The Mahabharata

What is the Mahabharata?

The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit epic of about 100,000 shlokas - roughly 1.8 million words - that tells the story of a war for the throne of Hastinapura between two branches of the same family. It is the longest epic poem known, some ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey together, and it contains the Bhagavad Gita.

The Sanskrit title means roughly "the great tale of the Bharatas", the Bharatas being the clan descended from King Bharata. Indian tradition classes it not as poetry but as itihasa, a word that literally means "so indeed it was" and covers works that narrate the past in order to argue about conduct. The epic makes the claim itself, with characteristic confidence: whatever is here may be found elsewhere, and what is not here is found nowhere.

Structurally it is eighteen books, called parvas, of wildly uneven character. Some move at the speed of a thriller. Others stop dead for thousands of verses of legal and philosophical instruction. Embedded in it are complete works that circulate on their own - the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Nala and Damayanti, the tale of Savitri, a compressed retelling of the entire Ramayana - along with cosmology, genealogy, statecraft, and a pilgrimage guide to the sacred fords of northern India. A nineteenth book, the Harivamsa, was attached later as an appendix on Krishna's lineage and childhood.

What holds it together is a single question asked from every possible angle: what is a person actually required to do? The epic calls that requirement dharma, and it never settles the matter. Every character who tries to act well in it is ruined by acting well, and the poem watches this happen without flinching and without supplying a rule that would have saved them.

Who wrote the Mahabharata?

Tradition credits the sage Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, who is also a character inside the story - the biological grandfather of both sets of cousins. Scholars regard the text as the work of many hands over roughly eight centuries, from about 400 BCE to about 400 CE.

Vyasa is not really a name. It is a title meaning "the arranger", and the same figure is credited with dividing the Vedas into four. In the story he is the son of Satyavati by the sage Parashara, born before her marriage to King Shantanu, and he is summoned back into the dynasty when its male line fails, fathering Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura by the custom of niyoga. He then spends the epic appearing at intervals to warn people who do not listen.

The poem also tells you exactly how it reached you. Vyasa taught it to his disciple Vaishampayana, who recited it at the snake sacrifice held by King Janamejaya, Arjuna's great-great-grandson, to avenge his father Parikshit. A bard named Ugrashravas, called Sauti, heard it there and repeated it to the sages of the Naimisha forest, and it is Sauti's voice that opens the text. The famous story of Ganesha serving as scribe, writing while Vyasa dictated on condition that he never pause, appears in later manuscripts and was not admitted to the constituted text of the Critical Edition.

The epic remembers its own growth. It speaks of a core of 8,800 verses, a Bharata of 24,000, and the full Mahabharata of a hundred thousand. Manuscripts survive in eight scripts and divide into Northern and Southern recensions that differ by thousands of lines. Between 1919 and 1966 the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, under V. S. Sukthankar and his successors, collated over a thousand manuscripts and produced the Critical Edition, a nineteen-volume reconstruction of the earliest recoverable text. It is about a quarter shorter than the traditional hundred thousand verses, and it is the version nearly all modern scholarship uses.

Full guide: who wrote the Mahabharata →

What is the story of the Mahabharata?

Two sets of cousins, the five Pandavas and the hundred Kauravas, both claim the throne of Hastinapura. A rigged dice game sends the Pandavas into thirteen years of exile; when the kingdom is not returned, the quarrel becomes an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra that kills almost everyone in the poem. The Pandavas win and rule over a wasteland, and thirty-six years later they walk into the mountains to die.

Here is the whole epic in order, one paragraph a book.

1. Adi Parva, the book of the beginning

   King Shantanu of Hastinapura marries the river goddess Ganga and then the fisherwoman Satyavati, whose father demands that her sons inherit. Shantanu's son by Ganga renounces the throne and swears lifelong celibacy so the marriage can go ahead, earning the name Bhishma, the terrible. Satyavati's sons die without heirs, so Vyasa fathers Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura on the widowed queens and their maid. Pandu, cursed to die if he touches a woman in desire, withdraws to the forest, where his wives Kunti and Madri summon gods and bear the five Pandavas; Dhritarashtra and Gandhari have a hundred sons. The cousins grow up together under Drona, already hating each other. Duryodhana tries to burn the Pandavas alive in a lacquer house; they escape, live disguised as brahmins, and win Draupadi at her swayamvara, who becomes wife to all five. The kingdom is partitioned, the Pandavas build Indraprastha on wasteland, and Arjuna and Krishna burn the Khandava forest to clear it.

