Mahabharataਮਹਾਭਾਰਤ

The Mahabharata is not so much a book as a library that grew around a war. Its central story, of two sets of royal cousins destroying each other over a throne, occupies perhaps a fifth of it; the rest is story inside story, law, philosophy, genealogy, geography and teaching, until the poem becomes an encyclopedia of its world. Its own proud claim is that what is found here may be found elsewhere, but what is not here is nowhere, and after two thousand years of Indian life, the claim is hard to wave away.

What is the Mahabharata?

The Mahabharata is a Sanskrit epic of about 100,000 shlokas, over 200,000 lines of verse, the longest epic poem ever composed. It is arranged in eighteen parvas, books, with the Harivamsha attached as a supplement. Tradition attributes it to Vyasa, the dark sage Krishna Dvaipayana, who is also credited with arranging the Vedas, and who walks inside his own poem as the grandfather of both warring houses. Tradition also says the poem grew: first the Jaya, the victory song of 8,800 verses, then the Bharata of 24,000, then the full Mahabharata. Scholars, dating its composition broadly between 400 BCE and 400 CE, hear in that legend the true history of a text assembled over centuries.

The house of Kuru and the dice game

The story turns on the Kuru throne of Hastinapura. The blind Dhritarashtra, passed over for the crown because of his blindness, watches his brother Pandu rule, retire to the forest and die; Pandu's five sons, the Pandavas, and Dhritarashtra's hundred sons, the Kauravas, grow up together in rivalry. Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, is anointed heir, and the kingdom is eventually divided, the Pandavas building their own splendid capital at Indraprastha. Then comes the hinge of the epic: a dice match to which Yudhishthira, a man bound to accept a challenge, is invited, and in which Shakuni, the Kauravas' uncle, plays with loaded skill. Stakes rise from gold to kingdom to brothers to himself, all lost, and last of all Draupadi, the Pandavas' wife, is staked and dragged into the hall, where her public humiliation, and the questions she puts to the assembled elders about law and dharma, stand among the most searing scenes in world literature.

Exile and return

The price of the dice is twelve years of forest exile and a thirteenth year in hiding, with the condition that if the Pandavas are recognised in that last year, the term begins again. The exile books are the epic's great storehouse of side stories, told to console and instruct the exiles: Shakuntala, whose son Bharata names India in tradition; Savitri, who talks Death itself out of her husband's soul; Nala and Damayanti, a king ruined by dice like Yudhishthira himself. The hidden year is spent in disguise at the court of Virata. When the term ends, the Pandavas ask for their kingdom back, and then, through Krishna's failed peace mission, for as little as five villages. Duryodhana, the eldest Kaurava, refuses them land enough for a needle's point. The war becomes unavoidable.

Eighteen days at Kurukshetra

The war at Kurukshetra lasts eighteen days, and the epic narrates it in pitiless detail: the great commanders fall in sequence, Bhishma on his bed of arrows, Drona by a half-truth about an elephant, Karna with his wheel in the mud, until on the eighteenth day Duryodhana's thighs are smashed and the Kaurava cause dies with him. It is on this field, before the first clash, that Krishna speaks the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna. The victory, when it comes, is ashes: nearly every warrior on both sides is dead, Gandhari curses Krishna himself, and Yudhishthira, crowned at last, rules a kingdom of widows while longing to renounce it. The epic closes in weariness and ascent: the Pandavas' final journey toward the mountains, falling one by one, and Yudhishthira's last, strange test in heaven and hell.

An encyclopedia, not only a war

Readers old and modern alike have treated the Mahabharata as India's memory of itself. Its frame story, a king hearing his ancestors' tale from a bard, nests narration inside narration until nearly every theme of classical India is treated somewhere in its hundred thousand verses: the duties of kings and the limits of those duties, the four aims of life, the conduct of just war and its horror, fate against effort, and the question the whole poem keeps asking, what dharma requires when every choice is stained. Its characters are correspondingly human: its heroes lie, gamble and fail; its villain Duryodhana is brave, loyal to friends and wronged in ways the poem itself records. That moral untidiness, more than its size, is why it has never stopped being retold.

The Mahabharata in Punjab

Punjab holds the epic's ground zero within reach: Kurukshetra, where the war was fought and the Gita spoken, lies just across the state border in Haryana, and Punjabi families have bathed at its tanks and visited its temples for centuries. Mahabharata stories saturate Punjabi folk culture, its proverbs cite Karna's generosity and Shakuni's cunning, its television retellings in the modern era emptied Punjab's streets as surely as anywhere in India, and the Ramayana's Punjab autumn of Ramlila is matched all year by katha and discourse on the Mahabharata in the region's temples. The epic's central family, with its blind king, its divided house and its ruinous inheritance quarrel, is one Punjab's own village histories understand very well.