Gandhari

The Mother Who Spoke Against Her Husband

In the first game of dice Draupadi is dragged into the hall by her hair, and that same night a jackal howls in the fire chamber of Dhritarashtra’s palace, and asses bray in answer, and birds of ill omen cry back from every direction. Gandhari and Vidura both understand those sounds, and they carry the omen to the king, who wakes from his son’s spell long enough to grant Draupadi her boons and send the Pandavas home with their wealth. Then Duryodhana wins from his father a second game. It is then, says the Sabha Parva, that Gandhari goes to her husband and brings out the old sentence. “When Duryodhana was born, Vidura, with all his intelligence, said this: ‘It would be well to send this disgrace of our line to the other world. He has cried again and again, and his cry is harsh, like a jackal’s. He will certainly be the destruction of our race.’” She asks him the questions of a woman who has watched a fire go out: “Who breaks down an embankment that has been finished? Who lights again a great fire that has been put out?” And then the thing only a wife could say: “You could not do it before, king, because you loved him as a father. Know that the time has come when the race will be destroyed through him.” Dhritarashtra‘s answer is one of the most exhausted sentences in the poem. “If the destruction of our race has come, let it come freely. I am in no condition to prevent it.” A messenger overtakes the Pandavas on the road, and one throw of the dice costs them thirteen years.

Thirteen years later Krishna comes to the Kuru court as an envoy of peace. Bhishma speaks, Drona speaks, Vidura speaks, and then Gandhari, Subala’s daughter, afraid for the whole house and angry with it, speaks to her cruel-hearted son with every king in the hall as her witness. “The kingdom of the Kurus passes in due order of succession; that has always been the custom of our house.” The kingdom was Pandu’s, since Bhishma in his righteousness would not take the throne, and so “Pandu’s sons, therefore, are its masters today, and no one else.” A mother states the law of inheritance against her own son, before his own allies. When Krishna has finished counting Duryodhana’s offenses one by one and Duryodhana has walked out of the court breathing like a snake, the blind king plays his last card and sends Vidura for his wife. She comes in as she has gone about for every year of her marriage, the band of cloth over her eyes, and listens to her husband’s complaint, and her answer lands first on him. “And you, Dhritarashtra, so fond of your son, are very much to blame for it, because you knew his sinfulness perfectly well and still you followed his counsel.” Vidura brings Duryodhana back, his eyes red as copper, and the mother who has never seen the face of this son, or of any of the hundred, speaks toward the sound of his breathing. A man whose senses are not his own cannot hold a kingdom for long. “Left unchecked, the senses can kill the man who owns them, the way unbroken and furious horses kill a driver who does not know his work.” And: “Thirteen full years of persecuting them has been enough, my son.” She saves for last the thing he will test on the field. Bhishma, Drona, and Kripa may give their lives for him, “even then they will never be able to cast an angry glance at King Yudhishthira.” Duryodhana lets every word fall to the floor and walks out to plan, with Shakuni, Karna, and Duhshasana, the seizing of Krishna.

