Mahabharata, Epic of the Bharatas

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Translator’s Epilogue
[370] Ancient India, like ancient Greece, boasts of two great Epics. One of them,
the Maha-bharata, relates to a great war in which all the warlike races of
Northern India took a share, and may therefore be compared to the Iliad. The
other, the Ramayana, relates mainly to the adventures of its hero, banished from
his country and wandering for long years in the wildernesses of Southern India,
and may therefore be compared to the Odyssey. It is the first of these two Epics,
the Iliad of Ancient India, which is the subject of the foregoing pages.
The great war which is the subject of this Epic is believed to have been fought in
the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ. For generations and centuries
after the war its main incidents must have been sung by bards and minstrels in
the courts of Northern India. The war thus became the centre of a cycle of
legends, songs, and poems in ancient India, even as Charlemagne and Arthur
became the centres of legends in mediaeval Europe. And then, probably under
the direction of some enlightened king, the vast mass of legends and poetry,
accumulated during centuries, was cast in a narrative form and formed the Epic
of the Great Bharata nation, and therefore called the Maha-bharata. The real
facts of the war had been obliterated by age, legendary heroes had become the
principal actors, and, as is invariably the case in India, the thread of a high
moral purpose, of the triumph of virtue and the subjugation of vice, was woven
into the fabric of the great Epic.
We should have been thankful if this Epic, as it was thus originally put together
some centuries before the Christian era, had been preserved to us. But this was
not to be. The Epic became so popular that it went on growing with the growth
of centuries. Every generation of poets had something to add; every distant [371]
nation in Northern India was anxious to interpolate some account of its deeds in
the old record of the international war; every preacher of a new creed desired to
have in the old Epic some sanction for the new truths he inculcated. Passages
from legal and moral codes were incorporated in the work which appealed to
the nation much more effectively than dry codes; and rules about the different
castes and about the different stages of the human life were included for the
same purpose. All the floating mass of tales, traditions, legends, and myths, for
which ancient India was famous, found a shelter under the expanding wings of
this wonderful Epic; and as Krishna worship became the prevailing religion of
India after the decay of Buddhism, the old Epic caught the complexion of the
times, and Krishna-cult is its dominating religious idea in its present shape. It is
thus that the work went on growing for a thousand years after it was first
compiled and put together in the form of an Epic; until the crystal rill of the
Epic itself was all but lost in an unending morass of religious and didactic
episodes, legends, tales, and traditions.
When the mischief had been done, and the Epic had nearly assumed its present
proportions, a few centuries after Christ according to the late Dr. Bühler, an