Mahabharata basics

What the epic is, who composed it, how long it runs and how much of it is history.

• What is the Mahabharata?The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit epic about a succession quarrel between two branches of the Kuru family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, that ends in an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra. At roughly 100,000 verses it is the longest poem known, and it contains the Bhagavad Gita.
• Who wrote the Mahabharata?Tradition credits the sage Vyasa, also called Krishna Dvaipayana, who is both the author and a character in the story. Scholars treat the epic as the work of many hands over several centuries, compiled and expanded by generations of bards and editors rather than written by one person.
• How many verses are in the Mahabharata?The Mahabharata traditionally counts about 100,000 shlokas, which is why it is called the Shatasahasri Samhita, the collection of a hundred thousand. The critical edition prepared in Pune, which strips out later additions, contains roughly 73,900 verses.
• How many parvas are in the Mahabharata?The Mahabharata has eighteen parvas, or books, from the Adi Parva to the Svargarohana Parva, with the Harivamsa attached as a supplement. Those eighteen are further divided into about a hundred sub-books called upaparvas.
• How long is the Mahabharata?About 1.8 million words of Sanskrit in roughly 100,000 verses, which makes it the longest epic poem known, around ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey together. A complete English translation runs to about ten thousand pages across ten to twelve volumes.
• When was the Mahabharata written?There is no single date. Most scholars place the composition of the Mahabharata between roughly 400 BCE and 400 CE, with older oral material inside it and later books added around a shorter heroic core. Tradition instead dates it to the start of the Kali Yuga, about 3100 BCE.
• Is the Mahabharata a true story?There is no proof either way. Many historians accept that a memory of a real conflict between clans in the upper Ganga plain lies under the epic, but the text as it stands is literature, with gods, curses and impossible numbers, and no inscription or excavation has confirmed any person or event in it.
• Which is older, the Mahabharata or the Ramayana?Tradition places the Ramayana earlier, in the Treta Yuga, with the Mahabharata in the following Dvapara Yuga. Most scholars also date the core of the Ramayana slightly earlier, though both grew over centuries and the surviving Mahabharata contains material later than parts of the Ramayana.
• How many characters are in the Mahabharata?No one has a final count. The epic names hundreds of warriors who appear once and dozens of kings who appear only in genealogies, so published estimates of named figures range from a few hundred to over a thousand. This site profiles 273 of them.
• What is the best translation of the Mahabharata?For a complete modern English text, Bibek Debroy ten-volume translation of the critical edition is the usual recommendation. Kisari Mohan Ganguli Victorian prose translation is complete and free online. For a first reading, an abridgement such as John D. Smith or R. K. Narayan is easier.

People of the epic

The Pandavas, the Kauravas, and the figures whose choices drive the story.

• Who were the Pandavas?The Pandavas are the five sons of Pandu: Yudhishthira, Bhima and Arjuna by Kunti, and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva by Madri. Each was fathered by a god because Pandu was under a curse, and all five shared one wife, Draupadi.
• Who were the Kauravas?The Kauravas are the hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, led by Duryodhana and Dushasana. Strictly, Kaurava means any descendant of Kuru, so the Pandavas are Kauravas too, but the epic uses the name for Dhritarashtra sons and their party.
• How many Kauravas were there?A hundred brothers, born to Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, plus a daughter named Dussala and a half-brother, Yuyutsu, born to a woman of the household. All hundred died at Kurukshetra; Yuyutsu, who fought for the Pandavas, survived.
• Who was Karna?Karna was the first son of Kunti, born to her by the sun god before her marriage and set adrift on a river. Raised by a charioteer, mocked for low birth, he was made king of Anga by Duryodhana and fought for him against the brothers he did not know were his.
• Why did Karna fight for Duryodhana?Because Duryodhana gave him a kingdom and a standing when everyone else called him a charioteer son. Karna refused Krishna offer of the throne and Kunti appeal to join his brothers, saying that he had eaten Duryodhana bread for years and would not desert him on the eve of the fighting.
• Why did Bhishma take his vow?So that his father could marry. Shantanu wanted Satyavati, whose father demanded that her children inherit the throne. Devavrata renounced the kingdom, and then, to remove any threat from his own sons, swore lifelong celibacy. For that terrible oath he was named Bhishma.
• Why did Draupadi have five husbands?Arjuna won her at the svayamvara, and when the brothers told Kunti they had brought alms, she said without looking that they must share it. Held to her word, the Pandavas married Draupadi jointly, and Vyasa justified it by a boon she had earned in a former life.
• Who was Shakuni?Shakuni was the prince of Gandhara, brother of Gandhari and uncle of the Kauravas, who lived at Hastinapur and advised Duryodhana. He threw the dice that ruined the Pandavas, never losing a cast, and was killed by Sahadeva on the eighteenth day of the war.
• Why was Gandhari blindfolded?Gandhari chose it. On learning that the husband arranged for her, Dhritarashtra, was born blind, she bound a cloth over her own eyes and kept it there for life, refusing to enjoy what her husband could not. She removed it only once, to look at Duryodhana.
• Is Ashwatthama still alive?In the epic, Krishna curses Ashwatthama to wander for three thousand years with a festering wound and no human company, so within the story he does not die. Reports of sightings at forts and temples are folklore, not text, and there is no evidence for them.
• How old was Krishna in the Mahabharata war?The epic never gives his age. Traditional reckoning has Krishna living 125 years and leaving the world 36 years after the war, which would make him about 89 at Kurukshetra. That figure comes from Puranic chronology, not from the Mahabharata itself.

