Latest posts
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The Vow Bhima Kept in Blood: How Duhshasana Died on the Sixteenth Day of Kurukshetra
Most vows in the Mahabharata are made in anger and forgotten in peace. Bhima’s was different. He swore it in front of a hall full of kings, and then he carried it for thirteen years of exile, hunger and waiting, never letting it cool. On the sixteenth day of the war at Kurukshetra, he finally…
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The Palace Floor That Looked Like Water: How One Fall Humiliated Duryodhana Into Starting a War
Every great war has a public cause and a private one. The public cause of Kurukshetra was a kingdom. The private cause, at least in the way the Sabha Parva tells it, was a man in wet clothes standing in a palace hall while his cousins tried not to laugh. That man was Duryodhana, and…
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The Day Duryodhana Went to Gloat at the Pandavas and Came Back in Chains
Imagine planning a victory parade through your cousins’ neighbourhood, and ending the day tied up in a stranger’s chariot while those same cousins are asked to come and save you. That is almost exactly what happened to Duryodhana in the thirteenth-year-less-one of the Pandavas’ exile, in an episode the Mahabharata calls the Ghoshayatra, the “cattle-station…
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The Demon Who Ate a Cartload of Rice a Week, Until Bhima Ate It First
Nobody in the town of Ekachakra had been asked whether they wanted to feed a monster. They simply did it, every week, because the alternative was worse. Into this town, after escaping the burning house of lac, walked five young men and their mother, dressed as wandering Brahmins. The Pandavas had spent months hiding in…
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The Iron Statue Dhritarashtra Crushed to Powder in a Grieving Father’s Embrace
The war was over. Duryodhana was dead, the hundred Kaurava brothers were dead, and the old blind king Dhritarashtra sat in Hastinapura with nothing left of his dynasty but grief. Then the messengers announced that the Pandavas were coming to pay their respects. And in the palace that morning, one man was quietly afraid, and…
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The Sick Old Monkey Bhima Couldn’t Move Was His Own Brother
Bhima had killed Hidimba with his bare hands. He had torn the demon Baka apart and carried his whole family out of a burning house of lac. There was, as far as he knew, nothing on earth he could not lift. And then, on a mountain path in the Himalayas, he met a sick old…
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The Princess Who Followed Death Into the Forest and Talked Him Out of Her Husband
During their long exile in the forest, Yudhishthira asked the sage Markandeya a painful question. Had there ever been a woman as devoted, and as wronged by fate, as Draupadi? Markandeya answered with a story. It is one of the most famous in the Mahabharata, and it is not really about devotion at all. It…
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The Python That Swallowed Bhima Had Once Been King of Heaven
Of all the Pandavas, Bhima was the one nobody worried about. He had wrestled a rakshasa to death in the forest of Hidimba. He had carried his mother and four brothers out of a burning house on his back. His strength was said to equal ten thousand elephants. So when he went off hunting alone…
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The Sage Who Put Death on Trial, and Sentenced Him to Be Born as Vidura
The wisest man in Hastinapura was a servant’s son. Vidura, half-brother to the blind king Dhritarashtra and to Pandu, spent his whole life telling the Kuru family the truth, and his whole life being ignored. The Mahabharata gives a surprising reason for his birth. Vidura was not an ordinary man at all. He was Dharma,…
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The Night Arjuna Drew His Sword on Yudhishthira Over a Secret Vow
It was the seventeenth day of the Kurukshetra war, the day everyone knew Arjuna and Karna would finally meet. And for one terrible hour that evening, it looked as though the Pandavas would lose Arjuna before he ever reached Karna, because Arjuna had drawn his sword on his own eldest brother, and he meant to…