THE KILLING OF DUSSASANA

Dussasana died a terrible death - to put it mildly. But then even superlatives wouldn’t adequately capture the horror of it. Bhima literally pulled out his arms from his body, mutilated his chest, and drank his blood. And as he was dismembering his wretched victim, he was jeering and shouting abuses at him, reminding himself more than him of all the humiliation that Draupadi had suffered in his hands, justifying as much to himself as to him why he should be killed like a beast, and challenging all those around to save that miserable wretch from his clutches in so offensive a manner that even his own brother Arjuna had to be restrained by Krishna from attacking him for his despicable exhibition of arrogance. Bhima had Draupadi brought to the battlefield and poured the blood flowing from Dussasana’s severed arms on her hair, and as the warm blood flowed down her face, she had a taste of it. No death in the Kurukshetra battlefield was as terrible and as disgusting as this. A beast was killing its prey in a manner that far exceeded what the beasts indeed do to their prey. No quest for revenge can reduce one to the kind of bestiality that Bhima demonstrated. If anything can, it must be blinding hatred.

Bhima had of course made a pledge to do to Dussasana precisely what he did. Thus he redeemed the pledge, and the moral code of those days arguably validated it. In fact, Krishna, for one, repeatedly justified his action on that ground. But what kind of a pledge was it then? Granted, it was a vow made in intensely trying circumstances. However the day he uttered the terrible vow and the day he redeemed it were separated by more than thirteen years – years of mental and physical suffering for the Pandavas, no doubt, but it was surely a period long enough for reflection too. And Bhima was neither devoid of basic moral sense nor unlearned in the shastras. He relished fighting, as Sarala said of him in his narrative, but he wasn’t a warmonger. Didn’t it ever occur to him that the vow he had made to give his disgraced and humiliated wife justice was fundamentally unjust because it involved reducing himself to the level of a beast? This might not be a meaningless question if one considers his initial disinclination for war to win back their kingdom that Duryodhana had usurped through deceit. Before going to the Kaurava court as Yudhisthira’s emissary, when Krishna met him and told him that his elder brother did not want war and would be content with just one village, Bhima requested him to ask Duryodhana for one more village because one village for the five of them would be insufficient in view of his rather embarrassingly excessive need for food. Krishna had to work on his psyche to get his consent for war.

Poor Dussasana! In Draupadi’s humiliation he was only obeying his elder brother Duryodhana’s orders. In Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata, if he took initiative in this matter at any stage, it was arguably only in the beginning, when after Yudhisthira lost Draupadi in the game of dice and Duryodhana wanted Draupadi, then reduced to a slave, to be brought to the court to join her husbands who had also been reduced to the same position, Dussasana, although not specifically called upon to do so by his elder brother, went to bring her from the inner quarters, and dragged her out, tugging at her hair. If this amounts to taking initiative, then Dussasana is guilty of the same. After that he did only what his brother asked him to do. The decision to humiliate Draupadi in the court was not at all his.

In fact Dussasana did not bring Draupadi to the Kaurava court straightaway when she told him that she was menstruating. He came to court alone and informed his brother about her state. It was only on Duryodhana’s orders that he dragged her to the court. Again Dussasana did not suggest Draupadi’s disrobing. It was his brother’s decision. He only tried to do what he was asked to do.

But this of course does not justify his doings. There was no question of his protesting, since he didn’t think that he was doing anything wrong. In Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata there is no evidence that he thought differently from Duryodhana on this or any other matter. Besides, in all that he did, he was not a reluctant participant, but an enthusiastic agent. He relished it all. Incidentally, in Sarala’s narrative, no one in the Kaurava court raised a voice of protest against Duryodhana’s decision and Dussasana’s action .

But in all fairness, one must not judge any of the three involved harshly, namely, Dussasana and Bhima for what they had done, and the cruel, unforgiving Draupadi, who relentlessly drove her husbands to war because she could be avenged, and who insisted that her hair be washed with Dussasana’s blood. The reason is that in Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata, Bhima could not have done things substantially differently, and poor Dussasana was doomed to die almost the way he did. And Draupadi too had to taste his blood.


The genesis of it all lay in something that had happened aeons and aeons ago – that was the dawn of creation, when from the residue things were to begin again. From the tears of Vishnu, who had opened eyes for a split second, emerged fifteen Brahmas, and then Vishnu closed his eyes and resumed his yoga nidraa (“yogic posture”, literally “yogic sleep”). The Brahmas saw Saraswati at Vishnu’s head, and wanted sex with her. Angry, the mother goddess created Ketuka, and as the Brahmas surrounded her to sexually assault her, Saraswati asked her to devour them. One by one she devoured all but one, Sudraka Brahma, who prayed to Vishnu for protection. Vishnu asked Ketuka to spare him, but Saraswati intervened and told him that Sudraka was really wicked, and had sought sex with her. Vishnu asked her to spare him till the aeon of Dwapara. Ketuka, he told her, would be born as Draupadi then, and would have five Pandavas as her husband, and Sudraka Brahma would be born as Dussasana. He would torment her in public, and her husband Bhima would avenge her by dismembering him in the battlefield. He would pour his blood on his her hair, and it would be then that she would savour his blood. The script was already there. Thus as re-enactment of the past event, Dussasana’s torment of Draupadi had to have sexual overtones, reminiscent of the Brahmas’ attitude towards Ketuka.

The celebrated sage Durvasa reinforced the script, not that any reinforcement was necessary. Durvasa was the one through whose benevolent intervention Gandhari’s children were born. The fond father of Dussasana laid the infant in the sage’s lap, hoping that his son would get a blessing from him. The great sage kissed the infant and blessed that he have the strength of a thousand lions. Then as the infant cried and fidgeted a bit, his fist hit the sage in the chest, and he fainted. When he revived, he cursed him that his brother punish him by dismembering his right arm in the battle: sodara saasti deu tote dakshina bhuja upaadi (“brother punish you by uprooting your right arm”), as Sarala put it. And the sage Vyasa smiled when Durvasa pronounced the curse. As one who knew the past and the future, Vyasa surely knew the script.

