Author: Saibal Dasgupta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: November 22, 2006
Within months of its release, the first-ever Chinese version of the Mahabharata sold out last December. The second edition of the six-volume translation of the epic is now under print and would be out in a few weeks.
There is a growing desire in China to learn about India's culture and traditions. "For a long time, Chinese scholars paid too much attention to the West. Now, there is a growing desire to know Indian civilisation and imbibe its wisdom," Huang Baosheng, who headed the five-member team of translators at Beijing University, told TOI.
"The 5,000 sets released in the first edition were bought not just by libraries as happens m the case of most such works - but also by ordinary readers," Huang, who is a teacher at the university's Sanskrit department, said. The sets are moderately priced at 680 yuan (Rs 3,862) each.
Huang and his team worked for over 10 years translating the epic from the Sanskrit edition brought out by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. The institute's version, Huang said, is the best of the epic in Sanskrit.
"The Chinese version has more than 30 illustrations taken from the original. The work has been appreciated by scholars around the world, including those from Harvard, who recently visited us in Beijing."
The Mahabharata's version comes several years after the Ramayana was translated into Chinese. Ji Xianlin, a Sanskrit scholar, secretly translated the epic in 1976.
Huang and most Sanskrit scholars in China are students of the 95-year-old Ji, who is now in hospital near the university. The other scholars involved in the Mahabharata project are Huang's wife Guo Liang Yun, and Ge Weijun, Li Nan and Duan Qin.
"In the beginning, we could not find a publisher as such works hardly earn profit," said Huang. But the team, was bailed out by the biggest government think-tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which published it. "There are a lot of stories and philosophy in the Mahabharata and it is not easy to render them in Chinese. That's why we took so long to translate the epic."