Introduction: The Critical Edition and its Critics – A Retrospective of Mahābhārata Scholarship

Abstract

Adluri introduces the issue with a sweeping overview of Mahābhārata scholarship, tracing its evolution from colonial and Orientalist paradigms to contemporary critiques of the Critical Edition. He argues that early Indologists—motivated by racial and historicist biases—sought a linear, historical "core" in the epic, sidelining its poetic and philosophical dimensions. The Critical Edition project, while monumental, inherited some of these prejudices. Adluri critiques the ideological underpinnings of German philological traditions and urges a return to the Mahābhārata as a self-conscious meditation on existence, time, and cosmic order—rather than a simple historical document.