It is an epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War. The Mahabharata Complete 10 Volumes [1 ed. Though the basic plot is widely known, there is much more to t 24MB Read more. The Mahabharata Set of 10 Volumes , The Mahabharata is one of the greatest stories ever told. Though the basic plot is widely known, there is much more to t 25MB Read more.
Close Submit. However, their five sons through Droupadi were killed. Having classified the Vedas, he composed the Mahabharata in , shlokas or couplets. One reaches around 90, shlokas. That too, is a gigantic number. The Mahabharata is almost four times the size of the Ramayana and is longer than any other epic anywhere in the world.
For a count of 90, Sanskrit shlokas, we are talking about something in the neighbourhood of two million words. The text of the Mahabharata tells us that Krishna Dvaipayana finished this composition in three years.
The text also tells us that there are three versions to the Mahabharata. The original version was called Jaya and had 8, shlokas. This was expanded to 24, shlokas and called Bharata. Finally, it was expanded to 90, or , shlokas and called Mahabharata. He composed the eighteen Maha Puranas, adding another , shlokas. Having composed the Mahabharata, he taught it to his disciple Vaishampayana.
When Parikshit was killed by a serpent, Janamejaya organized a snake-sacrifice to destroy the serpents. With all the sages assembled there, Vaishampayana turned up and the assembled sages wanted to know the story of the Mahabharata, as composed by Krishna Dvaipayana.
Janamejaya also wanted to know why Parikshit had been killed by the serpent. However, there is another round of recounting too. Lomaharshana was a suta , the sutas being charioteers and bards or raconteurs.
As the son of a suta, Lomaharshana is also referred to as Souti. His proper name is Ugrashrava. Souti refers to his birth. He owes the name Lomaharshana to the fact that the body-hair loma or roma stood up harshana on hearing his tales. Within the text therefore, two people are telling the tale. Sometimes it is Vaishampayana and sometimes it is Lomaharshana.
Incidentally, the stories of the Puranas are recounted by Lomaharshana, without Vaishampayana intruding.
Having composed the Puranas, Krishna Dvaipayana taught them to his disciple Lomaharshana. For what it is worth, there are scholars who have used statistical tests to try and identify the multiple authors of the Mahabharata.
As we are certain there were multiple authors rather than a single one, the question of when the Mahabharata was composed is somewhat pointless. It is impossible to be more accurate than that. There is a difference between dating the composition and dating the incidents, such as the date of the Kurukshetra war.
Dating the incidents is both subjective and controversial and irrelevant for the purposes of this translation. But even then, the size of the corpus is nothing short of amazing. Familiarity with Sanskrit is dying out. The first decades of the twenty-first century are quite unlike the first decades of the twentieth.
Lamentation over what is inevitable serves no purpose. If familiarity with the corpus is not to die out, it needs to be accessible in English. There are many different versions or recensions of the Mahabharata. This is an authenticated text produced by a board of scholars and seeks to eliminate later interpolations, unifying the text across the various regional versions. This is the text followed in this translation. Sometimes, the transition from one shloka to another is abrupt, because the intervening shloka has been weeded out.
With the intervening shloka included, a non-critical version of the text sometimes makes better sense. On a few occasions, I have had the temerity to point this out in the notes which I have included in my translation. It took a long time for this critical edition to be put together. The exercise began in Without the Hari Vamsha, the complete critical edition became available in And with the Hari Vamsha, the complete critical edition became available in Before this, there were regional variations in the text and the main versions were available from Bengal, Bombay and the south.
However, now, one should stick to the critical edition, though there are occasional instances where there are reasons for dissatisfaction with what the scholars of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute have accomplished.
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