6 The Mahabharata
Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Averie Basch
India
400 C.E.
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are the two most famous early Sanskrit epic poems from classical India. This “Great Indian Tale” stands as the world’s longest poem and serves as both a guide for Hindu morality and a history (itihasa) of early Hindu India. Authorship is traditionally ascribed to Vyasa, a legendary sage (rishi) who appears in the text as a character as well. The tales included in the Mahabharata existed for centuries in oral form, as Vyasa lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries BC, nearly twenty centuries before the earliest surviving written copy.
The stories in the Mahabharata work to explore the four goals of a person’s life, according to Hindu tradition. These goals, the Puruṣārtha, include the following: kama (love, pleasure, desire), Dharma (morality, duty), artha (financial/or political success, prosperity), and moksha (salvation, enlightenment, liberation). In addition to four life goals, classical India featured four social classes: the Brahmin were of the highest class, consisting of religious devotees and intellectuals; the Kshatriya were of the next highest class, serving as warlords charged with protecting the lower classes; Vaishya were farmers and merchants who aimed to provide for the higher classes; and finally, the Shudra served the other classes.
The Mahabharata features royal lineages and mythological foundations, opening with a sturggle for kingship between the Pandavas and Kauravas, groups of paternal cousins whose fathers were in line for the throne. The five Pandavas, sons of Pāṇḍu, fight against the one hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra.
The narrative opens with Dhṛtarāṣṭra as the next ruler of the Bharata, but upon his father’s death Dhṛtarāṣṭra is stripped of his kingship on account of his blindness. His brother Pāṇḍu is next in line but cannot father heirs because of a curse; to provide a line of succession, Pāṇḍu ‘s wife Kunti appealed to the gods and bore children by them but in her husband’s name. These five heroes compete against their cousins, the one hundred sons (and one daughter) of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and his wife Gandhari, who also have legendary birth stories. Gandhari wished for one hundred sons and a daughter. After being pregnant for two years, she gave birth to a lump of flesh which Vyasa, the legendary author of the Mahabharata, divided and placed into jars of ghee. Two years later, the hundred-and-one children were born.Vyasa, who is also credited as the biological father of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Pāṇḍu and thus serves as a mutual grandfather to the various cousins, assists the heroes as they wage war and navigate morals. The gods and brahmins also step in to guide the characters who effectively set the foundation for Hindu mythology and moral teachings.
The Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is available at the following link:
https://pressbooks.nvcc.edu/eng255/chapter/the-mahabharata/
FURTHER READINGS:
A learning module on Hinduism
A version of the Mahabharata that divide the text into many 100-word short stories. The book includes a glossary.
https://pressbooks.pub/mahabharata/
For a “Brief Description of the Mahābhārata” by Brown University, see here: https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Sanskrit_in_Classics_at_Brown/Mahabharata/MBh2Description.html
