Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit epic poem traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, compiled in stages from roughly the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE and running to more than 100,000 verses across eighteen books, making it, at an estimated 1.8 million words, several times the combined length of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the longest epic poem known. Its central narrative concerns a succession dispute between two branches of the Kuru royal family, the hundred Kaurava brothers and their five Pandava cousins, whose rivalry over the throne of Hastinapura escalates through a rigged game of dice and prolonged exile into the eighteen-day Kurukshetra War, a conflict so devastating that it destroys nearly the entire Kuru line. Woven through this central story are a vast number of embedded legends, dialogues and philosophical discourses, most famously the Bhagavad Gita, a conversation between the warrior Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna on the eve of battle. As a work of literature the Mahabharata is remarkable for its scale, its morally ambiguous heroes and its willingness to complicate rather than simplify questions of duty and righteous action, and it has served as a source for storytelling, drama and poetry across South and Southeast Asia for more than two thousand years.