Mahabharata basics · Mahabharata questions
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.
Eighteen is the epic number in the Mahabharata. There are eighteen parvas, eighteen chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, eighteen armies at Kurukshetra and eighteen days of fighting. The eighteen books run: Adi, Sabha, Vana, Virata, Udyoga, Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Shalya, Sauptika, Stri, Shanti, Anushasana, Ashvamedhika, Ashramavasika, Mausala, Mahaprasthanika and Svargarohana.
They are wildly unequal. The Adi Parva sets up the dynasty and the childhood of the cousins. The Sabha Parva covers the imperial sacrifice and the dice game. The Vana Parva, the longest of the early books, is the twelve-year forest exile and carries most of the epic embedded tales. The war occupies only four books, named for the four successive Kaurava commanders: Bhishma, Drona, Karna and Shalya. The Sauptika Parva is the night raid that follows. The Shanti and Anushasana Parvas together are the largest block in the whole work, a vast instruction on law, kingship and release spoken by Bhishma while he waits to die.
Each parva is divided into upaparvas, sub-books with their own names, and the epic counts a hundred of them in its own table of contents, though the surviving text yields slightly fewer depending on the edition. The last four books are short: the horse sacrifice, the old king retiring to the forest, the self-destruction of the Yadavas, and the final walk into the mountains.
The Harivamsa, which tells the ancestry and early life of Krishna, is often printed with the epic as a khila, a supplement, and is sometimes called the nineteenth parva. The critical edition includes it in a separate volume.