The Great Indian Novel

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The Mahabharata has not only influenced the literature, art, sculpture and painting of India but it has also moulded the very character of the Indian people. Characters from the Great Epic. . are still household words [which] stand for domestic or public virtues or vices. . In India a philosophical or even political controversy can hardly be found that has no reference to the thought of the Mahabharata.

C. R. Deshpande,Transmission of the

Mahabharata Tradition

The essential Mahabharata is whatever is relevant to us in the second half of the twentieth century. No epic, no work of art, is sacred by itself; if it does not have meaning for me now, it is nothing, it is dead.

P. Lal,The Mahabharata of Vyasa

Our past and present and future problems are much more crowded than we expect. . I think in India, some stories should be kept alive by literature. Writers experience another view of history, what’s going on, another understanding of ‘progress’. . Literature must refresh memory.

Gunter Grass, speaking in Bombay