1. Under the leadership of eminent Sanskrit Scholar V.S. Sukthankar, very ambitions project was started in 1919 CE. Many scholars decided to make a critical edition of Mahabharata.
2. Scholars worked out a method of comparing verses from each manuscript. They sorted all those verses appeared common in all manuscripts. All these were published in several volumes running into 1300 pages. It took 47 years to complete the project.
3. There were many similarities in various elements of Sanskrit version of the story. All these found in all the manuscripts that stretched from Kashmir and Nepal in north and to Kerala, Tamil Nadu in South.
4. A number of regional variations came in the light as the epic had been transmitted over the centuries. These were written as foot notes and appendices to the main texts. Pages in large numbers are devoted to these variations whenever they were taken together.
5. These variations could be reflected in the complete process which shaped before and after social histories through dialogues between dominant traditions and resilient local ideas and practices.
6. Information about all these processes is based on those Sanskrit texts which were written by Brahmans for themselves. In 19th and 20th centuries, historians explored these texts.
7. Historians believed that, what is written in the texts, could have been practised really. Many scholars studied many other traditions later with the help of Pali, Prakrit and Tamil texts.
8. Such studies mentioned that the ideas contained in normative Sanskrit texts were identified as authoritative. Sometimes, they were questioned and sometimes rejected.
