"Every civilization has its territory of fantasy. The Mahabharata seems to have drawn the boundaries of that territory for the Indian people. At the time that it got into circulation, other texts too were being composed but they were restricted to certain groups, to Buddhists, Jains, or Brahmins. The Mahabharat, however, could get into anyone's imaginative territory. That freedom to wander around was the Mahabharata's great gift from the beginning and that's why it is still appreciated in different forms - on television, in films, in digital media, in art, and in drama." - GN Devy, author, Mahabharata; The Epic and the Nation talks to Manjula Narayan about the Indian obsession with the epic, the need for a Mahabharata institute that can collate versions in different languages, and his belief that India will never have a revolution that entails a definitive break from the past because we've imbibed the idea of Kalachakra or of Time as cyclical from the Mahabharata.