Messengers and the Search for Peace

At Virata’s court the friends of the Pandavas gathered — Drupada, Krishna, the kings of the western and southern lands — to decide what came next, and the room split along the line the whole epic runs on. The hot voices wanted the war declared at once; thirteen years had been paid in full and the contract was satisfied; let the army march. Krishna spoke for the colder course, and it is worth marking that Krishna, who knows how this ends, still insists on it: a king must be seen to have asked for peace before he is permitted to take up a just war. The asking is not naïveté. It is the record the war will be judged against afterward.

So an old brahmin, Drupada’s priest, was sent first to Hastinapura with the modest, exact demand: the Pandavas had kept every term; let their half of the kingdom be returned, and there need be no war. He was received, and heard, and answered with delay — Bhishma counselling justice, Karna counselling defiance, Duryodhana counselling nothing because he had decided years ago and only the form of consultation remained. The blind king, true to himself to the end, neither granted the demand nor refused it, but sent his own envoy, Sanjaya, back to the Pandavas with words instead of land.

Sanjaya’s mission is the parva’s first portrait of bad-faith peace. He came to Yudhishthira with no offer, only an appeal to Yudhishthira’s own virtue — you are righteous; righteous men forgive; would you truly drench the earth in blood for a kingdom? — using the eldest Pandava’s conscience against his cause, asking the wronged man to absolve the wrong by being too good to demand redress. Yudhishthira, who felt the pull of it because it was aimed exactly at him, gave the answer the story endorses: he would still take peace, gladly, on terms a child could see were merciful — not the kingdom, not the half, but five villages, one for each brother, and the war would not happen. Five villages. The smallest the demand could be made and still be a demand at all.

It was, of course, designed to be refusable, and Duryodhana refused it in the form the epic remembers him by: he would not yield, he said, land enough to stand a needle’s point on, not without war. There it is, set down plainly so no later reader can blur it — the wronged side reduced its claim to five villages; the wronging side would not part with the width of a needle. The war, when it comes, will not be a tragedy of two equal rights. The Udyoga Parva is at pains to establish that, and to establish it through honest attempts at peace rather than mere assertion.

One attempt remained, the gravest, and everyone in both camps knew who would have to make it. There was a single man whom both sides loved and feared and could not lie to easily, who was kin to the Pandavas and bound by courtesy to the Kauravas, and whose going to Hastinapura would put the question beyond all evasion. Krishna said he would go himself — as envoy, alone, into the hall of the people who had every reason to want the Pandavas dead.