2. Sabha Parva, the book of the assembly hall

   The Pandavas build a hall of illusions, conquer the four directions and perform the Rajasuya, the imperial consecration. Duryodhana, visiting, walks into a pool he mistakes for a floor and is laughed at. Shakuni proposes a remedy: a game of dice. In the most consequential scene in the epic, Yudhishthira stakes and loses his wealth, his kingdom, his brothers, himself and finally Draupadi, who is dragged into the hall and asks a question nobody can answer: did a man who had already lost himself have the right to stake her? Bhima swears to break Duryodhana's thigh and drink Dushasana's blood. A second game sets the terms: twelve years of exile and a thirteenth in disguise, and if they are discovered, twelve more.

3. Vana Parva, the book of the forest

   The longest book, and the least linear. The Pandavas live in the forest for twelve years. Arjuna goes north alone, fights Shiva in the form of a hunter, receives the Pashupata weapon and spends years in his father Indra's heaven. The others hear story after story from visiting sages: Nala and Damayanti, Savitri, the churning of the ocean, the descent of the Ganga, and a compressed retelling of the whole Ramayana. Jayadratha abducts Draupadi and is caught and released, humiliated. The book ends with the questions of the yaksha, in which four brothers die for drinking from a lake without answering and Yudhishthira wins them back by answering instead.

4. Virata Parva, the year in disguise

   The thirteenth year, spent hidden in the court of King Virata of Matsya. Yudhishthira becomes a courtier, Bhima a cook, Arjuna a eunuch dance teacher, the twins a horse-keeper and a cowherd, and Draupadi the queen's maid. When the queen's brother Kichaka assaults Draupadi, Bhima kills him in the dark. The Kauravas raid Virata's cattle to force the Pandavas out; Arjuna takes the field alone with Virata's boy prince as charioteer and routs them all. The year is over. Abhimanyu marries Virata's daughter Uttaraa.

5. Udyoga Parva, the book of the effort

   Both sides spend months gathering allies. Krishna offers Duryodhana and Arjuna a choice between his army and himself unarmed; Duryodhana takes the army. Embassies go back and forth and fail. Krishna himself goes to Hastinapura and asks for five villages; Duryodhana refuses land the size of a needle-point and tries to have him arrested. Krishna then tells Karna who his mother is, and offers him the empire to change sides. Kunti asks him herself. Karna refuses both, and promises only that he will spare four of his five brothers.

6. Bhishma Parva, the first ten days

   The armies face each other, eighteen akshauhinis in all. Arjuna sees his teachers and cousins in the opposing line, drops his bow and refuses to fight, and Krishna answers him in the seven hundred verses of the Bhagavad Gita. Then the killing starts. Bhishma commands for ten days and cannot be beaten; on the tenth the Pandavas put Shikhandi, born a woman, in front of Arjuna, and Bhishma lowers his bow rather than fight him. He falls on a bed of arrows and does not die, waiting on the field for the winter solstice.

7. Drona Parva, the war turns cruel

   Drona takes command. On the thirteenth day he forms the chakravyuha and the sixteen-year-old Abhimanyu breaks in alone, knowing the way in and not the way out; six great warriors surround and kill him. Arjuna swears to kill Jayadratha before sunset or burn himself, and does it in the last of the light. The fighting continues after dark, against all agreement; Karna spends on Ghatotkacha the one-use weapon he had kept for Arjuna. On the fifteenth day Yudhishthira is persuaded to say that Ashwatthama is dead, meaning an elephant, and Drona lays down his weapons and is beheaded.

8. Karna Parva, two days

   Karna commands, with Shalya driving his chariot and insulting him all day. Bhima kills Dushasana and keeps the oath he swore in the assembly hall. On the seventeenth day Karna's chariot wheel sinks into the ground; he asks for the pause the rules allow, Krishna refuses it on the grounds of everything Karna's side has already done, and Arjuna kills him unarmed.

9. Shalya Parva, the last morning

   Shalya leads for half a day and is killed by Yudhishthira. Sahadeva kills Shakuni. The Kaurava army ceases to exist, and Duryodhana hides in a lake until he is taunted out of it. In a mace duel Bhima smashes his thigh, a foul blow made at Krishna's prompting, and leaves him dying on the field.

