"The mahabharata is a story of …

The mahabharata is a colossal epic which runs into 100000 verses. It describes the story of two sets of warring cousins and also lais down conduct of behavior for various social groups. It is a story of kindhip ,marriage and patriliny . It reinforces the idea that on sons had share on throne of father and thus pandavas claimed throne of there father king pandu. This substantiate patriliny. Then coming to kinship the story revolves around two sets of cousins pandavs and kauravas who had diffrences over acquiring throne of hastinapur . There are other characters as well such as vidhur , kunti and gandhari , ditrastra who belonged to same kin. The marriage of draupadi with the five pandavas tell us that may be at that time polyandry was practiced i.e the practice of a woman having several husbands. This could be due to shortage of females during the time of warfare. Thus from above points we can infer that mahabharata was the story of kinship, marriage and patriliny.