'Where can one find the Mahabharata? The facile answer is "India."'

A chance comment in 1974 fired Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière with the idea of producing a play based on the epic. Together they travelled across India, searching for all possible theatrical forms of the great poem. The result was an epic play—9 hours with two intermissions—later made into a film and a TV series, which has become a landmark in theatre. Another result was this delightful book made from the notes that Carriere jotted down during his travels, whose charm is enhanced by his piquant illustrations that run through the pages.

The ‘sacred frenzy’ of Theyyam in a Kerala village and the intricacies of Kathakali are interwoven with their encounters with the aged Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, a ‘one-in-three saint’, and the legendary Satyajit Ray in Kolkata. Here they also meet Professor P. Lal, who has been working for twenty years on translating the Mahabharata into English. It is vignettes like these that make their search for the epic into a journey that shows India, through Carrière’s words and sketches, in a way it has never been seen before.

'哪里可以找到《摩诃婆罗多》？最简单的答案是 "印度"。

1974年的一个偶然的评论使Peter Brook和Jean-Claude Carrière产生了根据这部史诗制作一部戏剧的想法。他们一起走遍了印度，寻找这首伟大诗篇的所有可能的戏剧形式。结果是一部9小时的史诗剧，其中有两次中场休息，后来被拍成电影和电视剧，成为戏剧界的一个里程碑。另一个成果是这本令人愉快的书，它是由卡里耶在旅行中记下的笔记制成的，其魅力因其贯穿各页的有趣插图而得到加强。

喀拉拉村的Theyam的 "神圣狂热 "和Kathakali的错综复杂，与他们在Kanchipuram遇到的年老的Shankaracharya，一个 "三分之一的圣人"，以及在加尔各答遇到的传奇人物Satyajit Ray交织在一起。在这里，他们还遇到了P. Lal教授，他已经为将《摩诃婆罗多》翻译成英文工作了20年。正是这样的小插曲使他们寻找史诗的过程成为一次旅程，通过卡里埃的文字和素描，以一种前所未有的方式展示了印度。