Mahabharata

The Mahābhārata is a smriti text from ancient India, one of the two important epics of Hinduism known as the Itihasas, the other being the Ramayana. It narrates the events and aftermath of the Kurukshetra War, a war of succession between two groups of princely cousins, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas. It contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha. Among the principal works and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, Shakuntala, Pururava and Urvashi, Savitri and Satyavan, Kacha and Devayani, Rishyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa.
File:Krishna and Arjun on the chariot, Mahabharata, 18th-19th century, India.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.1|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. The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period.
The title is translated as "Great Bharat ", or "the story of the great descendants of Bharata", or as "The Great Indian Tale". The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest version consists of over 100,000 shlokas or over 200,000 individual lines, 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. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.

Textual history and structure

The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, who is also a major figure in the epic. Vyasa described it as being an itihasa. He also describes the Guru–shishya tradition, 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" does not include Ganesha.
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 Vaisampayana, a disciple of Vyasa, to the King Janamejaya who was the great-grandson of the Pandava prince Arjuna. Many years later, the story is recited again by a professional storyteller named Ugrashrava Sauti to an assemblage of sages conducting a twelve-year sacrifice for King Saunaka Kulapati in the Naimisha Forest.
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." Moritz Winternitz considered that "only unpoetical theologists and clumsy scribes" could have lumped the parts of disparate origin into an unordered whole.

Accretion and redaction

Research on the Mahābhārata has put an enormous effort into recognizing and dating layers within the text. Some elements of the present Mahabharata can be traced back to Vedic times. 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." is likely. The Mahabharata started as an orally-transmitted tale of the charioteer bards. 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," 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 include a reference in Panini's 4th century BCE grammar Ashtadhyayi 4:2:56. 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." That manuscript evidence is somewhat late, given its material composition and the climate of India, but it is very extensive.
The Mahābhārata itself distinguishes a core portion of 24,000 verses: the Bhārata proper, as opposed to additional secondary material, while the Ashvalayana Grihyasutra makes a similar distinction. At least three redactions of the text are commonly recognized: Jaya with 8,800 verses attributed to Vyasa, the Bharata with 24,000 verses as recited by Vaisampayana, and finally the Mahābhārata as recited by Ugrashrava Sauti with over 100,000 verses. 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 the Adi Parva. The redaction of this large body of text was carried out after formal principles, emphasizing the numbers 18 and 12. The addition of the latest parts may be dated by the absence of the Anushasana Parva and the Virata Parva from the "Spitzer manuscript". The oldest surviving Sanskrit text dates to the Kushan Period.
According to what one figure says at Mbh. 1.1.50, there were three versions of the epic, beginning with Manu, Astika, or Vasu, respectively. These versions would correspond to the addition of one and then another 'frame' settings of dialogues. The Vasu version would omit the frame settings and begin with the account of the birth of Vyasa. The astika version would add the sarpasattra and ashvamedha material from Brahmanical literature, introduce the name Mahābhārata, and identify Vyasa as the work's author. The redactors of these additions were probably Pancharatrin scholars who according to Oberlies likely retained control over the text until its final redaction. Mention of the Huna in the Bhishma Parva however appears to imply that this Parva may have been edited around the 4th century.
The Adi Parva includes the snake sacrifice of Janamejaya, explaining its motivation, detailing why all snakes in existence were intended to be destroyed, and why despite this, there are still snakes in existence. This sarpasattra material was often considered an independent tale added to a version of the Mahābhārata by "thematic attraction", and considered to have a particularly close connection to Vedic literature. The Panchavimsha Brahmana enumerates the officiant priests of a sarpasattra among whom the names Dhritarashtra and Janamejaya, two main figures of the Mahābhārata's sarpasattra, as well as Takshaka, a snake in the Mahābhārata, occur.
The Suparnakhyana, a late Vedic period poem considered to be among the "earliest traces of epic poetry in India," is an older, shorter precursor to the expanded legend of Garuda that is included in the Astika Parva, within the Adi Parva of the Mahābhārata.

