For centuries, Indians heard it in the form of public recitations, or performances of dramatised episodes, or in the explanations of scenes depicted in stone or paint on the sides of temples. Ramanujan used to say that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time. It has remained central to Hindu culture since it was first composed, during the period from before 300 BCE to after 300 CE. The Mahabharata, in any case, takes up quite a lot of shelf space: it contains about 75,000 verses – sometimes rounded off to 100,000 – 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. Many people in India believe that, because the Mahabharata – the ancient epic poem, in Sanskrit, about a disastrous fratricidal war – is such a tragic, violent book, it is dangerous to keep the whole text in your house most people who have it stow one part of it somewhere else, just to be on the safe side.
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