Ashvatthama

The Cattle Have Not Been Won Yet

The Virata Parva is where Ashvatthama first speaks in his own voice, and the voice rises against Karna. Karna has just told the king to make every arrangement without regard to the teacher, and the son of Drona is harder on him than Kripa has been. “The cattle have not been won yet, Karna. They have not crossed the border of their owner’s kingdom, and they have not reached Hastinapura. What are you boasting about?” Then the sentence his own life will testify against: “Fire burns without a word. The sun shines without a word. The earth carries everything on it, what moves and what stands still, without a word.” He names the dice match with Duryodhana standing there to hear it, “Use what won you Indraprastha and what dragged Draupadi into the assembly,” and ends, “I will not fight Dhananjaya.” Bhishma makes the peace with one sentence, “Drona’s son sees clearly, and so does Kripa,” and the same afternoon brings him face to face with Dhananjaya after all. When Drona is driven from the field his son blocks Arjuna’s path, sees an opening, and cuts the string of the Gandiva with an arrow headed like a horseshoe. The Pandava’s quivers never empty, the son of Drona’s arrows run low, and Karna’s bow pulls Arjuna away.

Six Chariots and a Boy

On the thirteenth day of Kurukshetra, Ashvatthama is one of the six names that the story of Abhimanyu repeats. When Duryodhana’s son Lakshmana falls, Drona, Kripa, Karna, Drona’s son Ashvatthama, Brihadbala and Kritavarma close around him. Stripped of bow, chariot, sword, and at last his wheel, Abhimanyu takes up a mace and runs at Ashvatthama, and the son of Drona sees it come up like a blazing thunderbolt, gets down from his chariot in haste, and takes three long leaps to be out of its way. When the boy lies dead, creatures in the sky speak the judgment the poem lets stand: “Alas, this one lies on the field, killed while he fought alone by six great chariot warriors of Dhritarashtra‘s army, with Drona and Karna at their head. We hold that this was an unrighteous act.” On the night of the fourteenth day, when Duryodhana comes to him pleading for the Panchalas dead, he answers, “You, though, are greedy beyond measure,” he says, and calls him deceitful and suspicious of everyone, and then goes out to die for him anyway. “Dharma’s royal son and all his Somakas will see what I can do and think the whole world has filled up with Ashvatthamas.” In the dark of that night he kills Ghatotkacha’s son and calls the grieving Rakshasa his own child, since as Drona’s pupils the Pandavas and the teacher’s son were brothers of a kind, and Bhima‘s son a brother’s son to him; the Rakshasa will not stop.

The Father’s Name, the Elephant’s Name

On the fifteenth day the reason the father laid down his weapons was an elephant’s name, and the son was fighting somewhere else when it was spoken. When every army on the field was running, only Drona‘s son, like a huge alligator coming up against the current of a stream, fell upon his enemies, and when he came back Duryodhana could not tell him what had happened; Kripa told him the whole of it, Krishna‘s counsel, the elephant Bhima killed, the half-truth from Yudhishthira’s mouth, and Dhrishtadyumna’s sword. Wiping his eyes, Ashvatthama swears by truth and by his own acts of dharma that he will not bear the burden of life if he fails to exterminate the Panchalas, and adds, “In the knowledge of weapons there is none in the world equal to me and Arjuna.” Then he tells the story of the Narayana weapon, which does not strike a man who has laid down his arms, and he touches water and calls it up. Rivers run backward, and burning arrows, iron balls and discs fill the air. Krishna stops the running army with a gesture of his arms and gives the only order that works: “Lay down your weapons, all of you, quickly, and get down from your vehicles.” Every man obeys except Bhima, and the weapon comes down on his head like a fire fed by wind, until Krishna and Arjuna walk unarmed into the blaze and drag him off his chariot by force. Duryodhana asks for the weapon to be thrown again, and Ashvatthama answers with a long, unhappy breath. “That weapon cannot be recalled, king. It cannot be used twice.” And then, “But defeat and death are the same thing; in fact defeat is worse than death.”

Arjuna says to his friend that day the cruel words he has never said to him before, and in answer Drona’s son touches water and looses the Agneya weapon, and the field goes dark: a rain of blood, water that scalds, and an entire akshauhini of the Pandava army burned to ash where it stood. But when the darkness lifts, the bearer of Gandiva and Keshava are standing whole on an unbroken chariot, like the sun and the moon together in a cleared sky. Something in Ashvatthama gives way. He lays down his bow, gets down from his chariot, and says out loud, “Fie, fie, everything is untrue,” and he runs from the fight. On the road he meets Vyasa, dark as a rain cloud, and asks, “Is this an illusion, or is it some caprice of the weapon?” Vyasa tells him of Narayana’s austerities and the boons of Rudra, that Vasudeva is that Narayana, and “know that Arjuna is that Nara and no one else.” And then the sentence that turns the son of Drona toward his own interior: “You yourself, great-hearted one, have been born as a portion of Rudra, by the power of all your religious acts and as the fruit of high austerities, endowed with great energy and great wrath.” Ashvatthama bows to Rudra, holds Keshava worthy of the highest regard, and has the Kuru army withdrawn for the night.

