Move over Homer! Homer's Illiad and Odyssey often considered the greatest epics in the western world. Homer has serious competition in India, however, where the great Hindu epics, the Mahabratha and Ramayana, have stirred hearts and exalted the spirit for thousands of years.
Does the size matter? The Ramayana is as big as the Bible. The Mahabratha is four times the size of the Bible and eight times as long as the Illiad and the Odyssey put together The Mahabratha contains so much material its author it's here too", he said. And " if it ain't here, it ain't nowhere else neither!"
No size, doesn't really matter; it's the content that counts. If you're wondering about the quality of the content, consider this. When television producers ran a series of hour-long episodes dramatizing these two epics on Indian TV in the 1980s, the entire country shut down! For the hour the program was being broadcast you couldn't get a taxi, you couldn't get a meal in a restaurant, you couldn't find an open shop, your airline pilot wouldn't even take off. Every Hindu in the country had somehow, somehow, somewhere, found a TV and was sitting transfixed, watching the great sages of Hinduism gamely portrayed on the small screen.
Both epics have been around since least 700 B.C.E. but not in their present form. The original texts were undoubtedly much shorter, but they were so popular that succeeding generations kept tracking on more and more of their contributions. Like a snowball rolling down the hill of history, they'd grown to glacier size. You practically need a shopping cart to carry around all the volumes of the Mahabratha, much less the Ramayana.
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