Much of the Mahabharata’s narrative structure depends on a detail easy to overlook: how a blind king, Dhritarashtra, remaining in Hastinapura, receives a complete, real-time account of a war being fought many miles away.
A problem Vyasa solved directly
Recognizing that Dhritarashtra would need a way to follow the war without being present, the sage Vyasa granted his minister and charioteer, Sanjaya, a form of divine sight – the ability to see every event on the Kurukshetra battlefield as it happened, regardless of distance, along with the ability to hear private conversations and understand the inner thoughts of the warriors involved.
A narrator who never left the palace
Sanjaya used this gift to narrate all eighteen days of the war to Dhritarashtra in real time, including the entirety of the Bhagavad Gita, delivered privately between Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield before the fighting began – a conversation Sanjaya alone, among all those not physically present, was able to witness and later relay.
A device that shaped how the epic is told
This arrangement is why so much of the Mahabharata’s war narrative unfolds as dialogue – Sanjaya describing events to an anxious, blind king desperate for news of his sons. Vyasa’s decision to grant this vision rather than simply narrating the events himself gave the epic one of its most enduring structural devices: a story told through the eyes of someone deliberately kept at a safe distance from the violence he was witnessing.