Many Mahabharatas
The "Great Bharata" of Vyasa comprises over 100,000 Sanskrit stanzas organized into eighteen volumes. With about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is one of the longest epic poems in the world, about ten times the size of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, roughly five times longer than Dante's Divine Comedy, and about four times the size of the other Indian epic, the Ramayana. Within this vastness lies a net of countless stories, one story leading into another and that into another, a veritable mine of ancient Hindu folktales, myths and legends that serve to illuminate the ancient Hindu concept of dharma and adharma: righteous, dutiful, virtuous, wise living versus unrighteous, ignorant living. At its core is the conflict between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, two rival branches of the Lunar clan, culminating in the horrific civil war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, a holocaust which wiped out the entire warrior caste and ushered in the de...