Chakravyuha

I accidentally happened to revisit Mahabharata, which I watched as a television drama in my childhood days and was not much excited. But this time, reading the epic took me to those Mahabharata period, i.e. almost 5000 years back.

Perusing the Kurukshetra war, the soul of Mahabharata, is the best thing happened in my life in recent times :)

I read the concise and interesting version of the war here and, often cleared my doubts and matched the story with Kisari Mohan Ganguli's one-to-one english version here

One of the fascinating events happened in Kurukshetra war is the formation of an array called Chakravyuha on the thirteenth day of the battle. The vyuha which was aimed to captive 'Yudhisthira' turns out to reveal one of the most lovable hero of the war 'Abhimanyu', who at the end of the day attains heroic death.

I was so interested in knowing about the design, the formation size, the military science and ways of penetrating and breaking chakravyuha. I literally filtered the whole internet but not able to get much information about this.

As far as I know, there were two main theories for Chakravyuha
* It could be a 7 rings of circle with warriors rotating in liason
* It could be a 7-tier spiral formation with warriors spiralling in and out - as in this wiki page.

The book 'The Mahabharata - a modern rendering' has some good information on Chakra Vyuha and beautifully describes the prowess of Abhimanyu on that day.

But still... no concrete information could be found on Chakravyuha. I wonder if there is anyone who published an article on this? Maybe, I should do it :)

Useful References:
Mahabharata - by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
The Indian Labyrinth
The Warrior Monks
Arbit Articulations