The child Krishna was adored for his mischievous pranks; he also performed many miracles and slew demons. As a youth, the cowherd Krishna became renowned as a lover, the sound of his flute prompting the gopis (wives and daughters of the cowherds) to leave their homes to dance ecstatically with him in the moonlight. His favourite among them was the beautiful Radha. At length, Krishna and his brother Balarama returned to Mathura to slay the wicked Kamsa. Afterward, finding the kingdom unsafe, Krishna led the Yadavas to the western coast of Kathiawar and established his court at Dvaraka (modern Dwarka, Gujarat). He married the princess Rukmini and took other wives as well.

Krishna refused to bear arms in the great war between the Kauravas (sons of Dhritarashtra, the descendant of Kuru) and the Pandavas (sons of Pandu), but he offered a choice of his personal attendance to one side and the loan of his army to the other. The Pandavas chose the former, and Krishna thus served as charioteer for Arjuna, one of the Pandava brothers. On his return to Dvaraka, a brawl broke out one day among the Yadava chiefs in which Krishna’s brother and son were slain. As the god sat in the forest lamenting, a huntsman, mistaking him for a deer, shot him in his one vulnerable spot, the heel, killing him.

The rich variety of legends associated with Krishna’s life led to an abundance of representation in painting and sculpture. The child Krishna (Balakrishna) is depicted crawling on his hands and knees or dancing with joy, a ball of butter held in his hands. The divine lover—the most common representation—is shown playing the flute, surrounded by adoring gopis. In 17th- and 18th-century Rajasthani and Pahari painting, Krishna is characteristically depicted with blue-black skin, wearing a yellow dhoti (loincloth) and a crown of peacock feathers.

The legends of Krishna's childhood and youth describe him as a cow herder, a mischievous boy whose pranks earn him the nickname Makhan Chor (butter thief), and a protector who steals the hearts of the people in both Gokul and Vrindavana. The texts state, for example, that Krishna lifts the Govardhana hill to protect the inhabitants of Vrindavana from devastating rains and floods. Other legends describe him as an enchanter and playful lover of the gopis (milkmaids) of Vrindavana, especially Radha. These metaphor-filled love stories are known as the Rasa lila and were romanticized in the poetry of Jayadeva, author of the Gita Govinda. They are also central to the development of the Krishna bhakti traditions worshiping Radha Krishna.

Krishna legends then describe his return to Mathura. He overthrows and kills the tyrant king, his uncle Kamsa/Kansa after quelling several assassination attempts by Kamsa. He reinstates Kamsa's father, Ugrasena as the king of the Yadavas and becomes a leading prince at the court. In one version of the Krishna story, as narrated by Shanta Rao, Krishna after Kamsa's death leads the Yadavas to the newly built city of Dwaraka. Thereafter Pandavas rise. Krishna befriends Arjuna and the other Pandava princes of the Kuru kingdom. Krishna plays a key role in the Mahabharata. The Bhagavata Purana describes eight wives of Krishna that appear in sequence as (Rukmini, Satyabhama, Jambavati, Kalindi, Mitravinda, Nagnajiti (also called Satya), Bhadra and Lakshmana (also called Madra). According to Dennis Hudson, this is a metaphor where each of the eight wives signifies a different aspect of him. According to George Williams, Vaishnava texts mention all Gopis as wives of Krishna, but this is spiritual symbolism of devotional relationship and Krishna's complete loving devotion to each and everyone devoted to him. In Krishna-related Hindu traditions, he is most commonly seen with Radha. All of his wives and his lover Radha are considered in the Hindu tradition to be the avatars of the goddess Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu. Gopis are considered as Lakshmi's or Radha's manifestations.

Arjuna was born when Indra, the god of rain, blessed Kunti and Pandu with a son. From childhood, Arjuna was a brilliant student and was favoured by his beloved teacher, Drona. Arjuna is depicted as a skilled archer, winning the hands of Draupadi, who married the five brothers because of Kunti's misunderstanding. Arjuna is twice exiled, first for breaking a pact with his brothers; and secondly together with them when his oldest brother was tricked into gambling away the throne.

Some notable incidents during the first exile were Arjuna's marriages with princesses Ulupi, Chitrāngadā and Subhadra. From his four wives, Arjuna had four sons, one from each wife — Shrutakarma, Iravan, Babhruvahana and Abhimanyu. During his second exile, Arjuna gained many celestial weapons. Being a powerful warrior, Arjuna was also skilled in music and dance. At the end of the epic, Pandavas, accompanied by Draupadi, retired to the Himalayas. Arjuna was the fourth one to fall on the way.

Despite being the younger brother of Dhritarashtra, it was Pandu who succeeded their father as king of Bharata. This was because Dhritarashtra was blind, a disability that caused him to forfeit his right to the royal succession. Dhritarashtra fathered 100 sons, known as the Kaurava brothers, and ascended the throne on the death of Pandu. The Pandava brothers were then brought up with their cousins, the Kauravas, and the education of all these boys was supervised by Bhishma. Among their teachers was the brahmin warrior called Drona, who considered Arjuna to be his favourite. According to Swami Parmeshwaranand, Arjuna was Drona's most accomplished pupil. He notes an incident where Drona deemed that out of all his students, none but Arjuna had the steadfast focus to shoot the eye of a toy bird on a tree using a bow and arrow, and that Drona was proven right.

