What is the Mahabharata?

The Mahabharata is a Sanskrit epic attributed to the sage Vyasa. Its plot is a family quarrel over a throne. Two sets of cousins grow up in the Kuru capital of Hastinapur: the five sons of Pandu, called the Pandavas, and the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, called the Kauravas. The eldest Kaurava, Duryodhana, refuses to accept that the kingdom could pass to his cousins. A rigged game of dice sends the Pandavas into twelve years of exile and a thirteenth year in disguise. When they return and ask for their share, Duryodhana refuses them so much as a needle-point of land, and the quarrel becomes a war that draws in almost every kingdom of the subcontinent.

That plot is only the frame. Hung on it are hundreds of embedded tales, genealogies, debates on law and kingship, creation myths, a retelling of the Rama story, and long instructional books spoken by the dying Bhishma from his bed of arrows. The Bhagavad Gita, the seven-hundred-verse dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, sits inside the sixth book and is the single most read part of the whole work.

The text is organised into eighteen books, called parvas, with a nineteenth section, the Harivamsa, treated as an appendix. It is told as a story within a story: Vyasa teaches it to his pupil Vaishampayana, who recites it at the snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya, and the bard Ugrashravas later repeats that recitation to sages in the Naimisha forest. The epic is frank about its own scope, claiming that whatever is found here may be found elsewhere, and what is not here exists nowhere.

The Mahabharata is not a simple contest of good against evil. Its heroes cheat in battle, its villains keep their word, and its most repeated observation is that dharma is subtle and hard to trace. That difficulty is the point of the book.