Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [156]
Another key source of India’s myths is the Mahabharata, one of the longest literary works in history, more than seven times the combined length of the Iliad and the Odyssey. One of India’s two epic poems, the Mahabharata was said to have been dictated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom. In fact, it is a collection of Sanskrit writings by several authors who lived at various times, and parts of it may be more than 2,500 years old.
Mahabharata literally means “Great King Bharata,” and the poem recounts a cataclysmic family feud between the descendants of King Bharata—two related families, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, who lived in northern India, perhaps about 1200 BCE. The Pandava brothers lose their kingdom to their Kaurava cousins and engage in a mighty struggle to win it back.
The main narrative of the Mahabharata is frequently interrupted by other stories and discussions of religion and philosophy, one of which is the enormously important work called the Bhagavad-Gita. Perhaps the most widely read, beloved, and significant piece of Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita (Song of the Lord) is presented as a conversation between the warrior hero Arjuna and the god Krishna, who has taken the mortal role of Arjuna’s chariot driver. The Gita, as it is known, sets forth Krishna’s teachings to Arjuna, who faces a moral crisis as the two armies prepare to do battle.
The second of India’s two epic poems is the Ramayana, which supposedly describes events that took place 870,000 years ago. The poem contains 24,000 couplets—again, originally written in Sanskrit—and attributed to a sage Valmiki, who wrote it about 500 BCE. Very simply, it is the story of Rama, a prince whose father exiles him for fourteen years because of a dispute over the throne. Like the Iliad, it is largely about a war over a woman, as the main plot line is about the conflict between Prince Rama and a demonic king called Ravana, who kidnaps Rama’s beloved wife, Sita. The Hindi translation, written by the poet Tulsidas in the late 1500s CE, remains the most popular version of the Ramayana today.
Finally, there is a large collection of Sanskrit texts called Puranas, which were compiled between the early centuries of the Common Era and as recently as the sixteenth century. Mainly written in verse, they present an encyclopedia of Hindu lore, often taking the form of a dialogue—just as the works of Plato do—between a sage and a group of disciples. There are eighteen major and eighteen minor Puranas, and each is a long book that consists of various stories of the gods and goddesses, hymns, cosmology, rules of life, and rituals. Essentially extensive references and guides to religion and culture, the Puranas also describe the Hindu beliefs about Creation and how the world periodically ends and is reborn.
Just as many Christian churches traditionally used a catechism to teach their basic tenets, the Puranas were used to disseminate Hindu religious principles and practices to the majority of illiterate people as well as those prohibited from the older Vedic traditions, including women and the socially inferior people in India’s strict caste system. Many of the Puranas are especially important in understanding myth, because they were composed to explain the connection between particular places with mythological events, such as the origin of a sacred site where a deity had manifested itself.
Words, of course, are not all that we have to go on when it comes to India’s vast mythology. Along with the thousands of Hindu temples still in active use, there is archaeology. During the late-nineteenth-century era of British colonial rule in Pakistan and India, British scholars were the first Westerners to discover vestiges of whole cities full of ancient artifacts buried in huge earthen mounds in the Indus Valley region. By the 1920s, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a previously unknown civilization, now called “Harappan,” in the area’s two central