Karna

The arena at Hastinapura has gone silent. Arjuna’s display has just ended, and the assembly has settled who the finest archer alive is. Then the slapping of arms against arms sounds from the gate like thunder, and the spectators make way on their own. The Adi Parva tells it in sections 135 to 138 of the Gita Press text: a young man comes into the arena “like a walking cliff, his body sheathed in the mail he had been born with, his face lit by his earrings.” He repeats everything Arjuna has done and asks for a single combat. Kripa stops the duel with a question: “You too must tell us your lineage, the names of your father and mother, and the royal house you are the ornament of.” Karna’s face wilts like a lotus under the rains. In that same hour Duryodhana crowns him king of Anga, and when the new king asks what he can give to match a kingdom, Duryodhana answers, “I want nothing so much as your friendship.” Then Adhiratha the charioteer hurries in, and Karna, the water of his anointing still on his head, sets down his bow and bows to his father. In a single hour the world spurned Karna and Duryodhana claimed him. Everything the Mahabharata does after this pays interest on that hour.

The story has already told what the crowd does not know. The young man is Kunti’s child, born in her maidenhood by Surya, a portion of the Sun, and the eldest of the brothers he will spend his life fighting. She gave him up the moment he was born; the charioteer Adhiratha carried him home, and his wife Radha found her breasts filling with milk that same day. At Draupadi’s svayamvara, in sections 185 to 202 of the Adi Parva, he walks to the bow that has thrown down every king in the hall, strings it, and sets the arrows to the string, and the Pandavas count the mark as already fallen. Draupadi’s voice carries across the hall: “I will not choose a Suta for my lord.” He laughs, glances up at the Sun, and throws the drawn bow aside. Then the dice hall, sections 64 to 80 of the Sabha Parva. When Shakuni wins Draupadi, Karna laughs out loud while the rest of the hall weeps, and when Duhshasana drags her in by the hair in a single cloth, he applauds. To Vikarna, who alone speaks for her, he answers that a woman with five husbands is unchaste, and that to bring such a woman into an assembly in one cloth “is nothing to be surprised at.” It is the most soiled page in his story, and the Mahabharata does not hide it. Krishna will read it back to him on the seventeenth afternoon of the war.

Two meetings that could have changed everything

On the eve of the war, in chapters 140 to 146 of the Udyoga Parva in the Gita Press text, two people come to Karna with the same truth. Krishna takes him up on his chariot and speaks in private: Kunti’s son, born before Yudhishthira, a son of Pandu in the eye of dharma. “Come with me this very day,” he says, “and let the Pandavas learn that you are Kunti’s son.” The five brothers will touch his feet, Yudhishthira will ride behind him holding the white chamara, Arjuna will drive. Everything Karna has wanted since the arena is laid out in one speech. He says no. Radha cleansed him of his own filth and Adhiratha had every rite of his childhood performed, and he will break those bonds “not for the whole earth, not for heaps of gold.” Duryodhana has had thirteen years of his service and has built the whole war on him. Then he describes the coming battle as one great sacrifice of arms, the blood for clarified butter, the severed heads for the sacrificial cakes, and names his own death among the offerings. He asks one thing: “keep this talk of ours forever secret.” If Yudhishthira learns that Karna is the eldest, he will never take the kingdom, and whatever comes to Karna will go straight to Duryodhana.

Then Kunti herself comes, to the bank of the Ganga, where her firstborn stands facing east with his arms raised, reciting the hymns to the Sun. When the prayer ends he turns: “I am Karna, son of Radha and Adhiratha. Why have you come here, lady?” She tells him whose son he is, and Surya says the same from the sky. His heart does not move. She gave him up the moment he was born, he answers, and Dhritarashtra’s sons have made him their boat for crossing the sea of battle. Then he gives her the one thing he can. He will spare Yudhishthira, Bhima, Nakula and Sahadeva, and fight Arjuna alone: “Famed lady, the number of your sons will never fall below five.” Kunti, shaking with grief, embraces him, and the two walk away in different directions. His giving goes further still. In the Vana Parva, sections 300 to 310 in Ganguli’s numbering, Indra comes in the guise of a Brahmin and begs for the mail and the earrings he was born with. Karna knows who the beggar is and what the mail is worth to his life, and cuts them from his body and hands them over.

Every account is settled on the afternoon of the seventeenth day, in sections 41 to 96 of the Karna Parva, when the war has narrowed to two men. Karna cuts eleven of Gandiva’s strings, and for a moment the upper hand is his. Then Time itself, Kala, draws near him unseen and speaks of the Brahmin’s curse: “The earth is devouring your wheel.” In the same hour the brahmastra Parashurama taught him goes out of his memory, and the earth takes the left wheel of his chariot. Karna jumps down, takes the wheel in both arms, and cannot move it. He asks Arjuna to wait, citing the rules of fair fight, and Krishna answers: “How fortunate, son of Radha, that you remember dharma now.” When Draupadi was brought into the assembly in a single cloth, “your dharma did not show itself that day, Karna.” At Krishna’s word Arjuna draws the Anjalika, and the head of the Sun’s son falls “like the sun dropping blood-red from the hill of sunset.” After the war, at the Ganga, Kunti tells her sons in section 27 of the Stri Parva that the man Arjuna killed was their eldest brother. Yudhishthira burns “like a man thrown into a blazing fire,” and the water he offers to an elder brother drains the color from every song of victory in the epic.

His path

The arena and Karna’s entrance · The slap of arms at the gate, Kripa’s question about lineage, and a crown of Anga on a head still wet from its anointing.

Draupadi’s swayamvara · The bow strung and drawn into a circle, Draupadi’s refusal of a Suta, and the laugh with vexation in it.

The hall of dice · The blind king asking twice whether the stake is won, Karna laughing out loud, and his answer to Vikarna.

The dialogue of Karna and Kunti · A mother waiting in the heat on the Ganga bank for a prayer to end, and a promise that her sons will always number five.

Abhimanyu and the chakravyuha · Six great warriors close around a boy inside the wheel-array, and Karna is one of the six.

Karna as commander and Shalya at the reins · Two days of command, the appeal to Shalya for the reins, and a driver whose words cut deeper than the arrows.

Karna and Arjuna, and the killing of Karna · The left wheel sinking, the brahmastra gone from memory, Time’s voice at his ear, and the Sun’s son falling at afternoon.

The arithmetic of debt

Karna’s story asks the hardest question the epic has about loyalty: when truth and faithfulness stand face to face, which do you choose? Karna chooses faithfulness, and the Mahabharata gives him both punishment and dignity for it. Read this way, his error was one of timing. He spends his whole life paying for the honor handed to him on a single afternoon in the arena, and never once asks what a friendship founded in the very minute of his humiliation will go on to demand of him. If his story draws one lesson, it is this: weigh the first favor a hundred times, because that favor sets the direction of the years that follow. The same reading finds his full measure on the riverbank. He reproaches Kunti for abandoning him, and in the same breath gives her four of her sons; the hurt of his birth and the promises he keeps stand together in one speech. His giving was his own, and he held to it to the end. To give his best when defeat was certain, this was Karna’s dharma. At the Ganga after the war, Yudhishthira offers water to an elder brother he had known only as an enemy, and the epic gives Karna the one place no crown of Anga could supply: a place among his own.