Posted on 13/09/08
India's epic
To begin with, The Mahabharata is certainly one of the world's biggest books, a text of about 75,000 verses or three million words, some 15 times the combined length of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or seven times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and a hundred times more interesting. It is an epic poem composed in ancient India, some time between 300 BC and 300 AD (it takes a long time to produce three million words), in Sanskrit, the language of the sacred texts of Hinduism as well as of the secular literature of the court, related to Latin and ancient Greek and functioning, rather like medieval Latin, as a kind of lingua franca among the many vernacular languages of India.
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