Tradition credits the sage Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, who appears inside the story as the grandfather of its main characters. Scholars treat "Vyasa" as the name the tradition gave to a work that many hands built up between roughly 400 BCE and 400 CE.

Who is Vyasa?

Krishna Dvaipayana, called Vyasa, is the son of the sage Parashara and the fisherwoman Satyavati, born on an island in the Yamuna before Satyavati married King Shantanu. Krishna means dark and Dvaipayana means island-born; Vyasa is not a personal name at all but a title, "the arranger" or "the compiler", also used of the figure credited with dividing the Vedas into four.

That makes his position in the epic unusual. He is the author of the poem and a participant in it. When Vichitravirya dies childless, Satyavati calls her first son to father heirs on the widowed queens, and Vyasa becomes the biological grandfather of Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura, and so of everyone the war destroys. He returns at intervals to advise, to warn, to grant Sanjaya the sight that lets him narrate the battle, and at the end to console Dhritarashtra.

Who is telling the story, and to whom?

The Mahabharata is told three times over, each telling framing the one inside it. Vyasa composes the poem and teaches it to his disciple Vaishampayana. Vaishampayana recites it to King Janamejaya, the great-grandson of Arjuna, during the snake sacrifice Janamejaya holds to avenge his father Parikshit, who died of a serpent's bite. A bard named Ugrashravas, called Sauti, is present at that recitation and later repeats what he heard to an assembly of sages led by Shaunaka in the Naimisha forest. It is Sauti's voice that opens the text as we have it.

These frames are not decoration. They tell you that the epic is presented as speech, remembered and passed on, and that the audience inside the poem is a grieving king being taught why revenge consumes the avenger. Every reader is placed in Janamejaya's seat.

What is the story about Ganesha writing it down?

A well-known passage in the first book has Brahma advise Vyasa to find a scribe, and Ganesha agree to write the poem on condition that Vyasa never pause in dictation; Vyasa counters that Ganesha must understand each verse before writing it, and composes knotted verses whenever he needs time to think.

It is a lovely image and it is almost certainly late. The passage is absent from a number of the older manuscripts and the editors of the Critical Edition relegated it to an appendix rather than the constituted text. Its point is thematic: it insists that the poem is difficult on purpose, and that its hardest verses are there to slow the reader down.

Ganesha

How did the epic grow from Jaya to Mahabharata?

The text names its own stages. It speaks of a core of 8,800 verses, of a Bharata of 24,000 verses without the subsidiary tales, and of the full Mahabharata of a hundred thousand. Tradition calls the earliest layer Jaya, "victory". Whether those figures are historical or schematic, they encode a real memory: the poem was expanded, repeatedly, by adding episodes and teaching around a narrative spine.

You can still feel the seams. The narrative books move fast and the didactic books barely move at all: the Shanti and Anushasana parvas together take up roughly a quarter of the whole and consist almost entirely of Bhishma, dying on his bed of arrows, lecturing Yudhishthira on kingship, law, charity and liberation. Whole free-standing works sit inside the epic - the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Nala and Damayanti, the Ramopakhyana, the Savitri story - each of which can be read alone.

Most scholars therefore describe the Mahabharata as a tradition rather than a book, edited into something like its present shape by the Bhargava brahmin redactors whose family legends are conspicuously woven through it.

Are there different versions?

Many. Manuscripts of the Mahabharata survive in Sharada, Nepali, Maithili, Bengali, Devanagari, Telugu, Grantha and Malayalam scripts, and they divide broadly into a Northern and a Southern recension, each with regional sub-versions. They differ in episode order, in the presence and absence of whole passages, and in thousands of readings. The text most commonly printed and commented on before the twentieth century, the so-called vulgate, is the version accompanied by Nilakantha Chaturdhara's commentary from the seventeenth century.

That is why the hundred-thousand-verse figure needs care. It is a traditional round number, and it is roughly what the vulgate reaches once the Harivamsa, the appendix on Krishna's lineage, is counted with it.

What is the Critical Edition?

Between 1919 and 1966 the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune produced a critical edition of the Mahabharata, begun under V. S. Sukthankar and continued by S. K. Belvalkar and others. The team collated well over a thousand manuscripts from across the subcontinent and reconstructed the earliest recoverable form of the text, printing readings found in one branch but not another in the margins and appendices rather than discarding them.

The result runs to about three quarters of the traditional hundred thousand verses, filling nineteen volumes, with the Harivamsa edited separately afterwards. It is not "the original Mahabharata" and its editors never claimed it was; it is the oldest version the surviving manuscripts allow us to reach. Nearly all serious modern translation and scholarship now works from it, which is why the parva and chapter numbering in recent books sometimes differs from older ones.

How to read the Mahabharata

Which English translation is the text behind most retellings?

The complete prose translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, published in instalments by Pratap Chandra Roy between 1883 and 1896, is still the most widely circulated English Mahabharata because it is complete, unabridged and long out of copyright. It follows the vulgate rather than the Critical Edition, and its Victorian English softens some passages, but virtually every free online text of the epic descends from it.

The modern scholarly options are the University of Chicago translation begun by J. A. B. van Buitenen in 1973 and continued after his death by James L. Fitzgerald, which is authoritative but still incomplete, and Bibek Debroy's ten-volume unabridged translation of the Critical Edition, published by Penguin between 2010 and 2014.

Key facts

Attributed author: Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa
Narrators in the text: Vyasa, Vaishampayana, Ugrashravas Sauti
Stated stages: Jaya 8,800 - Bharata 24,000 - Mahabharata 100,000 verses
Composition span: c. 400 BCE to 400 CE
Critical Edition: BORI, Pune, 1919-1966, 19 volumes
Standard free translation: K. M. Ganguli, 1883-1896

Sources

V. S. Sukthankar, Prolegomena to the Critical Edition of the Adiparvan (BORI, 1933).
J. A. B. van Buitenen, introduction to The Mahabharata, vol. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1973).
James L. Fitzgerald, introduction to The Mahabharata, vol. 7 (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Bibek Debroy, The Mahabharata, 10 vols. (Penguin, 2010-2014).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

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