Mahabharata

The Mahabharata (Sanskrit Mahābhārata, often explained as ‘the great story of the descendants of Bharata’) is an epic poem composed in Sanskrit, the classical language of ancient India. It tells how a royal family, the Kurus, split into two rival branches and destroyed itself in a catastrophic war. Around this main story it gathers hundreds of other tales, sermons, dialogues on law and ethics, genealogies and descriptions of holy places.

Indian tradition classifies it as itihāsa, a word usually translated as ‘history’ or ‘so it was’: a narrative of the past that is also a guide for the present. The epic says about itself that ‘what is found here may be found elsewhere, but what is not here is nowhere’, a boast that expresses its ambition to contain the whole world of human experience.

Traditionally the poem is said to have 100,000 verses, which makes it several times longer than the Greek Iliad and Odyssey combined. Most verses are in the śloka, a flexible meter of two lines of sixteen syllables each. Its best-known portion, the Bhagavad Gītā (‘Song of the Lord’), is a dialogue of about 700 verses that became one of the most influential religious and philosophical texts in the world.

The Kuru king Pāṇḍu and his blind elder brother Dhṛtarāṣṭra have very different families. Pāṇḍu’s five sons, the Pāṇḍavas, are fathered by gods through his wives Kuntī and Mādrī: righteous Yudhiṣṭhira, mighty Bhīma, the archer Arjuna, and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva. Dhṛtarāṣṭra and his wife Gāndhārī have a hundred sons, the Kauravas, led by Duryodhana. Their great-uncle Bhīṣma, who has sworn never to marry or claim the throne, and their teacher Droṇa try to hold the family together.

Rivalry grows into hatred. Duryodhana tries to burn the Pāṇḍavas alive in a house of lacquer; they escape, and Arjuna wins the princess Draupadī in an archery contest, after which she becomes the shared wife of all five brothers. The Pāṇḍavas build a splendid capital, Indraprastha. Then Duryodhana’s uncle Śakuni challenges Yudhiṣṭhira to a rigged game of dice. Yudhiṣṭhira gambles away his wealth, his kingdom, his brothers, himself and finally Draupadī, who is dragged into the assembly hall and humiliated. Her question — could a man who had already lost himself still stake his wife? — is left painfully unresolved by the elders present.

The Pāṇḍavas are sent into exile for twelve years in the forest and a thirteenth year in disguise. When they return, Duryodhana refuses to give back even five villages. Kṛṣṇa, the prince of the Yādavas and a divine figure, tries to negotiate peace and fails. The armies meet on the plain of Kurukshetra, and for eighteen days almost every warrior of the age is killed. Bhīṣma falls pierced by arrows; Droṇa is tricked into laying down his weapons by a half-truth about his son’s death; Karṇa — secretly the Pāṇḍavas’ elder half-brother — dies when his chariot wheel sticks in the mud; Duryodhana is struck on the thigh against the rules of fair combat.

The victory is bitter. On the last night Droṇa’s son Aśvatthāman massacres the sleeping Pāṇḍava camp. Yudhiṣṭhira becomes king, but grief overwhelms him, and the dying Bhīṣma instructs him at great length on kingship, law and liberation. Decades later Kṛṣṇa’s own clan destroys itself, and the Pāṇḍavas walk towards the Himalayas on their final journey. Only Yudhiṣṭhira, accompanied by a faithful dog, reaches heaven alive — where one last test awaits him.

The poem is divided into eighteen parvans (books): Ādi (Beginning), Sabhā (Assembly Hall), Āraṇyaka or Vana (Forest), Virāṭa, Udyoga (Preparations), Bhīṣma, Droṇa, Karṇa, Śalya, Sauptika (Night Attack), Strī (Women), Śānti (Peace), Anuśāsana (Instruction), Āśvamedhika (Horse Sacrifice), Āśramavāsika (Hermitage), Mausala (Clubs), Mahāprasthānika (Great Departure) and Svargārohaṇa (Ascent to Heaven). A long appendix, the Harivaṃśa, tells the life of Kṛṣṇa.