Commander of Three Chariots

Under Karna‘s command Ashvatthama lays such a roof of arrows over Yudhishthira that no bird could fly through it, and the king taunts the teacher’s son with the one insult that lands inside a family. “It seems, then, that you are a Brahmin in name only.” Drona’s son smiles, says nothing, and answers with arrows, and the king has to give up the position. Among the Samshaptakas he approaches Arjuna like a guest asking for the hospitality of battle; for a while that day Drona’s son gets the better of Arjuna, and it takes Krishna’s rebuke, “Partha, this that I see of you in battle today is very strange, since Drona’s son surpasses you,” and his flat verdict that “The time for sparing him has passed,” before Arjuna’s arrows break his chariot and his driver carries him senseless out of the fight. Then comes the eighteenth day, and by its evening only three men of the Kaurava army are alive, Kripa, Kritavarma, and Ashvatthama the son of Drona. Beside Duryodhana, who lies with his thighs broken, Ashvatthama swears again to destroy the Panchalas. At the king’s command Kripa consecrates the son of Drona to the post of commander, and the new commander leaves the spot making the ten quarters ring with his roars. The command of eleven akshauhinis now belongs to three chariots.

The Owl and the Crows

The Sauptika Parva opens under a banyan tree. Kripa and Kritavarma are asleep on the bare ground, and Drona‘s son cannot sleep. On a second banyan thousands of crows roost in safety. Then an owl comes out of the dark, huge, green-eyed, with the speed of Garuda, settles among the branches without a sound, and begins to kill its sleeping enemies in great numbers, until the ground under the tree is covered with crows. Ashvatthama does not read it as an omen. He reads it as instruction. “This owl has given me a lesson in war,” he says to himself. “I have bound myself to a thing that will destroy me, like an insect that means to fly into a blazing fire.” Kripa answers him with the whole of a warrior’s law, the men who may never be killed, and puts it to his nephew in a single image: “This blameworthy deed, so impossible in a man like you, will look like a red spot on a white sheet.” Ashvatthama grants every word of it, answers with his own list of the Pandavas’ broken rules, from Drona to Duryodhana, and then says the thing the poem will not soften: “When I have killed them in the night, buried in their sleep, I do not care if I am born a worm or a winged insect in my next life.” Yoking his horses, he tells his uncle plainly what he means to do. “I will kill that killer tonight in the same condition, when he has laid aside his armor.”

At the gate of the Pandava camp stands a being huge as a hill, flames pouring from thousands of eyes, and the forms of Hrishikesha coming out of the flames by thousands. Ashvatthama rains celestial weapons on it and the being swallows them all. With nothing left in his hands he remembers his uncle’s words and resolves to take refuge in Mahadeva. A golden altar appears before him with a fire burning bright on it, and Drona’s son offers himself as the victim. “I cannot defeat my enemies, and so I wait as a libation for you. Accept me, god.” He walks into the blaze, and Mahadeva appears in person, smiling. “For that there is none dearer to me than Krishna. To honor him, and at his word, I have protected the Panchalas and shown many kinds of illusion.” And then: “Time has come upon them now. The span of their lives has run out.” The god gives him an excellent polished sword and enters his body. Drona’s son goes into the camp at a place where there is no door. Dhrishtadyumna is asleep on a bed strewn with flowers; a kick wakes him, a hand in his hair pins him to the ground, and a foot on his throat and chest begins to kill him the way an animal is killed. At last the Panchala prince says, low, “Teacher’s son, kill me with a weapon. Do not make it long. Let me go by your hand to the worlds of the righteous.” The answer: “Disgrace of your family, there is no world for men who kill their teachers.” Then the five sons of Draupadi, and Shikhandi, cut in two with the sword. When morning comes and Ashvatthama walks out of the camp, he is bathed in human blood, and the hilt of his sword has stuck so fast in his grip that his hand and his sword are one thing. To the dying king he gives the count. “On the side of the Pandavas only seven are alive, and among the sons of Dhritarashtra only we three.” Duryodhana answers him. “What Bhishma, the son of Ganga, could not do, nor Karna, nor your father, you have done at last today, with Kripa and the Bhoja beside you.” Then he dies.

