existed in the form
of popular stories of Gods, kings, and seers retained, retold, and
improved by priests living in shrines, ascetics living in retreats or
wandering about, and by traveling bards, minstrels, dance-troupes, etc.
- Later,
after about 350 CE, it came to be a unified, sacred text of 100,000
stanzas written in Sanskrit, distributed throughout India by
kings and wealthy patrons, and declaimed from temples.
- Even
after it became a famous Sanskrit writing it continued to exist in various
performance media in many different local genres of dance and theater
throughout India and
then Southeast Asia.
- Finally,
it came to exist, in numerous literary and popular transformations in many
of the non-Sanskrit vernacular languages of India
and Southeast Asia, which (with the
exception of Tamil, a language that had developed a classical literature
in the first millennium BCE) began developing recorded literatures shortly
after 1000 CE.
The Mahabharata was one of
the two most important factors that created the "Hindu" culture of
India (the other was the other all-India epic, the Ramayana, pronounced
approximately as Raa-MEYE-a-na), and the Mahabharata
and Ramayana still exert tremendous cultural influence throughout India
and Southeast Asia.
But the historical importance of the Mahabharata
is not the main reason to read the Mahabharata. Quite simply, the Mahabharata
is a powerful and amazing text that inspires awe and wonder. It presents
sweeping visions of the cosmos and humanity and intriguing and frightening
glimpses of divinity in an ancient narrative that is accessible, interesting,
and compelling for anyone willing to learn the basic themes of India's
culture. The Mahabharata definitely is one of those creations of
human language and spirit that has traveled far beyond the place of its
original creation and will eventually take its rightful place on the highest
shelf of world literature beside Homer's epics,
the Greek tragedies, the Bible, Shakespeare, and similarly transcendent works.
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Copyright © 1999-2009 James L. Fitzgerald
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