A talk given by Dan Ingalls and his father at Xerox PARC in 1980. It describes a project to determine authorship of various sections of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Dan Sr introduces the Sanskrit language and talks about the traits of oral and written authorship. Dan Jr talks about how he analyzed the text for such traits, and wrote a program to read the original text by recognizing the characters of Devanagari text.