The Mahabharata – Too Big to Hold

52 Books in a Year – Week 5

Welcome back to my 2026 book challenge. 52 Books in a Year. Still going. Still slightly questioning my life choices. Still on schedule surprisingly, unlike these blogs, but we’re getting there!

Right. So. The Mahabharata.

I want to be upfront about something before we get into it. This is not an easy book to review fairly, because it's barely a book. It's more like an entire world that was written down. Depending on which version you pick up, you're looking at somewhere between 200,000 and 1.8 million lines of verse. For context, that makes The Iliad look like a short story. Even the abridged versions I worked through were enormous — a real commitment.

And commitment is the right word. Because that's exactly what the Mahabharata demands from you.

So What Actually Happens?

Let me try to give you the shape of this, because it's genuinely hard to summarise without losing something important.

It begins with two branches of the same royal family — the Pandavas and the Kauravas — both descended from the same bloodline and both with a claim to the kingdom of Hastinapura. The Pandavas are five brothers: Yudhishthira, the eldest and supposedly the righteous one; Bhima, the physically powerful one; Arjuna, the greatest archer alive; and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva. On the other side, the Kauravas are one hundred brothers led by Duryodhana, the eldest, who believes the kingdom is his by right.

For most of their lives, these two families exist in uneasy tension — trained together, raised in the same court, and quietly hating each other. Duryodhana in particular resents the Pandavas. Their existence threatens everything he believes he's owed.

The breaking point comes in the form of a dice game. Yudhishthira — the righteous one, remember — is invited to play against Duryodhana's uncle Shakuni, who is almost certainly cheating. And Yudhishthira loses. Everything. His kingdom. His brothers. His wife, Draupadi, who is then publicly humiliated in the Kaurava court in one of the most disturbing scenes in the text. It's an act so degrading that it poisons the rest of the story — Draupadi never forgets, and neither does the reader.

The consequence of this game is thirteen years of exile for the Pandavas. Twelve years in the forest, one year living in disguise, having to avoid being recognised or the exile begins again. They survive it. They complete it. And then they return and ask for what is theirs.

Duryodhana refuses. He will not give back so much as a village. And that refusal is what makes the Kurukshetra War — the great war at the heart of the Mahabharata — inevitable.

What follows is eighteen days of battle that destroys almost everything. Both sides gather armies from across the known world. Teachers fight former students. Brothers are on opposite sides. Grandfathers face grandsons. Alliances are made and broken. Warriors who have trained their entire lives for this moment fall one by one, and the book does not look away from the cost.

The Pandavas win. Duryodhana is killed. And Yudhishthira, the righteous man, the winner, walks through the wreckage of what they've won — and there is nothing triumphant about it. Just grief. Just the question of whether any of this was worth it.

And then, buried inside all of that — right before the great battle begins — is the Bhagavad Gita. Which I want to talk about separately.

The Bhagavad Gita — The Bit That Stopped Me

Arjuna, the greatest warrior of the Pandavas, rides his chariot to the front line on the first day of battle. He looks across at the opposing army and sees his cousins. His teachers. His grandfather. His family.

And he breaks. He puts down his bow. He sits down in his chariot and tells Krishna — his charioteer, who is also an avatar of Vishnu, though Arjuna doesn't fully grasp this yet — that he cannot fight. That no kingdom is worth killing the people he loves.

What follows, over eighteen chapters, is Krishna explaining why he must.

It touches on duty, on the nature of the soul, on the illusion of death, on action without attachment to outcome. There's a concept in it — nishkama karma, doing what must be done without craving the reward — that I found myself thinking about long after I put the book down. There's also the moment where Krishna reveals his true divine form to Arjuna, which is one of the most overwhelming passages in the entire text. Arjuna essentially asks to see who Krishna really is, and what he sees is everything — all of existence, all of time, all of creation and destruction at once — and it nearly destroys him.

