Mahabharata

The frame is doubled. Ugrashravas recites the epic to sages in the Naimisha forest, having heard it recited by Vaishampayana at the snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya, Arjuna's great-grandson, so the story arrives as a report of a report, and the audience inside the text are the descendants of the people in it.

The narrative core is family. Five Pandava brothers and a hundred Kaurava cousins contend for the Kuru throne; Draupadi is won by Arjuna and married to all five; Yudhishthira gambles away kingdom, brothers, himself and Draupadi in a rigged dice game, and her humiliation in the assembly hall becomes the injury the war exists to answer. Thirteen years of exile follow, then the failure of every attempt at settlement, then eighteen days of fighting at Kurukshetra in which the Pandavas win by a series of deceptions and almost everyone dies.

But the battle books are a fraction of the whole. The Shanti and Anushasana Parvans, delivered by the dying Bhishma from a bed of arrows, run to some 20,000 verses of instruction on kingship, law, caste, penance and liberation, and constitute one of the largest bodies of political and ethical thought in Sanskrit. Embedded stories, Nala and Damayanti, Savitri who argues Death out of her husband, Shakuntala, the abridged Ramayana, were extracted and retold for centuries. The Bhagavad Gita sits in the sixth book, spoken before the fighting starts. The Harivamsa, a genealogy of Vishnu and an account of Krishna's youth, is appended as a supplement.

The text's own boast is that whatever is here on dharma and the rest may be found elsewhere, and what is not here is nowhere. It is close to true of its contents and exactly true of its ambition.

The epic describes its own growth. It names a version called Jaya of 8,800 verses, a Bharata of 24,000, and the full Mahabharata of 100,000, a three-stage account of accretion offered by the text itself, which is unusual and which broadly matches what philology finds. Scholars generally place the process between roughly 400 BCE and 400 CE, with a heroic narrative core older still and the didactic books the latest heavy additions. Sukthankar argued for a systematic Brahmanical reworking, associated with the Bhrigu clan, that expanded the epic with law and lineage material.

Tradition holds instead that Vyasa composed it entire, dictating to Ganesha, and that its length is original. Vyasa is also the biological grandfather of both sets of cousins and intervenes in the plot repeatedly, which makes the authorship claim a narrative device as much as a bibliographic one.

Whether any war lies behind it cannot be settled. There is no inscription, no destruction layer, no securely identified Kurukshetra battlefield. Traditional chronology places the war at the start of the Kali Yuga, conventionally 3102 BCE, a date derived from astronomical calculation in later Sanskrit sources rather than from any record contemporary with the events. Archaeologists who accept a historical kernel tend to associate it with Painted Grey Ware settlements in the Ganga-Yamuna doab around 1000-900 BCE, on the basis that sites named in the epic, Hastinapura, Kurukshetra, Indraprastha, have occupation of that period. The material culture the epic describes is in any case that of a much later era than either date, since reciters furnished the story with the world they knew.

Its scale is conventionally put at about ten times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

In 1919 the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute at Pune began an attempt to produce a critical edition of the Mahabharata. V.S. Sukthankar became general editor in 1925 and worked on it until his death in 1943; S.K. Belvalkar and then P.L. Vaidya carried it on, and the completed edition was announced in September 1966. It took forty-seven years, collated 1,259 manuscripts in a dozen scripts, and filled nineteen volumes.

What it produced is a constituted text of about 89,000 verses, appreciably shorter than the received vulgate, printed above an apparatus that records what each manuscript family has, with disputed passages marked and rejected material relegated to appendices. The editors' rule was conservative: where the northern and southern recensions diverge, prefer the reading that best explains the others, and treat the Kashmiri Sharada manuscript as the most reliable single witness.

The distinction that matters is what such an edition can claim. It recovers an archetype, the earliest state of the text that the surviving manuscripts allow reconstruction of, which Sukthankar himself dated to a few centuries CE. It does not recover an original poem, and Sukthankar said so. Later critics have argued that privileging the Sharada codex builds a northern bias into the result, and that a work which grew by performance may never have had a single archetype to recover. The edition nonetheless remains the basis of serious scholarship, and of the Chicago translation begun by J.A.B. van Buitenen in 1973 and still being completed by other hands decades later.

For general readers the older complete English version by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, published between 1883 and 1896 from the vulgate, is still the one most often quoted, which means the most widely read English Mahabharata is not the critical text.