The Mahabharata is remembered as the story of a hundred Kaurava brothers destroyed to the last man by their Pandava cousins, and in the broad strokes that is exactly what happened. But the number was never actually a hundred. Dhritarashtra had a hundred and one children — a hundred sons with his wife Gandhari, one daughter, Dushala, and one more son, Yuyutsu, born to a maid named Sughada, sometimes called Vaishya-putri.
Yuyutsu was raised alongside his hundred brothers, trained in the same halls, counted as a Kaurava in every practical sense. He was, by several accounts, one of the eleven Maharathis on the field — warriors rated capable of fighting hundreds of thousands of opponents single-handedly. He had every reason, by blood and upbringing, to fight for Duryodhana without question.
The Question on the First Morning
Before the fighting began on the first day at Kurukshetra, Yudhishthira, observing the customs of dharmic warfare, walked across the field to seek blessings from his elders standing in the Kaurava ranks — Bhishma, Drona, and the others he respected despite standing against them. It was in this same moment, with both armies assembled and watching, that Yudhishthira asked a further question: if anyone among the Kaurava side wished to fight instead for dharma, they were free to cross over.
Yuyutsu stepped forward. In front of his own father, his ninety-nine other brothers, and the entire assembled army he had trained with his whole life, he crossed the field and joined the Pandavas. It was an act with no possibility of a quiet retreat afterward — from that moment, he was fighting to kill the brothers he had grown up beside, and there was no side he could return to if he changed his mind.
The Only One Left
Yuyutsu fought the entire eighteen days of the war on the Pandava side. When it ended, every one of his ninety-nine brothers by Gandhari lay dead, along with the vast majority of the Kaurava army. Yuyutsu was the sole surviving son of Dhritarashtra.
After the war, it was Yuyutsu, not any of the Pandavas, whom Yudhishthira appointed to help administer Hastinapur and to see to the needs of the blind, grieving Dhritarashtra and Gandhari in their final years — the same parents whose other hundred children he had helped defeat. He is a minor figure in most retellings, and rarely appears in the popular imagination of the Mahabharata at all, but he is the answer to a question that trips up almost everyone who thinks they know the story well: what happened to all hundred Kaurava brothers? Ninety-nine of them died. One of them switched sides before a single arrow was fired, and lived.
Continue the Saga
- Barbarik’s Boon: The Warrior Who Could Have Ended the War in One Arrow
- Bharata: The Brother Who Ruled with Someone Else’s Sandals on the Throne
- Satyavati: The Fisherman’s Daughter Who Became the Mother of the Mahabharata
- Jaya and Vijaya: The Gatekeepers Reborn Three Times to Fight Their Own Lord
- The Sita Who Never Went to Lanka: Agni, the Shadow, and the Meaning of the Fire Trial