Mahabharata

by C. Rajagopalachari

The Mahabharata is a great and wonderful story. The sorrows of human life are painted with sublime beauty and rolled out in a grand panorama. Behind the story of errors and sorrows the poet enables us to have a vision of the Transcendent Reality. Thus it is that the Mahabharata, though a story, has come to be a book of dharma. This book, in style and substance, is altogether different from tales and romances. In modern novels, dramas and pictures, exciting scenes are enacted, the hero passes through dangers and difficulties and finally marries a woman whom he loves, or else everything seems to go on happily but suddenly things go wrong and terrible misfortune happens and the curtain drops. This is the art-scheme of ordinary sensational stories. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are quite a different kind of artistic creation. When we read them, our inner being is seized and cleansed, so to say, by being passed alternately through joys and sorrows, and we are finally lifted above both and taken to the Transcendent and Real.