One epic, many names: The myth of Mahabharata’s evolution from Jaya and Bharata

Nowadays, it is often believed as a given that the Mahabharata began as a small text called Jaya, consisting of 8,800 verses describing only the Kurukshetra war. Over time, it is said to have expanded into the Bharata of 24,000 verses and finally into the Mahabharata of one hundred thousand verses, with different narrators successively enlarging the text.

But is that really the case?

Let us examine what the Mahabharata itself says, what the traditional commentators understood, and how this now-popular theory came to be accepted.

What the Mahabharata Actually Says

The Mahabharata refers to all three numbers. The first is the famous reference to 8,800 verses:

अष्टौ श्लोकसहस्राणि अष्टौ श्लोकशतानि च ।

अहं वेद्मि शुको वेत्ति संजयो वेत्ति वा न वा ॥

“I know the meaning of these eight thousand eight hundred verses; Shuka knows them, and perhaps Sanjaya knows them too.”

More from Opinion

Traditionally, this verse was understood not as describing the total size of an earlier text, but as referring to particularly difficult or cryptic verses (kuta-shlokas) embedded within the epic. Neither the verse itself nor the surrounding context identifies these 8,800 verses as an independent work called Jaya.

The second number is 24,000:

चतुर्विंशतिसाहस्रीं चक्रे भारतसंहिताम् ।

“He composed the Bharata Samhita of twenty-four thousand verses.”

However, the text immediately clarifies that this count excludes the upakhyanas — the subsidiary narratives and illustrative stories. Thus, a natural reading is that the 24,000 verses refer to the core narrative of the Bharata lineage, without the ancillary episodes.

The third number is 100,000. In several places, the Mahabharata explicitly describes itself as “the collection of one hundred thousand verses”. Both Ugrashrava Sauti and Vaishampayana attribute this hundred-thousand-verse Mahabharata directly to Vyasa.

Ugrashrava tells the sages at Naimisharanya: “I have come from the Sarpa Satra of King Janamejaya, having heard there the stories from the Mahabharata recounted by Vaishampayana and composed by Kṛshna Dvaipayana Vyasa.”

Similarly, Vaishampayana says to Janamejaya: “These one hundred thousand verses have been composed by Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, son of Satyavati. This great story of the birth and lives of the progeny of Bharata is called the Mahabharata.”

A little later, in the same section (Adi Parva 62), Vaishampayana remarks: “This itihasa by the name Jaya should be heard by all who desire victory.”

Thus, within the text itself, Jaya appears to function as another name for the Mahabharata, rather than necessarily denoting an earlier, shorter work.

The Traditional Understanding

Premodern commentators did not view these counts as separate historical texts.

Nilakantha, the 17th-century commentator whose Bharatabhavadipa remains the most influential traditional commentary, explains the 8,800 verses strictly as profound, difficult verses whose deeper meanings were restricted to Vyasa and a few select disciples. He notes the 24,000 verses as the main narrative excluding the upakhyanas, and the 100,000 verses as the received epic.

Traditional commentators never describe a physical expansion through successive redactions; they maintain that the Mahabharata is fundamentally Vyasa’s unified composition.

The Three-Stage Theory

The Jaya > Bharata > Mahabharata sequence emerged from 19th-century Western philology. Faced with the epic’s massive size and stylistic shifts, European scholars used “higher criticism” to argue that it had expanded over time.

Christian Lassen (1800-1876) claimed a secular core was systematically enlarged by later narrators. Adolf Holtzmann Jr. (1838-1914) went further with his “Inversion Theory”, speculating that an original epic celebrating the Kauravas was later rewritten by Brahmins to favour the Pandavas.

The specific mathematical timeline (8,800 > 24,000 > 100,000) was popularised by E. Washburn Hopkins (The Great Epic of India, 1901) and Moriz Winternitz. Winternitz framed an original war poem called Jaya as the historical seed of the epic.

Crucially, these Indologists presented this as a scholarly hypothesis, not a manuscript fact. Yet, decades of textbook repetition transformed this speculation into unquestioned dogma.

Sukthankar’s Caution

A vital voice in this discussion, VS Sukthankar (1887-1943), the architect of the BORI Critical Edition, accepted that the text grew during centuries of transmission. However, he strongly warned against confusing scholarly guesswork with historical fact.

Sukthankar emphasised that the Jaya and Bharata of modern textbooks are not recoverable texts. No manuscript evidence allows us to reconstruct them as standalone works. The Critical Edition sought to recover the earliest common archetype underlying surviving manuscripts — not an imagined original from Vyasa’s hand.

Conclusion

While the Mahabharata undoubtedly evolved during its long transmission, the empirical evidence does not support three distinct historical texts. No independent manuscript of an 8,800-verse Jaya or a 24,000-verse Bharata has ever been found.

There is also a simple common-sense problem: if Jaya was merely an account of the 18-day war, how meaningful would it be? We do not study the World Wars by reading only battlefield logs; we examine the politics, alliances and grievances that caused them. The Kurukshetra war was the culmination of generations of moral dilemmas and ambitions. A bare battlefield summary, stripped of this essential context, makes little narrative sense.

Thus, when this hypothesis of a neat, three-stage chronological evolution is presented uncritically as history, we risk doing little more than repeating an Indological conjecture that has never been conclusively demonstrated by textual or manuscript evidence.

The Mahabharata itself presents us with a more complex picture: a text called Jaya, also celebrated as Bharata, received as the Mahabharata, transmitted through multiple narrators and expanded through generations, yet continuously understood as one great, continuous itihasa of the descendants of Bharata.

(Ami Ganatra is the author of ‘Mahabharata Unravelled’, ‘Ramayana Unravelled’, ‘Why Are We This Way’ and multiple books for children. This article is an expanded version of the discussion in the chapter ‘The Legend of the Scripting of the Mahabharata’ from Ganatra’s book, ‘Mahabharata Unravelled’, published by Bloomsbury. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.)