Discuss whether the Mahabharata could have been the work of a single author.
When we look into a text such as Mahabharata, one thing that come to notice is the sheer length of it and many characters within the story. We find that it took V S Sukthanker and the team 47 years to produce critically edited Mahabharata of 13000 pages. It took such a long time because there was enormous text in sanskrit written in different scripts with variations. Thus even if look into the variation itself we can be sure that the Mahabharata was not a work of a single author.
As we can see that:
(i) The original story was probably composed by charioteer-bards known as sutas who generally accompanied Kshatriya warriors to the battle field and composed poems celebrating their victories and other achievements.
(ii) According to scholars in the beginning Mahabharata’s compositions were circulated orally. This was done by scholars and priests generation to generation. Then from the fifth century BCE, Brahmanas took over the story and began to commit it to writing. This was the time when chiefdoms such as those of the Kurus and Panchalas, around whom the story of the epic revolves, were gradually becoming kingdom.
(iii) We notice another phase in the composition of the text between C. 200 BCE and 200 CE. This was the period when the worship of Vishnu was growing in importance, and Krishna, one of the important figures of the epic, was coming to be identified with Vishnu. Subsequently, between C. 200 and 400 CE, large didactic sections resembling the Manusmriti were added. With these additions, a text which initially perhaps had less than 10,000 verses grew to comprise about 100,000 verses. This enormous composition is traditionally attributed to a sage named Vyasa.
(iv) Moreover there are different version of Mahabharata in sanskrit written in different scripts. Thus it could only meant that there are many version of the story and it could only mean that to create Mahabharat an epic many authors has laboured.
