Originally posted by: FlauntPessimism
When Vaishampayan was talking to Janmejaya it couldn't have been a poem. The poem was wowen around what Shaunak and Ugrashwar's conversion was and then retold to remember.
Shanti Parva doesn't mention Arjun since it didn't have anything to do with Arjun. They can not forecefit Arjun anywhere, but whereever he was, his acts was over emphasized and explained in details
Its not just the war part. Even the abduction of Subhadra is in such detail while not that of other marriages.
Ugrasrava explains this in detail in what we know as first chapter of MB. Ugrasrava says that Vaishyampayana heard the entire corpus of songs along with 3 other disciples of Vyasa. And that full corpus of songs is only heard by Devas from Narada.
What Vaishyampayana narrated to Janmejaya was the one Ugrasrava heard from his father and that this version is not the entire corpus.
That the core text or summary is 8800 verses. But the one that Ugrasrava narrates is 1 lac verses which includes Vaishyamapayana parts which was 25000 verses. So Ugrasrava actually adds a lot of things which were not included by Vaishyamapayana in his narration and it is very obvious in the text itself. Whatever Vaishyamapayana says begins with "Vaishyampayana Uvacha". While the other stories don't begin with this.
The entire narration is in Question and answer format. Where Question by Janmejaya is unmetered text while answer by Vaishyampayana is metered poem. Basically Vaishyampayana depending upon the question asked by Janmejaya chose a poem that answers that question from the bank of poems.on Bharatvansh that Vyasa had composed.
We still see this format of question in text and answer in song in traditional folk plays of Pandavani of Teejanbai.
We also have a Jaimini version of Ashwamedha parva (the only section available today) which actually has a verse that mentioned Karna's son accompanying Arjuna for Ashwamedha and Vaishyampayana version skips him completely
So the version of MB that we have is not distorted perse... Rather it is an incomplete version that does not have the entire story rather has less than half of it and the half that focuses mainly on Janmejaya's immediate ancestors parikshit, Uttara Abhimanyu Subhadra and Arjuna
For eg.. Abhimanyu gets a whole chapter for himself and we have Dhritrashtra and Sanjaya spending almost 75 verses for him. Dhritrashtra and Sanjaya spends lamenting only 15 verses for Dusshasana
While for Iravan it is just two verses which describe his death.
I.e. Vaishyampayana cut the song of Iravans death into just one chanda. While for Dusshasan he probably took just the first and last stanza while for Abhimanyu he narrated the entire song....
This ugrasrava clarifies in the first chapter and states that the text we have is not complete.
Distortion also happened in MB but it wasn't done by Vaishyampayana or Ugrasrava. It wa by later translators and transcribers
Like Draupadi Swayamvar's "Naham Varami Sutam" is an addition/distortion made by Neelakanth. This is highlighted by Kisari Mohan Ganguli in his footnotes of the translation.
We have B R Chopra adding Andhe ka Putra Andha by Draupadi in the TV serial.
Which people now assume to be part of the Vyasa's composition.
It is not...
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