Mahabharata

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This article is about the Sanskrit epic. For other uses, see Mahabharata (disambiguation).

Mahabharata

Manuscript illustration of the Battle of

Kurukshetra

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Krishna and Arjuna at Kurukshetra, 18th-19th-century painting

The Mahabharata or Mahbhrata (US /mhbrt/;[1] UK /mhbrt/;[2] Sanskrit:

, Mahbhratam,pronounced [mabarttm]) is one of the two
major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Ramayana.[3]
The Mahabharata is an epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and
the Pandava princes. It also containsphilosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion
of the four "goals of life" or purusharthas (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in
the Mahabharata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, an abbreviated version of
the Ramayana, and theRishyasringa, often considered as works in their own right.
Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa. There have been many
attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The oldest preserved parts of
the text are thought to be not much older than around 400 BCE, though the origins of the epic
probably fall between the 8th and 9th centuries BCE.[4] The text probably reached its final form by
the early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE).[5] The title may be translated as "the great tale of the
Bhrata dynasty". According to the Mahabharata itself, the tale is extended from a shorter
version of 24,000 verses called simply Bhrata.[6]
The Mahabharata is the longest known epic poem and has been described as "the longest poem
ever written".[7][8] Its longest version consists of over 100,000 shloka or over 200,000 individual

verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. About 1.8 million words in total,
the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about
four times the length of the Ramayana.[9][10] W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of
the Mahabharata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the works
of Shakespeare, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the Qur'an.[11]
Contents
[hide]

1Textual history and structure

o

1.1Accretion and redaction

1.2Historical references

1.3The 18 parvas or books

2Historical context

3Synopsis
o

3.1The older generations

3.2The Pandava and Kaurava princes

3.3Lakshagraha (the house of lac)

3.4Marriage to Draupadi

3.5Indraprastha

3.6The dice game

3.7Exile and return

3.8The battle at Kurukshetra

3.9The end of the Pandavas

3.10The reunion

4Themes
o

4.1Just war
5Versions, translations, and derivative works

5.1Critical Edition

5.2Regional versions

5.3Translations

5.4Derivative literature

5.5In film and television

6Jain version

7Kuru family tree

8Cultural influence

9Editions

10References

11Sources

12External links

Textual history and structure

Modern depiction of Vyasa narrating the Mahabharata to Ganesha at theMurudeshwara temple, Karnataka.

The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, who is also a major character in the epic.
Vyasa described it as being itihsa (history). He also describes the Guru-shishya parampara,
which traces all great teachers and their students of the Vedic times.
The first section of the Mahabharata states that it was Ganesha who wrote down the text to
Vyasa's dictation. Ganesha is said to have agreed to write it only if Vyasa never paused in his
recitation. Vyasa agrees on condition that Ganesha takes the time to understand what was said
before writing it down.
The epic employs the story within a story structure, otherwise known as frametales, popular in
many Indian religious and non-religious works. It is recited by the sage Vaisampayana, a disciple
of Vyasa, to the King Janamejaya who is the great-grandson of the Pandavaprince Arjuna. The
story is then recited again by a professional storyteller named Ugrasrava Sauti, many years later,

to an assemblage of sages performing the 12-year sacrifice for the king Saunaka Kulapati in
the Naimisha Forest.
The text has been described by some early 20th-century western Indologists as unstructured and
chaotic. Hermann Oldenberg supposed that the original poem must once have carried an
immense "tragic force" but dismissed the full text as a "horrible chaos." [12] Moritz
Winternitz (Geschichte der indischen Literatur 1909) considered that "only unpoetical theologists
and clumsy scribes" could have lumped the parts of disparate origin into an unordered whole. [13]