Mahabharata Blood Relationships - The Complete Picture

This is the last part of the series “Relationships in Mahabharata”. In this series so far we came to know about Maternal Uncles and Aunts along with Paternal Uncles and Aunts of characters in Mahabharata.  If you have not gone through the whole series yet then I will recommend you to go through the previous parts of this series before reading this one. In this article we will know how those characters are actually placed within their direct blood relationships.  
So to represent all major characters I created the complete hierarchy of different dynasties who are involved in the epic Mahabharata. Here I am able to cover many of the major characters but still need to left out many of the characters either due to non-importance or not part of scope for this series. We focused majorly on the characters we used in all previous part of the series, which we have discussed so far. To understand the dynasties, presented below are the hierarchies defined in Mahabharata, I converted those textual hierarchy into pictorial format for better understandings. To understand these pictorial representations legends are mentioned below.

Legends:

1. All men in same generations are marked with same colors. 
   So the colors  represents each generations. E.g. Pandu, Vidur and Vasudev are men from same generations symbolized by orange color. So also Duryodhana, Bheema and Krisna represent another set of generation showed in blue color.
2. All women’s of Mahabharata across dynasties and generations are represented with pink colors. 
3. When a circle is cut into half then that person is consider the child of the person defined above. Now if the circle is just touched the line then that person is spouse of person above the hierarchy and mother or father of person below the hierarchy. E.g. based on this picture Rishi Parashar is father of Ved Vyasa and Spouse of Satyawati. Simlarly when Satyawati is used like Rishi Parashar in any other picture she will be the mother of those characters.
4. The solid blue lines are used for child born naturally from those parents. If used dotted red lines then that child is born via Yagna. The child born using Niyoga is represented by dotted purple lines  
   and if the child is born by some Mantra then its represented
   by dotted blue lines.
5.  All Dynasties are started with  to represented there may be kingdoms or dynasties before that too.

The whole Mahabharata is all about Kuru Dynasty so will start with that. The complete dynasty is mentioned below.

If you are wondering what Satyawati and Matsya Dynasty doing here, is to represent the complete underline story of Mahabharata. So Mahabharata starts because Father of Satyawati or Satyawati (In some version) wants only Satyawati’s blood should rule Hastinapur. So what happened due to that ambition is Devabrata being the apt ruler never able to rule and Chitrangada died in Young Age and Vichitra Virya was never capable of ruling and hence triggers the whole Mahabhrata. When everything settled and Yudhistira became king he was not the direct blood of Satyawati as he was the Mantra Prasad of Dharmaraj Yama. Now Aadi parva of Mahabharata mentioned that Satyawati borned with a Twin brother (See picture above), who actually founded Matsya Kingdom and Uttara who was Mother of Parikshit the final ruler of Hastinapur (As per Mahabharata, will discuss the whole lineage later) was from Matsya Kingdom so finally the Ruler of Hastinapur got the blood of Satyawati, even if its indirectly. Hence, the desire of Satyawati is being fulfilled.

There are many other dynasties which had important characters and role play in Mahabharata. Listed below are the most important ones.

There is one Dynasty which is not been mentioned properly in Mahabharata but almost four daughter in laws and one very important character is from that dynasty. In Mahabharata that kingdom is mentioned as Kashi kingdom. Mahabharata does not provide proper lineage or hierarchical relationships so providing what so ever is available and shown here as illustration purpose only.

In case you are wondering what happens  to Kuru Dynasty after Parkshit. Mentioned below is the complete hierarchy till the last Heir known.

Exclusions:

Mentioned below are some of the points that I have excluded while creating these pictorial representations.

1. Birth or Blood Relationship of Drona and Kripacharya is not included in this picture. As per mythology they are born without any mother involved. 
2. Chedi Dynasty is not shown in list of Dynasties as main characters of that dynasty like Upricari Basu, Sishupal etc. are already included here. This helps in avoiding duplicates and simplifies the contents.
3. Only Rukmini and her 10 sons are included in the Yadav Dynasty, remaining all wives and children of Krishna are not included in these pictures.
4. It’s been mentioned in some version of Mahabharata that Gandhari also has 100 brothers along with Shakuni, not included that part here.
5. As mentioned earlier there are many other important characters surfaced in during various Parva of Mahabharata like Ekalavya, Jarashandha etc. I dd not tried to form there hierarchy as they are not Uncles or Aunts of any other noticeable characters. Simply out of scope of this series.

Last but not least, I want to thank various sources of internet and texts which provided me input for all the articles of this series. Please provide feedback and comments in individual or this articles if you find I missed any of the relationships in this series.

Prev: Paternal AuntsOf Mahabharata 

©Tapas Majumdar