इतिहास itihāsa

The Mahābhārata calls itself an itihāsa, not a kāvya (poetry) or a purāṇa (ancient lore). The distinction matters. The literal sense of the word — iti ha āsa, “thus indeed it was” — is a truth-claim. The text is not asking the audience to imagine; it is asserting that what follows happened.

This does not map onto Western “history” cleanly. The narrator is happy to include divine intervention, time-bending, and frame-stories several layers deep, none of which compromise the itihāsa claim — because the claim is not about empirical historicity but about a kind of authoritative remembering. Itihāsa is what the keepers of memory (the sūtas, the brahmins, the rishis) have transmitted as having happened, and the transmission itself is what makes it true.

A useful working sense: itihāsa is the genre of texts that claim to be the inheritance of the past — that you encounter, rather than invent.