THE MAHABHARATA Peter Brook’s Epic in the Making <i> by Garry O’Connor (Mercury House: $24.95; 160 pp.) </i>

When Peter Brook undertook to stage the great Indian epic, “The Mahabharata,” he was adapting a story 15 times longer than the Bible, a Sanskrit text that forms the basis for all Hindu thought. “The Mahabharata” is said to contain all stories within it; indeed, the other great Indian epic, “The Ramayana,” is but a piece of “The Mahabharata” and the sacred Bhagavadgita but a chapter. “What is not in ‘The Mahabharata,’ ” goes the saying, “is nowhere to be found.” In the briefest terms, the book tells the story of two sets of brothers whose destiny it is to fight over a kingdom.

Traditional tellings of “The Mahabharata” during festivals in Hindu communities take place over whole days, and Peter Brook’s daring production approached these proportions. The play, adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere, played to sellout crowds in eight cities on three continents, audiences who saw the nine-hour work either in several sittings or in marathon performances. This book gives a behind-the-scenes account of how “The Mahabharata” was turned into a six-hour film.

When Garry O’Connor visited the set of the film outside Paris, he was overwhelmed by the pervasive sense of the real India, from the red dust to the Indian tailors “flown specially from Bombay to hand-stitch the seams of the unusual costumes.” Although movie sets always seem to strike awe into visitors, O’Connor’s descriptions are particularly evocative of a mythic place, with its “earthen ramparts, mounds and temples, columns and grottoes, palace courtyards and citadels. Each set will be demolished and become reborn in another form, until the last great battle when only the bare earth will remain. . . .”

O’Connor, a former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, treats the filming as an epic in itself, covering the practical issues on the production such as financing and language difficulties among the huge international cast (they performed in French and English versions) as well as Brook’s philosophical dilemmas, not to mention his classic bullying directorial style.

The accompanying photographs are not of uniformly good quality, but the set of cast portraits is worth the price of the book. Brook assembled actors from many countries and races, and the huge variety in their look and dramatic presence underlines “The Mahabharata’s” claim to be the mythic history of all mankind.