Maha

The Mahābhārata (US: /məhɑːˈbɑːrətə/,[1] UK: /ˌməhɑːˈbɑːrətə/;[2] Sanskrit: महाभारतम्,
Mahābhāratam, pronounced [mɐɦaːˈbʱaːrɐt̪ɐm]) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics

of ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa.[3] It narrates the struggle between
two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the
Pāṇḍava princes and their successors.
It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the

four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories
in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of
Shakuntala, the story of Pururava and Urvashi, the story of Savitri and Satyavan,
the story of Kacha and Devyani, the story of Rishyasringa and an abbreviated
version of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in their own right.
Krishna and Arjuna at Kurukshetra, 18th–19th-century painting

Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Vyāsa. There have
been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The
bulk of the Mahābhārata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the
3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE.
[4][5] The original events related by the epic probably fall between the 9th and
8th centuries BCE.[5] The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta
period (c. 4th century CE).[6][7]
The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the
longest poem ever written".[8][9] Its longest version consists of over 100,000
śloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long
prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten
times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the
length of the Rāmāyaṇa.[10][11] W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the
Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the Quran,
the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare.[12] Within
the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.[13]
Contents
1 Textual history and structure
1.1 Accretion and redaction
1.2 Historical references
1.3 The 18 parvas or books
2 Historical context
3 Characters
4 Synopsis
4.1 The older generations
4.2 The Pandava and Kaurava princes
4.3 Lakshagraha (the house of lac)
4.4 Marriage to Draupadi
4.5 Indraprastha
4.6 The dice game
4.7 Exile and return
4.8 The battle at Kurukshetra
4.9 The end of the Pandavas
4.10 The reunion
5 Themes
5.1 Just war
6 Translations, versions and derivative works
6.1 Translations
6.2 Critical Edition
6.3 Regional versions
6.4 Derivative literature
6.5 In film and television
6.6 In folk culture
6.7 Jain version
7 Kuru family tree
8 Cultural influence
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Sources
13 External links
Textual history and structure
Modern depiction of Vyasa narrating the Mahābhārata to Ganesha at the Murudeshwara

temple, Karnataka.
The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyāsa, who is also a major character
in the epic. Vyāsa described it as being itihāsa (Sanskrit: इतिहास, meaning
"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 Mahābhārata states that it was Ganesha who wrote down the
text to Vyasa's dictation, but this is regarded by scholars as a later
interpolation to the epic and the "Critical Edition" doesn't include Ganesha at
all.[14]
The epic employs the story within a story structure, otherwise known as frametales,
popular in many Indian religious and non-religious works. It is first recited at
Takshashila by the sage Vaiśampāyana,[15][16] a disciple of Vyāsa, to the King
Janamejaya who was the great-grandson of the Pāṇḍava prince Arjuna. The story is
then recited again by a professional storyteller named Ugraśrava Sauti, many years
later, to an assemblage of sages performing the 12-year sacrifice for the king
Saunaka Kulapati in the Naimiśa Forest.
Sauti recites the slokas of the Mahabharata.

The text was described by some early 20th-century 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."[17]
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.[18]
Accretion and redaction
Vyasa Reviewing Mahabharata

Research on the Mahābhārata has put an enormous effort into recognizing and dating
layers within the text. Some elements of the present Mahābhārata can be traced back
to Vedic times.[19] The background to the Mahābhārata suggests the origin of the
epic occurs "after the very early Vedic period" and before "the first Indian
'empire' was to rise in the third century B.C." That this is "a date not too far
removed from the 8th or 9th century B.C."[5][20] is likely. Mahābhārata started as
an orally-transmitted tale of the charioteer bards.[21] It is generally agreed that
"Unlike the Vedas, which have to be preserved letter-perfect, the epic was a
popular work whose reciters would inevitably conform to changes in language and
style,"[20] so the earliest 'surviving' components of this dynamic text are
believed to be no older than the earliest 'external' references we have to the
epic, which may include an allusion in Panini's 4th century BCE grammar Aṣṭādhyāyī
4:2:56.[5][20] It is estimated that the Sanskrit text probably reached something of
a "final form" by the early Gupta period (about the 4th century CE).[20] Vishnu
Sukthankar, editor of the first great critical edition of the Mahābhārata,
commented: "It is useless to think of reconstructing a fluid text in an original
shape, based on an archetype and a stemma codicum. What then is possible? Our
objective can only be to reconstruct the oldest form of the text which it is
possible to reach based on the manuscript material available."[22] That manuscript
evidence is somewhat late, given its material composition and the climate of India,
but it is very extensive.
The Mahābhārata itself (1.1.61) distinguishes a core portion of 24,000 verses: the
Bhārata proper, as opposed to additional secondary material, while the Aśvalāyana
Gṛhyasūtra (3.4.4) makes a similar distinction. At least three redactions of the
text are commonly recognized: Jaya (Victory) with 8,800 verses attributed to Vyāsa,
Bhārata with 24,000 verses as recited by Vaiśampāyana, and finally the Mahābhārata
as recited by Ugraśrava Sauti with over 100,000 verses.[23][24] However, some
scholars, such as John Brockington, argue that Jaya and Bharata refer to the same
text, and ascribe the theory of Jaya with 8,800 verses to a misreading of a verse
in Ādiparvan (1.1.81).[25] The redaction of this large body of text was carried out
after formal principles, emphasizing the numbers 18[26] and

Maha

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Maha

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Mahābhārata (US: /məhɑːˈbɑːrətə/,[1] UK: /ˌməhɑːˈbɑːrətə/;[2] Sanskrit: महाभारतम्,

Mahābhāratam, pronounced [mɐɦaːˈbʱaːrɐt̪ɐm]) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics

It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the

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

Modern depiction of Vyasa narrating the Mahābhārata to Ganesha at the Murudeshwara

Sauti recites the slokas of the Mahabharata.

Accretion and redaction

Vyasa Reviewing Mahabharata

You might also like