Emotions play a key role in literary texts, and especially epics, which deal with grand emotions. Anandavardhana, the tenth-century aesthetician comments that The Ramayana is essentially about Karuna rasa (sad emotion) while The Mahabharata is about Santa rasa (repose/calm emotion) in the context of the analysis of their aesthetic emotions. While Hinduism resonates with the epics and the wide range of emotions that they evoke and resolve, and some work explores the play of sentiments through sentiment analysis, especially in The Mahabharata and The Gita, a comprehensive exploration of the nuanced play of emotions from chapter to chapter, from canto to canto through sentiment analysis is not available. Moreover, there are striking similarities between the two epics, especially in terms of the early lives of the protagonists, their life in the forest (vanvasa) and the wars that are fought. In this research paper, we show interesting patterns of similarities and differences (a) across the texts as they progress to their resolutions and (b) between the two texts in terms of how similar themes are addressed differently in terms of the emotions they evoke. We do so by implementing various analytical methods based on a combination of natural language processing, sentiment/emotion analysis, and social network analysis methods. The methodology is found to hold promise for exploring traditional texts and cultural expression of emotions in historical contexts which traditional analysis may not be able to capture effectively. One of our key findings is the pattern of significant changes in the sentiments of epic stories when compared across Bana Parvas and Aranya Kandas. The methodology is found to hold promise for exploring traditional texts and cultural expression of emotions in historical contexts which traditional analysis may not be able to capture effectively.