Is the hindu epic 'Mahabharata' fiction or nonfiction fiction?

By carefulWren

I was chatting with my mom and somehow we ended up on the Mahabharata. I’m really not religious, so when she said it was “real,” I basically brushed it off. Then I got curious, mostly because I wanted to be right, and I was surprised to see that a lot of people—like even scholars—argue it’s non-fiction. Some stuff seems to match details from the story, like the whole rock bridge thing from India to Sri Lanka, or the research people cite about war evidence around that time near Sri Lanka. But then there are also parts that feel like total made-up stuff, like the whole gods and demons angle, the demon with eight heads, or the monkey moving a mountain. So… which is it? I’m trying to figure out the definite answer, but the closest thing I can land on is that it might be based on real events, and they just used the gods/demons stuff to make the characters more dramatic.