Mahabharat Watch Online is a 2013 drama TV series on Star Plus based on Indian legendary epic of the same name. It has been produced by Swastik Pictures and features actors such as Saurabh Raj Jain as Lord Krishna, Shaheer Sheikh as Arjuna, Pooja Sharma as Draupadi, Aham Sharma as Karna and Arav Chowdhary as Bhishma Pitamah. The producers had creative associations with writer Salim Khan, author Devdutt Pattanaik, designer Bhanu Athaiya, music directors Ajay-Atul and Ismail Darbar, action director Ram Shetty and set designer Omang Kumar. The casting of the show is done by Sahil Ansari, Mahesh Chandra Bhatt, Arun Mitra. It started broadcasting on 16 September 2013.
Mahabharat presents the story of the throne of Hastinapura, the kingdom ruled by the Kuru clan. The Kaurava and the Pandava brothers compete for rulership. Although the Kauravas’ father is the senior of the two patriarchs, Duryodhana, the eldest Kaurava, is younger than Yudhisthira, the eldest Pandava. Both Duryodhana and Yudhisthira claim to be first in line to inherit the throne.[10] When Bhishma Pitamah asked for Gandhari’s hand in marriage for the blind Dhritarashtra, her brother Shakuni got furious. Though he agreed later, he swore to himself that he would destroy the Kuru race. He sowed the seeds of the climactic battle of Kurukshetra during the adolescence of the Kauravas and Pandavas by poisoning the mind of Duryodhana against the Pandavas. The friction culminates in the Kurukshetra War. The battle produces conflicts of kinship and friendship, and instances of family loyalty and duty taking precedence over what is just.
The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, who is also a major character in the epic. Vyasa described it as being itihāsa (history). He also describes the Guru-shishya parampara, which traces all great teachers and their students of the Vedic times. The first section of the Mahabharata states that it was Ganesha who wrote down the text to Vyasa’s dictation. Ganesha is said to have agreed to write it only if Vyasa never paused in his recitation. Vyasa agrees on condition that Ganesha takes the time to understand what was said before writing it down.
The epic employs the story within a story structure, otherwise known as frametales, popular in many Indian religious and non-religious works. It is recited by the sage Vaisampayana, a disciple of Vyasa, to the King Janamejaya who is the great-grandson of the Pandava prince Arjuna. The story is then recited again by a professional storyteller named Ugrasrava Sauti, many years later, to an assemblage of sages performing the 12-year sacrifice for the king Saunaka Kulapati in the Naimisha Forest.
The text has been described by some early 20th-century western Indologists as unstructured and chaotic. Hermann Oldenberg supposed that the original poem must once have carried an immense “tragic force” but dismissed the full text as a “horrible chaos.” Moritz Winternitz (Geschichte der indischen Literatur 1909) considered that “only unpoetical theologists and clumsy scribes” could have lumped the parts of disparate origin into an unordered whole.