The Reluctant King

Yudhishthira had won the kingdom, and he did not want it. The Shanti Parva — the Book of Peace — opens not with a coronation but with the victor refusing to be crowned, sitting in the ash of his victory and arguing that the throne is not worth one of the men it cost, and that a war won by the means this one was won by has earned its winner not a kingdom but a hermitage.

This is the epic taking its own measure. It has spent seventeen books showing what the pursuit of a throne does — the lac house, the dice, the disrobing, the boy in the spiral, the lie that killed the teacher, the foul blow, the children killed asleep — and now it lets its most righteous character look at the prize and call it filth, and it does not treat him as weak for it. He has just learned that the man he warred against was his brother. He has Draupadi’s five sons’ empty places at the fire. His argument for renunciation is not cowardice; it is the only sane response to the bill the Stri Parva just presented, and the parva makes everyone in turn answer it.

His brothers answered him, and Draupadi answered him hardest. To renounce now, she said, would make every death meaningless — would mean the war was fought for nothing if its purpose, a just kingdom justly ruled, was abandoned the moment it was won; grief that walks away from duty is just despair wearing a saint’s robe. Krishna answered him. Vyasa answered him. And the answer they pressed on him is the answer the Gita had pressed on Arjuna in the field, now applied to the harder case of the aftermath: the duty does not end because the cost was unbearable; a king grieving is still a king, and the dead are not honoured by a living man’s withdrawal but by the just order he is now obliged to build over their graves. The throne is not a reward to be enjoyed. It is a burden to be carried, precisely by the one who least wants it, because wanting it was Duryodhana’s disease.

So Yudhishthira was crowned, against his own wish, king of Hastinapura — the reluctance itself presented as his fitness for it, the mirror-image of the cousin who would not yield a needle’s point. He performed the rites for the dead of both sides without distinction, his enemies’ funeral fires lit by the same hand as his brothers’. The blind king and Gandhari were kept in honour, not vengeance — the victor housing the parents of the men he killed, the reconciliation that had to be tricked into being on the field now made, with effort, into a daily practice.

But a man crowned into grief he does not understand cannot rule on grief alone, and the parva knew it. There was one teacher left in the world equal to instructing a king on how to bear a kingdom won this way — and he was lying out on the field of Kurukshetra still, on his bed of arrows, alive by his own will, waiting for the sun to turn north so that he could die. The new king was taken to the dying grandsire to be taught how to live.