Thus Sarala’s narrative can be seen as trying to find a deeper cause to such inhumanity and such degradation as evinced in Dussasana’s dismemberment. It was as though the poet was deeply hurt and offended by not only the bestiality of the act, but also what was presented as its cause and thereby its justification. Looking perhaps for a stronger cause he went beyond the here and the now. He explored the traditional belief that in some gross sense life ends with death, and karma ends once it is performed, but in a more subtle sense, neither life folds up in death nor karma, in its performance. In terms of the present episode, the demands of karma may require a succession of births. One must return to life as long as one has not experienced the results of one’s karma, and the ends of cosmic justice are not met. Intervention of even the Supreme can only delay the process.

The way Bhima was killing Dussasana, he had made it a spectacle. Many had stopped fighting and were watching. Among them were Duryodhana, Karna, Sakuni, the Pandavas, Krishna, and many, many terrified warriors of both sides. One can easily imagine the feelings of the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The former must have felt utterly devastated, and the latter, jubilant. But the ordinary fighters must have found the whole proceedings not only blood curdling, but also utterly sickening. Not just they, none present there deserved to witness an event during which the limits of cruelty were stretched so cynically. What justice was there in it?

None present there knew that the ancient Ketuka – Sudraka Brahma feud was reaching its predetermined, logical conclusion – if there was anyone who did, it could only be Krishna, but he gave no indication of it at any point of time. An event which had taken place aeons ago in some world of gods was folding up on earth in front of humans in a way that shamed humanness. Humans were not even there when the script was worked out. Why should they have been the victims of its senseless enactment?

Neither Dussasana nor Draupadi were aware of the true meaning of what was happening. In their present existence they had no memory of their past. Draupadi did not know that she was punishing her tormentor, and Dussasana did not know that he was being punished, and Bhima did not know that he was nothing but a designated killer acting on behalf of the tormented Ketuka who he never even knew. Without memory there is no knowledge, and what is the sense of retribution without the knowledge of either the crime or the criminal?

Is this the nature of karmic justice that whether or not it is intelligible to anyone including those involved, is immaterial? Perhaps not. For why, then, in Sarala’s narrative, was there the sage Agasti, whose knowledge of things transcended time, explaining the unfolding of karmic justice to a seeker like Baibasuta Manu?

KUNTI AND GANDHARI

The sisters-in-law were no great friends of each other. Gandhari was issueless when Yudhisthira was born. She felt insecure and worried. Being the first born in the Kaurava family, Kunti’s son would inherit the throne. In any case, as an issueless woman, her social and ritual status was much inferior to Kunti’s, who had attained motherhood. She became restless. To cut a really long story short, by the grace of Durvasa and other eminent sages she became the mother of a hundred children.

After her husband Pandu’s death, Kunti came to live in the palace with her three children, and Madri’s two, and the five later came to be known as Pandavas. Gandhari’s husband, Dhritarashtra, was the king; so she enjoyed the privileges of the queen. In contrast, Kunti was just a member of the palace, the mother of fatherless children, and a widow. She was a non-entity. But she seemed to have been reconciled to her situation. As for Gandhari, it hardly mattered to her that her husband had become king because of Pandu’s benevolence and affection for his blind brother. Power and privileges had wiped out that fact from her memory.

Gandhari and Kunti used to go to the river Yamuna for bath every morning, Gandhari in the royal style, with her entourage, and Kunti all alone. After bath, they used to go to a Shiva temple to worship; they went separately, not by design though, and did not meet in the temple.

One morning they did, and Gandhari was furious. How dared Kunti worship the Linga in her temple! She shouted at her, but Kunti was not the kind of woman to take it from her sister-in-law, of all people. She shouted back. Gandhari told her that as a widow she was an unfortunate woman and had no right to perform any religious act. Soon tempers rose, they pushed each other, and started fighting in real earnest.

That was when Shiva manifested himself. He told the quarrelling women that they, gods, belonged to no one, and would be with anyone who pleased them with offerings. He told them that he would be with whoever would be the first to worship him the following morning with a hundred golden champak flowers.

The Kaurava women left and Kunti locked herself in a room. She was very unhappy. She knew that each of her sons would be able to give her one such flower, but that added up to just five. She also knew that Gandhari could similarly get one flower each from her children, and it added up to hundred! She knew thus that she was going to be the loser.

After a while Arjun came looking or her. He was hungry. Kunti came out, gave him food, and told him what was troubling her. Arjun told her not to worry; the following morning he was going to get for her a hundred golden champak flowers each with a hundred petals.

Kunti woke him up in the morning and reminded him of the flowers. He shot an arrow at Kuvera’s treasury and got all the gold he needed. With his arrows he created many, many beautiful champak flowers each having a hundred petals for his mother to worship Shiva with.

Gandhari had told her sons about her quarrel with Kunti and about what Bhagawan Shiva had told them both. She asked her sons to give her a golden champak each. She was already feeling like the winner thinking that if at all, Kunti would be able to get just five flowers of gold. In the morning as she went in style to the temple with a hundred gold champaks and her hundred sons, she saw that there were golden flowers strewn all over the place. Defeated and sad, she returned.

How could their children have been cordial to each other when they knew their mothers were sometimes even explicitly hostile to each other? Of course neither bore ill will for the other’s children, and neither encouraged her children to be unfriendly to their cousins. Gandhari was disturbed by Duryodhana’s hatred towards the Pandavas, and did not approve of his grossly unjust treatment of them. She was also apprehensive about her sons because she knew that the Pandavas were stronger. And soon she came to realize that she was incapable of influencing Duryodhana with regard to his dealings with the Pandavas.

The temple events can be seen as a turning point for Kunti and Gandhari as far as their power relations are concerned. They derived their power from their male associations, as women by and large almost always have had: Gandhari from her husband and children, and Kunti, from her children. In the golden champak incident Gandhari came to realize the superiority of Kunti’s children to her own in terms of intelligence, enterprise and might, and she began to understand that the balance of power had clearly titled in Kunti’s favour.

