What makes the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata so appealing?

On 1 July, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, Maharashtra, organised the first edition of its English-language online course on the 18 parvans of the Mahabharata. It was based on the Critical Edition of the great epic, compiled by a board of scholars at the institute from 1919-66, that takes into account over 800-plus regional variations as well as Ved Vyasa’s Mahabharata. “This is an authenticated text produced by a board of scholars and seeks to eliminate later interpolations, unifying the text across the various regional versions,” writes author-economist Bibek Debroy in the introduction to his unabridged translation of The Mahabharata, published by Penguin between 2010-14; he too drew upon the Critical Edition, among other sources. Debroy himself points out: “One should mention that the critical edition’s text is not invariably smooth. Travel writer-editor and history enthusiast Sudha Ganapathi had always known of the Critical Edition but wasn’t aware that it had been created by the institute.