MAHABHARATA

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

This is not a reprint but a carefully revised new edition and I once again record my gratitude for the loving care with which Sri Navaratna Rama Rao has helped to bring this about. This book is as much his handiwork as mine, so far as the difficult and delicate task of translation goes.

In most translations, as Sit Walter Scott once humorously remarked, the noble transmutation is from gold into lead. If this has not happened in this case, the credit is due to my friend Sri Navaratna Rama Rao.

The realities of life are idealised by genius and given the form that makes drama, poetry or great prose. Since literature is closely related to life, so long as the human family is divided into nations, literature cannot escape the effects of such division.

But the highest literature transcends regionalism and through it, when we are properly attuned, we realise the essential oneness of the human family. The Mahabharata is of this class. Itbelongs to the world and not only to India. To the people of India, indeed, this epic has been an unfailing and perennial source of spiritual strength. Learnt at the mother's knee with reverence and love, it has inspired great men to heroic deeds as well as enabled the humble to f-ice their trials with fortitude and faith.

The Mahabharata was composed many thousand years ago, But generations of gifted reciters have added to Vyasa's original a great mass of material. All the floating literature that was thought to be worth preserving, historical, geographical, legendary political, theological and philosophical, of nearly thirty centuries, found a place in it.  

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