How many parts of mahabharat were there in original?
Answers
It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their succession. Along with the Rāmāyaṇa, it forms the Hindu Itihasa.
Mahabharata
Manuscript illustration of the Battle of Kurukshetra
InformationReligionHinduism, Jainism, Indonesian philosophyAuthorVyasaLanguageSanskritVerses200,000
Krishna and Arjuna at Kurukshetra, 18th–19th-century painting
The Mahābhārata is an epic legendary narrative of the Kurukṣetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa, and the story of Ṛṣyasringa, often considered as works in their own right.
Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Vyāsa. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The oldest preserved parts of the text are thought to be not much older than around 400 BCE, though the origins of the epic probably fall between the 8th and 9th centuries BCE.[4] The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE).[5][6] According to the Mahābhārata itself, the tale is extended from a shorter version of 24,000 verses called simply Bhārata.[7]
The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written".[8][9] Its longest version consists of over 100,000 śloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa.[10][11] W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the Quran.[12] Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the Fifth Veda.