Mahabharata

A summary of the report/thesis of Mahabharata,
the great epic of India

By Samim Ahmed

In this project I have tried to find out the Philosophical aspect of Mahabharata. my methodology was the ‘nirvacana’ --- a semantic theory of Acharyya Yaska. According to him, every word has a functional character even the word may designate a name or a place. There are many inconsistent events, situations and stories in the Mahabharata. My objective was to find out the consistency of this epic.
Chronologically speaking, Mahabharata is the second epic of India. Dharma, artha, kama and moksa are its principal objective of discussion. Great minds like Acharyya Anandabardhana, Rabindranath Tagore etc. have interpreted Mahabharata not as a mere description of human enmity or conflict of theories but as a great persuasion for peace. So the santiparva of Mahabharata holds the essence of this epic. The mode of analysis I would apply to interpret the Mahabharata, is that of Acharyya Yaska’s used in his book Nirukta. According to Yaska, the meaning of a word is extracted from its Dhatu. So the core meaning of any word lies in its Kriya. This kind of semantic understanding is completely from modern semantic theories. Modern theories describe the relation of word with it’s meaning as conventional and arbitrary, whereas thinkers like Acharyya Yaska feels word-meaning relationship as natural. My philosophical investigation of the said epic will follow the way of Yaska’s semantic methodology.
The epic Mahabharata starts with the story of king Janamejaya’s sacrificial rite of snakes, named as sarpasatra. I have interpreted that ‘Janamejaya’ designates the person who leads the people in revolution, thus janamejaya’ is an agitator. the snake represents three defining characteristics i.e., it’s swiftness, tendency to bite and camouflaging.