PROBLEMS OF INDIAN RESEARCH i8i
shadow of a throne, and that imperial. So much is clear on the face of it to one who meets with the book for the first time in mature life.
One would naturally expect it to have existed in fragments, or at best to be current in many different versions. Indeed it is clear enough on the reading, that it has at some far past time so existed. Every here and there the end of one chapter or canto will tell a tale in one way, and the beginning of the next repeat it, or some part of it, from an utterly different point of view, as might rival narrators of a single incident. But the work of collating and examining, of assigning their definite values to each separate story, and weaving all into a single co-ordinated whole, has been done by some one great mind, some mighty hand, that went over the ground long long ago, and made the path that we of to-diy must follow still. The minute differences of reading between the Bombay and Benares texts only serve to emphasize this single and uncontested character of one immortal rendering of the great work. All through Maharashtra and the Punjab, and Bengal and Dravida-desh, the Mahabharata is the same. In every part of India and even amongst the Mohammedans in Bengal it plays one part—social, educational, man- making, and nation-building. No great man could be made in India without its influence upon his childhood. And the hero-making poem is one throughout every province of the land.
Socially the first point that strikes one, as one
