One of the responsibilities of the scholars was the preparation of a critical edition of Mahabharata. This hugely challenging scheme was accepted by the handarkar Oriental Research Institute. This scheme began in 1919 under the leadership of the Sanskrit scholar V.S. Sukthanker. Dozens of scholars took part in this s big scheme. The work went on in good order, strictly following the scientific method.

Before embarking on this project, the scholars under Sukthanker collected as many manuscripts as they could get from different parts of India. After that, they compared the slokas in different manuscripts. They then chose the common slokas found in all versions. Then they published them in different volumes running into more than 13,000 pages. It took them 47 years to complete this task. Two things became clear from this project.

First of all, there were common features in the Sanskrit version of the story. There are evidences for this from the manuscripts collected from all over India, from Kashmir and Nepal in the North and Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the South. The second thing is that there were regional variations in the story. This happened centuries ago and the books became popular. All these differences are shown as footnotes and appendices, in the main book.

More than half of the entire book is devoted to these differences. The social history of India is made up of some very complex processes. We are to understand these processes from the Sanskrit books written by Brahmins. It was the historians of the 19^th and 20^th centuries that looked into the problems of social history. Therefore they took these books on their face value. Later the scholars also began to study the books written in Prakrit and Tamil.

It is the ideas in the Sanskrit books that are generally approved as authentic. But sometimes they have been questioned or rejected. When we consider how the social history was reconstructed, we should also remember that there were many differences even among scholars.