Kisari Mohan Ganguli

Kisari Mohan Ganguli was a Bengali scholar who translated the whole of the Mahābhārata into English prose, the first complete English version of the epic. Little is recorded of his life outside that work, which occupied him for more than a decade.

The translation was undertaken for the Calcutta publisher Pratap Chandra Roy, who conceived it as a work of public service. Roy raised subscriptions and grants so that copies could be given away to readers in India and abroad, and issued the work in parts from 1883, at first under his own name. After Roy’s death in 1895 his widow, Sundari Bala Roy, saw the last parts through the press in 1896, and the translator’s name was made known in the preface to the final volume.

Ganguli follows the Sanskrit closely, section by section, and supplies in round brackets what the original implies, so that his version reads less as literature than as a faithful and patient report. He kept the epic’s repetitions and lists, and its long teaching books, the Śānti and Anuśāsana Parvas, in full.

With M. N. Dutt’s version, which followed it in the 1890s, it was for nearly a century one of only two complete English Mahābhāratas, and it is still the way most English readers meet the epic’s philosophical books whole. Its sections on liberation, the Mokṣadharma, the story of Śuka and the Anugītā among them, are given in the Library’s reader.