Is the Mahabharata only an epic?

Well, to answer this question, we must research about certain concepts which have been discussed over the ages. Yes, indeed it is an epic and was written long ago so we can't be very sure of its reality. But of that we can also not be very sure of things that happened before our birth took place. India was once a British colony and this is a fact that I consider true even if it did not happen when I could actually see for myself to believe it as a fact. There was someone named Gautama Buddha, and he preached Buddhism and that too is something I consider as a fact down in the history, but have nothing to prove it since I have not seen him with my own eyes. Similarly the "seeing is believing" concept cannot be applied to the texts of Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Technically Puranas and Itihasas are the historical documents of ancient and recent past respectively. And since Mahabharata is considered among the Itihasa, which apparently speaks of a recent history. Yes, it could be true that the entire sequence of events could have been modified by the authors to bring some elements of fictionalization, however the core concept of the book and the learning from the book could not have been just the product of somebody's fertile imagination.

India (the land of the river Indus) is a name that was probably coined by the Britishers during their colonization. However, the actual name of India in other Indian languages is Bharatavarsha, referring to the kingdom of Bharata (which included the far reaches of the modern day Afghanisthan, Chinese territory of the Kailasha Mountains, the modern day SriLanka, and the modern day Myanmar in the east. Bharata (the son of Shakuntala and Dushmanta). The book that introduces Bharata to Indian readers was Kalidasa's AbhigyanShakuntala. However, in the AdiParva of the Mahabharata, we are again told about the same Bharata by Ved Vyasa. And there are several textual references where it is known that the official name of India, Bharata was after the king Bharata. Later on, invaders named it as Hindustan (the land of the Hindus) and thereafter it got an anglicized diminutive of India to it.

We are aware that Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India and thereafter several Muslim rulers have devastated the Somnath temple and the temple was rebuilt in the same location over and over again. However, what many people do not know is the fact that this was also the place where Krishna had been shot with an arrow by a hunter named Jara (who had absolutely no motive of killing Krishna but did it in an accident). This is the place where Krishna had hidden his precious Syamantaka (the philosopher's stone that belonged to Krishna) that has still not been found despite the nine times the temple was demolished and remade.

Megasthenes came to India and has his historical ledgers mentioning certain things about Heracles, the ancient deity of India. He wrote down about an Indian tribe of Sourasenoi (Surasena) of the city of Methora (Matura). Possibly, he had derived the name Heracles from the conventional way of praying Krishna as Hare-Krishna. However, based on assumption, these facts do relate the existence of such a tribe.

Places mentioned in the Mahabharata such as Kurukshetra, Mathura, Vrindavan, Indraprastha, Anga (modern day Bihar and Jharkhand), Vanga (modern day Bangladesh, few northeastern Indian states and West Bengal), Kalinga (modern day Orissa), Gandhar (the modern day Qandahar in Afghanisthan) etc, do exist even today. Few archaeological excavations at Kurukshetra have brought out several arrows and spears which have been dated by thermoluminescence to roughly 4800 years ago (roughly the same time Mahabharata is expected to have happened)

Archaeological investigations at Dwarka, both on shore and offshore in the Arabian Sea, have been performed by the Archaeological Survey of India. The first investigations carried out on land in 1963 revealed many artifacts. Excavations done at two sites on the seaward side of Dwarka brought to light submerged settlements, a large stone-built jetty, and triangular stone anchors with three holes. The settlements are in the form of exterior and interior walls, and fort bastions. From the typological classification of the anchors it is inferred that Dwarka had flourished as a port during the period of the Middle kingdoms of India. Coastal erosion was probably the cause of the destruction of what was an ancient port.

Dwarka is mentioned in the copper inscription dated 574 AD of Simhaditya, the Maitraka dynasty minister of Vallabhi. He was the son of Varahdas, the king of Dwarka. The nearby Bet Dwarka island is a religious pilgrimage site and an important archaeological site of the Late Harappan period, with one thermoluminescence date of 1570 BC.

The dynasties recorded in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata concur without a semblance of any difference. Even the relations between different kings and their dynasties in both the great "epics" match with each other. If both were mere "epics" written by two entirely different authors at two different timestamp, it would not be befitting for Ved Vyasa to have copied details from another text despite the fact that the subplots of Mahabharata were more interesting (more market viable) than that of Ramayana.

By reference to Mahabharata, Vyasa leaves certain very intricate astronomical details as to the date and time of the war. Astrologers have calculated the year to be somewhere around 3027 BCE. Krishna left Hastinapura with Karna, on the day when the moon was yet to reach the asterism Uttara Phalguni. Karna accompanied Him to some distance to see Him off and he then described to the Lord the positions of planets in the sky and expressed his apprehension that such a planetary configuration stood for very bad omen: such as large scale loss of life and drenching of blood. Vyasa narrated all these planetary positions in as many as sixteen verses as if someone was describing it after visualizing them in the sky.

It was Openheimer who believed that he was not the first one to make atomic weapons and that ancient India knew the science and had practiced nuclear warfare. Alchemy is a science that has been known in ancient times as well. If lead could be converted to gold by Syamantaka, it could not have been too very impossible to convert a uranium 235 into uranium 236. The science is similar. Nobody can directly reject the facts that the Brahmastras released during wars were sub-atomic in nature.

Eventually it is practically a matter of belief. We can only come to terms with a belief if we can readily accept it. If we cannot, we ask questions that arises from doubts in our minds. As they say, if you believe that you can fly, you actually can. People do jump from flying helicopters in a parachute, they do fly.