The topic of this issue is the Mahabharata war in relation to world history and culture. We will begin the topic with a question we received sometime back:

"In the Mahabharata, the war seemed to have affected the whole world. We don't find so many references to such of a huge event in other cultures. Why are there no references to a great world event?"

There is reference to a great war both in the Mayan culture and in old Chinese traditions. They speak about a huge war that happened long, long ago; but they give no details. They only knew that such a war had occurred.

After any war two things happen. In certain regions, nothing develops for a long time; and in certain other regions everything expands very rapidly. The same thing has happened after the Kurukshetra war. In some places everything just stopped; there was no communication. These places became completely isolated from the rest of the world.

You can imagine the situation of those other kingdoms which were working under the fifty-four kingdoms, the Aryan empire. When a huge war like this is waged on the other side of the globe, and none of the kings ever returned, and their armies also didn’t come back, what would be the state of communication?

These kingdoms would have become completely alien to everything. No one would have known what happened. The king with his entire army went to fight in the great war, and that's it. They just disappeared, never to be heard from again. The agents from the ruling kingdoms no longer came to collect taxes, no information was being sent from the world capital. Suddenly these former colonies are isolated and free. They don't have to pay taxes anymore, nor do they have to be subservient.

Naturally the new king would try to make a lot of indigenous effort to put forth their own culture. And if there were any texts left that said his grand father was a slave of Kaikeya, he would just burn it. They wouldn't want to keep such information.

The same thing happened in the modern World War, which was actually just a war around the world. But the Mahabharata war was one massacre at one single place, and nobody went back. None of the kings or soldiers returned to tell what

[link to en.wikipedia.org]



feels like it emotionally jogs our cultural memories

maybe physically more than we were previously aware