ndu morals, but is by
no means unparalleled in early Indian literature[20]) retired into
exile for thirteen years, and then came back with a great army of
allies, and after fierce and bloody battles with the Kauravas and
their supporters in the plain of Kurukshetra at last gained the
victory, slew the Kauravas, and established Yudhishthira as king in
Hastinapura. Among the Pandavas the leading part is played by the
eldest, Yudhishthira, and the third, Arjuna; of the others, Bhima, the
second, is a Hercules notable only for his strength, courage, and
fidelity, while the twins Nakula and Sahadeva are colourless figures.
Krishna plays an important part in the story; for on the return of
the Pandavas to fight the Kauravas he accompanies Arjuna as his
charioteer, and on the eve of the first battle delivers to him a
discourse on his religion, the Bhagavad-gita, or Lord's Song, which
has become one of the most famous and powerful of all the sacred books
of India.

[Footnote 20: See H. Raychaudhuri, _Materials for the Study of the
Early History of the Vaishnava Sect, p. 27_.]

Now if the Mahabharata were as homogeneous even as the Iliad and
Odyssey, which give us a fairly consistent and truthful picture of a
single age, we should be in a very happy position. Unfortunately this
is not the case. Our epic began as a Bharata, or Tale of the Bharata
Clan, probably of very moderate bulk, not later than 600 B.C., and
perhaps considerably earlier; and from that time onward it went on
growing bigger and bigger for over a thousand years, as editors
stuffed in new episodes and still longer discourses on nearly all the
religious and philosophic doctrines admitted within the four walls of
Hinduism, until it grew to its present immense bulk, which it claims
to amount to 100,000 verses. Thus it pictures the thought not of one
century but of more than ten, and we cannot feel sure of the date of
any particular statement in it. Nevertheless we can distinguish in a
general way between the old skeleton of the story, in which the theme
is treated in simple epic fashion, society is far freer than in later
days and no one objects to eating beef, from the additional matter, in
which the tale is recast in a far more grandiose vein and is padded
out with enormous quantities of moral, religious, and philosophic
sermons. The religion too is different in the different parts. In the
older portions the gods who are most popular are Indra, Agni, and
Brahma