If the original Mahabharata were to be published today, it would likely be described as “genre-defying”. All at once, it is an epic lyrical poem, a family drama, a treatise on justice and righteous war, a collection of parables, and a guide to Hindu philosophy and cosmology. It is an all-encompassing narrative that instructs as much as it entertains, evoking pathos as much as reverence. Alongside the Ramayana, the Mahabharata is one of the seminal texts in the development of Hinduism, its influence percolating through generations and across geographical borders. It draws numerous comparisons of form and theme not only to works of the classical canon such as Homer’s Iliad, but also to pop cultural touchstones such as the A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels by George RR Martin and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Its appeal is both high-brow and populist. It is as much surrounded by academic scholarship as it is by comic book adaptations and cartoon series, and inspires philosophy and intellect as much as it does movement and action.
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To trace the history of the Mahabharata is to tap into the kaleidoscopic and interpretive nature of storytelling itself. Scholars pin the Mahabharata’s oral-tradition origins to circa 400 BCE, when versions of its constituent stories were retold by priests and ascetics, and reinterpreted by travelling dance troupes. During the cultural golden age of the Gupta Empire circa 400 CE, the stories were unified in a single text written in Sanskrit verse, comprising approximately 100,000 stanzas across 18 chapters. The Mahabharata was disseminated across the Indian subcontinent, while also continuing to be reinterpreted through a variety of performance forms across the region and immortalised in monuments decorated with stone reliefs depicting pivotal scenes. Centuries later, translations of the text appeared in a multitude of South and Southeast Asian languages as recorded literatures started to develop and stories cross-pollinated across the region, traversing borders of cultural and linguistic difference.
The practice of reinterpretation runs deep in the heart of the Mahabharata. The preface of the Sanskrit Mahabharata tells the story of its own creation—its “origin story”, to borrow a term popularised by Marvel—where Vyasa, the revered author of the text, dictates the stories of the Mahabharata to his dedicated scribe, the elephant-headed god Ganesha, who shoulders the added challenge of interpreting Vyasa’s many meta-commentaries on the main narrative. The Mahabharata is defined by such frame tales, or stories-within-stories.
The nucleus of these tales is the story of a war for the throne of Hastinapur between two groups of cousins: the five Pandavas (sons of Pandu) and the 100 Kauravas (sons of Dhritarashtra, born blind).
