Mahābhārata in the digital age: A critical study of online editions, commentaries, and search tools

This paper examines the transformation of Mahābhārata studies through digital humanities initiatives. It surveys five major online projects—GRETIL, IIT Kanpur, BORI’s digitized Critical Edition, the National Sanskrit University (Tirupati) Mahābhārata project, and selected tools like SARIT and the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit—evaluating their textual integrity, usability, search functionality, and support for traditional scholarship. After outlining the epic’s complex manuscript history and the emergence of digital philology, the study provides a comparative analysis of these platforms, highlights key strengths and gaps, and proposes future directions, such as integrated NLP tools and a comprehensive digital commentarial corpus. Finally, it argues for a unified, open source infrastructure that balances academic rigor with user friendly features, thereby fostering interdisciplinary research and revitalizing classical Sanskrit studies.