(When) Did the Mahabharata Happen?

I came across a very cleverly written piece a few months back but all my efforts to trace the writer has been unsuccessful. The article has since then been taken down (I wouldn’t be surprised if the psycho Shiv Sena’s had a hand with it), but luckily I had a saved copy of the article.

I think its pretty funny, so here goes…

This is one question that has been bothering me for a while. Like most of you, I too have learned history in school, but never found an answer because like most of you I too slept in the history class. But after doing some research I have found out exactly when the Mahabharata war happened.If this is not Kali Yug, then what is it?

Kali Yug is one of the Yugas as per the Puranic timeframe. First there was Satya Yuga, then Treta Yuga, then Dwapara Yuga, and now, Kali Yuga. Even though the Puranas stop at this point, this was followed by various minor Yugas that went undocumented. These include India-Got-Independence Yuga, Secularists-wrote-history Yuga, and Secularist-lies-got-exposed Yuga.

One of the dates mentioned for Mahabharata is 3130-3140 BC. This date is based on the work of Aryabhata (with one t), who lived from 476-550 AD. Aryabhata held that the earth rotates on its axis, and gave the correct explanation of eclipses of the sun and the moon. In mathematics he solved the quadratic equation. In his spare time he also found an easy way to compute the tip mentally after seeing a restaurant bill. But he could not figure out how to fill Form 1040 without using Tax Cut.

Aryabhata stated that Kali Yug started 3600 years before, when he was 23 years old, making the start year as 3102 BC. To this if you add the age of Krishna, subtract the year when he was born and do a cube root with the number of years the Pandavas ruled, it will be found that the Mahabharata war happened in 3130-3140 BC. Looking at this information we can infer one thing for sure: When you are a 20-year-old something in 500 AD, there is very little for entertainment. Another way to verify the dates of historical events is Archeology.

But more than Archeology, Philology has been used to write ancient Indian history. Philology, started by a guy named Phil, is a discipline devoted to the reconstruction of history and culture based on the comparative study of ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and others. If the researcher does not come up with a conclusion involving all those languages, then he may not get a grant to continue research. Philology grabbed Indian history in the year 1785 when Sir William Jones started studying Sanskrit. He found many similarities between German and Celtic languages and postulated that all of these must have originated from the same source. Shared language means shared heritage, was the conclusion. The idea of one civilization spreading from Europe to India looked impressive. But there was one problem. How did the language spread from Europe to India?

So we got the Aryans, a group of horse-riding, fair-skinned, tuxedo-wearing people who invaded India and taught the dumb Dravidians everything from Vedas to Internet. There was one more problem -- they had to find one Aryan Homeland, somewhere in Europe. The main contenders were the south Eastern Europe and Frankfurt International Airport. Finally it was decided that the Aryans came from south Eastern Europe, which was finalized by throwing darts on a National Geographic Map of the world. The other day I was in K-Mart, looking to buy a bottle of Tang. I picked up the orange flavored one and it was written in Spanish that the flavor was 'Naranja'. Now in my home state of Kerala, a lemon is called 'Naranja' in Malayalam. So as per philology, Mexico, where Tang was made, and Kerala have a shared heritage. Now all I had to do was find a common homeland. For this I threw the dart at the National Geographic Map in my cubicle. But it hit my cubicle neighbor in the head. Anyways, she talks too loud.

Since I don't have a Sir before my name, the theory, 'Malayalees are from Mexico' is not popular. But it is important that we do some archeology to verify these philological theories. So an archeologist takes a shovel, goes to a spot where the earth has not been disturbed in recent times. Digging down, he finds various strata of earth clearly separated from each other. Motivated by the fact that he might find some bones, pottery, or tools that can tell a great deal about the history of early humans, he keeps digging. Finally he hits on an earthworm family, which was having a quiet earthworm lunch, and looks up and gives the choicest abuses in earthworm language.

Even though Archeology can open a can of worms sometimes, archeologists who conducted excavations in various places mentioned in Mahabharata found iron objects which included arrow and spearheads, shafts, tongs, hooks, axes and knives that indicate the existence of a vigorous industry. An analysis done based on these excavations points to the date of Mahabharata as 1000-900 BC, about 500 years before Buddha From what I have been reading these days, archeology is also not very popular with a certain section of people, like for example: historians. This is because Hindu Fundamentalists have been using Archeology to push back the antiquity of Indian civilization, according to Dr. D. N. Jha who told this in an article which appeared in the New York Times, and the reason for that is Saraswati. Through satellite photography, scientists have mapped the course of an enormous river that once flowed through the north western region of India. Dr J. R.Sharma who heads the Remote Sensing Services Centre in Jodhpur and his team believe they have found Saraswati, of the Ganga, Jamuna, and Saraswati (1988) fame starring Amitabh, Mithun and Jayaprada.

Saraswati, the river mentioned in the Vedas, is believed to have disappeared thousands of years ago. On this discovery, the Government decided to send archaeologists and geologists to explore sites along the river's course. We cannot predict what these archeological excavations will reveal. Maybe it will bring out more evidence of a civilization that pre-dated the Aryan Invasion, proving that when the Aryans came into India and tried to teach the locals how to use dial-up connection, the locals taught them how to use Wi-Fi networks.

The losers would be the people who championed the Aryan Invasion Theory and are not willing to change it in the face of new evidence. Archeological excavations in the Saraswati region would be a real historian's dream. But unfortunately this project was started by the democratically elected BJP Govt, which makes it illegitimate and motivated by religion according to the logic beamed into the critic's head by the aliens that appear in The Simpsons. That is the topic for another article.

But, anyway, we have an approximate idea on when Mahabharata happened. It happened in 1988 on Doordarshan.