Draupadi’s humiliation proved to the turning point from a different perspective. From then on Kunti became increasingly bitter and unforgiving. She was the one who had taken an absolutely uncompromising stand in favour of the war. Later Yudhisthira said this to her in so many words. On the penultimate day of the war, when her sons and Krishna returned to their camps without having killed Duryodhana, she greeted Bhima and Krishna with the harshest of words for their failure to kill Duryodhana. In fact so foul was her language and so abusive her tone as she addressed Krishna that Bhima got wild with her and had to be pacified by Krishna. But in all this, Gandhari was not in her mind.

The loss of her ninety-nine sons in the war had hardened Gandhari and she was full of hatred towards the Pandavas. Kuniti was not in her mind when she planned her revenge and resorted to deceit in order to destroy Yudhisthira. But Krishna countered her deceit with equally vicious deceit, and made her destroy her only surviving son, Durdasa, who had changed sides and had fought on behalf of the Pandavas.

Kunti now became the queen mother and Gandhari was a dependent on the Pandavas. The tables had turned, and the balance of power had completely tilted against Gandhari. She was too powerless to feel even a sense of jealousy towards Kunti. Bhima never lost an opportunity to hurt and humiliate Gandhari’s husband, Dhritarashtra. Dhritarashtra suffered as much as did Gandhari. But Kunti was not party to their humiliation. Power and status seemed to be of no interest to her. And power is no power when there is lack of will to exercise it or enjoy it. Gone was Kunti’s hostility to her sister-in-law. She was subdued and dejected. The joy her son’s enthronement must have given her was more than offset by her sense of loss. She suffered for her son Karna who had perished in the battlefield. Memories of this son – her eldest - to whom she had not been a mother in more ways than one, a matter that need not detain us here, and whom she had not brought up oppressed her. It was as though she was trying to make up for her failure, and give her dead son his due that she had deprived him of when he was alive. She wept for him every single day, and she also mourned for her grandchildren, Abhimanyu and Ghatotkacha, and for her relatives. Karna killed Ghatotkacha, and had participated in the killing of Abhimanyu, but she didn’t utter a word of condemnation against him. But she condemned Arjuna, who had killed Karna. She might not have empathized with her sister-in-law: she was too full of her own loss to think of anyone else’s.

She joined Gandhari, blind by choice, and her brother-in-law Dhritarashtra, blind from birth, when they retired to the forest for their vanaprastha. She would look after them in the forest. Gandhari was surprised. Why was she going with them? She had stayed with her sons and suffered with them during their difficult days. Why was she now leaving them in their days of prosperity? Kunti told her how she felt no joy in the palace and how miserable she indeed was.

In the end a bond had grown between the two women.

SAKUNI’S END

Sakuni survived in the Mahabharata war till the penultimate day. He had seen Bhishma incapacitated, Drona decapitated, Karna slain, Dussasana mutilated and every single brother of Duryodhana who fought on his side killed. He knew that the Kaurava commander- in- chief Salya, under whom he was fighting, would fall any moment, and after that, it would not take the Pandavas long to finish off Duryodhana. He of course would not live to see that day, but that hardly concerned him – he knew that he had achieved his goal. And he was absolutely clear about what to do next, and not merely because of what his father had told him.

Sahadeva faced his uncle Sakuni on the battlefield. In Krishna’s presence they had together planned the destruction of the Kauravas. Sahadeva knew Sakuni’s motive in driving Duryodhana to war against the Pandavas; he knew that Sakuni was seeking revenge. As they faced each other in the battlefield, Sahadeva asked Sakuni why he was still fighting. He had achieved his objectives, he told him; therefore he should return to his kingdom and rule instead of participating in a meaningless war, he said.

Sakuni’s reply is remarkable for the deep sadness of its tone. There is a distinct note of repentance of a kind, something to which we will return. Hadn’t he shared his problem with him, and hadn’t he told him about his determination to take revenge, he would tell Sahadeva as cordially as an elder would to a younger member of the family. As though to justify himself, he recounted again how Duryodhana had ruthlessly destroyed his innocent father and his relatives and friends. Then he went on to recount in a faint tone of remorse how he had systematically worked out his revenge; he was the one behind every thing that the Kauravas had done to harm the Pandavas – from giving poisonous sweets to Bhima to getting Abhimanyu mercilessly killed. Innumerable soldiers had perished in the Kurukshetra battlefield; among them were brahmins, kshyatriyas, vaishyas and sudras, and also daityas, daanavas, raakshyasas (roughly “demons”). After all this, he simply couldn’t go on living. He was carrying an enormous load of sin, and had to make amends in a way commensurate with the gravity and the measure of the sin he had committed. The only thing left for him was to make the ultimate sacrifice in the battlefield. And then dying in the battlefield of Kurukshetra was no ordinary dying!

What better way was there for a warrior to die than in the battlefield looking at Krishna – Narayana himself! - on Arjuna’s chariot, Sakuni told Sahadeva. Even he who had committed grievous sins would ascend to vaikuntha, the very abode of Narayana. He had rejected life for such a death, he told Sahadeva.

The next time Sakuni faced Sahadeva, he attacked him, and shot thousands of arrows at him. Sahadeva told him again to withdraw from the war. He had given the wealth and prosperity of Duryodhana who was his own to the Pandavas, who were the other - he was the one who had harmed his own and done good to the other. Why should a wise person like him participate in a fruitless war and seek to destroy himself, he asked him. This time Sakuni did not say anything of the kind he had in their previous meeting. He merely challenged Sahadeva and continued to shoot arrows at him. The poet Sarala does not spend many couplets on this engagement - after a brief fight Sahadeva cut off Sakuni’s head, and closed his story.

In Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata Sakuni’s awareness of his guilt attracts attention both for its moral essence and for the sharp contrast it presents with respect to almost all other characters, more specifically the Pandavas. Like the vanquished, the victors were no saints; in fact, as far as the war was concerned, it was the Kauravas who violated the war ethics on far fewer occasions than did the Pandavas. The victory of the Pandavas was founded on various acts of adharma on the battlefield. For every unethical act of theirs they had found justification in earlier events such as Draupadi’s dishonour in the Kaurava court, or the killing of Abhimanyu. Bhima never had any feeling of guilt for his beastly conduct as he killed Dussasana, and for his felling Duryodhana and thereby mortally wounding him in an impermissible manner. Arjuna too had never felt guilty in the least for his killing of Karna when he was clearly in a position of great disadvantage. That he did it at Krishna’s behest does not absolve him of the crime in any way, since he after all was not unaware of the rules of the war, and did not lack a cultivated mind. He had a sound education not merely in the science of warfare, but also in the ethics of it. Yudhisthira did not repent the part he played in the killing of his preceptor. He did not regret the destruction of Durdasa who had abandoned his Kaurava brothers and had fought on his side. The less said about the Pandava women in this connection, the better. Draupadi and Kunti had relentlessly incited the Pandava brothers and Krishna to destroy the Kauravas, and they never had the slightest sense of remorse for their role in the massive destruction that the war caused. When Kunti somewhat accusingly asked Krishna who had killed Draupadi’s children, Krishna silenced her saying tumhe go kaurabanta kete abasta na kala (“what all did you not do to the Kauravas”). Responding to Gandhari’s question as to why she was joining them as they were retiring to the forest, leaving her sons at the time of their prosperity, Kunti said that she was really a very unhappy woman having lost her son Karna, grandchildren Ghatotkacha and Abhimanyu, and her relatives in the war. Flabbergasted, when Yudhisthira asked her why she had in the first place pushed them to war, she put an end to this talk saying that one must not think of things past because it would affect one’s health (gata kathaa socanaa kale sarira hoye khinna -- “pondering over the past causes ill health”) – she uttered not a word of remorse.

Sakuni’s agony was both for what he had done, and for the circumstances that made him do what he did, and on which he had absolutely no control. He saw himself as the victim of circumstances, but did not justify his actions on that account. He had absolutely no hesitation about owning up his responsibility for what he had done. Avenging the killing of his innocent father and relatives was his duty in accordance with the social code of those days, but again he did not absolve himself of what he had done on that account. He no doubt resorted to various devious means, including hypocrisy, conspiring with the enemy, and blatant treachery, but before one judges him harshly for this, one might consider that his were the means of the weak - he was in no position to challenge the mighty Kauravas and achieve his objective. In some ways he was the original Kautilya.

In Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata Sakuni alone had a thought for the ordinary soldiers who perished in the war. Surely like other rulers Sakuni also believed that the soldier’s duty was to fight for his king, and that a soldier could never be a loser, because if he lost his life while fighting in the battlefield, he went to heaven. But he was too much of a humanist to remain content with this belief, and too much of a realist to know the value of remaining alive.

Sarala created the character of Sakuni with abundant sympathy. Some say that he was not the first to provide Sakuni with a legitimate motive (may not be the one that Sarala did) for his contemptible action. But very probably Sarala was the first to give him a second choice (and a second chance) where he amply redeemed himself. The first choice was in the manner he chose to take revenge. He could choose to fight Duryodhana and perish, or gain his confidence and push him to his destruction. He chose the second alternative. The second came when he knew that he had succeeded in his mission. He could go home and rule, or renounce all that and sacrifice his life as an act of atonement. In the battlefield Sahadeva only externalized what he was fully aware of; in saying what he did, Sahadeva was functioning only as his other self. He chose the latter option, and certainly not just because his father had told him so. In the eyes of Sarala, he was a sufficiently moral person to make that choice.

AS DURYODHANA FELL

Duryodhana fell when Bhima hit his thigh hard, and then he tore his wounded enemy him up to his navel. As blood gushed out, Bhima made a tikaa (“ritual mark”) with it on his forehead. Then with his left foot he crushed his victim’s regal crown studded with precious gems. Still wild with anger and hatred, as he proceeded to mutilate his body the way he had done earlier to Dussasana’s, Yudhisthira held him in tight embrace and stopped him. Bhima told him that he should not stand on his way; for all he had done to them, Duryodhana deserved no mercy or consideration. The eldest Pandava told him that all was over now with his defeat, and that he should therefore refrain from hurting him any further or humiliating him any more.

Tears flowing from his eyes, Yudhisthira went to his cousin. He held him on his arms, and regretted that blinded by his arrogance, Duryodhana had wasted away his prosperity and brought so much destruction to his own people. He told him that he had actually given him everything because he did not want to see this day: baabu kaalaka samprandhi dilain munhi tote / tohara abasthaa re na dekhibaara nimante (“My dear, I gave you so much prosperity / So that I do not see you suffer”) (Gadaa Parva: 94: 109). With his brothers, he had left the kingdom, and undergone so much suffering in exile, but still Duryodhana had shown no consideration or pity for them. Like an affectionate elder who has punished his errant younger brother for his misdeeds and is himself distressed at the pain the punishment has brought him, he asked him how he could be so unwise as to fight with people whose prowess he had himself seen many times. He surely knew that Arjuna had defeated Bhagawan Shiva himself and had received extremely destructive divine weapons from him. He also surely knew that Arjuna had defeated Hanuman himself. Yudhisthira went on telling him of the great successes of Arjuna and of the mighty Bhima. He then told him that with a person like Sahadeva on his side as his minister, who had the knowledge of the past and of the secrets of everyone’s death, Duryodhana was in a very vulnerable position. And finally with Narayana on the Pandavas’ side, how could he, Duryodhana, ever think that he was going to win the war, he asked him. He then reminded him of the efforts he had made to avoid the war, but of how Duryodhana had thwarted them all - how at Sakuni’s behest he had mocked at the family priest Dhoumya, and how out of sheer stupidity and wickedness he had not only insulted Krishna but also tried to kill him. He reminded him how he had pleaded with him for just one village, and how he had denied him even that and had insisted on war.

