The epic is traditionally ascribed to Vyasa, who is also one of the major dynastic characters within the epic. The first section of the Mahabharata states that it was Ganesha who, at the request of Vyasa, wrote down the text to Vyasa's dictation. Ganesha is said to have agreed to write it only on condition that Vyasa never pause in his recitation. Vyasa agreed, provided Ganesha took the time to understand what was said before writing it down. The epic employs the story within a story structure, otherwise known as frametales, popular in many Indian religious and secular works. It is recited to the King Janamejaya who is the great-grandson of Arjuna, by Vaisampayana, a disciple of Vyasa. The recitation of Vaisampayana to Janamejaya is then recited again by a professional story teller named Ugrasrava Sauti, many years later, to an assemblage of sages.
It is usually thought that the full length of the Mahabharata has accreted over a long period. The Mahabharata itself distinguishes a core portion of 24,000 verses, the Bharata proper, as opposed to additional secondary material, while the Ashvalayana Grhyasutra makes a similar distinction. According to the Adi-parva of the Mahabharata the text was originally 8,800 verses when it was composed by Vyasa and was known as the Jaya (Victory), which later became 24,000 verses in the Bharata recited by Vaisampayana, and finally over 90,000 verses in the Mahabharata recited by Ugrasrava Sauti.[6]
As with the field of Homeric studies, research on the Mahabharata has put an enormous effort into recognizing and dating various layers within the text. The state of the text has been described by some early 20th century Indologists as unstructured and chaotic. Hermann Oldenberg (1922) supposed that the original poem must once have carried an immense "tragic force", but dismissed the full text as a "horrible chaos."
The earliest known references to the Mahabharata and its core Bharata date back to the Ashtadhyayi of Pāṇini (fl. 4th century BCE), and in the Ashvalayana Grhyasutra (3.4.4).[citation needed] This may suggest that the core 24,000 verses, known as the Bharata, as well as an early version of the extended Mahabharata, were composed by the 4th century BCE. Parts of the Jaya's original 8,800 verses possibly may date back as far as the 9th-8th century BCE.[2]
The Greek writer Dio Chrysostom reported, "it is said that Homer's poetry is sung even in India, where they have translated it into their own speech and tongue. The result is that...the people of India...are not unacquainted with the sufferings of Priam, the laments and wailings of Andromache and Hecuba, and the valor of both Achilles and Hector: so remarkable has been the spell of one man's poetry!"Despite the passage's evident face-value meaning—that the Iliad had been translated into Sanskrit—some scholars have supposed that the report reflects the existence of a Mahabharata at this date, whose episodes Dio or his sources syncretistically identify with the story of the Iliad. Christian Lassen, in his Indische Alterthumskunde, supposed that the reference is ultimately to Dhritarashtra's sorrows, the laments of Gandhari and Draupadi, and the valor of Arjuna and Duryodhana or Karna.This interpretation, endorsed in such standard references as Albrecht Weber's History of Indian Literature, has often been repeated without specific reference to what Dio's text says.
Later, the copper-plate inscription of the Maharaja Sharvanatha from Khoh (Satna District, Madhya Pradesh) describes the Mahabharata as a "collection of 100,000 verses" (shatasahasri samhita). The redaction of this large body of text was carried out after formal principles, emphasizing the numbers 18 and 12. The addition of the latest parts may be dated by the absence of the Anushasana-parva from MS Spitzer, the oldest surviving Sanskrit philosophical manuscript dated to the first century, that contains among other things a list of the books in the Mahabharata. From this evidence, it is likely that the redaction into 18 books took place in the first century. An alternative division into 20 parvas appears to have co-existed for some time. The division into 100 sub-parvas is older, and most parvas are named after one of their constituent sub-parvas. The Harivamsa consists of the final two of the 100 sub-parvas, and was considered an appendix (khila) to the Mahabharata proper by the redactors of the 18 parvas
Mahabharata is one of the greatest epics of world. I don’t know when it was written but still after thousands of years, it has an important place in Hindu mythology. Along with Vedas and Ramayan, it is a major text of Hinduism. It is basically a story of the family feud between the noble Pandava princes and their scheming cousins, the Kaurava kings. It describes the human goals like dharma or duty, artha or purpose, k?ma, pleasure or desire and moksha or liberation. It also explains the relationship of the individual to society and the world and also explains the importance of Karma in life. If you want to know more about Indian culture and its rich heritage then I would recommend you to read Mahabharat.
Kurus Family Tree: Click Here to view
It is a collection of more than 74,000 verses, divided into 18 books. It also contains the Bhagawad Gita, the famous gospel of duty that was taught to the great warrior, Arjuna by Lord Krishna. During late eighties it was transformed into a successful Indian television series by producer-director B R Chopra. The 94-episode series ran from 1988 to 1990. Each episode was approximately 45 minutes long. If you don’t want to read Mahabharat then you have one more option.
Download and watch onlineComplete Playlist of all the 94 Episodes of Mahabharat
0 comments:
Post a Comment