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The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Translated into English Prose
by Sir Walter Scott
Category: History
Status: Available
Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg
About This Book
"The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Translated into English Prose" by Kisari Mohan Ganguli is an epic narrative that combines mythology, philosophy, and ancient Indian culture, with its translation completed during the late 19th century. This monumental work, regarded as one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient Indian literature, encapsulates the story of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and Pandava princes, with an emphasis on profound moral and ethical dilemmas. The opening of "The Mahabharata" introduces the context and highlights the significance of the epic within Hindu tradition. It begins with Sauti, who is surrounded by sages, recounting the key themes and stories of the epic as passed down by the sage Vyasa. Sauti sets the stage for the retelling of these sacred tales, which include the birth of key characters, divine interventions, and the conflicts that arise between the royal families of the Kauravas and Pandavas. The initial chapters establish a reflective tone on themes of duty, morality, and the cyclical nature of life and death, foreshadowing the epic's intricate exploration of these subjects. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About This Edition
This edition of The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Translated into English Prose by Sir Walter Scott is catalogued on Libreya under History and runs approximately 230,889 words — about 1154 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.
On Libreya, the text has been carefully formatted for comfortable reading on any screen — with consistent chapter navigation, adjustable font sizes, and four reading themes: light, sepia, dark, and night mode. Your reading position is saved automatically when you sign in, so you can pick up exactly where you left off across any device. The original text has not been altered in any way; what you read here is the same work as it appeared in its original published form.
About Classic Historical Writing
Classical historical writing is both a source of information and a form of literature in its own right, and the best historical texts deserve to be read as both. The great historians of antiquity — Thucydides, Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus — were also artists, shaping their accounts of wars, cities, and empires with conscious craft and a clear point of view. Reading these texts is to experience history not as a dry catalogue of dates and events but as a narrative shaped by interpretation, rhetoric, and the perspective of the person recording it. Later historical works — from Gibbon's monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the first-hand accounts of explorers, soldiers, and statesmen — occupy the fertile territory between literature and scholarship, offering information that is inseparable from the particular mind that observed and recorded it. Classic historical texts are invaluable as primary sources: they reveal not only what happened, but how people at the time understood what was happening around them.
