The Mahabharata Book I.: The Book Of The Beginning

by Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Kisari Mohan Ganguli, Bhakta Jim (Editor)

The Mahabharata is the greatest epic of India. Anyone who has studied the Bhagavad Gita, which represents only 700 verses from the Mahabharata (out of 200,000 total) must be interested in reading the whole book. When I was a Hare Krishna devotee I certainly wished I could do that.

Several summaries of the Mahabharata exist, but it is impossible to condense eighteen books into one without omitting anything worthwhile. The only complete English translation of the book is this one, by Kisari Mohan Ganguli.

These volumes are based on a text file scanned at sacred-texts.com, 2003, and proofed at Distributed Proofing, Juliet Sutherland, Project Manager. Additional proofing and formatting of the text file was done at sacred-texts.com, by J. B. Hare.

If you have a Kindle you can read this translation without cost by downloading it from http://www.gutenberg.org/. Amazon.com also has their own versions of these books which you may download and read for free.

While reading these free e-books I decided that I really wanted a bound and printed version. I felt this book deserved to be back in print, so I decided to prepare it for publishing using Create Space and offer it for sale at the lowest possible price.

I have moved the footnotes in these volumes (hundreds of them) from the end of the book back to the bottoms of the pages for easier reading. I have replaced archaic words like “behoveth” with “behooves”, etc., where it was possible to do so without rewriting the sentences where they appear. I have also fixed a few variant spellings, and replaced obscure words like "welkins" and "horripliated" with more common ones. Finally, the original work did not translate the titles of the individual books, so I have used the names found on Wikipedia. Thus Adi Parva in the original becomes The Book Of The Beginning.

The illustrations are from a Hindi translation of the Mahabharata that has also fallen into the public domain. (http://openlibrary.org/books/OL233650....) I have used page images provided at archive.org and have cleaned them up using The GIMP software. The results speak for themselves. When all the volumes are published (probably twelve or so) there will be over 300 full page illustrations.

In short, I have spared no effort to make this the most complete, most readable, and most attractive edition of the Mahabharata in English.

While I no longer practice the Vaishnava religion I hope that these books will meet with the approval of my former godbrothers and godsisters. I do not believe that they will find anything offensive in them.

BHAKTA JIM

644 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 19, 2013

About the author

Krishna Dvaipāyana Vyāsa, also known as Vyāsa or Veda-Vyāsa (वेदव्यास, the one who classified the Vedas into four parts) is a central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions. He is traditonally regarded as the author of the Mahābhārata, although it is also widely held that he only composed the core of the epic, the Bhārata. A significant portion of the epic later was only added in later centuries, which then came to be known as the Mahābhārata. The date of composition of this epic is not known - It was definitvely part of the traditions in Indian subcontinent at the time Gautam Buddha (~500 BCE) which would suggest it having been already around for atleast a few centuries. It was chiefy put down in the written form only somewhere between 300 BCE to 300 CE.

As the name would suggest, Vyāsa is believed to have categorised the primordial single Veda into its four canonical collections. He is also considered to be the scribe of Purānās, ancient Hindu texts eulogizing various deities, primarily the divine Trimurti God in Hinduism through divine stories.

Reviews

[Bhakta Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mahabharata may be the world's longest book. It can be considered one of the important scriptures of Hinduism, but it is much more than that. It is an epic in every sense of the word, and unlike other scriptures it is written by someone who knows how to tell a story.

This is not to say it is an easy book to read. The translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli uses a lot of archaic language, like saying behoveth instead of behooves, seemeth instead of seems, eleemosynary instead of begging, welkin instead of sky, and kine instead of cows. In this edition (which I prepared for publication myself), I fix most of that. You'll still be reading what Ganguli wrote, but with "behooves" where Ganguli wrote "behoveth", etc. It helps a lot.

There are other issues that my edition does not address, like the fact that many characters go by multiple names and the author like to mix them up. The sections involving Krishna and Arjuna are difficult because they both have lots of alternate names and you need to use context to figure out who is meant. The princess Draupadi is also named Krishna (because of her dark skin) and that name is used for her at least half the time, but not (so far) when Krishna Himself is present.

There are good summaries of the whole epic available, and you might want to read one of them before reading this. That said, reading the whole thing does have its rewards, and should be especially interesting for Krishna devotees. You'll find out about the second wife of Arjuna (Subhadra is actually his third) that you never heard about, and you'll read the story of a sage who was denied entrance into heaven because he had no sons, so he transforms himself into a bird and sires children on a female bird (to get children as quickly as possible).

Anyone who enjoys a good fantasy story should also enjoy this.