However, George M. Williams considers another pupil, Karna, to have been as capable as Arjuna. Karna had been born to Kunti prior to her marriage with Pandu, blessed with Surya but then abandoned to be raised by a low-caste family. He was thus secretly a half-brother of Arjuna and contrasted with him by being of low status. As the legend progresses, these classmates become enemies, with Karna and the Kauravas allying against Arjuna and his four brothers. After the princes completed their training, Arjuna defeated Drupada of Panchala, who was impressed by the prince's skills, as the gurudakshina for his beloved teacher Drona. Later, Duryodhana and his maternal uncle Shakuni planned to burn Pandavas alive along with their mother Kunti. They built a palace out of lac in a village named Varanāvata. The Pandavas, though, managed to escape the house of lac with the help of Vidura through a secret tunnel.

This misunderstanding, combined with the protocol that the oldest of the brothers, Yudhishthira, should marry first, leads to the agreement that all five brothers marry her. This is one of the rare examples of polyandry in Sanskrit literature. The brothers agreed that none should intrude if Draupadi was alone with one of the others, the penalty for doing so is a year to be spent in exile during which the culprit must remain celibate. When Arjuna, his siblings, mother and Draupadi returned to Hastinapura, Dhritarashtra determined to avoid a rivalry developing for control of Hastinapur by splitting the kingdom, with half of it being left to his own eldest son, Duryodhana, and half to the eldest son of Pandu, Yudhishthira.

Arjuna inadvertently broke the pact with his brothers, intruding as he sought to collect weapons whilst Yudhishthira, was alone with Draupadi. He felt obliged to go into exile despite Yudhishthira's attempts to dissuade him. It was this event that led to him forming a close relationship with his cousin Krishna because he ignored the celibacy condition of the pact and married three people on his travels, the first of whom was a Naga princess named Ulupi, with whom he had a son called Iravan. His second marriage was with a princess of Manipura, Chitrangada, who bore a son named Babhruvahana. The third was with Subhadra, the sister of Krishna. This last event, which took place in Dvaraka, is not the first meeting between Krishna and the Pandavas in the story but it does mark the start of a bond, sealed with the birth of the couple's child, Abhimanyu, whom Krishna adores.

As Dhritarashtra's advisor, Sanjaya's job was not as hard. Until he had to tell Dhritarashtra the news of the death of his “hundred sons at the hands of Bhima at different points of time in the battle and offers the sorrowing king solace in his darkest hours. Sanjaya tells every incident of the Kurukshetra war. Sanjaya also gives various descriptions of: Earth, the other planets, and focuses on the Indian subcontinent and gives an elaborate list of hundreds of kingdoms, tribes, provinces, cities, towns, villages, rivers, mountains, and forests of the Indian Subcontinent (Bharata Varsha). He also explains about the military formations adopted by each side on each day, the death of each hero and the details of each war-racing. Sanjaya is known to be very frank in his narration of the battle events and his opinions and he also predicted the destruction of Kauravas at the hands of Krishna and Arjuna (“Sanjaya, Charioteer”). Sanjaya was Dhritarashtra's honest advisor.

Sanjaya is a virtuous character who “represents intuitive knowledge, which arises from long and arduous spiritual practice, a predominance of sattva and inner awakening” (V, “Symbolism in the Bhagavadgita”). Despite him not being as lucky as Arjuna to earn the divine grace, he is still able to receive knowledge from Lord Krishna because he mastered having control over his body and mind (V, “Symbolism in the Bhagavadgita”). He represents having a sense of awareness as he is able to witness all of the details occurring in the battle. Sanjaya was able to spot when "Arjuna dropped his bow and arrows, and sat down on the seat of the chariot, with his mind overwhelmed with sorrow". Seeing Arjuna past his physical appearance as being exhausted from the battle, Sanjaya displays his mastery in the mind and body as he was able to see Arjuna as sorrowful.

When it came time to nominate an heir, Vidura suggested that Pandu would be a better fit because he was not blind. Though bitter at the result, Dhritarashtra willingly conceded the crown, though this act would flower into the protectiveness he would have over his crown later in life. Dhritarashtra marries Gandhari of Hastinapur's weakened and lowly vassal Gandhar; Gandhari covers her eyes with cloth in order to better understand her husband's blindness. He and Gandhari had one hundred sons, called the Kauravas and one daughter Dushala. He also had a son named Yuyutsu with a concubine.

After the incident with Rishi Kindama, Pandu retired to the forest. Hence, Dhritarashtra became the de facto king. Through the blessings of Vyasa, he and Gandhari have one hundred sons and a daughter, with his oldest son, Duryodhana, becoming his heir. Upon Duryodhana's birth, ill omens appeared; many sages and consultants advised Dhritarashtra and Gandhari to abandon the baby. But they refused to do so; Duryodhana grows up with a princely education and his parents thought that he will be a great heir. However, when Pandu dies, Kunti and her sons come to Hastinapur, living alongside Dhritarashtra's children. Yudhishthira, Pandu's eldest son, is older than Duryodhana. Given that Pandu was the king and that Yudhishthira is born of the god Dharma, he has a strong claim to the throne. A succession crisis begins; though recognizing Yudhishthira's merits, Dhritarashtra favours his own son, blind to his faults. Upon much pressure from the Brahmin council, Vidura, and Bhishma, Dhritarashtra reluctantly names Yudhishthira as his heir.