10. Sauptika Parva, the night raid

    Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma enter the sleeping Pandava camp after dark. Ashwatthama kills Dhrishtadyumna, Shikhandi and the five sons of Draupadi in their beds. Pursued the next day, he looses a weapon at the unborn child in Uttaraa's womb; Krishna revives the child and curses him to wander for three thousand years.

11. Stri Parva, the book of the women

    The women come out to the field to look for their dead. Gandhari walks among the bodies of her hundred sons and, seeing what Krishna allowed, curses him to watch his own clan die the same way. Their lament is the epic's judgement on its own battle scenes.

12. Shanti Parva, the book of peace

    Yudhishthira, sick with what he has won, tries to abdicate and is talked out of it. He is crowned, and then made to sit at Bhishma's bed of arrows while the dying man instructs him on the duties of a king, on what may be done in extremity, and on liberation. It is the longest book in the epic and almost nothing happens in it.

13. Anushasana Parva, the instruction

    The teaching continues: gift-giving, vows, fasting, the duties of the orders, the thousand names of Vishnu. Then the sun turns north and Bhishma dies at last, fifty-eight days after he fell.

14. Ashvamedhika Parva, the horse sacrifice

    Yudhishthira performs the ashvamedha to expiate the war. A horse is released to wander for a year with Arjuna following it, fighting whoever stops it; at Manipura he is killed by his own son Babruvahana and revived. The book ends with a mongoose with one golden flank walking into the great sacrifice and telling the assembly that a poor family's gift of barley flour was worth more than all of it.

15. Ashramavasika Parva, the retreat

    Fifteen years on, Dhritarashtra, Gandhari and Kunti leave the palace for a forest hermitage. Vyasa raises the dead warriors from a river for one night so that the mothers can see their sons again. Two years later a forest fire takes the three of them.

16. Mausala Parva, the iron maces

    Thirty-six years after the war, Gandhari's curse comes due. The Yadavas kill each other in a drunken brawl with reeds that turn to iron clubs in their hands. Krishna, resting in a wood, is shot in the foot by a hunter who takes him for a deer. The sea takes Dwaraka.

17. Mahaprasthanika Parva, the great departure

    The Pandavas crown Parikshit and walk north towards the mountains with Draupadi and a dog that attaches itself to them. One by one they fall and are left where they lie. Only Yudhishthira reaches the end, and when Indra's chariot arrives he refuses to board it without the dog.

18. Svargarohana Parva, the ascent

    Four chapters, and the best ending in the literature. Yudhishthira arrives in heaven and finds Duryodhana enthroned there and no sign of his brothers. Taken to hell to see them, he hears their voices in the dark and refuses to leave. The illusion is lifted; everyone is where they belong, and the epic closes on a man who would rather be damned with his family than comfortable without them.

Read all 974 stories in order →

Who are the main characters?

The epic names thousands of people, but twenty carry the plot: the five Pandava brothers and their shared wife Draupadi, their cousin and counsellor Krishna, the hundred Kauravas led by Duryodhana, and the elders - Bhishma, Drona, Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Kunti and Vidura - who watch the disaster coming and cannot stop it.

• YudhishthiraEldest Pandava, son of Dharma; incapable of a lie and unable to refuse a game of dice.
• BhimaSecond Pandava, son of Vayu; the strongest man alive and the keeper of the epic's two fiercest oaths.
• ArjunaThird Pandava, son of Indra; the greatest archer of the age and the man the Bhagavad Gita is spoken to.
• NakulaFourth Pandava, son of an Ashvin; swordsman and horseman, the handsomest of the brothers.
• SahadevaFifth Pandava, son of an Ashvin; the youngest, and the one who can see what is coming and may not say it.
• DraupadiDaughter of Drupada of Panchala, wife of all five Pandavas; the woman whose humiliation makes the war inevitable.
• KrishnaYadava prince of Dwaraka, cousin and counsellor to the Pandavas, and God in this text; Arjuna's charioteer.
• KarnaKunti's firstborn by Surya, raised by a charioteer; the most generous man in the epic, loyal to the wrong side.
• DuryodhanaEldest son of Dhritarashtra; refuses to yield land the size of a needle-point and takes the world down with him.
• DushasanaDuryodhana's brother, who drags Draupadi into the assembly hall and pays for it in the seventeenth day of the war.
• ShakuniGandhari's brother; the loaded dice, and the patient voice that turns a grudge into a war.
• BhishmaSon of Shantanu and Ganga, the grandsire; his vow of celibacy empties the throne everyone later fights over.
• DronaBrahmin master of arms who trains both sets of cousins, then commands the army fighting his favourite student.
• AshwatthamaDrona's son; his night raid on the sleeping camp ends the war and leaves him cursed to wander.
• DhritarashtraThe blind king of Hastinapura, who knows what his son is and never once stops him.
• GandhariHis queen, who blindfolded herself for life and curses Krishna over the bodies of her hundred sons.
• KuntiMother of the three eldest Pandavas and, in secret, of Karna; the woman who keeps the epic's costliest silence.
• ViduraHalf-brother of the kings, born of a maidservant; always right, never in a position to be obeyed.
• AbhimanyuArjuna and Subhadra's son, killed at sixteen inside a formation he knew how to enter and not how to leave.
• DhrishtadyumnaDraupadi's brother, born from a fire altar to kill Drona; commander of the Pandava army for all eighteen days.

