On Appreciating the Mahābhārata as Literature

Abstract

This paper draws from the philosophy of literature. It makes its arguments with reference to the history of Mahābhārata scholarship, at times focusing in on Bhagavadgītā scholarship. It argues that the critically reconstituted Mahābhārata archetype admits of appreciation as a literary work; that this is so regardless of how extended one might deem its compositional period to have been; that the literary work contains its own fictional world that should not be confused with, or used to tell us about, the real world of ancient India; that hypotheses about these two worlds are of different types, the one being interpretive, the other historical; and that interpretations should be made with the entire literary work in view. The paper delineates the analytic and synthetic approaches to the text, and encourages translation.