The Mahabharata Virata Parva

Kisari Mohan Ganguli (also known as K. M. Ganguli) was an Indian translator who was the first to produce an English translation of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. His translation was published as Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa’s Mahabharata. Pratap Chandra Roy (1842-1895), a Calcutta bookseller who owned a printing press and donated funding for the project, translated it into English prose between 1883 and 1896. The chain of events that led to the publication is mentioned in the “Translator’s Preface” in Book 1: Adi Parva, Ganguli. Sometime in the early 1870s, Pratapa Chandra Roy visited Ganguli at his home in Shibpur, Howrah, Bengal, with Babu Durga Charan Banerjee, requesting that he take up the translation project, which he did after initial reluctance and a second meeting, when extensive plans were drawn, and a copy of a translation by Max Müller was left behind, which Ganguli found to be literal and lacking in flow. As a result, he began altering the text line by line, “without compromising faithfulness to the original.” Soon after, a dozen sheets of his first ‘copy’ were typed and sent to notable writers, both European and Indian, and it wasn’t until they responded positively that the initiative was launched.