The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit epic, and one of the two great epics of India.
It narrates the events of the Great War at Kurukshetra, that leads to the manifestation of
Lord Krishna on Earth, delivering the Srimad Bhagvad Gita (the Song of the Lord). It is one
of the longest texts in existence, containing over 200,000 individual verses,
with 18,00,000+ words, it is ten times the length of Illiad and Odyssey combined.
This website hosts the English translation of the Mahabharata. This humongous work was not
done by me, of course, as I only stand on the shoulders of giants. The original translation was
done by Kisari Mohan Ganguli (KMG, for short), and was digitized in a joint effort between
Sacred-Texts and Project
Gutenberg.
The KMG translation of the Mahabharata remains the only complete public domain translation in
existence.
Books 1-4 were proofed at Distributed Proofing (Juliet Sutherland, Project Manager), from page
images scanned at
sacred-texts.com. Books 5-7 and 12-15 were scanned and proofed at sacred-texts.com by John Bruno
Hare.
Books 8-11 and 16-18 were scanned and proofed by Mantra Caitanya.
My work has largely been on turning the plaintext files into beautiful HTML, and writing a search
indexer for the scripture to be searched for any particular sequence of words.
Many of the images here are created by the wonderful Italian artist Giampaolo Tomasetti. You can
find
them in full resolution from this website: http://www.mahabharata.bg/. The site is
in Bulgarian, you may need to Google Translate it. It would be unfair for me to not say parts of
this website
are inspired from it.
Regards,
S.Gautam.