Across the last century, the Mahabharata has been continually reborn in visual storytelling, each medium drawing out different strands of its vast tapestry. In cinema, early mythological films and later classics such as Maya Bazaar and Karnan chose particular episodes or characters—Abhimanyu’s marriage, Karna’s tragic dignity—to embody the epic’s emotional and ethical tensions. Other films, like Kalyug, transpose the conflict into modern corporate or social settings, using the familiar pattern of fraternal rivalry and the crisis of dharma to comment on contemporary life. Internationally, Peter Brook’s stage and film versions sought to reveal the epic’s psychological and universal dimensions, even as they simplified the narrative for a global audience. These varied filmic visions rarely attempt the entire text; rather, they select emblematic moments where war, kinship, and moral ambiguity converge most sharply.

Television has offered the most sustained visual engagement with the epic, especially through long-running serials. The widely influential Hindi series directed by B.R. Chopra presents a relatively faithful narrative arc, framed with a devotional and moral emphasis that has shaped popular imagination. Later serials, including high-budget remakes and character-focused works such as those centered on Karna, tend to heighten emotional backstories and inner motivations, inviting viewers to dwell on the psychological burdens of destiny, loyalty, and righteousness. Regional television adaptations in various Indian languages further inflect the story with local devotional sensibilities, often foregrounding Krishna’s presence and the didactic power of the Bhagavad Gita. In these serials, the epic becomes a kind of visual scripture, teaching ethics through repeated, dramatized remembrance.

Beyond film and television, the Mahabharata lives vigorously in performance, literature, and visual narrative. Classical and folk theater traditions—such as Kathakali, Yakshagana, and Koodiyattam—stage selected episodes with ritual intensity, while modern dramatists and international theater practitioners rework the same material to probe political, social, and existential questions. Prose retellings, abridgements, and novels, including feminist and character-centered narratives, revisit the story from the vantage point of figures like Draupadi or Karna, using their voices to interrogate power, patriarchy, and suffering. Comics and graphic novels, notably the Amar Chitra Katha series, distill the sprawling saga into vivid, accessible sequences for younger readers, often emphasizing clear moral lessons over ambiguity. Animated films and series similarly simplify the plot, highlighting courage, devotion, and virtue, and thus serve as an entryway into the epic’s spiritual and ethical universe.

In more recent forms of media, the epic continues to be reinterpreted and reframed. Audio dramas, podcasts, and other narrative formats retell or analyze key episodes, frequently drawing out themes of leadership, duty, and inner conflict, especially around the dialogue of the Gita. Digital and interactive adaptations, including web series and games, tend to focus on action, heroic quests, and divine weaponry, even when they cannot fully encompass the text’s philosophical depth. Across all these manifestations, one can see a consistent pattern: each adaptation, whether devotional, political, psychological, or feminist in emphasis, chooses certain threads from the Mahabharata’s immense weave to address the ethical and spiritual anxieties of its own time. The epic thus functions less as a fixed story and more as a living reservoir of symbols and dilemmas, continually reimagined so that questions of dharma, power, and kinship remain spiritually and culturally resonant.