The epic is also a frame story, a narrative that contains other narratives. The bard Ugraśravas recites it to sages in the Naimiṣa forest; he repeats what Vaiśampāyana, a pupil of Vyāsa, recited to King Janamejaya, the great-grandson of Arjuna, at a snake sacrifice. Inside the main story, characters constantly tell each other stories, so the reader moves through several levels of narration at once.

Many of these embedded tales are famous in their own right: the love of Nala and Damayantī, who is separated from her husband after he loses everything at dice; Sāvitrī, who wins back her husband’s life from Yama, the god of death, by her wisdom; Śakuntalā, later retold by the poet Kālidāsa; and a compact version of the Rāma story. The ‘questions of the Yakṣa’, a riddle contest in which Yudhiṣṭhira saves his brothers by answering a spirit’s questions about life, is still widely quoted.

The world the epic describes looks back to the Kuru realm, a powerful polity of the late Vedic period (roughly the late second to early first millennium BCE) in the upper Ganges–Yamuna region, around modern Delhi and Haryana. Vedic texts mention the Kurus and a king Parikṣit, who in the epic is Arjuna’s grandson. Whether a real war stands behind the story is unknown; tradition dated it to the start of the Kali age, 3102 BCE, but that date comes from later astronomical reckoning, not from historical evidence.

The text as we have it took shape much later, during roughly 400 BCE to 400 CE. This was a period of enormous change: the rise of cities and kingdoms in the Ganges valley, the spread of Buddhism and Jainism, the Maurya empire (c. 320–185 BCE) and the edicts of Aśoka, invasions and kingdoms of Indo-Greeks, Śakas and Kuṣāṇas in the north-west, and finally the Gupta dynasty (from c. 320 CE). Brahmin (priestly) groups were reformulating their tradition in response to renunciant movements and new forms of kingship.

Many scholars therefore read the epic as a response to its own time as much as a memory of an older one. Its long debates on dharma — duty, law and right order — on the proper conduct of kings, and on the relation between action in the world and liberation from it can be seen as a Brahmanical answer to Buddhist and other ideas, and as a way of imagining a righteous kingship after the era of great empires. Its world was not isolated: in the same centuries the Greek writer Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–120 CE) reported that Indians sang a poetry like Homer’s, which may be an early echo of epic recitation.

The central problem of the Mahabharata is dharma, a word that means duty, law, virtue and the order of the world. The epic repeatedly insists that dharma is ‘subtle’ (sūkṣma): good people face situations in which every choice breaks some obligation. Yudhiṣṭhira, called ‘the son of Dharma’, is truthful yet gambles away his family; Karṇa is loyal and generous yet fights for the wrong side; Bhīṣma keeps his vow and thereby stands by while injustice is done. The poem invites readers to argue rather than simply admire.

A related theme is the tension between human effort and fate or time (daiva, kāla). Characters are often told that events were destined, and yet they are held responsible for what they choose. The war itself is presented as the end of an age, and the epic’s mood after the victory is one of grief and exhaustion rather than triumph. The Indian theorist Ānandavardhana (9th century) argued that the dominant aesthetic mood (rasa) of the epic is śānta, peace or tranquillity — the calm that comes from seeing through worldly ambition.

Women’s voices are unusually forceful. Draupadī’s public question in the assembly hall, Gāndhārī’s curse of Kṛṣṇa after the death of her sons, and Kuntī’s hard choices shape the plot and open up questions about power, honour and suffering that many modern readers and writers have taken up. The epic also shows the costs of hierarchy: the tribal archer Ekalavya is made to cut off his thumb so that he cannot rival Arjuna, a scene that is now often read as a critique of caste privilege.

In the sixth book, as the armies stand ready, Arjuna asks Kṛṣṇa, his charioteer, to drive between the lines. Seeing relatives and teachers on the other side, he lays down his bow. Kṛṣṇa’s answer, the Bhagavad Gītā, runs to eighteen chapters (Critical Edition 6.23–40; chapters 25–42 in some older printed editions). It teaches that the self (ātman) is eternal and cannot be killed, that one should perform one’s own duty (svadharma), and that action should be done without attachment to its results.

