The Mahābhārata
Mahābhārata, The,an epic Hindu poem, written in Sanskrit, reputedly over 100,000 stanzas long, describing the war between two groups of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It dates in its earliest written forms to the 5th or 6th cent. BC . The work was introduced to an English-speaking readership in 1785 when a section, the Bhagavad-gitā , translated by Charles Wilkins , was published. Since then there have been numerous translations of sections of the poem, notably by Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda (American edition, 1944 ; introduction by A. Huxley ). The Mahabharata became well known in Britain with Peter Brook 's stage adaptation of 1985 , which went to Glasgow in 1988 . Brook worked closely with French writer Jean-Claude Carrière , and their production attracted enormous public interest, sparking off lively and sometimes fierce debate about ‘cultural appropriation ’: see ‘A View...
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