Read the epic. Test your knowledge.

Every epic is told in stages. At each one, first the story, then the questions — and behind every right answer, another story.

Ramayana — A prince sent to the forest for fourteen years, and a war that began with an abduction.
Mahabharata — Two halves of one family, eighteen days of war, and nobody in it entirely innocent.
Krishna-Leela — The child who stole butter, the flute-player, and the charioteer who spoke the Gita.
Hanuman-Gatha — The one who forgot his own strength, and had to be reminded of it every time.
Vishnu-Puran — From a fish to Kalki — ten avatars, and the stories that lie between them.
Shiv-Mahima — The god who does not weigh the one who asks, and stands outside the order.
Devi-Charit — The gods make her out of their own defeat — and then she does not go back.
The Bhagavad Gita — One talk on a halted chariot, which eighteen centuries have read eighteen ways.
Ganesh-Vrittanta — The god you invoke first — and every one of whose stories is told two ways.
Bhagavata Devotees — Ten people, ten starting points — and each reached God simply by wanting to.
Kartikeya-Vrittanta — Almost forgotten in the north — perhaps the most beloved god in the south.
The Garuda Purana — The most detailed map of what happens after death — and a pointing past it.
Harishchandra — A king who gave up everything for a promise — and a story that has been told twice, two different ways.
Nala-Damayanti — A king who lost everything at his own game of dice, and a queen whose wit won him back.
Savitri-Satyavan — A princess who used her own reasoning to outwit Yama himself, and brought her husband back from death.
Silappadikaram — An anklet, a false accusation, and a woman who burned a whole city with her own body.
Manimekalai — A bowl that never empties — and a courtesan's daughter who held hunger to be the greatest disease.
Kathasaritsagara — A tale Shiva told Parvati, carried down to earth by a curse — and grown into an ocean of hundreds of stories.
Vikram and Baital — A king, a corpse, a vetala — and at the end of every tale a question that, once answered, sends him flying back to the tree.
Raghuvamsha — A line born of the Sun — Dilipa, Raghu, Aja, Dasharatha, Rama — sung by one poet with such love that when it ends, you still do not feel the story is finished.
Matsya Purana — A Purana that begins with one small fish — with a flood boat in it, an old king's borrowed youth, a Yaksha's penance, and three cities turned to ash.