Where Righteousness Is, There Victory Is

For eighteen days a king comes to his mother each morning before the conches sound and asks for a blessing of victory in a war of kin against kin. Gandhari knows the calamity has already arrived, and every day she gives the same answer: “Where righteousness is, there victory is.” Whether that is a blessing or a verdict, the son cannot tell, and he carries it into the field eighteen times. When the war is over and the five brothers come to her, grief for a hundred sons has brought her to the edge of cursing Yudhishthira. Vyasa reads the intention in her before she speaks it, comes to the spot with the speed of thought, and addresses his daughter-in-law. “Do not use this occasion to pronounce a curse. Use it to show your forgiveness.” Her son asked her for victory every day of the battle, and every day she answered him the same way; “I cannot remember, Gandhari, that any word spoken by you has ever proved false.” Her reply is the clearest likeness of her in the poem. “Holy one, I bear the Pandavas no ill will, and I do not wish them to perish.” The Kurus were wiped out through Duryodhana and Shakuni, through what Karna and Duhshasana did; no blame attaches to any of the five. One thing stirs her anger, the mace blow Bhima struck below the navel. “Why should heroes, to save their lives, throw away the obligations of duty that great men who know every duty have laid down?” Bhima, looking like a frightened man, tells her that no one could have killed her son in a fair fight, and that a prince who bared his thigh to Draupadi in the assembly had earned his death there and then; when she names the blood of Duhshasana he answers that it never passed his lips and teeth, that only his hands were smeared. Then she asks the question that no one in the poem ever answers. “Why, child, did you not spare one? One son for this old couple who have lost their kingdom, one whose offenses were lighter than the rest?” Anger rises in her, and she asks, “Where is the king?” Yudhishthira comes toward her trembling, hands joined. “Here is Yudhishthira, goddess, the cruel slayer of your sons. I deserve your curses, for I am the cause of this universal destruction. Curse me.” She draws long breaths and says nothing. But as he bends to fall at her feet, her eyes turn down inside the folds of the cloth to the tip of his toe, and the nail there, on a man whose every nail had been beautiful until that moment, becomes a sore. Arjuna sees it and steps behind Krishna. Then the anger leaves her, and she comforts the Pandavas as a mother should, and says to Kunti, “It was through my fault that this greatest of families has been destroyed.”

A Bandaged Eye on the Battlefield

Vyasa’s boon has given her the eye of the spirit, and from where she stands, far from the field, she sees Kurukshetra as clearly as if she stood on it: bones and hair, streams of blood, headless trunks, and the jackals and vultures and crows at their work. Then the whole household goes out to the field, and women who had never seen the sun fall down among the dead. Gandhari keeps Krishna beside her and goes from body to body, naming each man and the manner of his death, and she gives her own sons and the enemy’s heroes the same grief. At the sight of Duryodhana she falls like a plantain tree torn up by the roots, comes to herself, takes the blood-covered body into her arms, and tells Krishna that she does not grieve for her son: “I grieve for Dhritarashtra, helpless, with his friends and kinsmen taken from him.” Over Duhshasana she remembers the day he called Draupadi a slave in the assembly, and what she said to Duryodhana then: “Son, send the wrathful Shakuni away from your side. Understand that your mother’s brother has a wicked heart and loves a quarrel beyond anything. Send him away without delay and make peace with the Pandavas.” And when she comes to that brother’s own body, killed by Sahadeva, the sister’s son killing the mother’s brother, she says what only she could say of him: “what I fear, Krishna, is that even there that crooked man may find a way to stir up quarrels among my children, who are trusting and open-hearted, all of them.” Then her fortitude gives way. She falls, and rises, and lays every fault at Krishna’s door. “While they were being wiped out, why did you stand aside?” He had followers, an army, eloquence, the power to make peace. “I have earned a little merit by waiting dutifully on my husband, and it is merit very hard to come by. By that merit I curse you, wielder of the discus and the mace.” He will be the slayer of his own kinsmen: “In the thirty-sixth year from this one you will bring about the slaughter of your kinsmen and your friends and your sons, and you yourself will perish by a shameful means in the wilderness.” Krishna answers the old queen with a faint smile. “No one in the world can exterminate the Vrishnis except me.” He is already at work on it, and in speaking the curse she has helped him. Then he lifts her up and says the thing Vyasa had not said. “This vast carnage came about through your fault.” Her son had a wicked soul, “You applauded his wicked acts and counted them good.” Gandhari says nothing more. Thirty-six years later, when the omens turn over Dwarka, Krishna reads them, understands that what Gandhari said in the fire of her grief is about to happen, and sets about making her words true.

