KUNTI'S VANAPRASTHA

 

Kunti and Gandhari never had an easy relationship. It was bound to be so. Kunti wanted her eldest son, Yudhisthira, inherit the throne of Hastinapura whereas her sister-in-law, Gandhari, wanted her eldest son, Duryodhana, to do so. But neither encouraged their children to be hostile to their cousins; in fact, on occasions, Gandhari harshly scolded Duryodhana for his hostility towards the Pandavas, as Kunti did Bhima, equally harshly. After the wax palace fire happened, in which the Pandavas and Kunti were believed to have perished, Duryodhana was enthroned as the king of Hastinapura. Kunti seemed to have more or less resigned to this situation. But after her daughter-in-law Draupadi’s humiliation in the Kaurava court and the Pandavas’s exile in the forest for twelve years and their one year and thirteen days’ humiliating stay, incognito, in the state of Matsya in the service of king Virata, Kunti bayed for revenge. She wanted the complete annihilation of the Kauravas. Before Krishna went to Duryodhana as Yudhisthira’s emissary of peace, he met her and she asked him to give her his solemn word that he would work for war, instead of peace, in the Kaurava court and ensure that war took place between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. When the Great War was going on, she often reproached her sons for not being able to kill the Kauravas, even after so many days of the fight. Once she went to the extent of abusing even Krishna on this account! Her language was so venomous and insulting that Bhima got infuriated and wanted to punish her but Krishna saved the situation for both. When the War was over, like the Pandavas, Draupadi and Subhadra, she too claimed that the victory was solely due to her.

After the Belalasena episode, she virtually disappeared from the narrative. Much that was terrible happened after that:  Gandhari tried to destroy Yudhisthira with her yogic energy and Dhritarashtra tried to kill Bhima with his physical energy. Both failed because of Krishna’s interventions. Draupadi’s sons were killed and Abhimanyu’s son was killed in his mother, Uttara’s womb. On account of Krishna’s intervention, the dead son was restored to life but Uttara died. The narrative does not say anything about Kunti’s reactions to these. 

Despite the uneasy relationship that she had with Gandhari, when Dhritarashtra and Gandhari left for their vanaprastha, Kunti surprised everyone by saying that she too would go on vanaprastha with them. Yudhisthira asked her why she was leaving them. She said that she would not be happy in the palace when Gandhari would live in hardship and sorrow in the forest. Yudhisthira asked her whether Gandhari was living in sorrow when she was living in misery in the forest. Kunti told her son that it would not be right to think in such terms about her, the miserable mother, who had given birth to a hundred sons and had lost them all. Yudhisthira told her that throughout her life she had undergone great suffering in order to bring the five of them up all alone and now by leaving for the forest, she was not giving them the opportunity to serve her and was thereby leaving them with a huge burden of debt towards her. Kunti took him aside and told him that she had to go to the forest; it was absolutely imperative on her part. Both blind, they would, in the forest, face all kinds of difficulties and each time they would, they would curse him. She told Yudhisthira that she would serve them well and thereby protect him from their curses.

When Gandhari came to know that Kunti was joining them, she asked her with concern and affection, why she was leaving her sons in the time of prosperity and opting for a life of deprivation. What she told her sister-in-law shocked Yudhisthira. She said that she had been living in great sorrow in the palace. She had sleepless nights thinking of her son Karna, who she had suffered humiliation on her account throughout his life. He was a celebrated warrior and a very virtuous person. She condemned Arjuna as a sinner – “papistha ”– for taking advantage of his unfortunate situation in the battlefield and killing him (Ashramika Parva: 2544). She told Gandhari that she had lost Ghatotkacha, Abhimanyu and many others who were her own and she had no peace.  None in the family knew about her suffering; she obviously hadn’t shared her grief with anyone – she had alienated herself from her own. Deeply upset, Yudhisthira told her how she had been responsible for the war: how she had desperately wanted war and how she had made Krishna promise her that the war took place. Kunti cut him short and told him that it was pointless to think of those things at that moment. She also told him that parents could not live with their children all the time.

What Kunti did can be viewed as an exemplary moral act. She voluntarily chose a life of privation and suffering over a life of comfort and that too at her old age.  And she chose to do so to serve her elder brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who did not ask for her help and did not expect her to help them. Kunti knew that she could be extremely useful to them. It is true that Dhritarashtra and Gandhari were not going to be alone in the forest and that Vidura and Sanjaya would be with them, who had served him well for years. One might surmise that she might have thought that despite that, she would be of service to them, in other ways than Vidura’s and Sanjaya’s. The text does not say anything explicitly in this regard but isn’t suggestiveness a basic feature of poetic expression?

There is no reason to suspect that she was not sincere about what she told Gandhari by way of explaining why she had opted for being with them. The devastating war had levelled both the victors and the vanquished – they had all become losers. The War had ended their life-long uneasy relationship.

As Kunti had told Yudhisthira, there were three of them: Gandhari, Madri and she herself. With Madri gone in the service of her husband (se swami karjya kala se punyamani – literally, she did her husband’s work; she was a virtuous person. “Her husband’s work” can be understood as “she did what pleased her husband”) (Ashramika Parva: 2544), only they two were left, suggesting that she did not want to be separated from her from then on. Besides, with Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Vidura and Sanjaya leaving Hastinapura, there would be no one from her generation in Hastinapura. For years, she had looked after her children (she had never treated Madri’s children differently from her on) but had not shared her hurts and feelings with any of them. If she did with anyone, it was Krishna. In view of this, it is not implausible to think that she wanted to spend her last days with those of her generation.

These suggest that her decision to serve Dhritarashtra and Gandhari was not entirely altruistic, not entirely out of her sense of duty. What Kunti had told Yudhisthira in confidence reinforces this perspective, namely that the real reason she was going to be with Dhritarashtra and Gandhari in their vanaprastha was to protect him from their curses. The quintessential mother, she had felt that she had still to take care of her children, who needed that care from her and she could do so by not staying with them. In sum, the intention behind her clearly noble act was not as noble.

Think again. Hers was a self-centered selfless act in the sense that she did not do it for glory or fame or anything to do with the promotion of her ego. When the mother acts to protect her children, then questions of ego become irrelevant. Hers was a moral act and a truly impeccable one at that.