Then he said something which was surely unexpected – here one has yet another example of the difference between Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata and Vyasa’s Mahabharata. He said that he would now give him the kingdom of Hastinapur and retire to the forest with his brothers. Bhima mocked at the idea – the idea of a blind father and his lame son ruling over the kingdom. Yudhisthira found nothing odd in the arrangement; after all, wasn’t this that his father Pandu had done? Hadn’t he given his kingdom to his blind brother Dhritarashtra? How was the shameless Duryodhana still alive after listening to these words, Bhima said to Krishna in the former’s hearing? Bhima was right, said Duryodhana. Soon they all left the battlefield as Krishna reminded them about their mother Kunti’s waiting for the news of Duryodhana’s conclusive defeat and death. She might kill herself if the news did not reach him by the end of the day, he told them.

Yudhisthira’s agonized words ring absolutely sincere. He was an authentic person. He valued his relationship with his cousin Duryodhana despite the ill will he bore against him, and despite the hurt he had caused him many times. He was not unaware of the rich resources of power that he controlled, but he was totally disinclined to use the same against his cousin either for revenge or for claiming his due. Probably this is what he meant when he said that he had given him so much prosperity because he did not want to see him perish. He had forced his unwilling brothers Bhima and Arjuna to get Duryodhana released from the captivity of his enemies on an occasion or two. He was reluctant to go to war with Duryodhana, but was almost tricked into it by Krishna. In order to avoid war, what he had asked for was just one village in case Duryodhana was unwilling to give him five, but he didn’t ask for some specific village. Advised by Sahadeva, Krishna asked for five particular villages, which simply could not be given, making the war inevitable. He succeeded in creating the impression that it was Duryodhana who was responsible for the war. Yudhisthira had no knowledge that he had been betrayed by his mother, his wife, his brothers except Arjuna, and his emissary Krishna on whom he had absolute trust.

But what could one make of Yudhishthira’s statement about handing over the kingdom to Duryodhana? It couldn’t be anything more than a statement of his sincere intention, for at that time he was not in a position to implement it. Leave alone that the vanquished would not have accepted the offer, no one would have allowed him to do so – neither his brothers nor Krishna nor his mother. He surely knew that. That might have been why he did not even raise the issue again. Later of course he declared his unwillingness to assume the kingship of Hastinapur and his intention to retire to the forest alone – “alone” because he must have figured out that at that time that his brothers were not with him on that matter. He was dissuaded from such a step by his brothers and his well wishers including the great sage and family elder Vyasa.

However, by making that statement Yudhisthira, at one stroke, rejected the approach that when people take positions that are or eventually become irreconcilable, then war provides the only possible resolution. Duryodhana was unwilling to share his kingdom with the Pandavas because with the exception of Sahadeva, the Pandavas, in his view, born of gods such as Dharma, Pavana, Indra, etc., were not the legitimate members of the Kuru family. As such they had no right to the throne. Incidentally, in Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata, the brothers were called Pandavas not because they were sons of Pandu, but because they had killed a demon called Pandabasura. Sahadeva alone was Pandu’s son. He had died soon after his birth, and was restored to life by the gods Ashwini Kumaras. The Kauravas recognized Sahadeva’s rights, and were not unwilling to give him his share of the kingdom. However the Kaurava elders such as Bhishma, and Bidura, etc. did not share Duryodhana’s position, and neither did even his parents, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari. The Pandavas were already rulers of Indraprastha, which was part of Hastinapur earlier, when they lost their kingdom to Duryodhana in the game of dice. For Duryodhana it was righting a wrong - regaining something that had wrongly gone to the Pandavas – whereas for the Pandavas it was losing their kingdom through deceit, and they naturally wanted it back. However, by wishing to return the kingdom to the Kauravas (to Duryodhana, but effectively to Dhritarashtra), Yudhisthira had most emphatically declared the futility of war. If nothing else, Yudhisthira’s words served just this one purpose.

DURYODHANA'S BURDEN OF DESTINY

Sarala's Duryodhana was doomed virtually from birth. He and his ninety-nine brothers were born outside of their mother's womb through the blessings of the great sage Vyasa. Deeply worried over Bidura's prediction that his eldest child Duryodhana would be the cause of the destruction of the Kaurava clan, and should therefore be eliminated, a distressed Dhritarashtra invoked Vyasa. As he appeared, the father put the infant Duryodhana him on his lap, praying to the illustrious sage to bless him. Vyasa obliged. He blessed him that he be invincible in battle and lord over the kingdom. He moved his fingers on the infant's body, thereby infusing enormous power into it through his blessing. However, the only parts of the body, which accidentally escaped the sage's blissful touch, were his thighs and these thus remained vulnerable.

In Vyasa's lap as the infant cried and shook his limbs, his right foot hit the sage's chest, and the impact was so hard that he fell down unconscious. When he regained consciousness, he cursed the infant that that same foot be crushed in the battle. It was a terrible curse; as a consequence Duryodhana had to die a slow and painful death, which again was only part his suffering. Apart from the great Bhisma, perhaps no major warrior who fought in the Mahabharata war had to wait for death. But Bhisma's case was different; he chose the time of his death. Given the sage's curse, Bhima was the instrument of destiny when he roared in the Kaurava court before they departed to the forests for their twelve-year vanavaasa and one-year agnyaata vaasa that he would smash Duryodhana's thighs. When he did it in the decisive battle with Duryodhana, Vyasa's curse materialized; he was merely the means.

And incidentally, when Bhima dealt the fatal blow to Duryodhana, he did it not with his mace, but with Krishna's (Vishnu's), kaumodaki, in Sarala's language. He was completely unaware of this fact, as was everyone else, apart from Krishna of course, at whose wish the mace had come to Bhima's hands. No one was privileged to know of it even later. However, this fact is not directly related to Duryodhana's destiny. Its significance lies elsewhere, and we do not wish to dwell on it here.

It was Vyasa's curse that linked Duryodhana with Bhima; nothing in their past existences connected them - very unlike Dussasana and Draupadi, who were linked from an earlier existence. That link ended with the propitiation of the latter in the form of Dussasana's blood on her lips.

