The Sanskrit epic attributed to the sage Vyasa, composed over roughly eight centuries and reaching its present form around 400 CE. At roughly 1.8 million words, it is the longest poem in any language. The Mahabharata tells the story of the Kurukshetra War between the Pandava and Kaurava cousins and contains within it the Bhagavad Gita, extensive philosophical and legal treatises, and a cosmological framework that has organized Hindu thought, law, and practice across South and Southeast Asia for two millennia.
The Mahabharata is ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It contains within it the Bhagavad Gita — itself one of the most influential texts in world history — as an episode. It has been continuously performed, recited, debated, and reimagined across South and Southeast Asia for over two thousand years. And yet it is organized around a central moral problem that it does not resolve: a righteous war fought by righteous men produces devastation, the survivors are haunted by what they have done, and the question of whether the war was worth fighting is left genuinely open. The Mahabharata is the oldest great work of literature that takes seriously the possibility that the right side won and still lost.