The Imperial Sacrifice and the Fall of Jarasandha

Jarasandha of Magadha was not an ordinary obstacle. He had been born in two halves, the story says — two lifeless pieces joined into a living child by a rakshasi named Jara, and from that joining he took a strength that ordinary weapons could not finally undo. He had defeated kings beyond counting and did not kill the defeated; he penned them, scores of them, in his city like animals kept for a rite, intending in time to offer them in sacrifice. He was, besides, the father-in-law of Kamsa, the tyrant Krishna had killed, and he had driven Krishna’s whole people out of Mathura and across to the sea at Dwaraka in vengeance for it. He was, in short, the precise rival the Rajasuya forbade, and he was personal to the one man whose counsel the Pandavas trusted most.

Krishna proposed not war but a reckoning. He went to Magadha with Bhima and Arjuna, the three of them in the dress of brahmins, and asked of Jarasandha the hospitality a king owes a guest. Jarasandha received them, and then, reading them more clearly than their disguise allowed for, observed that they bore the marks of warriors, not the bearing of priests, and asked them to declare themselves. Krishna did. He named them, named the old quarrel between his people and Jarasandha’s, and offered the king the warrior’s choice: free the imprisoned kings, or give one of the three single combat to the death.

Jarasandha, to his credit and his cost, did not flinch from the form of the thing. He chose combat, and he chose Bhima, the largest of them, as a king of his strength would. The two met without weapons, hand against hand, and fought for days without either yielding — a wrestling so long and so even that the city watched it the way one watches weather. Jarasandha could not be worn down and could not be thrown to any effect, because the two halves of him, struck apart, found each other again. Krishna, watching, took up a blade of grass and split it down its length and cast the two ends in opposite directions — a thing to look at, not a word spoken. Bhima understood him. He took Jarasandha, tore him along the old seam of his making, and flung the halves apart so they could not rejoin, and the unkillable king was dead.

The imprisoned kings were let out of their pen and sent home to their own countries — and they went home owing their lives and their thrones to Yudhishthira’s cause, which was the whole quiet point of the exercise. Jarasandha’s son was set on Magadha’s throne in his father’s place, as a ruler now bound to the Pandavas rather than a wall standing across their path. Notice the method, because Krishna will use it the length of the epic: the obstacle is not merely removed; it is converted, where it can be, into an obligation that runs the other way.

The road to the Rajasuya was open. The four brothers went out in the four directions, each with an army, and brought the kings of the earth, by treaty or by force, to acknowledge Yudhishthira paramount; and tribute came back to Indraprastha until the hall of illusions could barely hold it. The sacrifice could now be performed. And a great sacrifice, in this story, is never only a triumph — it is also an assembly, and an assembly is a room with everyone’s old wounds in it at once.