what is maHABHARAT?

The Mahabharata or Mahābhārata (Sanskrit: ¹­, Mahābhāratam, pronounced[məɦaːˈbʱaːrÉ™t̪əm]) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Ramayana.

Besides its epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pandava princes, the Mahabharata contains much philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or purusharthas (12.161). Among the principal works and stories that are a part of the Mahabharata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, and the Rishyasringa, often considered as works in their own right.

Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa. 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. The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century).The title may be translated as "the great tale of the Bhārata dynasty". According to the Mahabharata itself, the tale is extended from a shorter version of 24,000 verses called simply Bhārata.

The Mahabharata is the longest Sanskrit epic

.

Its longest version consists of over 100,000

shloka

or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. About 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the

Iliad

and the

Odyssey

combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana.

W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahabharata to world civilization to that of the

Bible

, the works of

Shakespeare

, the works of

Homer

,

Greek drama

, or the

Qur'an

.