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Book description

The Mahabharata is one of the greatest stories ever told. Though the basic plot is widely known, there is much more to the epic than the dispute between Kouravas and Pandavas that led to the battle in Kurukshetra. It has innumerable sub-plots that accommodate fascinating meanderings and digressions, and it has rarely been translated in full, given its formidable length of 80,000 shlokas or couplets. This magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation of the epic is based on the Critical Edition compiled at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. The fifth volume will complete Udyoga Parva with the story of Amba who was reborn as Shikandi. It includes Bhishma Parva which covers the first ten days of the war and has Krishna's advice to Arjuna in the form of the Bhagavad Gita. This volume thus gets into the war proper. After Bhishma's downfall, Drona is instated as the commander and Abhimanyu is killed. Every conceivable human emotion figures in the Mahabharata, the reason why the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination. In this lucid, nuanced and confident translation, Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvelously accessible to contemporary readers.