Only five hundred years or so before this, by generally accepted guess, Aryan tribes originally from the area between the Caspian Sea and the Hindu Kush mountains had migrated into the Indian subcontinent, bringing the prototype of the Sanskrit language and countless elements of belief and culture that have been part of the Hindu tradition ever since. This guess has recently been supported by excavations at the ancient city of Dvaraka, which, according to the Mahabharata, was destroyed and submerged in the sea after the departure of its divine ruler, Krishna. – close, that is, to the very dawn of recorded Indian history.

Historians surmise that like the Iliad, the Mahabharata might well be based on actual events, culminating in a war that took place somewhere around 1000 B.C. The battlefield is a perfect backdrop, but the Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious. Yet at the same time, I felt I knew the setting of the Gita much more intimately than I could ever know this peaceful field. I felt the way Schliemann must have when he finally reached that desolate bluff of western Turkey and knew he was standing “on the ringing plains of windy Troy,” walking the same ground as Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, and Helen. Where you’re standing now – who knows? – Arjuna might have sat, his bow and arrows on the ground, while Krishna gave him the words of the Bhagavad Gita.” Arjuna rode here, with Sri Krishna himself as his charioteer. “Bhishma and Drona commanded their armies here. “Imagine!” my companion said to me in awe. Great phalanxes shaped like eagles and fish and the crescent moon surged back and forth in search of victory, until in the end almost every warrior in the land lay slain. The air rang with the conch-horns and shouts of battle for eighteen days. Thousands of years ago this was Armageddon. Addressed to everyone, of whatever background or status, the Gita distills the loftiest truths of India’s ancient wisdom into simple, memorable poetry that haunts the mind and informs the affairs of everyday life.Įveryone in our car got down from the train to wander for a few minutes on the now peaceful field. Like the Sermon on the Mount, it has an immediacy that sweeps away time, place, and circumstance. The Gita has been translated into every major language and perhaps a hundred times into English alone commentaries on it are said to be more numerous than on any other scripture. Today, after more than thirty years of devoted study, I would not hesitate to call it India’s most important gift to the world. Not until I went to college and met Mahatma Gandhi did I begin to understand why nothing in the long, rich stretch of Indian culture has had a wider appeal, not only within India but outside as well. I must have heard the Gita recited thousands of times when I was growing up, but I don’t suppose it had any special significance for me then. Arjuna (far right), hero and leader of the Pandava army, is supported by his personal charioteer, the god Krishna (second from right). But what makes it unique is that embedded in this literary masterpiece is one of the finest mystical documents the world has seen: the Bhagavad Gita. The Mahabharata is literature at its greatest – in fact, it has been called a literature in itself, comparable in its breadth and depth and characterization to the whole of Greek literature or Shakespeare. The temper of the story is utterly contemporary I can imagine it unfolding in the nuclear age as easily as in the dawn of Indian history. Its characters, removed in time by some three thousand years, are as familiar to us as our relatives. Kurukshetra, “the field of the Kurus,” is the setting for the climactic battle of the Mahabharata, the vastest epic in any world literature, on which virtually every Hindu child in India is raised. I asked the man next to me if something had happened. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India.

Lucid synonym