Sources & Credits

Sanskrit text (original)

The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (Pune) critical edition of the Mahābhārata (1919–1966), as digitised and curated in the open DharmicData repository (github.com/bhavykhatri/DharmicData, “Hindu Sacred Texts Dataset”), licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). Devanagari and IAST transliteration are both taken from that dataset; the upstream digitisation provenance is described in the repository only briefly and was not independently verified. This site’s derived database keeps the same licence and attribution.

Translations that already exist (used)

• Bhagavad Gītā (Bhīṣma Parva 6.23–6.40, 700 verses): the Hindi (Swami Tejomayananda) and English (Swamis Sivananda and Gambirananda, Swami Adidevananda, Dr. S. Sankaranarayan, Shri Purohit Swami) translations published on the Gītā Supersite of IIT Kanpur, reused as on this site’s Gītā section for non-commercial study, with credit. The link between each Gītā verse and its critical-edition verse is by position and Sanskrit similarity.
• K. M. Ganguli, The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (1883–1896): English prose, public domain. Digitised text: scanned at sacred-texts.com, proofed at Distributed Proofing (Juliet Sutherland), additional proofing and formatting by J. B. Hare; this copy comes from the CC0 repository aasi-archive/mbh. Shown section by section, not verse by verse.

Translations created for this site

None. No Hindi or English translation was written or machine-generated for the Mahabharata. Short “simple meaning” and word-by-word notes exist for one verse (1.1.0) and were written for this site.

Commentaries

None included.

Audio

There are no recordings. “Listen” uses your browser’s built-in text-to-speech voices (Web Speech API), so voices and pronunciation depend on your device. Sanskrit is read with a Hindi voice, which is approximate.

Software

Python 3 and its standard library (database, build), the indic-transliteration library (used for other texts on this site), and the fonts Fraunces, Newsreader, Tiro Devanagari Sanskrit and Noto Serif Devanagari from Google Fonts (SIL Open Font Licence). The reader itself uses plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no external dependencies.

About Heritage IITKanpur (heritage.iitk.ac.in/MBH)

This section was requested to be integrated from heritage.iitk.ac.in/MBH. That site was inspected. Its pages load verse text with JavaScript from an API that requires access arrangements, its terms and Content Licence (HCAL-1.0) were not available for review, and its own “Gratitude” page states that its Mahābhārata comes from other openly shared corpora rather than the Gītā Supersite. Because no authorised export or permission was available, nothing was copied from it. If you obtain permission or an export (for example Hindi or English translations), they can be merged with tools/import_translations.py and will appear with their own credit.

Not used: Vedapath “Mahabharata (Gita Press)”

Translations from vedapath.app/en/mahabharata-gita-press were requested for this section, but nothing was copied from it. Its Terms of Service state that its translations are owned by the company (section 4.1), allow reading only through its own website and app for personal, non-commercial use (4.2), and forbid automated access, bulk copying, and building any collection or dataset from its content (4.4). Its Gita Press edition is also the traditional vulgate text (about 92,655 verses; for example 233 adhyāyas in Ādi Parva), while this site’s Sanskrit is the BORI critical edition (73,816 verses; 225 adhyāyas in Ādi Parva), so verse and adhyāya numbers do not correspond one to one. You can read that edition on its own site through the link above. If Vedapath grants written permission and supplies the text with verse identifiers, it can be merged after a vulgate-to-critical-edition concordance is made, and will be credited here.

Other texts on this site

The Ramayana and Gītā sections have their own credits on the main Sources & Licence page.