Where to Begin with Classical Indian Poetry

In brief: begin with the story of Nala and Damayanti or Dutt's condensed Ramayana. Then read the Bhagavad Gita and one play of Kalidasa. Leave the complete Mahabharata for last, and read it a book at a time.

Two kinds of poem

Sanskrit literature has two great traditions of narrative poetry. The first is the epic (itihasa, "so it was"): the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, vast poems that grew over centuries and are still told, sung and performed across South and Southeast Asia. The second is court poetry (kavya): shorter, highly wrought works by named poets, of whom Kalidasa is the greatest. The two traditions call for different kinds of reading. The epics can be read for the story; kavya is read slowly, verse by verse, for its images.

1. Start with a story

Nala and Damayanti, translated by H. H. Milman (1835), is the best first step. It is an episode of the Mahabharata, told to the exiled Yudhishthira: a king loses his kingdom at dice, abandons his wife in the forest, and is restored by her constancy. It is complete in itself and takes an evening to read.

Then read the Ramayana in Romesh Chunder Dutt's condensed verse (1899). Dutt keeps the main line of Valmiki's story, from Rama's exile to the war with Ravana and the return to Ayodhya, in twelve short books of English verse. When you want the whole poem, turn to Ralph Griffith's complete verse translation (1870–74). The Ramayana study guide covers both versions.

2. The Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of eighteen chapters set inside the Mahabharata. On the eve of battle, the warrior Arjuna refuses to fight his kinsmen, and his charioteer Krishna answers him with a teaching on duty, action and devotion. **Edwin Arnold's The Song Celestial (1885)** is the translation Gandhi first read, in London. It is in flowing English verse, and the study guide goes through it chapter by chapter.

3. The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is the longest poem in the world: about 100,000 couplets in eighteen books (parvas), telling the war between two branches of one family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Here, too, there are two ways in.

• Dutt's condensed Mahabharata (1899) tells the main story in a short book of English verse. Read this first.
• The complete prose translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli (1883–96), the first complete English translation, is on the site in all eighteen books, from the Adi Parva to the Svargarohanika Parva.

Readers rarely read Ganguli straight through. A good plan is to follow the main story through Books 1 (the origins), 2 (the dice game), 5 (the failed embassy), 6 to 11 (the war and its aftermath) and 17 and 18 (the final journey), and to dip into the great teaching books (3, 12 and 13) later. The Mahabharata study guide summarises every book.

4. Kalidasa

Kalidasa probably lived in the fourth or fifth century, and he is the classical poet of Sanskrit. Four of his works are on the site:

• Shakuntala, his play of a king, a hermitage girl and a lost ring, translated by Arthur W. Ryder (1912). It was a sensation in Europe after William Jones translated it in 1789, and Goethe wrote a famous epigram in its praise. (Study guide)
• The Cloud Messenger (Meghaduta), also Ryder's: an exiled lover sends a message to his wife by a monsoon cloud, and the poem follows the cloud's flight north across India. It is short and is perhaps the best single introduction to kavya. (Study guide)
• The Birth of the War-God (Kumarasambhava), Griffith's translation (1879), on the love of Shiva and Parvati.
• The Raghuvamsa, the story of Rama's dynasty, translated by P. de Lacy Johnstone (1902).

5. Two more classics

• The Gita Govinda by Jayadeva (twelfth century), the love songs of Krishna and Radha, in Edwin Arnold's The Indian Song of Songs (1875). (Study guide)
• The Buddhacarita by Ashvaghosha (first or second century), a life of the Buddha in the form of a court epic, translated by E. B. Cowell (1894). (Study guide)

A note on the translations

All of these translations were made between 1835 and 1912, and they are in the public domain. They are older than the modern scholarly versions, and some of them are free. Arnold, for example, shortens and softens the Gita Govinda. Each study guide says where a translation departs from the Sanskrit. The study guides use the translators' spelling of names in quotations and the usual modern forms in their own prose.