The Mahabharata: Volume 10

Description

The Mahabharata is one of the greatest stories ever told. Though the basic plot is widely known, there is much more to the epic than the dispute between Kouravas and Pandavas that led to the battle in Kurukshetra. It has innumerable sub-plots that accommodate fascinating meanderings and digressions, and it has rarely been translated in full, given its formidable length of 80,000 shlokas or couplets. This magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation of the epic is based on the Critical Edition compiled at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. The final volume ends the instructions of the Anushasana Parva. The horse sacrifice is held, and Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Kunti, Vidura and Sanjaya leave for the forest. Krishna and Balarama die as the Yadavas fight among themselves. The Pandavas leave on the great journey with the famous companion-Dharma disguised as a dog. Refusing to abandon the dog, Yudhishthira goes to heaven in his physical body and sees all the Kurus and the Pandavas are already there. Every conceivable human emotion figures in the Mahabharata, the reason why the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination. In this lucid, nuanced and confident translation, Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers.

Bibek Debroy is Member, NITI Aayog. He is an economist and was educated in Ramakrishna Mission School, Narendrapur, Presidency College, Kolkata, Delhi School of Economics and Trinity College, Cambridge. He has worked in Presidency College, Kolkata (1979-83), Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune (1983-87), Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi (1987-93), as the Director of a Ministry of Finance/UNDP project on legal reforms (1993-98), Department of Economic Affairs (1994-95), National Council of Applied Economic Research (1995-96), Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (1997-2005), PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry (2005-06) and Centre for Policy Research (2007-15). He has authored/edited several books, papers and popular articles and has also been a Consulting/Contributing Editor with several newspapers.