I'm not going to pretend I understood all of it. I didn't. But I felt the weight of it. And there's a version of reading where feeling the weight is enough.

The Characters — Nobody Is Clean

This is where the Mahabharata is most like life.

Yudhishthira is supposedly the righteous one. The man of dharma. And yet he gambles his kingdom, his brothers, and his wife away at a rigged card table. The fact that he was cheated is almost beside the point. He sat down and played.

Duryodhana is the closest thing to a villain the story has. But there are genuine moments where you understand him. Where you see someone who was overlooked, humiliated, and pushed to the edge his entire life. He makes terrible choices. But they don't feel like the choices of a cartoon villain. They feel like the choices of someone who was never shown another way.

Arjuna is the great warrior hero, but he's also the one who falls apart at the moment he's needed most, and has to be talked back into himself by a god.

Draupadi — and I think she's underrated in most discussions of this text — is extraordinary. She is wronged more deeply than almost anyone in the story, and she does not let anyone forget it. Her anger is one of the driving engines of the whole narrative. She's the one who holds the wound open.

Karna might be the most tragic figure in the book. He's actually the secret eldest brother of the Pandavas — born to their mother before she was married, given up, and raised as a charioteer's son. He grows up to be one of the greatest warriors alive, but is dismissed and mocked for his low birth his entire life. Duryodhana is the one who gives him respect and status. So Karna fights for the Kauravas — against the brothers he doesn't know are his brothers — because loyalty is all he has. And he dies for it.

That's not a subplot. That's a tragedy inside a tragedy.

The War — And What It Costs

The Kurukshetra War is devastating. Not in the way The Iliad is devastating, where individual deaths are felt viscerally and named one by one. It's devastating on a different scale — civilisational.

Rules of honourable combat are agreed upon at the start. They are broken almost immediately, by both sides, whenever the situation demands it. Great warriors are killed through tricks and ambushes as much as honest combat. Abhimanyu — Arjuna's young son — is lured into a battle formation he knows how to enter but not how to escape, and is surrounded and killed by multiple warriors at once. It's brutal and it's deliberate and it's presented without any pretence of glory.

By the end, there are almost no men left. The Pandavas win, but their side is decimated too. Entire lineages are gone. And Yudhishthira, standing in the wreckage, has to be convinced that ruling what remains is worth doing.

That moment, more than anything else in the book, felt true to me.

Why It Didn't Fully Land for Me

Here's where I have to be honest. The sheer scale of the Mahabharata worked against my engagement with it at times. I never fully connected with any single character the way I connected with Achilles or Odysseus. There were too many people, and the story kept pulling me away from the ones I cared about to spend fifty pages on a subplot involving a character I'd never meet again.

It's structured more like a library than a novel. And I think you need to come to it that way — not as a story to be consumed, but as a world to be explored, probably revisited, probably read in pieces rather than straight through.

Rich, yes. Important, absolutely. But tough going in places.

Legacy

The influence of this text on storytelling — particularly in Eastern and South Asian traditions — is so vast it's almost impossible to summarise. But increasingly it's filtering into the kind of fiction I love. The moral ambiguity. The ensemble of flawed characters pulling in different directions. The idea that war is not glorious, that righteous people make catastrophic decisions, that duty and desire are constantly at war with each other inside every single person.

Game of Thrones, if you squint, owes something to this. The idea that a story can be too big for any single hero to carry — that's Mahabharata DNA.

Final Verdict

★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Three stars is not a dismissal. This is arguably the most important book on this reading list so far. The Bhagavad Gita alone justifies the read.

But as a reading experience, it was the one I struggled with most. The scale eventually started working against the story rather than for it. I came away with profound respect for what it is and a slightly glazed expression from the journey to get there.

If The Iliad is focused, The Odyssey is human, and The Aeneid is constructed — the Mahabharata is vast. And vast is its own thing entirely.

I'll probably return to parts of it. But I needed a moment after finishing it.

Next Up: The Ramayana