Historical references

The earliest known references to bhārata and the compound mahābhārata date to the Ashtadhyayi of Panini and the Ashvalayana Grihyasutra. This may mean that the core 24,000 verses, known as the Bhārata, as well as an early version of the extended Mahābhārata, were composed by the 4th century BCE. However, it is uncertain whether Panini referred to the epic, as bhārata was also used to describe other things. Albrecht Weber mentions the Rigvedic tribe of the Bharatas, where a great person might have been designated as Mahā-Bhārata. However, as Panini also mentions figures that play a role in the Mahābhārata, some parts of the epic may have already been known in his day. Another aspect is that Panini determined the accent of mahā-bhārata. However, the Mahābhārata was not recited in Vedic accent.
The Greek writer Dio Chrysostom reported that Homer's poetry was being sung even in India. Many scholars have taken this as evidence for the existence of a Māhabhārata at this date, whose episodes Dio or his sources identify with the story of the Iliad.
Several stories within the Mahābhārata took on separate identities of their own in Classical Sanskrit literature. For instance, the Abhijnanashakuntala by the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, believed to have lived in the era of the Gupta dynasty, is based on a story that is the precursor to the Mahābhārata. The Urubhanga, a Sanskrit play written by Bhasa who is believed to have lived before Kalidasa, is based on the slaying of Duryodhana by the splitting of his thighs by Bhima.
The copper-plate inscription of the Maharaja Sharvanatha from Khoh describes the Mahābhārata as a "collection of 100,000 verses".

The 18 parvas or books

The division into 18 parvas is as follows:

Parva	Title	Sub-parvas	Contents
1	Adi Parva ''''	1–19	How the Mahābhārata came to be narrated by Sauti to the assembled rishis at Naimisharanya, after having been recited at the sarpasattra of Janamejaya by Vaisampayana at Takshashila. The history and genealogy of the Bharata and Bhrigu races are recalled, as is the birth and early life of the Kuru princes. Adi parva describes Pandavas' birth, childhood, education, marriage, struggles due to conspiracy as well as glorious achievements.
2	Sabha Parva	20–28	Maya Danava erects the palace and court at Indraprastha. The Sabha Parva narrates the glorious Yudhisthira's Rajasuya sacrifice performed with the help of his brothers and Yudhisthira's rule in Shakraprastha/Indraprastha as well as the humiliation and deceit caused by conspiracy along with their own action.
3	Vana Parva ''also Aranyaka Parva, Aranya Parva	29–44	The twelve years of exile in the forest. The entire Parva describes their struggle and consolidation of strength.
4	Virata Parva	45–48	The year spent incognito at the court of Virata. A single warrior defeated the entire Kuru army including Karna, Bhishma, Drona, Ashwatthama, etc. and recovered the cattle of the Virata kingdom.
5	Udyoga Parva	49–59	Preparations for war and efforts to bring about peace between the Kaurava and the Pandava sides which eventually fail.
6	Bhishma Parva	60–64	The first part of the great battle, with Bhishma as commander for the Kaurava and his fall on the bed of arrows. The most important aspect of Bhishma Parva is the Bhagavad Gita narrated by Krishna to Arjuna.
7	Drona Parva	65–72	The battle continues, with Drona as commander. This is the major book of the war. Most of the great warriors on both sides are dead by the end of this book.
8	Karna Parva	73	The continuation of the battle with Karna as commander of the Kaurava forces.
9	Shalya Parva	74–77	The last day of the battle, with Shalya as commander. Also told in detail, is the pilgrimage of Balarama to the fords of the river Saraswati and the mace fight between Bhima and Duryodhana which ends the war, since Bhima kills Duryodhana by smashing him on the thighs with a mace.
10	Sauptika Parva	78–80	Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma kill the remaining Pandava army in their sleep. Only seven warriors remain on the Pandava side and three on the Kaurava side.
11	Stri Parva	81–85	Gandhari and the women of the Kauravas and Pandavas lament the dead and Gandhari cursing Krishna for the massive destruction and the extermination of the Kaurava.
12	Shanti Parva	86–88	The crowning of Yudhishthira as king of Hastinapura, and instructions from Bhishma for the newly anointed king on society, economics, and politics. This is the longest book of the Mahabharata.
13	Anushasana Parva	89–90	The final instructions from Bhishma. This Parba contains the last day of Bhishma and his advice and wisdom to the upcoming emperor Yudhishthira.
14	Ashvamedhika Parva	91–92	The royal ceremony of the Ashvamedha conducted by Yudhishthira. The world conquest by Arjuna. Anugita is told by Krishna to Arjuna.
15	Ashramavasika Parva	93–95	The eventual deaths of Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, and Kunti in a forest fire when they are living in a hermitage in the Himalayas. Vidura predeceases them and Sanjaya on Dhritarashtra's bidding goes to live in the higher Himalayas.
16	Mausala Parva	96	The materialization of Gandhari's curse, i.e., the infighting between the Yadavas with maces and the eventual destruction of the Yadavas.
17	Mahaprasthanika Parva	97	The great journey of Yudhishthira, his brothers, and his wife Draupadi across the whole country and finally their ascent of the great Himalayas where each Pandava falls except for Yudhishthira.
18	Svargarohana Parva	98	Yudhishthira's final test and the return of the Pandavas to the spiritual world.
khila	Harivamsa Parva	99–100	This is an addendum to the 18 books, and covers those parts of the life of Krishna which is not covered in the 18 parvas of the Mahabharata''.