Reading Suggestions for Getting Started

A Short Introductory Overview by Barend A. van Nooten

A Comprehensive Guide to the Mahabharata (and the Ramayana) and Scholarship on them by John Brockington

A One-Volume Retelling of the Story by C. V. Narasimhan

A Dramatic Adaptation by Jean-Claude Carriere and Peter Brook

The Critical Edition of the Sanskrit Text from the Bhandarkar Institute in Poona, India

The Complete Text of the Critical Edition in Modern English (in progress) by J. A. B. van Buitenen, et. al.

The Northern Indian Popular Sanskrit Text with the Main Popular Commentary: The Nilakantha Mahabharata

The Complete Text of the Popular Northern Version in Antiquated English by M. Ganguli (the "P. C. Roy transl")

The Complete, Downloadable, Digitized Mahabharata of John Smith, based on the work of M. Tokunaga

An Index to the Names in the Mahabharata by S. Sorenson

A Short Introductory Overview: The Mahabharata Attributed to Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa by Barend A. van Nooten (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971). This volume, one in the Twayne's World Authors Series, provides a well informed but non-technical overview of the Mahabharata by an emeritus Professor of Sanskrit at the University of California at Berkeley. It contains a detailed, book-by-book summary of the story, discussions of the religious, philosophical, and ethical components of the text, and an outline of the Mahabharata's influence since the Eighteenth Century. The author's text is one hundred twenty pages long and is followed by fourteen pages of notes and references. It is accompanied by a good introductory bibliography of six pages, a short glossary of character names and places, and an index.

A Comprehensive Guide to the Mahabharata (and the Ramayana) and Scholarship on them: The Sanskrit Epics, by John Brockington (Leiden: Brill, 1998). An up to date, general survey of the history of the two Sanskrit epics and the scholarship upon them written by Professor John Brockington, Head of the Department of Sanskrit at the University of Edinburgh. This comprehensive treatment has a general introduction that discusses both epics in the context of ancient Vedic literature and ancient bardic institutions and recapitulates the plot of each epic. It then devotes 272 pages in four chapters to the Mahabharata and 120 pages in three chapters to the Ramayana. There is a chapter in between the treatements of the two epics on the Harivamsa (known in Indian tradition as an appendix of the Mahabharata, this work focuses upon the life of Krishna Vasudeva), and the tenth and final chapter of the book is a general discussion of the interrelationship of the two epics, their influence on later literature, and their place in world culture. There is an extensive bibliography of thirty-three pages, a twelve-page index of passages cited, and a twenty-six page general index.

A One Volume Retelling of the Story:The Mahabharata: An English Version Based on Selected Verses by Chakravarthi V. Narasimhan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). "A straightforward narrative account of the main theme of the epic" (from the Preface, p. vii), this version selects about four and one-half percent of the Critical Edition's 74,900 couplets that present the basic story and nothing else. It is thus a rather dry and oversimplified version of the Mahabharata, but it is a useful recapitulation of the bare bones of the story in two hundred and sixteen pages. It contains a listing of the names of the characters, a list of the alternative names of the main characters, and an index to the passages in Narasimhan's source texts (the Critical Edition of Poona for Books One through Eight, the P. C. Roy edition for Books Nine through Eighteen).

A Dramatic Adaptation: The Mahabharata: A Play Based Upon the Indian Classic Epic by Jean-Claude Carriere; translated from the French by Peter Brook (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1987). The script which served as the basis for Peter Brook's stage and film presentations of the Mahabharata. A rendition of the epic's action which is not based immediately upon the Sanskrit text (neither Carriere nor Brook is a Sanskritist), but which is more thematically nuanced and pointed than Narasimhan's condensation. This version reproduces many of the small, symbolic details of the original and thus requires closer attention than a broader retelling, but that fact also makes it an interesting, ambitious attempt to represent the significance of the epic beyond its surface narrative. Carriere sees the central theme of the epic to be ". . . a threat: we live in a time of destruction--everything points in the same direction. Can this destruction be avoided?" (Introduction, p. ix), and his play represents that theme consistently. I myself do not agree with this interpretation of the Mahabharata, but this is an authentic contemporary Western reading and adaptation of the text.

The Critical Edition of the Sanskrit Text:The Mahabharata for the First Time Critically Edited, 19 vols. (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 1933-1966), edited by V. S. Sukthankar, S. K. Belvalkar, and P. L. Vaidya, general editors, and Franklin Edgerton, Raghu Vira, S. K. De, R. N. Dandekar, H. D. Velankar, V. G. Paranjpe, and R. D. Karmarkar. A massive editorial project which recorded the readings of hundreds of manuscripts and other forms of testimony from all over the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia. Begun in 1919 at the Bhandarkar Institute in Poona, Maharashtra, this edition was fundamentally shaped and guided by Sukthankar, who laid out his editorial map in his brilliant Prolegomena to the first volume of the edition. The project was controversial from the beginning: Several scholars have argued that the Mahabharata textual tradition is too complex, too rooted in living, oral traditions, to be amenable to edition on the basis of principles developed in the more simply literary traditions of Western texts. These scholars judge the Poona text to be an unwarranted simplification of the tradition that has produced an artificial text that never existed for anyone at any time in the past. At the same time the Poona edition (though only in its complete version, that is, with its full apparatus) makes available not only the editorially determined critical text, but all the variants to that text and all the passages that were judged to be additions to the putative original text. This text is the basis of most contemporary Western scholarship on the Mahabharata, but at the same time few such scholars, if any, take the critical edition simply at face value.