The Gita brings together several paths or disciplines (yoga): karma yoga, the discipline of action performed without selfish desire; jñāna yoga, the discipline of knowledge; and bhakti yoga, loving devotion to God. In a famous line (2.47) Kṛṣṇa says, in paraphrase, ‘Your concern is with the action alone, never with its fruits.’ In chapter 11 Kṛṣṇa reveals his cosmic form, containing all beings and devouring the warriors, to show Arjuna that time and the divine are working through events.

Because it seems to justify fighting, the Gita has been read in very different ways. Classical commentators such as Śaṅkara (c. 8th century) read it as teaching the non-duality of self and ultimate reality; Rāmānuja (11th–12th century) stressed devotion to a personal God. In modern times Bal Gangadhar Tilak read it as a call to engaged action, while Mohandas Gandhi read the battlefield as an allegory of the inner struggle and drew from it a gospel of selfless, non-violent action. Philosophers today also discuss it as a text about moral reasoning — whether duty and procedure should come before outcomes.

The epic was first transmitted orally by bards (sūtas) and reciters, and it presents itself as a performance: someone always tells it to someone else. At some stage — scholars disagree about when — it was also written down, and thereafter it circulated in manuscripts copied by hand on palm leaves, birch bark and later paper, in many different scripts from Kashmir to Kerala. Its own tradition says that it grew in three stages: Jaya (‘Victory’, 8,800 verses), Bhārata (24,000 verses) and Mahābhārata (100,000 verses). Scholars treat this as a traditional account rather than a documented history, but it reflects a real awareness that the text expanded.

No two manuscripts are identical. Broadly they fall into a Northern and a Southern recension (families of manuscripts), each with sub-versions in different scripts. The Southern manuscripts in particular tend to be longer. A well-known story says that the god Gaṇeśa wrote the epic down as Vyāsa dictated; this episode is found only in some manuscripts, and the Critical Edition places it in the notes rather than the main text.

Between 1919 and 1966 the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune produced the Critical Edition, directed first by V. S. Sukthankar. Editors collated 1,259 manuscripts to reconstruct the oldest form of the text that the surviving witnesses allow, and published it in 19 volumes with a detailed critical apparatus listing variants and later additions. It is now the standard reference for scholars, although it is a reconstruction and was never read as such by any historical community.

The Mahabharata became a shared story-world rather than a single book. It was retold in almost every language of South Asia: the Kannada poet Pampa composed his Vikramārjuna Vijaya in 941; there are Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and many other versions, and countless folk and ritual performances such as the Terukkūttu theatre of Tamil Nadu and the Kathakali dance-drama of Kerala. Temples and sculpture across India depict its scenes, and Draupadī is worshipped as a goddess in parts of South India.

The epic travelled with trade, religion and courts. In Java, the Old Javanese Kakawin Bhāratayuddha (1157) retold the war, and Mahabharata characters are still central to the wayang shadow-puppet theatre of Indonesia; versions also reached Bali, Cambodia and Thailand. At the Mughal court, the emperor Akbar ordered a Persian translation, the Razmnāma (‘Book of War’), produced in the 1580s by Hindu and Muslim scholars working together and richly illustrated.

In the modern period the Gita reached Europe in Charles Wilkins’s English translation of 1785, influencing figures from the German Romantics to the American Transcendentalists. Kisari Mohan Ganguli published the first complete English prose translation (1883–1896). B. R. Chopra’s Hindi television series (1988–1990) drew enormous audiences in India, and Peter Brook’s nine-hour stage adaptation (1985) brought the story to international theatre. Novelists, poets, feminist writers and Dalit authors continue to rewrite the epic from the perspectives of Draupadī, Karṇa, Ekalavya and others.

