Karna Takes the Field

Karna took command on the sixteenth day, and for the first time the Kaurava army was led by a man who wanted, with his whole heart, to win it. Bhishma had fought without appetite; Drona without joy; Karna fought as a man fights for the one friend who had ever lifted him out of contempt, knowing the cause was wrong and not caring, because the debt was older than the cause.

He fought enormously. He drove the Pandava army before him, beat the brothers he had sworn his mother he would not kill, and kept that terrible promise even in the middle of his fury — he had Bhima at his mercy and did not take it, had the twins and did not take them, only mocked them and let them go, because four of the five were not his to kill and one was. Every encounter on Karna’s days carried the secret only three living people knew: that the man wrecking the Pandava line was the Pandavas’ eldest brother, and that he was sparing them by a vow they did not know existed, hunting through the whole army for the only one of them he had sworn to face.

There was one more thing pulling against Karna, and the parva makes a long, strange chapter of it, because the epic likes to show its great men defeated by small humiliations before they are defeated by weapons. Karna needed a charioteer the equal of Krishna, who drove for Arjuna, and demanded the best: Shalya, king of Madra, uncle of the Pandava twins, a great king in his own right. Shalya was bound to the Kaurava side by a trick of Duryodhana’s and resented every hour of it, and being made to hold another man’s reins — a king reduced to a driver — he agreed only on the condition that he might say whatever he liked, and he used it. Through Karna’s greatest day his own charioteer sat in front of him belittling him, praising Arjuna, foretelling his death, grinding at his confidence with the steady cruelty of a man avenging his own shame on whoever was nearest. The two greatest archers of the war would meet at last with one of them carrying not only his enemy in front of him but his own driver’s contempt at his back.

Everything the Adi Parva had loaded was now in the chamber at once: Karna’s birth, his armour given away on the pilgrimage, the spear spent in the night on Ghatotkacha, the curses laid on him in his youth by a brahmin and by his own teacher Parashurama for the lie he had once told to be taught, the vow to Kunti, the vow to Indra, the friendship with Duryodhana that had bought all of it. The story had spent the whole epic putting weights on one man, and the Karna Parva is the parva where the scale is finally read.