All 273 characters → ‧ The family tree ‧ How everyone is related

Where did the Mahabharata take place?

In northern India, mostly on the plain between the Ganga and the Yamuna. The two capitals are Hastinapura and Indraprastha, the war is fought at Kurukshetra in what is now Haryana, and Krishna rules from Dwaraka on the coast of Gujarat.

Hastinapura, the Kuru capital, sits on the Ganga in western Uttar Pradesh; the epic itself records that the river later washed it away and the court moved to Kausambi. Indraprastha is the city the Pandavas raise on the wasteland they are fobbed off with after the partition, cleared by the burning of the Khandava forest, and is traditionally identified with a site in modern Delhi. Kampilya is the capital of Panchala, Drupada's kingdom and Draupadi's home, the Kurus' rival and then their ally. The kingdom of Matsya, ruled from Virata, shelters the Pandavas through their thirteenth year.

The wider map reaches much further: Gandhara in the far northwest, from which Gandhari and Shakuni come; Anga in the east, given to Karna; Magadha under Jarasandha; the Himalayan passes Arjuna crosses alone; and the forests - Kamyaka, Dvaitavana, Gandhamadana - where twelve of the thirteen exile years are spent. Kurukshetra itself was already a sacred field before the war, which is why the Bhagavad Gita opens by calling it dharmakshetra, the field of dharma.

Open the interactive map → ‧ All 146 places

When did the Mahabharata happen?

Tradition dates the war to 3102 BCE, the year the Kali Yuga is held to have begun. Archaeology finds the epic's heartland occupied by the Painted Grey Ware culture between roughly 1200 and 600 BCE, and most historians who accept a historical kernel place it somewhere in the later Vedic period rather than in the fourth millennium.

The 3102 BCE figure comes from the astronomical tradition and is old and well-attested: the Aihole inscription of about 634 CE dates itself both by the Shaka era and by the number of years since the Bharata war, and the two together produce that date. What the inscription proves is that the war was already a fixed chronological anchor by the seventh century, not that the anchor is accurate.

Many attempts have been made to date the war from the eclipses, comets and planetary positions the text mentions. They have produced results ranging from 3067 BCE to about 1400 BCE, and they disagree because the astronomical references in the epic contradict each other, belong to different layers of composition, and include omens that were never observations in the first place.

The archaeological evidence is genuine but limited. B. B. Lal's excavations at Hastinapur in the early 1950s found Painted Grey Ware and a flood horizon matching the epic's own account of the city's end, and the same pottery appears at sites identified with Indraprastha and other named places. No excavation anywhere has produced evidence of the battle. The Kurus themselves are historical: they appear in Vedic literature as a dominant clan of the upper Ganga-Yamuna region, which is the best reason to think some real dynastic conflict lies at the bottom of the poem.

Full guide: is the Mahabharata real? →

What is the Bhagavad Gita?

The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of about 700 verses in eighteen chapters, set in the sixth book of the Mahabharata, in which Krishna answers Arjuna's refusal to fight. It circulates as a scripture in its own right, but it is a scene in the epic, spoken in the gap between two armies that are waiting to start killing each other.

Arjuna looks across at his grandfather, his teacher and his cousins, sees what victory will cost, and puts down his bow. Krishna's answer moves through several arguments: that the self is not destroyed with the body; that action is unavoidable and only attachment to its fruit is optional; that duty done badly is better than another's duty done well; that knowledge, works and devotion are three roads to the same place. In the eleventh chapter he shows Arjuna his universal form, and the conversation stops being an argument between friends.