Duryodhana of course was born because of a curse, and Vyasa knew it. Duryodhana was no other than Pannanga Narayana himself, who was cursed by Sudraka Brahma to be born in the world of the mortals. The latter had performed most rigorous tapas to please the former, who not only did not respond to his tapas, but also destroyed it with the help of feminine attraction. When Sudraka Brahma realized what had happened, he cursed him. Pannanga Narayana appeared before the great god and pacified him. Sudraka Brahma assured him that he would enjoy a great life in the mortal world, that his divine spouse would join him as his wife, and that his status would be so high that he would not bow down to anyone, human or god. Anyone who dared to receive his bowing would be reduced to ashes. Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata constructs a belief system where an inferior could not receive reverence from a superior in the form of bowing or prostrating at the feet, etc. without being burnt to ashes.

This last assurance was obviously intended to be a boon, but it turned out to be nothing less than a curse. Duryodhana did not bow to anyone, but it would be unsatisfactory to say that it was entirely due to his arrogance, since it could not be due to it that he did not bow to his parents. However, it is not clear whether he had the memory of the boon, that is, whether his not bowing was actually an act of concern and considerateness, or whether that lost memory had taken the form of an almost instinctive action. However if the constraint on him with respect to showing respect was widely known, his own teacher and benefactor Balaram did certainly not know of it. As he was engaged in that decisive fight with Bhima, an angry Balaram appeared, with the intention of intervening in his favour, but withdrew, when on his arrival on the battlefield the Krishna and Pandavas repeatedly prostrated before him, but Duryodhana did not bow down to him. He blessed the Pandavas, chided Duryodhana and left. Human or god, it is impossible indeed to live in the world and not pay for transgressing the moral code of the world. The only one who was unaffected by all this was Krishna.

We need to note that whereas Sudraka Brahma's curse caused the birth of Duryodhana in the mortal world, it was certainly not the cause of his agonizing death in the Mahabharata war. Now a reasonable question to ask is whether Vyasa himself was destiny's instrument. He was not; there is no evidence in Sarala's text to support this.

Apart from Vyasa's curse, there is yet another thread that connected Vyasa and Bhima in Saaralaa Mahabhaarata. The sage went to Pandu and advised him and his wife Kunti that the latter should get a child from god Pavana. The god's son would be immensely powerful, and would be able to deal with Gandhari's hundred sons who would turn out to be both powerful and wicked, and would deny Pandu's sons the kingdom. And this led to the birth of Bhima. One could connect this action of the sage to his curse by suggesting that he was arrogant and mean enough to work towards bringing into the world someone enormously powerful through whom his curse would materialize. Whereas we do not deny that there may be some merit to this view, we should also like to observe that Sarala's work does not make this connection explicitly, because of which such an interpretation might be far-fetched.

In any case, destiny worked very differently for Bhima. Soon after his birth, a finger of his left foot hit a peak of the Mountain Satasringa, and it crumbled to pieces. An angry and wounded Satasringa cursed Bhima that he would lose the first time in a battle. Kunti was very upset, and told the mountain that he was grossly unfair in cursing her innocent infant, and cursed him that he would suffer the agony of people cutting away parts of it. The chastised mountain prayed for her forgiveness, and assured her that after his first defeat, Bhima should invoke him, upon which he would acquire such immense energy that he would be invincible in battle.

Sarala's Kunti was a remarkably self confident person. She immediately protested against a very unjust curse, and as a victim of the abuse of power, even went to the extent of cursing the mountain in response, which readily brought about corrective action. In contrast, Dhritarashtra did not utter a word. In so much in awe he was of the celebrated sage, who was also the revered family elder, that it did not seem to have even occurred to him that his eldest child had been unjustly treated. He might also have been too stunned to react to what had happened. Bidura had already suggested that the infant be put to death for the survival of the clan, and a deeply troubled father was seeking Vyasa's blessings in order to negate the impact of the malignant forces that possessed his son. And here was the redeemer who uttered such a horrible curse. Then all said, Dhritarashtra of Sarala was not the man who was capable of protesting, but more about him elsewhere.

Consider Vyasa's conduct. Consider the way he was situated with respect to the children of Gandhari. He was a great sage, learned in the shastras, and he was the knower of the past, the present and the future. He was reverentially called, in Sarala's words, duti krushna ("Second Krishna"). That apart, he was the family's venerable eldest, and as such the protector of the family, which must have primarily been why Dhritarashtra sought his blessings for Duryodhana. Then it was because of his intervention that Gandhari's children were born; thus there was a special bond between them and him, on account of which it would not be unreasonable for Dhritarashtra if he expected that the great sage would protect them.

Surely it did not occur to Vyasa that if the impact of an infant's foot was so powerful, it was not natural, and he did not pause to think that it was because of his caress that his body had acquired such enormous power, so angry he was. It also did not occur to him that the infant did not act out of choice and as such was not responsible for what had happened. His anger might have been due both to the pain he had suffered, and the humiliation he might have felt on having fallen unconscious by being hit. Here was a small, arrogant man who misused his power in a most deplorable manner. Apart from this, Vyasa's conduct was well above reproach in Sarala's text. But this one grievously unjust act far outweighs a lifetime's good deeds done; it led to a totally meaningless engagement between Duryodhana and Bhima.

The man never repented even once for his despicable act, an act for which there are hardly any parallel in Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata. He never suffered disgrace in the unjust world; he did not suffer disgrace in his own eyes. Moral order is never more strongly violated than when men of learning and spiritual attainments and stature abuse their power against totally helpless victims. And often there is no redress. Krishna did not put duti krushna in place!

The Story of Durdasa

Durdasa of Sarala’s Mahabharata, the first retelling of the classical story in Oriya in the fifteenth century, strongly reminds one of Yuyutsu of Vyasa’s Mahabharata. Since Gandhari’s children were born at the compassionate intervention of Durvasa, all her children were given names beginning with the syllable du, as an expression of gratitude to the illustrious sage. However, whereas Yuyutsu prospered under the protection of the Pandavas, Durdasa perished. In Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata, by which name the text is popularly known, no one’s story is more poignant than Durdasa’s. Durdasa was the one who at Yudhisthira’s call on the Kurukshetra battlefield left Duryodhana’s army and joined the Pandavas. Yudhisthira blessed him for a long life; “you will live as long as I am alive”, he told him. It was not just a wish; it was an assurance too.

