The Mahabharata and the Critical Edition

The Mahabharata is one of the richest texts of the subcontinent. In its present form it has over 100,000 verses, and it was composed over about 1,000 years (from about 500 BCE). It describes a war between two groups of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and also includes rules about social behaviour.

In 1919, a team of scholars led by the Sanskritist V. S. Sukthankar began an ambitious project: a Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. They collected Sanskrit manuscripts written in different scripts from all over the subcontinent, and compared the verses in each.

They selected the verses that appeared common to most versions, and published them in over 13,000 pages. The project took 47 years.

Two things became clear. There were common elements in the Sanskrit versions everywhere. And there were huge regional variations in how the text was transmitted: these were recorded in footnotes and appendices, which took up more than half of the pages.

Early historians often took Sanskrit texts at face value, assuming that their rules were followed. But later historians also studied Pali, Prakrit and Tamil works, which show that these norms were questioned and sometimes rejected. Compare many manuscripts to find the common core.