It was but natural that, with the advance of scientific Indology, the need should have been urgently felt for a critical edition of the Mahabharata. Insta presented at the 11th International Congress of Orientalists held at Paris in 1197, WINTERNITZ strongly voiced this need for a critical edition of the Mahabharata as sine qua nos for all historical and critical research regarding the great epic of India" As the result of the persistent efforts in this regard of WINTERNITZ and several other scholars, the International Union of Academies resolved in 1904 to undertake the preparation of such an edition. Funds were raised for this purpose, and a specimen of the edition prepared by Lünens was also published for private circulation among scholars, But then came the first world war which interrupted all scholastic activities in the West. On the other hand, during the last years of the first world war, there began to become evident in India a new spirit of Independence which touched almost all spheres of national life. Accordingly, the workers of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, which was founded in 1917 to commemorate the name and work of Ramakrishna Gopal BHANDARKAR who had worthily come to be regarded as one of the leading pioneers of scientific Orient ology in India, decided, la their understandable enthusiasm, to venture upon the project of a critical edition of the Mahabharata making a fresh start, of course with the collaboration, wherever possible, of their foreign colleagues.

The first volume in the Institute's Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, namely, the Adiparvan, edited by V. S. SUKTHANKAR, was published in 1933, and it soon evoked quite an encouraging response. The critical edition of the eighteen puranas of the Mahabharata (extending over 13,000 demi quarto pages) was completed in 1966, and this historic event was formally announced by Rashtrapati Dr. S. RADHAKRISHNAN at a special function held at the Institute on September 22, 1966.

It would seem that the Editorial Board and the Board of Referees for the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata bad visualized it as a multifaceted project, Besides the critical edition of the 18 Puranas it was to have comprised also a critical edition of the Hariramda, which is traditionally regarded as a Khilaparvan of the Mahabharata, (later published in two volumes containing 1,711 pages, 1969-1971), the Pratika- Inder (6 volumes containing 4,805 pages, 1967-1972), the Critically Constituted Text of the Great Epic and the Harivanta (5 volumes containing 3,150 pages, 1971- 1976), and the Epilogue of the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. This last team, namely, the Epilogue, has had rather a chequered career. Even at an early stage, it was thought that, as a prelude to the Epilogue, the Institute should publish a fairly comprehensive analytical Cultural Index to the Critical Edition. This latter too posed many problems, but the Institute duly overcame them.

In 1966 the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute completed its monumental project of preparing and publishing the first ever critical edition of the Mahabharata', a project on which three General Editors and seven parvan-Editors had steadily worked for nearly half a century. In continuation of this major task the Institute subsequently brought out two significant publications which went a long way in facilitating the use of the critically edited text: (1) The Pratika Inder of the Mahabharata, being a comprehensive index of the verse quarters (ilokapādasüel) occurring in the edition of the Mahabharata, 1. e, verse quarters which are included in the critically constituted text as well as those which form part of the passages regarded as interpolations and which appear either as starred passages in the footnotes or in the appendices. This Pratika-Indez appeared in six volumes and took as many years for its completion (1967-1972); and (2) A handy edition of the Mahabharata giving only the critically constituted text and omitting the critical apparatus and the interpolated passages. It appeared in four volumes (1971-1975). Long before the completion of the work on the critical edition in all respects In 1975, the idea of writing an Epilogue to the Mahabharata had taken root. In the Annual Report of the Institute for the year 1951-52 (p.3) we find for the first time, under the activities of the Post-graduate and Research Department of the Institute, the mention of a research project relating to the Epilogue of the Mahabharata which the University of Poona had undertaken to finance with an annual grant of Rs. 3000/-.

In 1951, Dr. S. K. Belvalkar, the then General Editor of the Critical Edition, published a detailed outline of the scheme of the literary and historical Epilogue to the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. The Epilogues, as envisaged by him, was meant To assess "the net gala to Mahabharata scholarship, due to the present edition, on various questions of form, matter and structure that have engaged for over a hundred wears generations of scholars in and outside India.