Yudhisthira had gone to the Kaurava’s side to seek the elders’ blessings for victory in the war. Ignoring counsel of his brothers, he had gone there alone and weaponless. Stung by Durdasa’s decision and Krishna’s celebration of the same, Duryodhana ordered his army to attack both Durdasa and Yudhisthira, who was still in the enemy’s part of the battlefield. And with his army going into the attack, the Mahabharata war started.

To a bewildered and frightened Yudhisthira, Durdasa said that he had no cause for worry as long as he was alive. And the brave son of Gandhari fought valiantly against the Kaurava warriors until Bhima arrived on the scene. And so overwhelmed was Bhima by Durdasa’s act of protecting Yudhisthira that he too told him that as long as he remained alive, let alone humans, gods and demons would not dare to even think of causing him any harm.

This was how Durdasa’s story began. He surfaced later when Yudhisthira asked him to stay on in the battlefield and protect the vanquished and mortally wounded Duryodhana from the attack of the wild animals during the night. And that was a catastrophic night. As Duryodhana appointed Ashwasthama as his commander-in-chief, Durdasa was a mere uninvolved witness, and at the day break as the former was seen coming with a carrier containing the severed heads, Durdasa in a disinterested tone informed Duryodhana about Aswasthama’s coming with the severed heads of the Pandavas. Soon he would again inform him in the same tone that those were actually the heads of Draupadi’s sons, and would be a witness to his great agony over this incident. Soon after, Durdasa, anguished over the calamity that had befallen the Pandavas, would tell Krishna about all that had happened, and about how Duryodhana had harshly rebuked Aswasthama for what he had done, and had forsaken him, and how he had died with the heads of Draupadi’s sons in his lap, bitterly grieving over their death.

Later Durdasa went with the victorious Pandavas and Krishna to meet Dhritarashtra and Gandhari. The grief-stricken couple was persuaded by Bidura to meet them. As the Pandavas paid their obeisance to them, Gandhari could not control herself and charged them of killing innumerable people for the sake of kingdom. Then she said that she had not seen her husband and her children, and now she wanted to see the Pandavas which would be some consolation for her. She wanted them to take the cover off her eyes. A suspicious Krishna quietly asked Sahadeva what her intentions were, and Sahadeva said that she wanted to destroy the Pandavas with her fiery glance.

“There must be no residue of enemies”, said Krishna to Sahadeva, and he went to Durdasa and asked him to take off the cover from his mother’s eyes. As he did so, Gandhari’s fiery look reduced him to ashes instantly. First Bidura and then Krishna reprimanded her for destroying her only surviving son who Yudhisthira had protected, and told her that if Yudhisthira perished, dharma would perish. He asked her to cover her eyes again. A chastened Gandhari obeyed without a word.

So that was the end of Durdasa. He just went out of Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata and was not heard of any more. Those who had assured him long life until they themselves were alive were still alive. Granted that neither Yudhisthira nor Bhima had any knowledge of what was to come, but neither even uttered a word of protest after the meanest and the crudest of betrayals took place, and trust was most cynically murdered. As Durdasa was burning, the Pandavas moved away under Krishna’s protection from the sight of Gandhari. The conduct of Bhima does not merit even a mention, let alone a censor. He was one who could drink his cousin’s blood without a second thought because he had taken such an oath, but had surely no hesitation in shying away from the assurance he had given a benefactor of the Pandavas. He epitomized just sheer energy and power; where is the place of sensitivity, and moral sense and discrimination in all that?

But what could one say of Yudhisthira? Durdasa had taken shelter under him, and he had granted him his protection. It was his sacred duty to ensure that he came to no harm. When the event took place, he probably was too surprised and too shocked to react, and things had happened too fast. He surely had not thought of the destructive power of Gandhari’s glance. But nothing really absolves him of his silence. His silence was his acquiescence in the act, and thus he had necessarily become part of it - the very embodiment of dharma had abandoned dharma.

No tears need be shed for Gandhari since she got only what she deserved. Eighteen days of such comprehensive destruction had not hardened her against killing, and had also not made her realize that anger and hatred yielded no solution and that an act of revenge of the most destructive nature did not put the lid on anything. She paid a very heavy price indeed to learn that one could not eliminate the other without eliminating a vital part of oneself.

On the ground that deception, and similar others, could be accepted as the weapon of the weak and the helpless against the mighty, one might feel hesitant to judge her too harshly for the low cunning she was employing to destroy the Pandavas. But she really deserves no sympathy because she was by no means weak, with the kind of weapon she knew she had, namely her fiery glance, from which there was no protection.

Poor Durdasa. Despite protecting Yudhisthira when he was most vulnerable and most unprotected, and despite his not having said or done anything that would invite even a shade of suspicion that he was hostile to the interests of the Pandavas, he ultimately remained the outsider, the other in their midst. It was his birth as a Kaurava that determined his identity, not his action. Thus he remained the enemy, the shatru, as Krishna put it with such ruthless clarity. His instant destruction was the only blessing he had – he had no time to look back and reflect on things, on the utter unfairness of it all.

Finally turning to Krishna, he orchestrated, and was the high priest at, what one can call the last sacrifice at the altar of the Mahabharata war. The mention of war after the Kurukshetra battlefields had become quiet need not surprise one; didn’t Krishna characterize Durdasa as the last residue of the enemy? Krishna’s action leaves one thoroughly bewildered and morally defeated. Why did Durdasa have to die? It would be morally revolting to swallow Krishna’s description of him. If, as the knower of the past, the present and the future, Krishna knew something about him that damned him as the enemy of the Pandavas, he did not share it with others. If there was a cosmic design behind his destruction, Krishna did not explicate it to make the unfortunate event intelligible to the ordinary mortals.

Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata does not condemn Krishna; Sarala was a devotee. As for us, we do not know with what yardsticks to judge an avatar, who is constrained by the form he takes, and at the same time exceeds it in dimensions beyond the fullest realizations of the possibilities of that form. Thus Krishna is and yet is not subject to the human moral system But such a juxtaposition of opposites lacks intelligibility and coherence. But what hopefully does not is the following: as an avatar who, unlike say, Nrusingha, lived among humans, shared his life with them, and participated in their affairs, he was obligated to give the humans a meaningful explanation of his action that strongly offended moral sense. We charge him of failure to do this.

