A House Divided

Every great war has roots that reach back before the first blow. The Mahabharata knows this. So it begins its war not on a battlefield, but inside a family, generations early. To understand the fighting, we must first understand the house.

It begins with a prince named Bhishma. He was the rightful heir of the Kuru house. But to let his aging father marry again, he gave up two things at once, with a single mighty vow. He gave up his own claim to the throne. And he swore he would never marry and never have children of his own, so that no son of his could ever contest the line.

It was a fearsome promise, and the old stories say the gods themselves rained down flowers and called him Bhishma, "the one of the terrible vow." For the rest of his long life he kept it. But a vow so total left a cost. The royal line grew thin and troubled, and Bhishma would spend his years trying to hold together a house that kept breaking.

In time the throne passed down to two brothers. One was Dhritarashtra, the elder, who was born blind, and so could not rule alone. The other was Pandu, pale and able, who became king in his place. Two brothers, one who could see and could not rule, one who could rule but could not see well into his own heart. The seed of trouble was already there.

From these two brothers came the cousins whose quarrel is the heart of the epic. From Pandu came five sons, called the Pandavas — brave, bright, and loved. From the blind Dhritarashtra came a hundred sons, called the Kauravas, the eldest of them a proud and angry prince named Duryodhana. Five against a hundred. The two sets of cousins grew up together in one palace, sharing teachers and games — and growing, year by year, into rivals.

And now we must meet one more figure, one of the most moving in the whole poem. His name is Karna. Long before she was a queen, the lady Kunti, who would become mother of the Pandavas, bore a secret first child. Frightened and unwed, she laid the baby in a basket and set him afloat upon a river. A humble charioteer found him and raised him as his own son.

So Karna grew up not knowing he was a prince. He grew into a warrior of dazzling skill, the equal of the very greatest. He was famous for his giving — it was said he would refuse no one who asked. He was fierce in loyalty. By every measure of the heart, he was noble.

And yet, again and again, doors were shut in his face. Because the world believed he was the son of a charioteer, a man of low rank, he was mocked at the warriors' contest and told he had no right to compete with princes. The sting of that shut door shaped his whole life, and bent him, at last, toward the wrong side of the war. Here the epic touches a hard and tender question, and an honest teacher must pause at it. varna

The question is about varna — the broad orders of society we first met in the Vedic age — and about birth and worth. Was Karna shut out by a just order, or by a cruel one? People have read this differently for a very long time. So we step to the Threshold and look at both readings, with calm and with sources, before we return to the tale.