The Mahabharata is the longest known epic poem and has been described as “the longest poem ever written”. Its longest version consists of over 100,000 shloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. About 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana.
The Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic poem originally composed in Sanskrit in around the fourth century BC or thereabouts. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, it was originally passed down orally before eventually being written down and later standardized. The ancient Indian epic stands as the longest poem ever written, about 10 times as long as “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” combined. The tale of a rivalry and war between cousins, it’s mammoth not only in scale but in its intricate complexity, with many hauntingly tragic stories nestled within it that are almost incidental to the larger narrative and yet somehow inextricably part of its rich tapestry. The famous Hindu text the “Bhagavad Gita” is just one philosophical conversation that the great archer Arjuna has with his charioteer Krishna on the way to battle in the middle of the “Mahabharata.” As with other great works of mythology and folklore, the “Mahabharata” has proven an inexhaustible inspiration for dramatizations and other adaptations.
Credit : Kavishala labs
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