On Two Acts of Revenge

There are two major acts or revenge in Sarala’s Mahabharata (also called Saaralaa Mahaabhaarata here, following popular usage, in which the creator’s name becomes part of that of his creation): Duryodhana’s and Sakuni’s. Duryodhana avenged a perceived wrong done to his father by destroying his maternal grandfather, all his sons, his close relatives and friends, except Sakuni. We do not wish to go here into what low cunning he resorted to in order to lure his victims to their own destruction, what inhuman cruelty he had subjected them to, and how just one man survived his destructive design. However we would like to clarify that making that exception for Sakuni was not intentional on Duryodhana’s part. It was an accidental event that led the crown prince to think that the sole survivor would prove to be very useful in his fight with the Pandavas; so he made him a minister, ignoring his mother’s warning that her brother Sakuni was a dangerous person, and would surely take revenge.

This was precisely what Sakuni did. He was in no position to avenge the killing of his father and his brothers on his own strength. The Kauravas were just far too powerful. What Sakuni did for revenge was what the weak can do to annihilate the mighty. He abandoned the straight path, and followed the devious route. He soon became the crown prince’s confidant, and his principal adviser. It was he who pushed Duryodhana to the disastrous war, when all his elders had advised the crown prince against it. Thus these two acts of revenge converged on the battlefields of Kurukshetra where Duryodhana and his brothers were wiped out.

In those violent days revenge was elevated, for the elite at least, to the status of a duty, even a sacred duty, when it came to one’s family. The two acts of revenge under reference here differed in certain ways, and most of them could be located in the two agents - what they thought was adequate justification for their action, and what they thought of the action itself. Duryodhana’s revenge was a sickly arrogant response to what he felt was an affront to his self-esteem. His feeling that his father had been wronged by his maternal grandfather was nothing but an exercise in either self-deception or rationalization. Before his mother Gandhari married his father Dhritarashtra, she had been married to a saahadaa tree which died the moment the marriage took place. On account of some unfortunate constellation of stars at the time of her birth, her husband was doomed to die. So following the great sage Vyasa’s advice, her father first married her to the tree in order to neutralize the malignant effect, and then married her to Dhritarashtra. From Duryodhana’s point of view his maternal grandfather had done a grievous wrong to his father by giving him a widow in marriage. This he thought called for revenge. It is another matter that others, including his mother, did not think that Dhritarashtra had been wronged. But revenge is not merely intensely personal, it is intensely blind too.

In Sakuni’s case, he, the eldest son of the king of Gandhar, was the chosen avenger by the members of his family who were dying a slow death. They made sacrifice in order for him to live. And before his father died, he told him what course of action to follow in order to avenge their deaths. He also told him that after taking revenge, he must not live - one could not destroy one’s nephews and continue living thereafter. Thus Sakuni had to perform a double duty, which he did.

Karna had just fallen, as had Bhishma, Drona, and other great Kaurava warriors, and all the Kaurava princes with the exception of Duryodhana. As Sakuni and Sahadev faced each other on the battlefield, the latter told the former that since his purpose had been served, he had no reason to take part in the war and should go back to his kingdom instead and rule there. Sakuni told him that he had sinned grievously by being the cause of the death of his nephews, other relations, dynasties, and also of innumerable soldiers. He had thus forfeited his right to live and had to atone for it by sacrificing his life in the battlefield. He challenged Sahadev on the last day of the war, and was killed by him.

In those days when successful revenge was a matter of honour and glory and even of otherworldly merit, Sakuni’s put an emphatic question mark on this attitude to revenge. He knew, as did his father, that one could not destroy others without committing oneself to destroy oneself in the process. Thus his act of revenge was simultaneously his act of suicide. Sakuni’s revenge dharma detached him from his act of revenge because one cannot choose to commit suicide without detachment from self. He acted when he systematically executed his revenge on Duryodhana, and was true to self when he fought Sahadev on the eighteenth day of the war with full knowledge of the result of that engagement.

In contrast to his maternal uncle, Duryodhana was a man of his time. He had internalized its values, and did not critique them. As such, revenge for him was a demand of justice; that was why it was a noble act. In his consuming arrogance and his intense hatred of the Pandavas, he never realized that he could himself be a victim of that hatred – after all, it resided in him, and pervaded his whole being. It is easy to condemn him, as his elders often did, but they didn’t help him grow up. He remains an object of pity.

Duryodhana died with the same illusion with which he had lived ever since he made Sakuni his minister; his faith in Sakuni was intact. Almost every elder and every well-wisher in his family had warned him that Sakuni was untrustworthy and would avenge his family’s killing, and drive him to his destruction, but he had complete trust in him. Sakuni’s death plunged him into abject despair – perhaps the ultimate disaster that one could suffer. One feels sorry for him, he was a man betrayed by the one his faith on whom had never wavered. If there was one good that Sakuni had done him, intentionally or unintentionally, we can never be certain, it was this: even at the very end he didn’t tell him the truth about himself.

At the same time this was the ultimate deception of uncle Sakuni. He withheld the truth from the victim. Perhaps the victim had a right to know. He could have breathed his last with knowledge which would have been redeeming. Perhaps justice demanded that the condemned knew why he had been punished.

But let us not be harsh on Sakuni. Here was a man who had condemned himself the day he had decided that he would take revenge. He had signed a bond with his relatives in their blood that he would avenge their miserable death. He lived a life acting, to redeem that pledge. He succeeded, but the success gave him no satisfaction, no sense of fulfillment. Instead it had filled him with a profound sense of sin. At this point of time, the only image of Duryodhana he had was that of his nephew. He wanted to pay the price with all earnestness, and walked on to his death. At that moment he was lonely, utterly lonely, emptied inside of every feeling and thought except the reassuring thought of his own death through which he knew would come his redemption. His language was already dead within him, what could he have told anybody anyway?