Sentiments of Sustainability

The Mahabharata is an Indian epic that throws light on several important aspects like governance, war, dharma, and spirituality. This research uses the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm to study environmental sustainability verses that are present in the Mahabharata text. It uses a pre-trained BERT model and trains it on the Mahabharata text and environmental sources to classify the verses into important themes, including nature conservation and water sustainability. The study also uses sentiment analysis to look at the emotional tone of environmental discourse to find whether they were considered as threats, moral duties, or signals of peace in the world. The objective of the study is to reread the epic using machine learning to identify the ancient sustainability ideas and look for what they can offer in present time. The results suggest that the Mahabharata has a dominance of eco-spirituality as an environmental theme, as nature was often understood in terms of a divine entity during ancient times. Similarly, the text discusses the anger tone associated with the massive destruction that happened during the Kurukshetra war. The results suggest that the Mahabharata offers a spiritually based methodology for considering environmental sustainability.