The Mahabharata Essays and Translations

In this volume have been collected all of Sri Aurobindo's independent prose writings on the Mahabharata, as well as his translations of passages from the epic. (Writings on and translations of the Bhagavad Gita are not included.) The principal prose work is an essay written in Baroda entitled, "Notes on the Mahabharata", in which Sri Aurobindo put forward the idea that the original Mahabharata of Vyasa, consisting of some 24,000 verses, could be disengaged from later "enlargements, accretions and additions" by means of a detailed textual study. Three examples of this textual criticism have been found in Sri Aurobindo's notebooks. They are published here under the heading "Detailed Notes." Two of them are appearing here for the first time. A few paragraphs on the Mahabharata from A Defence of Indian Culture have been included as an appendix. These repesent Sri Aurobindo's later thinking on the epic.