The Women Walk the Field

When the weapons were down and the avenging was spent on every side, the epic does the thing that makes it the Mahabharata and not merely a war story: it stops, and gives a whole book to the women, and walks them out onto the field to see what the men have made.

The blind king Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, who had bound her own eyes for a lifetime, came out of Hastinapura with the women of the household — a hundred sons’ worth of widows and mothers — and went to Kurukshetra. The Stri Parva is the after of everything: no formations, no strategy, no oaths left to keep, only the ground itself, covered, and women moving across it turning bodies over to find which ruin is theirs.

The story refuses to keep it general. It walks beside particular women finding particular men. Here is a queen who came as a bride in an early chapter, kneeling by a son who fought brilliantly for a day and is now part of the field. Here is a young wife beside a husband whose face the animals and the long days have already changed past recognising, so that she knows him by an ornament. The poem lingers on this on purpose, because everything before it — the vow at the ferry, the dice, the rules sworn and broken, the Song between the armies — has been argument, and this is the bill. The women do not debate dharma. They identify the dead. It is the most devastating section of the epic precisely because it has no philosophy in it; it is only the cost, counted by the people the war was supposedly fought to protect, none of whom were asked.

Vidura and Yudhishthira and the Pandavas came to the elders on that field, and the meeting carried the war’s last private violences. Dhritarashtra, blind and grief-blind both, asked to embrace Bhima — the man who had killed his hundred sons — and Krishna, reading the murderous strength in the old king’s arms before the old king could spend it, slipped an iron statue of Bhima into the embrace instead, and Dhritarashtra crushed the metal to fragments thinking it was the man, and then wept, his rage spent on iron, and asked forgiveness for what he had nearly done. The epic will not even let the reconciliation be clean; it has to be tricked into existing, like every other good thing in the back half of this story.

And then the women’s grief gathered into the one woman who had spent the whole epic with a cloth over her eyes, and who now took it off — or saw without it — and looked, for the first time and the last, at the whole field and everyone on it. Gandhari had a hundred sons in that ground. She had warned, in the Adi Parva, against the first of them; she had been ignored, as the true voices in this story are always ignored. She stood on Kurukshetra with all of it in front of her at once, and she was about to do the thing the wronged in this story do when the law has failed them in every hall — she was about to curse, and she had earned the right to, and the story was going to let the curse land.