Why Indians Called the Epics Itihasa and Never Called Them Mythology

The Sanskrit word Itihasa breaks into three parts: iti, ha, asa, thus, indeed, it was. The people who composed and transmitted the Ramayana and Mahabharata did not reach for a word meaning story, fable, or allegory. They chose a word that asserts occurrence. That choice was deliberate, and it has never been neutral.

The Puranas distinguish between shruti, that which was heard, the Vedas, and smriti, that which was remembered. Itihasa sits within smriti, but it carries a further specification. Valmiki's Ramayana opens by asking Narada who among living men is virtuous, powerful, and righteous, and Narada answers with a name: Rama. The question is posed as an inquiry about a living world, not a symbolic one. The Mahabharata's opening in the Adi Parva describes itself as the fifth Veda, a text containing everything that exists and everything that does not exist elsewhere. Neither text introduces itself as a parable.

Mythos in ancient Greek meant word, speech, or story, not falsehood. The modern English sense of myth as something invented or unverifiable came much later, through Enlightenment historiography that sorted the ancient world into fact and superstition. When nineteenth-century European scholars applied the word mythology to the Ramayana and Mahabharata, they were not translating an Indian category. They were imposing a European filing system onto texts that already had their own. The imposition stuck in academic English. It did not replace the original classification inside the tradition.

Tulsidas writing the Ramcharitmanas in the sixteenth century did not describe himself as retelling a myth. He described himself as a devotee recording what Shiva narrated to Parvati, who narrated it to Kakabhushundi, who narrated it to Garuda. The chain of transmission is the point. A myth is told; Itihasa is transmitted. The distinction matters because transmission implies a source, and a source implies an event. Pilgrimage routes in India follow the geography of both epics with the same precision applied to documented historical sites. Chitrakoot, Hampi, Kurukshetra, these are not theme parks for a story. They are the places the tradition has always said the events occurred.

Reclassifying Itihasa as mythology does not neutralise the texts. It relocates their authority. A myth can be beautiful, structurally sophisticated, and spiritually rich while remaining, in the modern English sense, untrue. Once a text is mythology, its geography becomes symbolic, its characters become archetypes, and its ethical claims become cultural artifacts to be studied rather than obligations to be weighed. The Bhagavad Gita, which occurs inside the Mahabharata, is addressed to a specific man at a specific moment before a specific battle. Krishna's instruction in Chapter 2, verse 19, na jayate mriyate va kadacin, is not addressed to an archetype. It is addressed to Arjuna. The force of that address depends on Arjuna having existed.

None of this means the tradition was without its own internal debates. The Nyaya and Mimamsa schools argued extensively about the nature of Vedic and epic authority. Some commentators read episodes as symbolic. Adi Shankaracharya's Advaita framework treats the phenomenal world itself as a kind of appearance, which complicates any simple literal reading of any text. But these debates happened inside the tradition, in Sanskrit, using the tradition's own categories. They were arguments about interpretation, not about whether the category Itihasa was correctly applied. The category itself was never contested from within.