Mahabharata Study Guide

The author of the Mahabharata is disputed, with many scholars believing it began as an oral tradition and so has multiple authors. Another tradition names the author as Vyasa, who appears in the poem as a character himself. One of the most widely read English-language editions of the poem is the abridged Penguin Classics version by John D. Smith, which condenses the sprawling poem into one large volume. Smith was a scholar of Sanskrit and Hindi who lectured at the University of London in the 1970s before becoming a professor at the University of Cambridge in 1984. His early work focused on the writing and traditions of Rajasthan, a northern state of India. In 1997, he began working on the Mahabharata, a task that took him until 2008—a full fifth of his life, as he once noted. Smith retired from Cambridge in 2007.

As with the Bible and other holy texts, people have long debated how literally to interpret the version of history that the Mahabharata describes. By the time of the Mahabharata’s writing, India was still made up of several disparate kingdoms and empires, leading to power struggles similar to the Kurukshetra War in the epic poem. Buddhism and Jainism were both founded in India not too long before the first appearance of the full Mahabharata. The poem came out right around the same time as the “Hindu synthesis,” when ideas from various traditions merged to become modern Hinduism, which has no single founder and remains a diverse religion with many local traditions and variations. Although few people ever read the complete unabridged Mahabharata, the events of the poem remain an enduring part of culture in India, even today. One of the poem’s most famous followers was Mahatma Gandhi, who called the Bhagavadgita section of the poem the single greatest influence on his life and eventually created a Gujarati translation of it.

As one of the foundational texts of Hinduism, the Mahabharata has several connections to other Hindu scriptures. The poem references the Vedas, a set of four volumes (with several subdivisions) that deal with philosophical and moral questions and are the oldest surviving Sanskrit holy writings. Tradition has it that the author of the Mahabharata (Vyasa) is also the one who compiled the Vedas. The Mahabharata sometimes earns comparisons to the Ramayana by Valmiki, another long Sanskrit epic poem, which takes place before the events of the Mahabharata and features some of the same figures. The Mahabharata also shares characters with Sanskrit drama, perhaps most notably Shakuntala, a play by Kalidasa that expands on the story of king Duhshanta and Shakuntala. In the roughly two millennia since it was written, the Mahabharata has been adapted countless times, with a couple recent examples being Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug, V. S. Khandekar’s Yayati, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions.