Gandhari's Curse

Gandhari looked over the field of her hundred sons, and her grief turned, as grief in this story always turns when no hall will answer it, toward the one figure who had stood at the centre of the whole war and lifted no weapon in it.

She did not curse the Pandavas, though they had killed her sons; she had sense enough, even in that grief, to know how the dice and the disrobing and the needle’s-width refusal had set the war in motion, and she said so. She turned instead on Krishna. He could have stopped it, she told him — he, of all of them, had the power and the foresight and the standing to have prevented the whole destruction, and he had let it run its course; he had managed the war instead of preventing it. So she laid on him the curse a mother of a hundred dead sons is owed: that his own people, the Yadavas, would destroy one another exactly as the Kurus had, in a senseless drunken slaughter of kin against kin, and that he himself would die alone and ignominiously, and his city be taken by the sea, thirty-six years on.

And Krishna accepted it. That is the hinge of the chapter and of the epic’s whole theology. He did not argue, did not plead his reasons, did not undo it. He bowed to the curse and confirmed it, because it was just — because the destruction of the Yadavas was already, he said, both fated and deserved, and a mother’s true grief had simply pronounced what was coming anyway. The most powerful figure in the story submits to the word of the most broken one, and the submission is the point: even he does not stand outside the law of consequence; he stands inside it more fully than anyone, which is why the curse can take.

Then the parva closes the war’s accounts. The dead were given fire, all of them, the hundred Kaurava sons and the Pandava boys and the kings of every country, the pyres running the length of the field. And Kunti, at last, unsealed the silence she had carried since the second chapter she appeared in. She told the Pandavas that Karna — the man Bhima had longed to kill, the man Arjuna had killed at the chariot wheel, the man they had been taught to hate for eighteen days and a lifetime — had been her firstborn, their eldest brother, born of the Sun and set on a river before any of them existed. The grief that broke over Yudhishthira then was, the epic suggests, worse than the war’s: he had cursed and warred against his own brother in ignorance, and the ignorance had been a choice made by the people who loved him, and nothing could be done with that knowledge except carry it. He cursed all women, in his anguish, that none should ever again be able to keep such a secret — the epic recording even the just king’s grief as something that lashes outward and wounds. The war was over. The Stri Parva ends not in peace but in a man learning, too late to do anything but grieve, exactly what every silence and every vow in the story had finally cost.