Reading Notes: The Mahabharata Part A

I found the reading for the Mahabharata to be a little bit more difficult than that of the Ramayana! With so many character names, I found myself flipping to the front of the page of my edition to maintain who was who. One thing I do really appreciate about Narayan's writing is how he is able to turn such epic poetry into a modern day prose, so that it is a little bit easier to follow.

One thing that really stood out to me was the story about how the Pandava brothers all got so powerful. The description of how strong the brothers were reminds me of how strong Rama became after training to Vishwamartha. There seems to be a strong parallel between this type of training and weapons that I see more in these Indian Epics than I do see with Western ones.

One thing I wish Narayan added a little bit more of is some more description into how all these characters felt at the time when this was hapenning. For example, we get a glimpse into how it must have felt for the family to crawl into the cave so that they could escape being burned alive, but we get no description of literally how any of them felt. Narayan's writing king of reminds me of Defoe's writing of Robinson Crusoe in that it all seemed to be facts and very little of how the characters felt.

image of the Pandava's escape from vyasaonline

Bibliography:

R.K. Narayan - The Mahabharata

Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe