Stories that outlived empires — but did they happen? (Image generated using ChatGPT)

The Ramayana and Mahabharata: History, Myth, or Something We’re Afraid to Question?

These stories built a civilisation. But cultural truth and historical truth are not the same thing.

My grandmother could silence a room just by beginning.

Not loudly. She’d simply stop whatever she was doing, sit very straight, and say — “Do you know what Hanuman did when they told him Sita could not be found?” — and that was it. Whatever argument was happening, whatever noise the house was making, it stopped. We gathered. We listened.

She knew the Ramayana the way you know the layout of your own home in the dark. Every corridor, every room, every place where the floor creaks. She didn’t recite it. She inhabited it. Valmiki’s Sanskrit had passed through centuries of retelling and arrived, still warm, in her mouth.

I grew up inside those stories the way you grow up inside a language — not by learning it, but by breathing it. The Mahabharata’s idioms lived in my father’s sentences. The Ramayana’s geography lived in our festivals. Ram’s exile was not ancient history to us. It was last season. The grief of it was fresh.

And then, slowly, the way water finds a crack, a question got in.

Is any of this actually true?

Not: is it meaningful? I knew it was meaningful. I had watched my grandmother cry at the moment of Ram’s exile since I was four years old. I knew exactly how meaningful it was.

The question was narrower. Harder. More uncomfortable.

Is there evidence — outside the texts themselves, outside the traditions built around them — that these events occurred?

I want to answer that question honestly. Not to wound anyone. But because I think the stories are large enough to survive honest examination — and I think we insult them when we protect them from it.

What We Mean When We Say “True”

The first thing to untangle is what we’re actually asking when we ask whether something is true.

A story can be true in at least four different ways, and we routinely collapse them into one, which is where most of the confusion begins.

There is cultural truth — a story that shapes how a people understand themselves, their duties, their relationships. The Ramayana is culturally true in a way that very few texts in human history have matched. It has been continuously retold for over two thousand years across fourteen countries and dozens of languages. It gave Indian civilisation its emotional vocabulary for loyalty, sacrifice, the cost of keeping one’s word, and the specific grief of love that survives separation.

There is moral truth — a story that captures something real about how human beings actually are, and how they ought to be. The Mahabharata contains more moral truth per page than almost any text ever written. The question it asks — what do you do when every choice is a betrayal of something you love? — is not a Bronze Age question. It is the permanent question of conscious human life.

There is religious truth — a story that is the vehicle for a relationship with the divine, for spiritual transformation, for the experience of grace. For hundreds of millions of Hindus, Ram is not a character. He is God. The Ramayana is not a story about God. It is the presence of God in literary form. This is a category of truth that science does not have the instruments to measure, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

And then there is historical truth — the claim that specific events occurred at specific times in specific places, involving specific people who can in principle be verified through evidence independent of the story itself.

The argument I am making is this: the Ramayana and Mahabharata are among the most culturally, morally, and for many people religiously true texts ever produced by human civilisation.

That is not the same as saying they are historically true in the fourth sense.

And these are not the same claim.

What the Texts Say About Themselves

Here is something the texts reveal, if you read them without the need to find a particular answer.

Neither the Ramayana nor the Mahabharata is a single, frozen document written by one person at one time.

The Mahabharata is the longest poem in human history — roughly 100,000 verses, ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. The text itself acknowledges, in its own frame narrative, that it grew. Scholars trace three distinct stages: an early poem of approximately 8,800 verses called the Jaya; an intermediate text of 24,000 verses called the Bharata; and finally the Mahabharata as we have it. This growth is believed to have occurred over a span of approximately five to eight centuries, beginning perhaps around 400 BCE and continuing into the 4th century CE.

The Valmiki Ramayana is similarly layered. The critical edition produced by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and the Oriental Institute, Baroda — a project spanning decades and involving the analysis of hundreds of manuscripts — established that the first book (Bala Kanda) and the last book (Uttara Kanda) are linguistically and stylistically distinct from the middle five books, and are considered later additions by most scholars. The “core” Ramayana is estimated to date to around the 5th century BCE in its earliest oral form, with the text as we have it reaching something like its current shape by roughly the 3rd century CE.

This is not a Western theory designed to undermine Hindu civilisation. The manuscript evidence shows it. The language shows it. Epic Sanskrit — the dialect in which both texts are composed — is a distinct phase of the language, dateable by comparative philology, and it does not correspond to the periods when the events are traditionally said to have occurred.

The Mahabharata war is variously dated by tradition and by different researchers to anywhere from 3067 BCE to 5561 BCE. But the language of the text itself is datable to the first millennium BCE at the earliest. A text cannot describe an event in a language that did not exist at the time of the event — not unless it was written or substantially reworked much later.

This is the quiet, irrefutable problem of philology, and it doesn’t get discussed enough.

The Archaeology: Specific Claims, Examined Honestly

Let me go through the main archaeological claims, one by one.

Dwarka.

Off the coast of Gujarat, near modern Dwarka, the National Institute of Ocean Technology has conducted marine surveys and found submerged structures. This is real. The structures exist. In the 1980s and 1990s, S.R. Rao led expeditions that identified stone structures, walls, and what appeared to be an ancient settlement beneath the water.

The question — the one that matters — is whether these structures are the Dwarka of Krishna.

The available dating places the structures at roughly 1500 BCE. That is the date. What has not been found at that site: any inscription mentioning Krishna, any artefact identifiable with the Yadava kingdom, any material that independently connects the physical location to the textual claim. The identification is based entirely on geographical coincidence — the modern city has the same name as the textual city — combined with tradition.

Marine archaeologist Dr. S.R. Rao himself, who led the original surveys, was careful to distinguish between what the excavation proved and what it suggested. What it proved was that an ancient settlement existed there. What it did not prove was that it was the Dwarka of the Mahabharata.

In archaeology, a site having the same name as a textual location is the beginning of a question, not the end of one.

Kurukshetra.

The site of the great war. The Kurukshetra region in Haryana is ancient and genuinely significant in the archaeological record. Excavations at sites like Hastinapur — identified by some with the Mahabharata’s Hastinapur — have found material corresponding to the Painted Grey Ware culture, broadly dated to around 1200 to 600 BCE.

But here is what archaeology has not found at Kurukshetra, despite the text’s description of a war involving millions of soldiers over eighteen days: no mass graves, no layer of battlefield destruction, no weapons concentration, no evidence of the kind of catastrophic conflict that would have — by the text’s own account — ended a cosmic age and reshaped the subcontinent.

Wars of scale leave signatures in the ground. The Bronze Age collapse, approximately 1200 BCE, is visible in the archaeological record of the Eastern Mediterranean. Ash layers. Destroyed cities. Abandoned trade routes. Skeletal evidence of mass death. Battles involving hundreds of thousands of people do not vanish cleanly from the earth.

The absence of evidence is not always the evidence of absence. But when the claimed event is described as among the largest wars in the history of the world, the absence of any physical trace is a significant problem that deserves an honest answer.

The Astronomical Dating Attempts.

Several researchers — most prominently Dr. Narhari Achar, a physics professor at the University of Memphis, and writer and researcher Nilesh Oak — have used planetarium software to match astronomical configurations described in the Mahabharata to specific dates. Achar proposed the war occurred around 3067 BCE. Oak has argued for a date as early as 5561 BCE.

These attempts are serious and deserve engagement.

The methodological problem is this: the Mahabharata describes numerous astronomical events across its text, which was composed and expanded over several centuries. Different researchers, applying the same software to the same text, arrive at dates separated by thousands of years. When a method produces results ranging from 3000 BCE to 5500 BCE depending on which verses are selected and how they are interpreted, the method has not yet produced a reliable answer. It has produced a range of possibilities that is too wide to be useful as historical evidence.

There is also a deeper problem. If the text was composed and reworked over centuries by multiple authors — which the internal evidence strongly suggests — then some of the astronomical references may have been introduced by later authors, possibly precisely to anchor the narrative to a cosmologically significant date. The practice of retrofitting celestial events into religious narratives is well-documented in ancient literature worldwide.

This is not to say the astronomical research is worthless. It may eventually yield useful constraints. But it is not currently evidence of the kind that would satisfy a standard historical methodology.

The Missing Witness

This is the argument I find most difficult to dismiss, and the one I have never heard satisfactorily answered in any popular or even semi-scholarly discussion of this topic.

The Mahabharata, as described within the text, was not a regional conflict. It was a world-ending event. Eighteen akshauhinis of soldiers — traditionally calculated to total over three and a half million combatants. Kings and warriors from across the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and beyond. A war that, the text tells us explicitly, ended the Dwapara Yuga and ushered in the Kali Yuga — the degenerate age in which we now live.

In the period around 3067 BCE — one of the proposed dates — human civilisation was not illiterate or isolated.

Egypt was in its Early Dynastic Period, just entering the era of the great pharaohs. Its scribes were already recording military campaigns, astronomical observations, and royal lineages. Mesopotamia had cuneiform writing, was running trade networks across thousands of miles, and was meticulous about recording significant events. The Indus Valley Civilisation was at or near its height, and we have now established that it had trade contact with Mesopotamian cities — Indus weights and seals have been found at Mesopotamian sites.

A war involving millions of soldiers, fought by a coalition of kingdoms from across the known world, in the middle of the Indian subcontinent, that ended an entire cosmic age — this event would have been the largest thing that had ever happened in the ancient world.

Not one external civilisation recorded it. Not Egypt. Not Mesopotamia. Not the Hittites. Not any of the literate cultures of Central Asia.

You might argue that ancient records are incomplete — and they are. But the incompleteness is not unlimited. Campaigns of far smaller scale, fought in far more peripheral regions, have left traces in multiple independent records. The very existence of trade between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia means the channel existed for information to travel.

If the Mahabharata war occurred at the scale described, at a time when literate civilisations with existing trade connections to the Indian subcontinent were keeping records, the silence from those civilisations demands explanation.

I have not encountered a satisfying one.

What India’s Own Tradition Says — The Part We Skip

Here is the piece of this conversation that almost never makes it into popular debate, and it matters enormously.

The classification of the Ramayana and Mahabharata within the Hindu textual tradition is Itihasa. The word is often translated as “history,” but the literal meaning is “thus indeed it was.” Itihasa is a specific category, distinct from Purana (mythological accounts), distinct from Shruti (the Vedas, considered directly revealed truth), and distinct from Kavya (poetry composed for aesthetic purposes).

The existence of this category reflects that these texts were understood, within the tradition, as occupying a particular kind of middle ground — not quite the revealed truth of the Vedas, not quite invented narrative, but inherited account. The tradition was honest about what the texts were. It did not classify them as Shruti. It gave them their own, more provisional category.

More significantly: the Advaita Vedanta tradition — among the most sophisticated philosophical systems ever produced by any civilisation, rooted in Adi Shankaracharya’s 8th-century CE commentaries — reads the Ramayana as an allegory of inner spiritual experience. Ram is the Atman (the true self). Sita is the mind (Chitta). Ravana is the ego. Lanka is the body. The abduction is the mind’s capture by ego. The war is the spiritual struggle for liberation. This is not a modern liberal reinterpretation invented to make the text palatable to rationalists. It is ancient. It is orthodox. It is the reading of some of the greatest philosophical minds the Hindu tradition has produced.

The 15th-century poet Tulsidas — who wrote the Ramcharitmanas, the version of the Ramayana that most North Indians know more deeply than Valmiki’s — was a devotional poet. He understood himself as writing bhakti, surrender, love offered to God in literary form. He was not writing a documentary. The question of whether Ram physically walked the earth was not his question. His question was: how do I dissolve myself in devotion?

The insistence on strict literal historicity is, in significant ways, a product of the 19th century — specifically of the encounter between Hindu revivalism and Western empiricism. Certain Hindu reformers, responding to Christian missionary dismissal of Hindu texts as “mere mythology,” began arguing that the Vedas, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata were not mythology but history — older, more accurate, and more scientifically advanced than anything the West had produced. This move was politically understandable. It was a defensive response to colonial condescension.

But a defensive response to colonial condescension is not the same as historical truth. And the ancient tradition itself was always more philosophically flexible than the 19th-century revivalist position acknowledged.

Why This Question Is Not Academic Right Now

I want to say something directly that most writers on this topic choose to avoid.

The historicity of these epics is not, in 2025, a discussion confined to university departments. It is politically live in India in ways that have consequences for public institutions, legal decisions, and the education of children.

The 2019 Supreme Court verdict on the Ram Janmabhoomi case — which awarded the disputed site at Ayodhya to the Ram Lalla trust — was decided partly on the basis of the Archaeological Survey of India’s 2003 excavation report, which identified structural remains beneath the Babri Masjid. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s concurring opinion, however, explicitly noted that the ASI report could not conclusively establish that the structure below was a temple, let alone that it marked the precise birthplace of Ram. The land was awarded on the basis of faith and long-standing possession, not on archaeological proof of divine geography.

That distinction — between faith-based identification and archaeologically established fact — matters. The court understood it. It should be part of public understanding too.

School curricula in several Indian states have incorporated Vedic and Puranic chronologies as historical fact — placing events described in these texts on timelines alongside Ashoka’s reign or the Mughal period, without distinguishing between archaeologically verified history and traditional religious chronology. Students are being taught, as historical truth, things for which the evidence does not exist.

Tourism and heritage projects routinely market locations as “the exact spot where Sita was abducted” or “the forest where Ram spent his exile” — treating textual geography as verified physical history in ways that blur the line between devotional significance and archaeological confirmation.

Faith is a private matter that deserves protection and respect. The use of unverified historical claims to shape public education, legal decisions, and government heritage policy is a different matter. When a claim moves from the temple into the courtroom or the curriculum, the question of evidence becomes a question of justice.

The Stories Are Larger Than Literal History

And now I want to say something that I mean with complete seriousness, not as a consolation prize.

The Mahabharata would be among the greatest achievements of human thought even if no war ever took place on the plains of Kurukshetra.

The question at its centre — how do you act rightly when acting rightly will destroy people you love? — is the question that never goes away. Arjuna’s paralysis on the battlefield, facing his cousins, his teachers, his grandfather, is not a Bronze Age crisis. It is the exact crisis of every person who has ever had to choose between duty and affection, between truth and protection, between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

The answer the Gita gives — that action done without attachment to its fruits, in alignment with one’s deepest nature, is both the only freedom and the only real responsibility — is not a historical claim. It is a philosophical discovery. It would be just as true if a poet invented every word of the surrounding war.

The Ramayana’s emotional range — exile and longing, devotion that doesn’t waver under conditions designed to break it, loyalty freely chosen and therefore real — gave a civilisation its inner life. The fact that this story crossed the Bay of Bengal and took root in Java, in Thailand, in Cambodia, in Malaysia — that it was retold and transformed across cultures that had no obligation to adopt it — tells you something about the depth of what it touches. It touches the part of human experience that does not belong to any one civilisation.

These stories survived two thousand years of transmission, invasion, colonial suppression, and modernisation. That is not explained by historical accuracy. It is explained by the fact that they map something real in human experience that other maps do not capture as well.

That is a profound and extraordinary thing. It does not require the stories to be literally true. It requires them to be deeply true — which they are.

The One Thing We Cannot Afford

The greatest minds produced by the Hindu tradition — Adi Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, Abhinavagupta, Ramanakrishna Paramahamsa — were not afraid of questions. They were, in almost every case, defined by their willingness to push any question further than it was comfortable to go.

The Upanishads — the philosophical core of Vedic thought — open with a teacher saying to a student: ask. The entire tradition of jijnasa — the desire to know — is built into the structure of Hindu philosophical inquiry.

Freezing these texts behind a wall of defensive literalism is not honouring the tradition. It is diminishing it. It is taking the most intellectually alive tradition in human history and replacing it with a demand for uncritical acceptance.

The danger is not faith. Faith has built extraordinary things. The danger is the fear of questions — a fear that, if spread widely enough, produces a society that can no longer distinguish between what it believes and what it can demonstrate, between what it was told and what it has examined.

That is not a Hindu society. It is not a modern society. It is not, frankly, any kind of society that should feel confident about its future.

What I Can’t Unknow — And Wouldn’t Want To

My grandmother is gone. The certainty she had — that complete, untroubled certainty, the kind that let her face her own death without a flinch of fear — I do not have it, and I will not pretend I do.

What I have instead is something harder and perhaps less comfortable: the ongoing experience of holding two things at once. Knowing that the evidence for the literal historicity of these events is thin to nonexistent. And knowing that when Tulsidas writes of Ram — “Tulsi das sada hari chera” — “Tulsidas is always the servant of Hari” — something real is being described. Not historically real. Experientially real. The real of a person dissolved in something larger than themselves.

I think we can hold both. I think we have to.

I think the Ramayana is not diminished by the fact that no archaeological evidence confirms it. I think the Gita is not less true because the war it describes cannot be located in the physical record of the ancient world. I think these stories are important precisely because they are not dependent on archaeology for their value — because what they carry is of a kind that archaeology was never equipped to measure.

But I also think that a society that cannot look at its own foundational texts with clear eyes — that flinches from the question of evidence, that treats curiosity about historical claims as an act of religious aggression — that society is not honouring its stories. It is hiding behind them.

The Better Question

So: did the Mahabharata war happen? Did Ram walk the earth?

I don’t know. Nobody, currently, does. The evidence as it stands does not confirm it. That may change; archaeology has surprised us before. But intellectual honesty requires saying plainly: as of now, these texts cannot be confirmed as literal historical accounts by the standards that apply to all other historical claims.

That is not the most interesting question, anyway.

The most interesting question is this: why, out of everything that human beings have ever made, do these stories refuse to die?

Why does a war poem composed in a language that no one has spoken natively for over a thousand years still make people weep? Why does the image of a god who accepted exile rather than break his father’s word still carry moral weight in the same world that has smartphones and particle accelerators? Why has the story of a monkey who set himself on fire rather than fail someone he loved crossed every cultural and linguistic boundary it has ever encountered?

What does it mean that these are still the stories we reach for when we are trying to explain to our children what courage is, what loyalty costs, what it means to be human?

That question doesn’t need archaeology to answer it.

And it doesn’t need us to be afraid of archaeology, either.

My grandmother knew the answer. She sat very straight, she said “Do you know what Hanuman did?” — and the room went quiet.

Whatever that was, it was real. I’m still trying to understand it.

The archaeological findings, manuscript scholarship, and philological claims in this article are based on publicly available academic sources. Readers are encouraged to consult the critical editions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, published reports of the Archaeological Survey of India, the marine archaeology surveys by the National Institute of Ocean Technology, and peer-reviewed scholarship in Indology. No claim in this article should be taken as the final word on an active area of research.