Dating is necessarily approximate. The grammarian Pāṇini (usually placed around the 4th century BCE) knows names such as Vāsudeva, Arjuna and Yudhiṣṭhira, which suggests that the heroes were already known; but this does not prove that the epic existed in anything like its present form. At the other end, a copper-plate land grant of the ruler Śarvanātha dated to 533–534 CE refers to the Mahabharata as a ‘collection of 100,000 verses’, so the large text was established by then. Most scholars place the main phase of composition between about the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd or 4th century CE.

How the text grew is the central controversy. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European scholars such as E. W. Hopkins followed an ‘analytic’ approach: they tried to peel away didactic and religious layers to reach an original heroic war poem, often assuming a gradual accumulation over many centuries. Others, beginning with Joseph Dahlmann in the 1890s and later Madeleine Biardeau, took a ‘synthetic’ approach, treating the epic as a deliberately integrated work whose teachings are part of its design. Georges Dumézil read its characters in terms of Indo-European mythological structures.

More recently Alf Hiltebeitel has argued that the Sanskrit epic was composed as a written work by a group of Brahmin authors over a relatively short span (he suggests roughly the mid-2nd century BCE to the turn of the Common Era), while James L. Fitzgerald and others have proposed that a major written redaction took place in response to the political situation after the Mauryas and was later expanded. Scholars of oral tradition stress, in contrast, that performance and textual transmission continued to interact for centuries. These positions are not fully reconcilable, and the question remains open.

The attribution to Vyāsa is also a matter of interpretation. Within the story, Vyāsa is both the author and the biological grandfather of the Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas, so the poem folds its author into its own plot. Scholars generally regard ‘Vyāsa’ (a name that can mean ‘arranger’ or ‘compiler’) as a traditional figure standing for a long collective process, while many believers regard him as a historical sage.

The textual evidence is almost entirely in manuscripts, and because palm leaf and birch bark decay in South Asia’s climate, most surviving copies are only a few centuries old; a small number of fragments are much earlier. The Critical Edition’s apparatus is therefore the main tool for seeing how passages vary across regions and which episodes appear only in some traditions. Commentaries, above all that of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara (17th century), whose text formed the basis of the widely used ‘vulgate’ printed editions, show how pre-modern readers understood the work.

External evidence includes inscriptions (like the 6th-century Śarvanātha grant), references in other Sanskrit, Buddhist and Jain literature, and translations such as the Persian Razmnāma. Sculptural depictions of epic scenes on temples in South and Southeast Asia show which episodes were popular at particular times and places.

Archaeology can illuminate the setting but not confirm the war. In the 1950s the archaeologist B. B. Lal excavated at Hastinapura and associated Painted Grey Ware sites (an Iron Age culture of the northern plains, c. 1200–600 BCE) with places named in the epic. His interpretation has been influential in India but is contested, since pottery cannot identify people or events described in a text composed centuries later. Claims that the war can be dated precisely from astronomical references in the epic are likewise not accepted by most historians, because the relevant passages are internally inconsistent and may be later insertions.

Readers should distinguish between several ‘Mahabharatas’: the reconstructed Critical Edition, the vulgate of Nīlakaṇṭha, regional recensions in Sanskrit, vernacular retellings, and oral and performance traditions. None is simply the ‘original’. Many modern debates depend on which version one reads: in the Critical Edition, for example, Draupadī’s garments are miraculously renewed during the attempt to disrobe her, but the popular scene in which she calls on Kṛṣṇa to save her is largely absent, and the Gaṇeśa episode is missing altogether.

For the same reason, translations should be chosen with care. J. A. B. van Buitenen began a scholarly translation of the Critical Edition for the University of Chicago Press (books 1–5, 1973–1978), later continued by other scholars; Ganguli’s complete translation follows the vulgate. Abridged retellings are good introductions but often smooth out the ethical ambiguity that is central to the epic.

Finally, the Mahabharata is a sacred and living text for millions of people. Historical-critical study (asking when and how passages were composed) and devotional reading (asking what a passage teaches) are different activities with different aims. Good scholarship can describe both without dismissing either, and recognises that questions about the epic’s history are often politically sensitive in modern South Asia.