The Complete Text of the Critical Edition in Modern English (in progress): The Mahabharata, edited and translated by J. A. B. van Buitenen, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973-78). These three volumes comprise the first five books of the epic, taking the narrative up the point that the great war is about to begin. Van Buitenen translated the Poona text into contemporary English prose (though he rendered the parts of the Sanskrit text that occurred in the tristubh meter with English verse), with all the major sections of the text preceded by short, chapter by chapter summaries, and followed by brief annotations. His translation also includes a brief glossary of the names of characters and each volume contains an index of names. I and David Gitomer of DePaul University and Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago are in the process of completing this translation. Professor Gitomer is working on the war books of the epic, Books Six through Ten; I am translating the lamentation of Book Eleven (the Book of the Women) and the didactic collections of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Books, and Professor Doniger is translating the five concluding books, Books Fourteen through Eighteen. Volume Seven of the sequel, my translation of the Eleventh Book (the Book of the Women) and the first one hundred and sixty-seven chapters of the Twelfth Book (the Book of Peace), is being edited for publication and should be availabe to the public by late in 2000 or early in 2001. Volume Four (comprising Book Six, the Bhisma [pronounced Bheeshma] Parvan) should follow that by a short interval and Volume Eight (comprising the second half of the Twelfth Book, the collection of sixty-three texts offering "Instructions on Absolute Freedom [moksha]") will follow in three years.

The Northern Indian Popular Sanskrit Text with the Main Popular Commentary: Srimanmahabharatam with the Bharatabhavadipa of Nilakantha, 8 vols. (including the Harivamsa), (Poona: Citrashala Press, 1929-1936). One of the handiest published version of the vulgate text with Nilakantha's often copious commentary. Though his explanations are sometimes formulaic or deductive and sometimes tendentious or even inconsistent, Nilakantha was a learned scholar who has been maligned without warrant in the past and whose understandings underlie more than a little of what is in the English language renderings of the epic.

The Complete Text of the Popular Northern Version in Antiquated English: The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Translated into English Prose from the Original Sanskrit Text, by K. M. Ganguli, translator and P. C. Roy, sponsor and publisher, 11 vols. (Calcutta: Bharata Press, 1884-1896). An informed, serious, and scholarly translation (though far from perfect and completely reliable) of an eclectic mix of the Popular Version of Neelakantha and the Calcutta version of the text. Ganguli's original edition (unlike many, though not all, of its reprints) contained indications of the individual verses translated and also thoughtful footnotes that pointed out Ganguli's differences with the commentator Neelakantha and with the authors of the Bengali translation.

The Complete, Downloadable, Digitized Mahabharata: The Electronic Text of the Mahabharata edited by Professor John Smith of Cambridge University is available at http://bombay.oriental.cam.ac.uk/john/mahabharata/statement.html. This text (initially released in March, 1999) is a corrected and enhanced form of the first electronic version of the Mahabharata (see below) carried out by Professor Smith with the aid of a team of scholars at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Poona, India (the home of the critical edition of the Mahabharata). The Smith text is available for PC, Macintosh, and Unix platforms and in different font-character encodings (including CSX+, a font developed by Professor Smith, which allows the completely correct display of Romanized Sanskrit). The original electronic text of the Mahabharata is The Machine-readable Text of the Mahaabhaarata: Based on the Poona Critical Edition, by Professor Muneo Tokunaga, First revised version (V1), September, 1994; Upgrade Version (1.1), October, 1996, produced by Mrs. Mizue Sugita (Kyoto: ftp://ccftp.kyoto-su.ac.jp/pub/doc/sanskrit, 1996). Professor Tokunaga accomplished the stupendous task of entering the entire Mahabharata (and the Ramayana as well!) into ASCII format in a specially devised transliteration and formatting scheme. Professor Tokunaga's text is the basis of the improved and corrected Smith text (see above) and most users should now use that electronic version of the Mahabharata.

An Index to the Names in the Mahabharata: An Index to the Names in the Mahabharata with Short Explanations and a Concordance to the Bombay and Calcutta Editions and P. C. Roy's Translation, by Soren Sorensen (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904-1925; reprinted, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1963). Though cumbersome to use in connection with the critical edition, an indispensable reference work for anyone wishing to study the Mahabharata in addition to reading it. All proper names are given with a complete listing of the places of their occurrence. It also contains, under the names of the 100 sub-parvans, very brief, chapter by chapter summaries of the contents of the sub-parvans.

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A Brief Description of the Mahabharata

The Story of the Mahabharata

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