Sixteen Years, and the Fire in the Forest

For fifteen years after the war Gandhari lives in Hastinapura, with the queens of the Pandavas waiting on her like maids of all work and Kunti obeying her in everything. She frees herself of the debt she owes her dead sons with shraddha rites and gifts. One day Bhima stands within her hearing and slaps his armpits and says that the sons of the blind king were all sent to the other world by these two arms; Dhritarashtra gives way to sorrow, and Gandhari, “who understood every duty and knew what Time carries along in its course, treated them as untrue.” On the day the old king leaves for the forest Kunti walks in front, carrying Gandhari’s hand on her shoulder, and Dhritarashtra walks behind with his hand on Gandhari’s shoulder, a blind man led by a woman who will not see, led by the one who can. In the forest all three put on bark, and there “The faultless Pritha became the eye of Gandhari.” About a year later the Pandavas come to visit, and when the old king breaks down over his son’s wrongs, Gandhari, her eyes bandaged, joins her hands to her father-in-law Vyasa. “Sixteen years have passed over the head of this king as he grieves for the death of his sons and finds no peace of mind.” She asks for the one thing a sage’s penance can give. “Through the power of your penance you can create new worlds. What is it, then, to show this king his children, who are now in the other world?” She counts the grief of Draupadi and Subhadra and of the wife of Bhurishravas along with her own, and the hundred widows of her hundred sons. That night, out of the waters of the Bhagirathi, the dead of both armies rise with the uproar of the old armies, Bhishma and Drona and Karna and Duryodhana among them, in celestial robes, free of every enmity, and Gandhari, endowed with celestial knowledge, sees all her children. The sons she never once saw while they lived. When the time comes to part, Yudhishthira wants to stay in the forest, and it is Gandhari who sends him back. “Let it not be so, my son. Listen: the race of Kuru depends on you now. The ancestral cake of my father-in-law depends on you too.” After that, in the forest at Gangadwara, Dhritarashtra lives on air with pebbles in his mouth, Gandhari on water alone, and Kunti on a little food every sixth day. One day the wind rises and a fire runs through the forest. The king sends Sanjaya away, sits down facing east with Gandhari and Kunti, and the three of them draw in their senses and stay like posts of wood as the fire takes them. Narada tells Yudhishthira afterward that the fire had sprung from the king’s own abandoned sacrificial fires, and Yudhishthira says that for the famous Gandhari he does not grieve: “She kept the same vows as her husband, and she has reached the same regions he has.”

Her Path

The Game of Dice · Gandhari among her daughters-in-law like Rohini among the stars, on the morning the guests arrive for the game.

Krishna’s Report, and the Armies March · The Kuru council replayed voice by voice at Upaplavya, and a mother’s verdict against her son among them.

The Destruction of the Yadavas, and Krishna’s Departure · The thirty-sixth year, the omens over Dwarka, and a curse that Krishna would not let prove false.

The Woman Who Gave Up Looking and Saw Everything

Sight keeps arriving in Gandhari’s life, and every time it arrives from behind a bandaged eye. A bride embraced and recognized as the death of her sons; a jackal’s howl understood on the night of the dice; a son’s anger read from his breathing in a hall full of kings; and at the end, by Vyasa‘s gift, the whole of Kurukshetra seen from far away. The woman who gave up looking at the world was the one in that house who saw farthest. Her sentences come back the same way. Vidura‘s warning, kept thirteen years and handed to her husband; the law of succession, spoken against her son with his allies listening; and the single line she gave for eighteen mornings in place of a blessing, which Vyasa called a word that had never once proved false. The force of that word is what burns Yudhishthira’s toenail from inside the folds of a cloth, and what reaches Dwarka thirty-six years later. The poem does not hold her blameless. Krishna tells her that she applauded her son’s wicked acts, and she herself tells Kunti that the family was destroyed through her fault. The question she puts to Bhima, why not one son spared, goes unanswered by anyone. In the forest she counts sixteen sleepless years and asks to see the dead, and for one night sees the sons she had never seen alive; then Kunti becomes her eye, and she sits down facing east in a fire the king had kindled with his own hands. The cloth went on at her wedding and never came off, and everything that happened to that family was seen from behind it.