The Kurukshetra war

The dice game that caused it, the eighteen days, the deaths and the count of the dead.

• When did the Mahabharata war happen?No date is established. Traditional reckoning places the war at the end of the Dvapara Yuga, around 3102 BCE. Historians who accept a historical kernel usually suggest a far later period, roughly 1000 to 900 BCE, on archaeological grounds. The disagreement is unresolved.
• How many days was the Mahabharata war?The war at Kurukshetra lasted eighteen days. Bhishma commanded the Kaurava army for the first ten days, Drona for the next five, Karna for two and Shalya for the last, on which Duryodhana fell. The night raid that follows belongs to the nineteenth night.
• Who won the Mahabharata war?The Pandavas won. All hundred Kaurava brothers were killed, and Yudhishthira was crowned king at Hastinapur. But their side lost nearly everyone too, including Abhimanyu, Ghatotkacha, Draupadi five sons and Drupada, and the epic treats the victory as a ruin.
• How many people died in the Mahabharata war?Eighteen akshauhinis fought, about 3.9 million men and animals by the epic own arithmetic, and almost all were killed. In the Stri Parva the text gives a far larger figure of 1,660,020,000 dead with 24,165 missing. Only a handful of named warriors survived.
• Who survived the Mahabharata war?Tradition counts ten survivors: the five Pandavas, Krishna and Satyaki on the winning side, and Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma on the Kaurava side. Yuyutsu, who changed sides before the first day, also lived, as did Vrishaketu, the surviving son of Karna.
• What is an akshauhini?An akshauhini is the epic largest army unit: 21,870 chariots, 21,870 elephants, 65,610 horses and 109,350 foot soldiers, a total of 218,700 pieces. Eighteen akshauhinis fought at Kurukshetra, eleven for the Kauravas and seven for the Pandavas.
• What happened in the dice game?Invited to a game he could not refuse, Yudhishthira gambled against Shakuni, who played for Duryodhana and did not lose. Yudhishthira staked wealth, kingdom, his brothers, himself and finally Draupadi, who was dragged into the assembly hall. A second game sent the Pandavas into thirteen years of exile.
• Who killed Abhimanyu?Abhimanyu was killed on the thirteenth day inside the chakravyuha by many warriors at once, against the rules of war. Drona, Karna, Kripa, Ashwatthama and Kritavarma broke his chariot, bow and armour, and the son of Dushasana killed the disarmed boy in a mace fight.
• What is the chakravyuha?The chakravyuha is a battle formation shaped like a spinning discus or a coiled maze, with layered rings of troops that close behind anyone who enters. Drona used it on the thirteenth day at Kurukshetra, and Abhimanyu, who could enter but not leave it, was killed inside.
• How did Bhishma die?Bhishma fell on the tenth day of the war, shot down by Arjuna, who fought from behind Shikhandi because Bhishma would not raise a weapon against one he regarded as a woman. Able to choose his moment of death, he lay on a bed of arrows for fifty-eight nights and died after the sun turned north.
• How did Karna die?Karna was killed by Arjuna on the seventeenth day. His chariot wheel sank into the ground, as a brahmin curse had promised, and he forgot the mantra for his greatest weapon, as Parashurama had cursed him to. Stepping down to free the wheel unarmed, he was shot with the anjalika arrow.
• Who was the strongest warrior in the Mahabharata?The epic never settles it. Bhishma rates himself first among the Kaurava commanders, with Karna half a ratha by his reckoning; Bhishma, Drona and Krishna all name Arjuna the finest archer; Bhima is the strongest man; and Krishna repeatedly says no one could have beaten Bhishma or Drona in a fair fight.
• Why did Krishna not fight in the war?Krishna offered both sides a choice before the war: his whole army, or himself alone, unarmed and not fighting. Arjuna chose Krishna, Duryodhana took the army. Krishna kept the condition by serving as Arjuna charioteer and counsellor, and twice almost broke it in anger.

