The Mahabharata is the greatest epic poem in the world, being eight times as long as the Iliad and Obyssey put together and three and a half times the Bible. Revered as a religious text by the people of India, it has been recognized by people all over the world to be a classical of world literature too. Though studies of some facets of the work are available, there has so far been no comprehensive and detailed literary study of the work. This is being offered for the first time in this work.

The Gita, which is part of the epic, has been extensively studied and in many languages, but as a detached text. The author, who regards the story as the main metaphor of the poet, shows that the Gita cannot be isolated thus from its embedding in the epic and has analyzed its message in detail, the space devoted to this being as extended as in most of the books on the Gita that have been published. There are also an outline summary of the epic and analyses of the major characters and crucial episodes.

A dedicated work by a writer who is the author of a five-volume philosophy of freedom and a ten-volume history of world literature, its analysis of the philosophy of the epic is against the background of the major currents of world philosophy, old and new, eastern and western, and the literary evaluation matches the highest standards of criticism anywhere in the contemporary world.

About the Author:

Krishna Chaitanya, whom a national periodical has described as "one of the most original and stimulating minds writing in the sub-continent today", and as "our nearest approximation to the Renaissance man" is the author of over thirty books whose interdisciplinary range got him the "Critic of Ideas" award of the Institute of International Education. New York. The major categories are: a five-volume philosophy of freedom for which he got a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship and which has been compared by critics to the works of Thomas Aquinas, the French Encyclopaedists, Herbert Spencer, Bergson, Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin; a ten-volume history of world literature including a history of Sanskrit literature, in English and several Indian languages, which won a special award from the Kerala Sahitya Academy; several books on Indian culture including a four-volume history of Indian painting; and books retelling Sanskrit classics or vividly recreating the life of past epochs for children, one of which got the Federation of Indian Publishers' award for the best children's book published during the International Year of the Child. As Vice-President Chairman, member of functional committees he has been associated with over a dozen Cultural organizations. He has traveled widely in Asia, Europe and the USA and is listed in several international biographies and directories.