Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/228

i8o FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY this catechism is extremely suggestive. "How should one deal with an enemy by whom one is vastly outnumbered?" asks the father. "Divide and attack them one by one," answers the son, evidently from his book. In Hindu literature there is no second work which can be called "national" in the same sense as the Mahabharata. The foreign reader, taking it up as sympathetic reader merely and not as scholar, is at once struck by two features; in the first place, its unity in complexity; and in the second, its constant effort to impress on its hearers the idea of a single centralised India with an heroic tradition of her own as formative and uniting impulse. It is in good sooth a monarch's dream of an imperial race. The Gupta Emperor of Pataliputra who commissioned the last recension of the great work was as conscious as Asoka before him or Akbar after of making to his people the magic statement, "India is one."

As regards the unity of the work itself, this in the case of the Mahabharata is extraordinary. That a composition so ancient in subject-matter, and so evidently complex in its derivation, should be handed down to us as one single undisputed whole, is historical evidence of the highest importance for its original promulgation in this form by some central power with ability and prestige to give it authoritative publication. The origins of the poem are hoary with antiquity. Its sources are of an infinite variety. But the Mahabharata was certainly wrought to its present shape in the