Read alone, the Gita is a compact treatise on how to act. Read where it stands, it is far stranger, because the poem it sits in spends the next twelve books demonstrating what following that advice does to the people who follow it.

Read the Bhagavad Gita ‧ Chapter 1: Arjuna's despair ‧ Chapter 18: liberation

What does the Mahabharata teach?

That dharma - right conduct - is real, binding, and frequently impossible to work out; that actions have consequences that outlive the people who took them; and that the four aims of a human life - dharma, artha, kama and moksha - pull against each other and have to be held in some kind of balance by people who will mostly fail.

The epic is famously reluctant to moralise, which is why it keeps being reread. Its most honest man loses his wife at dice. Its greatest archer has to be argued into doing his job. Its most generous character dies unarmed, cheated, and in the right about having been cheated. Krishna, who is God in this text, recommends one dishonourable act after another and is cursed by a grieving mother for it. Nobody in the poem gets to be simply good.

What it offers instead of a rule is a method: put a hard case to several people who each hold a defensible position, let them argue, and let the reader see what the answer costs. Draupadi's question in the assembly hall is never answered by anyone present. Bhishma spends two books saying what a king must do and cannot say what he himself should have done. The Gita's advice is given to a man who takes it and is broken by the result.

Karma in the epic is less a system of reward than a description of how consequences propagate: a vow taken in one generation empties a throne in the next, a curse pronounced in grief takes thirty-six years to arrive, a lie told on a battlefield follows the man who told it into the afterlife. The last book makes the point bluntly by putting the villain in heaven and the heroes briefly in hell, and then explaining that both were true.

Eight themes traced through the epic → ‧ The moral dilemmas, argued from every side

How do you start reading the Mahabharata?

Start with a short abridgement to learn the names, then choose one full translation and read the narrative books in order. Do not start with the Bhagavad Gita, and do not feel obliged to finish the Shanti and Anushasana parvas on a first pass.

For a complete text at no cost, Kisari Mohan Ganguli's prose translation, published between 1883 and 1896, is in the public domain and available everywhere; it follows the older vulgate rather than the Critical Edition and its English is Victorian, but it is complete and reliable. For a modern complete translation, Bibek Debroy's ten volumes for Penguin, published between 2010 and 2014, render the Critical Edition in plain contemporary English. For scholarship, the University of Chicago translation begun by J. A. B. van Buitenen in 1973 and continued by James L. Fitzgerald is the most carefully annotated, though it remains unfinished.

For a first encounter, C. Rajagopalachari's abridgement from 1951 and R. K. Narayan's shortened prose version from 1978 are both short, clear and widely available. They will not give you the epic's arguments, but they will give you the story and the names, which is what makes the arguments readable afterwards.

Full guide: how to read the Mahabharata → ‧ Guided learning paths

Key facts about the Mahabharata

Also known as

Mahabharata, Mahabharat, the Bharata

Attributed author

Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa

Language

Sanskrit

Genre

Itihasa, the epic-historical class of Sanskrit literature

Length

About 100,000 shlokas, roughly 1.8 million words

Books

18 parvas, plus the Harivamsa as an appendix

Contains

The Bhagavad Gita (Bhishma Parva, 18 chapters)

Central event

The Kurukshetra war, fought over 18 days

Setting

The Ganga-Yamuna plain, Kurukshetra, Dwaraka

Composition

Layered, roughly 400 BCE to 400 CE

Traditional date of the war

3102 BCE

Standard modern text

The Critical Edition, BORI Pune, 1919-1966

Explore the Mahabharata

• Interactive map146 places, plotted and linked to the stories they belong to
• All stories974 episodes in chronological order, most with narration
• Characters273 figures, their kin, their vows and their appearances
• PlacesKingdoms, forests, rivers, battlefields and sacred fords
• Timeline363 events across the eras of the epic
• The war, day by dayEach of the eighteen days, with commanders and deaths
• Family treeThe Kuru dynasty, generation by generation
• The 18 parvasWhat each book contains and where it sits in the whole
• Glossary129 Sanskrit terms explained in plain English
• Questions answeredShort answers to the questions people actually ask
• QuotesLines from the epic, in context
• GuidesLonger essays on history, authorship, the war and how to read it