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their history. The poem itself deals primarily with a land dispute. Woven into the main story, however, are thousands of side stories and myths that teach a good deal of the history and belief of the ancient Aryan people.
    The Aryans are referred to in several of the ancient Hindu works, most notably in a work known as the
Rig Veda
. The word
Arya
, means "noble" or "cultured" in Sanskrit. In the early 19th century, it became the long-standing assumption that the Aryans were European invaders that conquered the more primitive Dravidian people living in India at the time. However, the idea formed less from any evidence than from simple, unadulterated racism. The Europeans who conquered India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries simply assumed that such an intelligent and "noble" race
must
have come from Europe, and could not have been indigenous to Asia. This idea of a vastly superior race of Europeans known as "Aryans" was the basis for Hitler's blond-haired, blue-eyed "Aryan race" that he was attempting to create during the Third Reich.
    Now, as more and more — and older — references to the Aryans have cropped up in the past few decades, historians have been forced to abandon this idea of a superior invading race slaughtering inferior natives. It is currently believed, therefore, that the word simply references the earliest sages of India, known as the "Nobles" by later people. This is not unheard of. Even in America, we tend to refer to the "Founding Fathers" when we speak of the great minds that drafted the Constitution of the nation. In any event, within the
Mahābhārata
lay several stories that reveal the history and belief of that ancient culture.
    The name of the book itself comes from two words,
mahā
, meaning "great" or "large," and
bhārata
, meaning "[battle of] the Bhāratas." The Bhāratas were a tribe in India that had eventually split into two clans: the Kurus and the Pāņdus. At some point in time, the two clans began warring over a parcel of land that had belonged to their ancestors. By the time of the poem, the battle is over, the Kurus have been annihilated, and the Pāņdus alone survive. The
Mahābhārata
is the story of the initial dispute, and the years leading up to the great battle.
    The part of the story in which we are interested, "The Fish Story of Manu," is found in book III, chapter 185. It is told to the traveling Pāņdus as they wander about the land, exiled, in the years before the battle. The story is related to the other Pāņdus by Mārkaņdeya, a member of their company.
    In the original Sanskrit, the poem makes up roughly seven volumes. In English, that length nearly triples to 19 volumes. 1 The work is sprawling. It varies in vocabulary, grammar, style, and meter. It has been called a "literary monstrosity," 2 and is an intellectual thicket of history and philosophy. Because of its sheer size and scope, we can hardly help but wonder how such an immense work came into being.
    The origin of the
Mahābhārata
has been a point of debate for the last 200 years, when the work was first translated into English. The Sanskrit grammarian Pāņini offered an etymological description of the title sometime around 400 B.C. Most Sanskrit literature references the work and even quotes it, indicating just how influential the epic poem has been. There is, however, one exception to the rule: the Vedic literature.
    The
Vedas
are a collection of religious hymns composed over a large period of time (the
Rig Veda
, mentioned above, is one of these). No one is precisely sure when they were begun, but we do know that they were finally completed sometime between 1800 B.C. and 1400 B.C. Because of their religious nature, they should surely have been influenced by the
Mahābhārata
. However, they are not. In fact, they do not reference the poem at all, leading most people to believe that the
Mahābhārata
was not in existence at that point. This is a reasonable idea. Because the work is referenced by