'Mahabharata' (Pt. 4)

Scholars have stated the following about the historical accuracy about the events in the war:

"Divergence of views regarding the Mahabharata war is due to the absence of reliable history of the ancient period."

Regardless of the PGW that has been found, we haven't actually found anything that suggests an actual war to us. This is why we have "divergence"—a section of scholars who do not believe the war took place at all due to the lack of fact.

In terms of developing the text, the written accounts and edits had come up much later in the times of the 6th and fifth century CE, a very long time after the war itself and therefore, cannot justify why the edits were made. We know of three major edits.

The first is called "Jaya" or "Victory"—which is what the Mahabharata was officially first called. It was 8,800 verses of a book which accounted the war and only the war. Suggesting that everything else apart from the 18 days is falsified or complete fiction.

The next is the Bharata, which is the 24'000 verses that it swelled up to—suggesting that additions could be the result of textual corruption.

The third is the one we know today as the Mahabharata—over 200,000 verses in which there are 1.8 million words credible to over three different time periods and therefore are a result of corruption both textually and orally as both require to be told and scribed through traditions that match with the time period in which they were altered.

Many scholars believe there may have been some kind of conflict from the PGW found at over 1000 sites becoming more regional than national, the kingdoms are broken up and families, regions and smaller towns now have their own geometric patterns regarding the PGW. But relying on PGW alone isn't enough and therefore, cannot give enough fact to the suggestion of conflict or war. But the changes in the text regarding the regional correlations and answers to various questions in the text. Thus it suggests more heavily that the war didn't take place and may have been a smaller, less violent conflict. Archaeology has dated a war to 1000 BCE but whether this is the one depicted by the epic the Mahabharata is unknown.

Be that as it may, the war can be dated to far further back than 1000 BCE by various scholars who believe, because of the carbon dating of the stories of the war on the temples of India named the Aihole Inscriptions, it is something else entirely and the text may have been written up to 2000 years after the war took place. These inscriptions are of various "added" sections of the Mahabharata that were there before the added sections had claimed to be written in the Medieval Era. This is the one that dates the war at 3102 BCE or there about.

What we've found is that the philosophy and some historical evidence seems to add to the historical accuracy in terms of the conflict and the way in which the story is told and composed. What we've also found is the way in which texts can be manipulated to suit the region or division they belong to—suggesting that there was probably always more than one version of the text circulating. But the only problem this gives us is the question of which one the true one is. We believe that the ones that are more truthful to the original narrative belong closer to the places in which the narrative correlate with it—the northern states.

But, even though we can't prove anything historically and with factual concrete evidence—we can accept the fact that the creativity when writing this epic is something, a talent, to be revered and respected and that, will be the course of our next lecture on Indian mythology when we cover the stories of the supreme Gods and Goddesses. I'm going to end with the opening line to the text:

"Bow down to Narayana and Nara, the most exalted male being, and also to the goddess Saraswati, must the word Victory be uttered!"