The Adi Parva or The Book of the Beginning is the first of eighteen books of the Mahabharata. "Adi" is a Sanskrit word that means "first". Adi Parva traditionally has 19 sub-books and 236 adhyayas. The critical edition of Adi Parva has 19 sub-books and 225 chapters. Adi Parva describes how the epic came to be recited by Ugrasrava Sauti to the assembled rishis at the Naimisha Forest after first having been narrated at the sarpasatra of Janamejaya by Vaishampayana at Taxila. It includes an outline of contents from the eighteen books, along with the book's significance. The history of the Bhāratas and the Bhrigus are described. The main part of the work covers the birth and early life of the princes of the Kuru Kingdom and the persecution of the Pandavas by Dhritarashtra.
Structure & Chapters
The Adi Parva consists of 19 upa-parvas or sub-books. Each sub-book is also called a parva and is further subdivided into chapters, for a total of 236 chapters in Adi Parva. The names of 19 sub-books of Adi Parva, along with a brief of each sub-book: , the giant brother, carries his youngest brothers through smoke.
English Translations
Adi Parva and other books of Mahabharata are written in Sanskrit. Several translations of the Adi Parva are available in English. To translations whose copyrights have expired and which are in public domain, include those by Kisari Mohan Ganguli and Manmatha Nath Dutt. The translations are not consistent in parts and vary with each translator's interpretations. For example: Translation by Manmatha Nath Dutt: Translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli: The total number of original verses depend on which Sanskrit source is used, and these do not equal the totalnumber of translated verses in each chapter, in both Ganguli and Dutt translations. Mahabharata, like many ancient Sanskrit texts, was transmitted across generations verbally, a practice that was a source of corruption of its text, deletion of verses as well as the addition of extraneous verses over time. Some of these suspect verses have been identified by change in style and integrity of meter in the verses. The structure, prose, meter and style of translations vary within chapters between the translating authors. Debroy, in his 2011 overview of Mahabharata, notes that updated critical edition of Adi Parva, with spurious and corrupted text removed, has 19 sub-books, 225 adhyayas and 7,205 shlokas.
Controversies
Adi Parva, and Mahabharatain general, has been studied for evidence of caste-based social stratification in ancient India, as well as evidence for a host of theories about Vedic times in India. Such studies have become controversial. First, the date and authenticity of the verses in Adi Parva, as well as the entire Mahabharata, has been questioned. Klaus Klostermaier, in his review of scholarly studies of Mahabharata, notes the widely held view that original Mahabharata was different from currently circulating versions. For centuries, the Mahabharatas 1, 00, 000 verses—four times the entire Bible and nine times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined—were transmitted verbally across generations, without being written down. This memorization and verbal method of transfer is believed to be a source of text corruption, addition and deletion of verses. Klostermaier notes that the original version of Mahabharata was called Jaya and had about 7000 shlokas or about 7% of current length. Adi Parva, and rest of Mahabharata, underwent at least two major changes - the first change tripled the size of Jaya epic and renamed it as Bharata, while the second change quadrupled the already expanded version. Significant changes to older editions have been traced to the first millennium AD. There are significant differences in Sanskrit manuscripts of the Mahabharata found in different parts of India and manuscripts of the Mahabharata found in other Indian languages such as Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and others. Numerous spurious additions, interpolations and conflicting verses have been identified, many relating to history and social structure. Thus, it is unclear if the history or social structure of Vedic period or ancient India can be reliably traced from Adi Parva or Mahabharata. Second, Adi Parva is part of an Epic fiction. Writers, including those such as Shakespeare or Homer, take liberty in developing their characters and plots, they typically represent extremes and they do not truthfully record extant history. Adi Parva has verses with a story of a river fish swallowing a man's semen and giving birth to ahuman baby after 9 months and many other myths and fictional tales. Adi Parva, like the works of Home and Shakespeare, is not a record of history. Third, Adi Parva and other parvas of Mahabharata have been argued, suggests Klaus Klostermaier, as a treatise of symbolism, where each chapter has three different layers of meaning in its verses. The reader is painted a series of pictures through words, presented opposing views to various socio-ethical and moral questions, then left to interpret it on astikadi, manvadi and auparicara levels; in other words, as mundane interesting fiction, or as ethical treatise, or thirdly as transcendental work that draws out the war between the higher and the lower self within each reader. To deduce history of ancient India is one of many discursive choices for the interpreter.
Quotations & Teachings
Anukramanika Parva, Chapter 1: Sangraha Parva, Chapter 2: Paushya Parva, Chapter 3: Adivansabatarana Parva, Chapter 62: with friends are described in chapters of Sambhava Parva in Adi Parva. Sambhava Parva, Chapter 73: Sambhava Parva, Chapter 74: Sambhava Parva, Chapter 79: Sambhava Parva, Chapter 133: Viduragamana Parva, Chapter 206:
