The Kurukshetra war · Mahabharata questions
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.
The Mahabharata gives two answers and they do not reconcile, which is worth stating plainly.
The first is structural. Eighteen akshauhinis take the field, eleven for Duryodhana and seven for Yudhishthira. An akshauhini is defined in the epic as 21,870 chariots, 21,870 elephants, 65,610 horses and 109,350 foot soldiers, and eighteen of them come to roughly 3.9 million chariots, beasts and men together. By the end of the eighteenth day these armies have effectively ceased to exist.
The second is rhetorical. In the Stri Parva, when Yudhishthira asks for a count, the figure given is one billion six hundred and sixty million and twenty thousand killed, with twenty-four thousand one hundred and sixty-five listed as missing. That is far more people than the ancient world contained, let alone the Ganga plain, and it is not a census. It is the epic way of saying the destruction exceeded counting, and it sits in the book of the women, where the widows walk the field looking for their dead.
The survivors are counted precisely, which makes the contrast sharper. Ten men are usually named: the five Pandavas, Krishna and Satyaki on one side, and Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma on the other. Yuyutsu, the son of Dhritarashtra by a serving woman who changed sides before the first day, also lives, and is left in charge at Hastinapur at the end.
The point the text is making with these numbers is not arithmetic. Gandhari walks the battlefield at the end and Krishna receives her curse there. What the figures record is a civilisation deleting itself over a quarrel about a throne.