The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic is a mythological book by R. K. Narayan. It is a modernised, shortened, and translated retelling of The Mahabharata. It was first published by Heinemann, London in 1978. The book was published as a result of a long endeavour that included three Hindu mythological works, Gods, Demons and Others, The Ramayana and finally The Mahabharata; in 1995, these works were republished as part of a new book, The Indian Epics Retold. Plot Narayan's version of the Mahabharata focuses on the central conflict of the epic, the Kurukshetra War, while abridging many of the tangential stories-within-stories found in the original text. It begins with the ancestry of the central characters of the story, starting off with the life of King Santanu, the vow of Bhishma, the birth of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and the tragic death of Pandu. The tale then follows the tutelage of the Pandavas by Drona, the burning of the house of lacquer, and the swayamvara of Draupadi. From there, the story continues building toward the central war of the story, as Yudhisthira loses everything in the dice game, sending him and his brothers into years of exile in the forest, where they remain until tensions upon their return escalate into the great war. Narayan focuses the rest of his version of the Mahabharata on the Kurukshetra War (with the central dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna, the Bhagavad Gita, summarized into two pages), ending off with a swift post-war chapter and a two-to-three page epilogue.