The Pandavas and the Kauravas

At a Glance

• Central figures: The five Pandavas - Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva - and their hundred Kaurava cousins led by Duryodhana, all heirs of the Kuru dynasty of Hastinapura.
• Setting: The kingdom of Hastinapura and later Indraprastha, ending on the field of Kurukshetra; drawn from the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the Kuru dynasty.
• The turn: Shakuni rigs a game of dice, and Yudhishthira loses his kingdom, his brothers, and Draupadi; Duryodhana then refuses to return what was won by fraud, making war unavoidable.
• The outcome: The eighteen-day Kurukshetra War destroys nearly every great warrior of the Kuru line; the Pandavas win but inherit a kingdom emptied of almost everyone they loved.
• The legacy: The Bhagavad Gita - Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield - emerges from the war as one of the most enduring spiritual texts of the tradition.

Duryodhana was born two days after Yudhishthira, and those two days cost him everything. As the eldest son of the blind king Dhritarashtra, he had grown up watching his cousin receive what he believed was rightfully his - the throne of Hastinapura, the acclaim of the court, the love of every teacher who had ever judged them side by side. The Pandavas were stronger, more celebrated, and, in the eyes of the kingdom, more dharmic. Duryodhana was none of these things, and he knew it, and he never forgave any of them for it.

The conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas runs through the Mahabharata the way a crack runs through stone - not always visible at the surface, but going all the way down. What follows is the arc of that crack, from a shared childhood to a war that unmade the world they had both grown up in.

Two Fathers, Two Destinies

Pandu and Dhritarashtra were brothers. Dhritarashtra was the elder, but blind from birth, and so the throne passed to Pandu. Pandu married Kunti and Madri, but a sage’s curse left him unable to father children. Kunti had once received a boon from the rishi Durvasa - a mantra by which she could summon any god and bear his child. She used it three times, and Madri used it once for twins.

This is how the five Pandavas came into the world: Yudhishthira from Yama, the god of righteousness; Bhima from Vayu, the wind; Arjuna from Indra, the king of the gods; and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva from the Ashwini Kumars. When Pandu died in the forest, Dhritarashtra finally took the throne he had been passed over for. His hundred sons - the Kauravas, born from Gandhari’s long and strange gestation - grew up in the same palace as their fatherless cousins.

Dhritarashtra loved his sons with a love that saw nothing clearly. He knew Duryodhana’s jealousy. He knew what his son was capable of. He could not bring himself to stop it.

The Lac Palace

The first serious attempt on the Pandavas’ lives was elegant in its simplicity. Duryodhana and his uncle Shakuni arranged for the family to travel to the city of Varanavata, where a palace had been prepared for them - walls, floors, furniture, all built of jatugriha, lac soaked in oil and fat, as flammable as anything that could be made to look like a house. The plan was to burn it with the Pandavas inside while they slept.

Their uncle Vidura, who walked carefully between his loyalty to Dhritarashtra and his love for the Pandavas, warned Yudhishthira in veiled words before the journey. A miner was sent ahead. An escape tunnel was dug. When the palace was set alight, the Pandavas were already underground, and by the time Duryodhana’s men confirmed the fire, the five brothers and their mother Kunti were gone, moving through the dark toward the forest.

They survived. They said nothing publicly. They disappeared for a time, letting Hastinapura believe them dead, and they moved in disguise among the common people. Arjuna won Draupadi at her swayamvara - a bride-choice assembly - by stringing a bow no other man could bend and hitting a rotating target with a single arrow. The Pandavas had returned to the world, and they had brought with them a queen.

The City in the Wasteland

The return could not be ignored forever. Eventually Dhritarashtra brokered a division of the kingdom. Duryodhana kept Hastinapura with its green fields and trade routes. Yudhishthira was given Khandavaprastha - dry, barren, almost uninhabitable. A gift designed to humiliate.

The Pandavas took it. With Krishna’s help and the labor of the divine architect Maya, they drained the land and raised a city. They called it Indraprastha. It had a hall with floors so clear that Duryodhana, when he came as a guest, mistook water for marble and marble for water, stumbling and soaking himself in full view of the court while Draupadi laughed.

Yudhishthira then performed the Rajasuya Yagna, the great sacrifice that marked an emperor’s ascension. Kings came from across the subcontinent to pay tribute. Duryodhana watched all of it. He went home to Hastinapura carrying the memory of that laughter in Draupadi’s voice, and whatever restraint had remained in him dissolved.

The Dice Game

Shakuni was Gandhari’s brother and a man who could make loaded dice of any bones at hand. He went to Duryodhana with the simplest plan yet: invite Yudhishthira to a game of dice.

Yudhishthira could not refuse a challenge of that kind - it was against his understanding of dharma to decline a formal invitation from a kinsman. He knew he was not a skilled gambler. He sat down anyway, and Shakuni threw for Duryodhana.

He lost his treasury. He lost his kingdom. He staked his brothers, one by one, and lost each of them. Then he staked Draupadi. In the court of Hastinapura, with Dhritarashtra on the throne and every noble of the Kuru line looking on, Duryodhana ordered Draupadi dragged into the assembly hall and publicly disrobed. Dushasana took hold of her sari and pulled. The cloth kept coming - yards and yards of it, more than could possibly be there, until Dushasana’s arms gave out. Krishna had intervened from a distance, multiplying the cloth. Draupadi stood unharmed, but what had happened to her in that hall could not be undone.

She made her vow. She would not bind her hair again until she had washed it in Dushasana’s blood. Bhima swore the same.

The Pandavas were exiled - twelve years in the forest, one year in hiding, their identities secret. If they were recognized in that final year, the exile would begin again.

Thirteen Years

The Pandavas survived the forest. Arjuna went alone to the Himalayas and returned with weapons given by the gods themselves. Alliances were made with kings throughout the subcontinent. In the thirteenth year the five brothers took service in disguise at the court of King Virata, and they were not discovered.

At the end of the year they revealed themselves and sent Krishna to Hastinapura as their ambassador, seeking return of their half of the kingdom. Five villages, even. Anything.

Duryodhana refused. He would not give them land enough to place the point of a needle.

Kurukshetra

The war lasted eighteen days. Both sides had assembled armies vast enough to describe by the names of their formations rather than their numbers. Bhishma, the eldest patriarch of the Kuru line, led the Kaurava forces. Drona taught strategy on one side and fought on the other. Karna, who had been Duryodhana’s closest friend and champion for years, held the position of commander in the final days - and it was only after Karna fell that it became known, to most, that he had been Kunti’s firstborn son, older than Yudhishthira, the Pandavas’ lost eldest brother.

Krishna did not fight. He drove Arjuna’s chariot and sat between the two armies on the first morning, when Arjuna saw his teachers and uncles and cousins arrayed against him and could not raise his bow. What Krishna said to him then became the Bhagavad Gita. It concerned dharma, and action without attachment to the fruit of action, and the nature of the soul that does not die when the body falls.

The war killed nearly everyone. Bhishma was brought down on a bed of arrows, held alive by his own vow until the right moment to release it. Drona was tricked into believing his son was dead and died with his weapons down. Karna was killed while his chariot wheel was stuck in the earth and he stood defenseless, pleading the rules of war he had violated himself. On the eighteenth day, Bhima met Duryodhana alone, and Duryodhana fell.

After the Silence

Yudhishthira was crowned in Hastinapura. He ruled well and ruled long, but the grief of what the war had cost never left him. When the time came, all five brothers and Draupadi renounced the throne and walked north into the Himalayas, seeking moksha - liberation from the cycle of return. One by one the others fell on the long climb. Yudhishthira alone reached the summit, and what he found there is another story.

The Kuru line was not destroyed. But the world that had produced the Pandavas and the Kauravas - that particular flowering of ambition and honor and blood loyalty and ruin - was over. Kurukshetra was quiet. The field grew back.