The Sanskrit Mahabharata, attributed to Vyasa, runs to about 100,000 couplets in eighteen books; Valmiki's Ramayana to about 24,000 in seven. Ramayana and Mahabharata retellings keep multiplying because the epics arrive already retold — Tamil and Awadhi classics, village theater, television, and in English R. K. Narayan's Ramayana (1972) and Peter Brook's stage Mahabharata (1985).
How Big Are the Epics?
Large enough that size is part of the meaning. The Mahabharata calls itself the longest poem and runs several times the Iliad and Odyssey combined; embedded in its sixth book is the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna and Krishna's dialogue before a war the poem neither celebrates nor condemns. The Ramayana — exile, abduction, return — is its gentler counterweight.
The Sanskrit tradition files both under itihasa — “thus it was” — a genre that claims happening rather than fiction. And both poems contain their own transmission: the Mahabharata is narrated by a bard to an assembly of sages, recounting an earlier recitation at a great snake sacrifice, within which Vyasa dictates the poem to the god Ganesha; the frame stories describe exactly the retelling machinery that has kept the works alive. The epics did not acquire their retellings by accident. They were built to be told again.
Why Is Retelling the Tradition Itself?
Because devotion made it so. The bhakti traditions of the last millennium composed vernacular retellings as acts of love, not scholarship: Kamban's Tamil Iramavataram, commonly dated to the eleventh or twelfth century, and Tulsidas's Awadhi Ramcharitmanas, traditionally 1574, are the most beloved — in many households more beloved than the Sanskrit original.
Each reframes the story for its language, region and theology, and each is treated not as a substitute but as a presence in its own right. The scholar A. K. Ramanujan made the structural point in an essay titled “Three Hundred Ramayanas” (1991): the tellings found across South and Southeast Asia — Thailand's Ramakien, the Javanese traditions, dozens of Indian languages — are not versions of one fixed original but a family of tellings, some older, some newer, none simply derivative. The essay itself became part of the story when Delhi University removed it from a syllabus in 2011 after protests from groups objecting to its framing. That dispute, too, demonstrates the thesis: to retell the epic is to enter an argument the epic has been having about itself for two thousand years.
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What Do the Modern English Retellings Do?
They extend the same tradition under new conditions. R. K. Narayan's Ramayana (1972), a short prose retelling drawing chiefly on Kamban, proved a compact English version could carry the story with dignity. Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière's nine-hour stage Mahabharata, first performed at Avignon in 1985, made the opposite bet on scale.
Filmed in 1989, both productions were contested, and both became reference points — the usual fate of epic retellings. Around them, a shelf has grown. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions (2008) gives the Mahabharata to Draupadi, the wife of the five brothers at the story's center; Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel (1989) maps the epic onto the independence movement; Devdutt Pattanaik's Jaya (2010) retells it with the variant traditions annotated in the margins. For readers who want the whole poem, Bibek Debroy's complete English translation, published in ten volumes between 2010 and 2015, made the full text available in a uniform edition for the first time in decades. The pattern holds across all of them: new tellers add a standpoint, a language, a grievance or a joke, and the tradition absorbs it.
Why Isn't One Telling the “Original”?
Because there is no fixed text to be original about, only a convergence of tellings. The Sanskrit poems took shape over many centuries, in layers scholars still disagree about dating; the critical edition of the Mahabharata, assembled in Pune between 1933 and 1966, deliberately records variants rather than flattening them.
The living traditions carry the principle further: Ramlila, the annual outdoor theater of the Rama story across northern India, recognized in UNESCO's lists of intangible heritage, produces new local performances of a story everyone present knows by heart. This is what it means to call the epics living traditions rather than old books. A translation of a fixed text can be more or less faithful; a retelling of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata can only be one more event in the sequence — Valmiki to Kamban to Tulsidas to a village stage to a novel in English. The epics survive not despite this redundancy but through it. Every era keeps the tellings it needs, loses the rest, and trusts the story to be told again by someone whose name nobody has yet thought to expect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Short answers to the questions readers bring to these epics: where to start, whether the poems count as scripture, how old they are, and what to make of Brook's famous production. Each compresses the account above and adds nothing to it.
Where should a new reader start?
With R. K. Narayan's Ramayana (1972) for the Rama story, and with a prose Mahabharata retelling before attempting the full poem. For the whole text, Bibek Debroy's ten-volume translation (2010–2015) is complete and uniform.
Are the epics scripture?
Not exactly. They are itihasa, “thus it was” — revered tradition rather than revealed text, though the embedded Bhagavad Gita carries scriptural weight in most Hindu traditions. Devotion treats the boundary as unimportant.
How old are they?
Older than any date anyone can honestly give. The Sanskrit texts took shape over many centuries through layers of composition; scholarly datings differ and are contested, and the poems themselves claim eternity on their own terms.
Is Brook's Mahabharata faithful to the epic?
It is faithful to its scale and ambition, not to its language or social world. Critics in India and abroad debated its universalizing cast from the start — which makes it a typical retelling, contested exactly as every telling before it was.