The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c19.s3.16

c19.s3.16

16. It may not be a fortuitous invention that the *Mahābhārata* gives an elaborate identification of battle and sacrifice (*Mbh* 12. 98). Cf. Marcel Mauss’s observation: “Le *Mahābhārata* est l’histoire d’un gigantesque potlatch” (“Essai sur le don,” *Sociologie et Anthropologie* (Paris 1950), 243). Mauss’s study is the starting point of G. J. Held, *The Mahābhārata: An ethnological study* (Leiden, 1936).