Evil in the Mahabharata

Good and evil loyalty and treachery faith and doubt honour and ignominy---the Mahabharata has served as a primer for codes of conduct of generations of Hindus. Over time the epic has also fascinated those who love a tale well told. In its telling however the story has lost much of its richness and nuance and the characters have become one-dimenssional cut-outs---either starkly good or irredeemably evil. <p/>In this reinterpretation Meena Arora nayak analyses how the values espoused in the Mahabharata came to be distorted into meagre archetypes creating customary laws that injure society even today.