An Introduction to Indian Mythology

The article is incomplete - Dec 2001 !

Our Ancient writings consists of Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Epic Stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana and so on. Vedas are hymns to the primeval Gods like Prajapathi, Agni, Varuna, Maruth, Indra etc, some of whom might see parallels in ancient Greek and Avestan Mythologies. Upanishads are much shorter discourses on pure philosophical grounds. Ramayana is the story of King Rama as told by Maharshi Valmiki. Mahabharata, the biggest writing of all times, is the story of the great war of the Cousins at Kuruskhetra, with Krishna as an important character and witness to all the happenings. Mahabharata also claims to contain the sum total of everything that can be seen on Earth - then, now and in future! Sage Vyasa says "What you see here, you may see elsewhere, but what you don't see here, you may not see anywhere else!"

The great writings in Sanskrit, though modified over generations, by and large have remained unchanged. The reason for this is the simple fact that they are not written in prose, but as poems with strict metric rules. Generations have remembered and recited it without mistakes again and again.

Here we introduce some of these translations in English, none of them claim to be perfect, but something is always better than nothing! A lot of these translations have been originally made by Westerners like Max Müller and Sir Edwin Arnold. Max Müller is also attributed to the theory of Aryan Invasion of India. In recent times there have been some attacks on this theory. We do not go into the details of this here at all. But some of these attacks have gone to the extremes to the extent of discrediting all that Max Müller had written! One should not forget the fact that Max Müller wrote all these long ago around 1879, and he never visited India, though he had learned Sanskrit. During the Colonial Era, some commments from Max Müller might have been influenced by the then rulers. This happens now and there is no reason to believe that this did not happen then. Max Müller's interpretaions are not 100% correct, but it was one of the first attempts to see the Wisdom of the East. On these grounds we still consider Max Müller's work to be historically important.

The Mahabharata story was rendered into English by a Bengali Gentleman Romesh Chunder Dutt, University College, London, as early as  1893. We have great pleasure in reproducing these here. Readers may note that some of the spellings used then was different from what is used today - most notablly Sanskrit has been spelled 'Sanscrit' those days. These are not errors, but just usages of a period.