The Kurukshetra War ( ), also called the Mahabharata War, is a war described in the Hindu epic poem Mahabharata ( ), arising from a dynastic struggle between two groups of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, for the throne of Hastinapura. The war laid the foundation for the events of the Bhagavad Gita.
Background
The Mahābhārata is an account of the life and deeds of several generations of a ruling dynasty called the Kuru clan. Central to the epic is an account of a war that took place between two rival families belonging to this clan. Kurukshetra (literally "field of the Kurus"), also known as Dharmakshetra (the "field of Dharma"), was the battleground on which the Kurukshetra War was fought. The first Mahābhārata says that this site was chosen because a sin committed on land was forgiven because of the land's sanctity.
Despite only spanning eighteen days, the events of the war make up more than a quarter of the Mahabharata. These chapters are considered among the oldest in the Mahabharata.
Historicity and dating
The historicity of the war remains the subject of scholarly discussion. The Battle of the Ten Kings, mentioned in the Rigveda, may have formed the core of the Kurukshetra war's story. The war was greatly expanded and modified in the Mahabharata's account, which makes it dubious. Attempts have been made to assign a historical date to the Kurukshetra war, with research suggesting BCE. However, popular tradition claims that the war marks the transition to the Kali Yuga, dating it to BCE.
Literary traces
The historicity of the Kurukshetra War is subject to scholarly discussion and dispute. It is possible that the Battle of the Ten Kings, mentioned in the Rigveda, may have "formed the 'nucleus' of the story" of the Kurukshetra war, though it was greatly expanded and modified in the Mahābhārata'''s account making the Mahābhārata's version of very dubious historicity. Although the Kurukshetra War is not mentioned in Vedic literature, its prominence in later literature led British Indologist A. L. Basham to conclude that there was a great battle at Kurukshetra which, "magnified to titanic proportions, formed the basis of the story of the greatest of India's epics, the Mahābhārata". Acknowledging that later "generations looked upon it as marking an end of an epoch", he suggested that rather than being a civil war it might have been "a muddled recollection of the conquest of the Kurus by a tribe of Mongol type from the hills". He saw it as useless to the historian and dates the war to the ninth century BCE based on archaeological evidence and "some evidence in the Brahmana literature itself to show that it cannot have been much earlier".
Puranic literature presents genealogical lists associated with the Mahābhārata narrative. There are two pieces of evidence of the Puranas: there is the direct statement that there were 1,015 (or 1,050) years between the birth of Parikshit (Arjun's grandson) and the accession of Mahapadma Nanda, commonly dated to 382 BCE, which would yield an estimate of about 1400 BCE for the Bharata battle, which would imply improbably long reigns on average for the kings listed in the genealogies.
There are also analyses of parallel genealogies in the Puranas between the times of Adhisimakrishna (Parikshit's great-grandson) and Mahapadma Nanda. Pargiter estimated 26 generations by averaging 10 different dynastic lists and assuming 18 years for the average duration of a reign, arrived at an estimate of 850 BCE for Adhisimakrishna and approximately 950 BCE for the Bharata battle.
Scholarly dating
Despite the inconclusiveness of the data, attempts have been made to assign a historical date to the Kurukshetra War. The existing text of the Mahābhārata went through many revisions, and mostly belongs to the period between c. 500 BCE and 400 CE. Within the frame story of the Mahābhārata, the kings Parikshit and Janamejaya are featured significantly as scions of the Kuru clan, and Michael Witzel concludes that the general setting of the epic has a historical precedent in the Vedic period, where the Kuru kingdom was the center of political power during roughly 1200 to 800 BCE. According to Professor Alf Hiltebeitel, the Mahābhārata is essentially mythological. Indian historian Upinder Singh wrote:
According to Finnish Sindhologist Asko Parpola, the war may have taken place during the later phase of the Painted Grey Ware, c/ 750–350 BCE.