Places and geography

Where Kurukshetra, Hastinapur, Indraprastha and Dwarka are, and what has been dug up there.

• Where is Kurukshetra?Kurukshetra is a city and district in the state of Haryana in northern India, about 160 kilometres north of Delhi on the road to Ambala. The epic battlefield is identified with the plain around it, and the town of Jyotisar nearby is the traditional spot where the Bhagavad Gita was spoken.
• Where was Hastinapur?Hastinapur is identified with a village of the same name in Meerut district, Uttar Pradesh, on an old course of the Ganga about 100 kilometres north-east of Delhi. Excavations there in the 1950s found Painted Grey Ware settlement and a flood layer that matches the Puranic account of the capital being abandoned.
• Where was Indraprastha?Indraprastha is traditionally located in Delhi, at or near the Purana Qila. A village called Indarpat stood inside those walls until the early twentieth century, and excavations at the site have produced Painted Grey Ware of roughly the period associated with the epic.
• Where was Dwarka, the city of Krishna?Dwarka is placed on the Gujarat coast at the western tip of the Saurashtra peninsula, where the modern pilgrimage town of Dwarka stands. The epic says the sea took the city after Krishna died, and marine archaeologists have found submerged stone structures offshore whose dating is disputed.

Dharma and meaning

Dharma, karma, the Bhagavad Gita and what the epic argues about all three.

• What is dharma in the Mahabharata?Dharma is right conduct: cosmic order, moral law, social duty and the particular obligation a person carries in a particular situation, all at once. The Mahabharata never reduces it to a rulebook, and its most repeated admission is that dharma is subtle and hard to know.
• What is the Bhagavad Gita and when was it spoken?The Bhagavad Gita is a 700-verse dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that sits inside the sixth book of the Mahabharata. It is spoken between the two armies at Kurukshetra, on the morning of the first day of the war, when Arjuna refuses to fight.
• What is karma in the Mahabharata?Karma means action, and the moral consequence an action leaves behind, which ripens in this life or a later one. In the Mahabharata it is the machinery that makes curses, boons and inherited guilt intelligible: nothing in the epic simply happens, everything is owed.
• What are the lessons of the Mahabharata?That dharma is genuinely hard to know, that silence in the face of wrong is itself a wrong, that anger and greed destroy the people who hold them, and that victory can cost more than defeat. The epic teaches by showing good people choose badly, not by issuing rules.

After the war

The reign, the ruin of the Yadavas, the final journey and the line that survived.

• What happened after the Mahabharata war?Yudhishthira was crowned and ruled for thirty-six years, taught by the dying Bhishma. Dhritarashtra, Gandhari and Kunti retired to the forest and died in a fire. The Yadavas then destroyed themselves, Krishna died, and the Pandavas walked into the Himalaya, leaving Parikshit as king.
• How did Krishna die?Thirty-six years after the war, the Yadavas destroyed each other in a drunken brawl at Prabhasa, as Gandhari had cursed. Krishna withdrew to a forest, where a hunter named Jara mistook his foot for a deer and shot him. The sea then took Dwaraka.
• How did the Pandavas die?After Krishna death they crowned Parikshit and walked north into the Himalaya to die. Draupadi fell first, then Sahadeva, Nakula, Arjuna and Bhima, each for a particular fault named by Yudhishthira. Only Yudhishthira reached the gate of heaven in his own body.
• Who was Parikshit?Parikshit was the son of Abhimanyu and Uttara, born after the war and revived by Krishna when Ashwatthama weapon struck him in the womb. He was the only surviving heir of the Kuru line and became king when the Pandavas departed. His son Janamejaya first heard the epic recited.