The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata tells of the Kuru dynasty of Hastinapura. The blind king Dhritarashtra has a hundred sons, the Kauravas, led by Duryodhana. His late brother Pandu has five, the Pandavas: Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva, all married to Draupadi. Jealousy, a rigged game of dice and the public humiliation of Draupadi lead to thirteen years of exile, failed peace talks, and an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra in which almost every warrior dies. Shri Krishna stands with the Pandavas as friend, counsellor and Arjuna's charioteer.

Around this story the epic gathers an ocean of other material: stories of sages and kings, teachings on statecraft and ethics, philosophy, and devotion. It calls itself an itihasa, 'thus it happened', and says of itself that whatever is found here may be found elsewhere, but what is not here is found nowhere.

The epic is divided into 18 major parvas (books) and, in the traditional scheme, 100 sub-parvas. The traditional figure of 100,000 shlokas, which counts the Harivamsha, gives it the name shatasahasri samhita, 'the collection of a hundred thousand', a name already used in a copper-plate inscription of 533–534 CE. The Critical Edition, which keeps only what is supported across the manuscript families, is considerably shorter. The Mahabharata itself (1.1.61) speaks of a core 'Bharata' of 24,000 verses.

According to tradition, the sage Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, who also arranged the Vedas, composed the Mahabharata and was himself the grandfather of the Pandavas and Kauravas. A well-known passage in the Adi Parva tells that Ganesha agreed to write the epic down as Vyasa dictated, on the condition that Vyasa never pause, while Vyasa asked that Ganesha understand every verse before writing it. The epic is framed as a series of tellings: Vyasa's disciple Vaishampayana recites it to King Janamejaya, Arjuna's great-grandson, at his snake sacrifice, and the bard Ugrashravas Sauti later retells it to the sages of the Naimisha forest.

Scholars see the Mahabharata as a text that grew over many centuries. A common view is that the bulk was compiled between about the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than about 400 BCE, and that it reached its final form by the early Gupta period. Some elements reach back to Vedic times, and the Kuru kingdom of roughly 1200–800 BCE may lie behind the setting, but the historicity of the war is uncertain. The Critical Edition, prepared at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, under V. S. Sukthankar and his successors, compared manuscripts from across India; the Ganesha scribe episode, for example, is not part of its reconstructed text. Tradition and scholarship thus offer different but each meaningful ways of understanding the epic.

The subtlety of dharma. The epic repeatedly says that 'dharma is subtle'. Good people make hard choices: Bhishma's vow binds him to the wrong side; Karna's loyalty to Duryodhana outweighs the truth of his birth; Yudhishthira, who never lies, utters a half-truth that leads to Drona's death. The Mahabharata does not hide these tensions; it invites reflection on them.

The four aims of life. Dharma, artha (prosperity), kama (desire) and moksha (liberation) are discussed throughout, with dharma as their foundation.

Great teachings within the epic. The Bhagavad Gita (Bhishma Parva) is the most famous. Others include Vidura Niti on wise conduct (Udyoga Parva), the Yaksha Prashna, where Yudhishthira answers a series of questions to save his brothers (Vana Parva), Bhishma's long teaching from his bed of arrows (Shanti and Anushasana Parvas), and the Vishnu Sahasranama, the thousand names of Vishnu (Anushasana Parva).

Stories within the story. Shakuntala and Dushyanta, Nala and Damayanti, Savitri who wins back her husband from Yama, and Ruru and Pramadvara are among the many tales that later poets retold.

The Sanskrit below follows the text on Sanskrit Wikisource, whose verse numbering differs from the Critical Edition.

The Mahabharata lives in recitation, performance and daily speech. The Vishnu Sahasranama is chanted in countless homes and temples, and the Gita is read daily by many. Pravachans (discourses) on the epic are held in temples, and regional traditions perform it: Yakshagana in Karnataka, Kathakali in Kerala, Pandavani in Chhattisgarh and Terukkuttu in Tamil Nadu. Draupadi Amman temples in South India hold festivals that re-enact parts of the story.

Some households traditionally hesitate to keep the full Mahabharata at home or to read it continuously, fearing that its theme of family conflict may bring discord; others read it freely. This is a regional custom rather than a scriptural rule. B. R. Chopra's television series (1988–90) brought the epic to a whole generation of viewers in India.

Gita Press, Gorakhpur publishes the complete Mahabharata in six volumes with Sanskrit text and Hindi translation. In English, Kisari Mohan Ganguli's complete translation (1883–96) is in the public domain and freely available online; Bibek Debroy's ten-volume Penguin translation of the Critical Edition is the most complete modern English version, and J. A. B. van Buitenen's University of Chicago translation (continued by others) is scholarly but unfinished. For an approachable start, C. Rajagopalachari's 'Mahabharata' (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan) and R. K. Narayan's short retelling are classics.

A practical path is to begin with a good abridgement to learn the story, then read the Bhagavad Gita, Vidura Niti and the Yaksha Prashna in full, and only then turn to the complete text, one parva at a time.