Mahabharata is an epic that a lot of us grew up with, thanks to Doordarshan and BR Chopra. Each character stayed in our minds and represented a facet of who we are. While I enjoyed the TV show it took many years for me to connect with its deeper metaphorical connection with life and universe. And it does not stop there, every time I revisit the story, it offers new meanings and perspectives. All you need is an open and inquisitive mind. Here is an attempt to look at Mahabharata from the perspective of Ithihasa.
From the available sources the lineage of Mahabharata starts from King Pururavas and goes all the way till Janmanjeya - the great grand son of Arjuna. There has been many attempts to put a date for the times of Mahabharata and none has been conclusive. Aryabhatta's calculation arrive at 3rd millennium BC and so does the Jain inscriptions in Aihole, Karnataka. Contemporary scholors find these calculations erroreneous and arrive at 5th millennium BC as the period when this epic happened. Assuming it happened sometime around 5000 BC, we can draw conjectures that the last known Kuru King Janmenjaya lived around 5000 BC and one of the earliest ruler from our recorded history King Mahapadma Nanda walked the earth around 1000 BC. That gives us 4000 years of void except for a few broken pots and drainage system that comes in between, from the Harappa and Mohenjo daro age.
Thanks to the profanity of the britishers we know more about Harappa's drainage system and less about their culture. Apparently the british party that was incharge of constructing rail roads in Sindh took the bricks and stones from these ancient structures as cheap raw material for their building activities. If not for these idiots I wonder what else we would have uncovered about this civilisation and perhaps a connection to King Janmenjaya or his descendants? Sadly, we will never know. The present day Kurukshetra which is Haryana and Delhi is believed to have been subjected to massive floods following Janmenjeya's rule which forced the Kuru's to abandon that part of the country.
Here is a visualisation (not to scale) that puts things in perspective.
Thanks to Kannan and Srini for reading drafts of this.
