Krishna Dharma

Krishna Dharma (born 1955 in London) is a British Hindu scholar and author.

Krishna Dharma is "the author of the world's most popular editions of India's great epics": the Ramayana: India's Immortal Tale of Adventure, Love, and Wisdom (1998) and the Mahabharata: The Greatest Spiritual Epic of All Time (1999). He is also a contributor to the press and a regular radio broadcaster.

Krishna Dharma was born as Kenneth Anderson in 1955 in London. In his youth he served as a merchant navy officer. In 1979 he joined ISKCON and converted to the monotheistic Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. Since the beginning of the 1980s, he has offered seminars and lectures on the Vedas and associated disciplines. In 1986 he established the first ISKCON temple in Manchester, England, and served there as a temple president until 2001. In 1989 he started in Manchester a "Hare Krishna Food for Life" programme, which has become the largest free food distribution effort in the city. He is married to Cintamani devi dasi and has three children, Madhava,Radhika and Janaki. He currently lives with his family in Hertfordshire.

In 1999 Krishna Dharma published the first edition of his adaptation of the Mahabharata. British author and journalist James Meek wrote in his review in The Guardian: "With its intense love scenes, jewelled palaces, vast battles, superheroes, magical weapons and warring families, the novelised version resembles a 20th century saga-cum-soap opera, a marriage of Barbara Taylor Bradford and Arthur Hailey. Salman Rushdie was threatened with murder for it. William Tyndale was strangled and burned for it. Altering, challenging or even translating sacred texts can be dangerous. But a British Hindu priest expects only praise, high sales and converts from an epic effort of literary digestion launched next week: the 100,000-verse Mahabharata, turned by him into a 1,000-page blockbuster novel".