The Gem

That same morning Draupadi sits down beside Yudhishthira in the vow of praya, and names her price. “I have heard that Drona’s son has a gem on his head that was born with him,” Draupadi answers. “I will see that gem brought to me when that wretch has been killed in battle.” Bhima sets out alone. On the bank of the Ganga he finds him sitting among the rishis beside Vyasa, covered in dust and ghee. Taking it for his last hour, the son of Drona picks up a blade of grass with his left hand, charges it with mantras into the Brahmashira, and lets it go with three words, “For the destruction of the Pandavas.” At Krishna’s word Arjuna looses the same weapon to meet it, and between the two fires Narada and Vyasa come and stand. Arjuna draws his weapon back. Drona’s son cannot draw his, because that weapon returns only to a man who has kept the vow of brahmacharya. Vyasa asks for the gem on his head in exchange for his life, and Ashvatthama says that the gem is worth more than all the wealth of the Pandavas and the Kauravas together, and then, “Here is the gem. Here am I.” The blade of grass, though, will not come back, and he throws it into the wombs of the Pandava women. Krishna promises that the child it kills will live again, and then pronounces the sentence. “For three thousand years you will wander over this earth without a companion, unable to talk with anyone.” “The stench of pus and blood will come from you. Forests that no one can enter and dreary wastes will be your home.” Vyasa confirms the words, and the last words the son of Drona speaks in the poem are to him. “With you among all men, holy one, I will live,” Ashvatthama says. “Let the words of this great man come true.” He gives his gem over to the Pandavas and goes off to the forest before their eyes, with no gladness in him. Draupadi gives up her vow with a sentence of her own. “The teacher’s son deserves my reverence as the teacher himself does. Let the king bind this gem on his head.” In the Stri Parva the three survivors meet Dhritarashtra and Gandhari on the road and separate before sunrise, Kripa to Hastinapura, Kritavarma to his own kingdom, and the son of Drona to the hermitage of Vyasa. The Mahabharata never records his death.

The Bhagavata’s Own Telling

The first skandha of the Bhagavata tells the same night in its own way: Ashvatthama severs the heads of Draupadi’s five sleeping sons, Arjuna rides after him, and the son of Drona, alone with his horses spent, looses the brahmastra although he does not know how to bring it home again. Arjuna withdraws both weapons at Krishna‘s leave, binds the man with a rope like an animal, and brings him to the camp, where Draupadi bows to the killer of her children and says, “Release him, release him. He is a Brahmin, and for all of us a Brahmin is worthy of the utmost reverence.” Arjuna cuts the gem from the crown of Ashvatthama’s head with his sword, taking the locks of his hair away with it, and turns him out of the camp, which for a fallen Brahmin is the whole of the death sentence the shastras prescribe. The Bhagavata has no blade of grass, no bank of the Ganga, and no three thousand years; its punishment ends where the gem comes away.

His Path

The Training in Arms and Ekalavya · A neigh at birth, rice water taken for milk, and a vessel with a broad mouth.

The Cattle Raid at Virata · The cattle not yet won, and the string of the Gandiva cut.

Abhimanyu and the Wheel Array · Six chariots around a boy, three long leaps, and a judgment from the sky.

The Fall of Drona · An elephant’s name, an alligator against the current, and a vow to exterminate the Panchalas.

The Narayana Weapon and Vyasa’s Account · Rivers running backward, an akshauhini burned to ash, and Vyasa on the road.

The Sauptika Parva · The owl and the crows, the thousand-eyed guardian at the gate, a hand fused to a hilt, and a blade of grass.

The Bhagavatam, Ashvatthama’s Brahmastra · A teacher’s son bound with a rope, Draupadi‘s plea, and a gem cut away with the hair.

The Man Who Could Not Call It Back

Ashvatthama holds every weapon and the knowledge of recalling none. The Narayana weapon cannot be used twice, the Agneya weapon burns an akshauhini and goes out in front of two men, and the Brahmashira in a blade of grass goes into the wombs of women because the man who loosed it was no brahmachari. Beside Virata’s cattle he said that fire burns without a word, and every scene of his after that one opens with his own roar, over his father’s severed head, at Dhrishtadyumna’s door, beside a dying king. Vyasa calls him a portion of Rudra, and on the night of the Sauptika Parva Mahadeva enters his body, and still the poem charges nothing done that night to the god; the hand that had fused to the sword by morning was his. The gem that had kept him from birth beyond the reach of weapons is given up in two short sentences, and what he receives for it is a life, three thousand years long, alone. The Mahabharata never writes his death, and perhaps that silence is exact: a man who could not call a thing back is given no place in the story to which he can return.