The Two Armies Face to Face

The plain of Kurukshetra held two armies the way a bowl holds water it cannot keep — vast, restless, packed horizon to horizon, eighteen great divisions of chariots and elephants and horse and foot, with the old field of an ancient sacrifice underfoot and the dust already rising before anyone had moved.

The storyteller frames the whole war through one pair of eyes that should not have been able to see it. The blind king Dhritarashtra could not go to the field and would not have borne to; so Vyasa offered him sight of the war and he refused even that, unwilling to watch his sons destroyed. Instead the gift was given to Sanjaya, his charioteer and counsellor, who would see everything from afar, exactly, and narrate it to the blind king in his hall, hour by hour, death by death. So the entire war reaches us as a report to a father who chose not to look — which is the truest possible frame for it, since not looking, in this story, has been the royal disease from the first chapter.

The two hosts faced each other and the conches were lifted. The Kaurava line was anchored on its grandsire, Bhishma, white and unkillable at its head, with Drona and Kripa and Ashwatthama and Duryodhana’s hundred ranged along it, and Karna deliberately absent, sworn out of the field while Bhishma lived. The Pandava line stood on Dhrishtadyumna’s command, with Bhima and the twins and Drupada’s sons and the kings of the west, and at its heart one chariot drawn by white horses, with the strongest archer alive holding the bow and, holding the reins, the one man on the field who had sworn to lift no weapon at all.

Both sides blew their conches until the sound was a single sound and the earth and sky seemed to crack with it, and the armies leaned toward the collision. And then, in the half-breath before the first arrow, the war stopped — not for the soldiers, who stood ready, but inside one chariot in the centre of the field, where Arjuna asked Krishna to drive him out into the space between the two armies so that he might see, before he killed them, exactly whom he had come to kill.

Krishna drove him out and halted the white horses in the gap between the hosts, in plain view of both, under Bhishma and Drona. And Arjuna looked down the lines and saw not an enemy but a family — grandfather, teachers, uncles, cousins, the men who had taught him the very bow now in his hand, arrayed on both sides to destroy each other for a kingdom. The greatest warrior alive looked at the thing he had spent the whole epic preparing to do, and his hands would not do it. Gandiva slipped from his grip; his body would not hold him; and he sat down in the chariot, between two armies that could not begin until he did, and said that he would not fight.