Mahabharata

Anonymous

About 4 pages (1,190 words)

Mahabharata Summary

Know this topic well? Help others and get FREE products!

Mahabharata

The monumental Sanskrit poem the Mahabharata, attributed to the legendary poet-seer Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa (fifth century? BCE), although perhaps not the oldest epic poem to have survived from antiquity, is certainly the longest and undoubtedly among the most influential in the world. Its complex characters and its grim and involuted plot have left a profound and indelible impression on the peoples and cultures of South and Southeast Asia for at least two millennia, influencing the arts, literature, and religious, political, and social lives of many hundreds of millions of people throughout this vast region. One section of the immense text, the Bhagavad Gita, has come to be regarded as a seminal text of classical Hindu ethics.

The Mahabharata, as it has come down to us in a large number of manuscripts from virtually all the regions and in virtually all the indigenous scripts of South Asia, is a lengthy epic narrative ranging (depending on the textual version) from some 100,000 to perhaps 120,000 Sanskrit couplets, although a few passages are in prose.

The Central Narrative

At its narrative heart, the poem is a political and military history recounting the origins of the ruling family (known variously as the Bharatas, the Pauravas, and the Kurus or Kauravas) of an early Indian kingdom that appears to have flourished in central northern India in the vicinity of the modern city of Delhi, probably around the beginning of the first millennium BCE.

The story involves a bitter succession struggle between rival claimants for the ancestral throne of this kingdom and culminates in a brutal and bloody civil war that leaves most of the aristocratic characters in the epic drama dead and the world of the Bharatas in ruins. The struggle originates in a complex set of displacements and disqualifications that muddy the clear stream of dynastic succession so that the sons, respectively, of a pair of royal brothers, each of whom is forced to give up his claim to the throne, are pitted against one another in increasingly implacable rivalry and enmity.

The poem casts the struggle not only in political terms but also as a conflict over dharma, righteousness itself. The protagonists of the poem, and the parties more clearly associated with dharma, are the sons of King Pandu, known as the Pandavas. Their rivals (sometimes called the Kauravas for the sake of convenience) are their first cousins, the sons of Pandu's older brother Dhritarashtra, who had to forgo sovereignty because of congenital blindness. As a consequence of a curse, Pandu cannot father children. His five heroic sons are, however, sired by a series of powerful Vedic divinities and are therefore regarded as earthly incarnations of these gods. The eldest and heir apparent to the throne, Yudhishthira, is the incarnation of the god of righteousness, Dharma. His brothers Arjuna and Bhima are the children of, respectively, the Vedic warrior and wind gods Indra and Vayu, and the two youngest Pandavas, Nakula and Sahadeva, are the twin sons of the twin divinities, the Asvins. Their antagonists, the sons of Dhritarashtra, are led by the eldest brother, the angry and vengeful Duryodhana, who is regarded as an incarnation of a demonic being.

The two parties are rivals from childhood, and the Pandavas must endure threats, abuse, and assassination attempts by Duryodhana and his allies. At length a seeming resolution is reached when the kingdom is divided, with Duryodhana ruling in the ancestral capital of Hastinapura, and Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, building a fabulous new capital city at nearby Indraprastha. This device does not, however, long appease the envy and enmity of Duryodhana. He invites Yudhishthira to a rigged gambling match where he divests him of all his property, his brothers, and their common wife, the princess Draupadi. This ultimate catastrophe is averted at the last moment through the wit of Draupadi, but as a consequence of a second round of dicing, the Pandavas are forced to withdraw in exile to the forest for a period of twelve years and spend a thirteenth year incognito. They fulfill these conditions, but Duryodhana is obdurate in his refusal to share power with them. The two sides set about securing allies and preparing for battle. Complex bonds of loyalty obligate many of the epic's most powerful and venerable figures to ally themselves reluctantly with Duryodhana; the Pandavas, through the intervention of Arjuna, the foremost hero among the five brothers, manage to secure the latter's close friend and virtual alter ego, their cousin Krishna, as a noncombatant adviser and charioteer.

The long-brewing war at last breaks out, attended by massive slaughter on both sides, but at length the Pandavas, although outmatched by Duryodhana's forces, manage to achieve a Pyrrhic victory largely by adhering to the sagacious though often ethically questionable advice of Krishna. Yudhishthira reigns disconsolately over his hard-won but devastated kingdom for some years, until he and his brothers, along with their long-suffering wife Draupadi, abandon the world and trek off into the Himalayas in an attempt to enter heaven. The four younger Pandavas and Draupadi fall dead on the path, with only the supremely righteous Yudhishthira managing to enter the heavenly realm in his earthly body. Ultimately, however, all the heroes are reunited in paradise.

Cultural Significance of the Epic

This spare narrative, central though it is to the work, does scant justice to the dense layering of meaning and richness of substance that characterize the text of the epic that has come down to us. The core narrative was used as a frame around which was attached a huge corpus of secondary texts incorporating a considerable amount of the systematized knowledge of ancient India. This takes the form of discourses and stories placed in the mouths of various characters, detailing mythological, cosmological, historical, theological, philosophical, political, social, and scientific knowledge preserved by the culture. Thus the Mahabharata is not merely an exciting story of treachery, intrigue, and war but a virtual encyclopedia of ancient India.

With its concentration on and magnification of the role of Krishna, who emerges in the poem as an earthly incarnation of the supreme Lord Vishnu, the poem has become one of the major early textual sources for Vaishnavism (worship of Vishnu), one of the sectarian forms of Hinduism. The triumph and salvation of the Pandavas are represented as artifacts of their (especially Arjuna's) devotion to and faith in Krishna. The Bhagavad Gita, a section of the epic's sixth book in which Krishna exhorts Arjuna to fight his righteous war and reveals himself as the all-loving god, became one of the central texts of Hindu devotionalism.

Although traditional Indian culture has always been cautious about the message of the Mahabharata, with its focus on intrafamilial conflict, the text lies close to the heart of the tradition and powerfully influenced the social, religious, political, and artistic sensibility of South and Southeast Asian peoples for two millennia or more.