+

The Difficulty of Being Good

+ +

+
 +

ALSO BY GURCHARAN DAS

NOVEL
A Fine Family (1990)

PLAYS
Larins Sahib: A Play in Three Acts (1970)
Mira (1971)
9 Jakhoo Hill (1973)
Three English Plays (2001)

NON-FICTION
India Unbound (2000)
The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change (2002)

+ +

+
The Difficulty of
Being Good
On the Subtle
Art of Dharma
 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
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Copyright © 2009 by Gurcharan Das

First published in Allen Lane by Penguin Books India 2009

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Das, Gurcharan.
The difficulty of being good : on the subtle art of dharma / by Gurcharan Das.
p. cm.
Originally published: New Delhi : Allen Lane, 2009.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-975441-0 (pbk.)
1. Mahabharata—Criticism, interpretation, etc.
2. Mahabharata—Characters. 3. Dharma. I. Title.
BL1138.27.D37 2010
294.5'923—dc22
2010009508

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 +

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING GOOD
‘Through a series of bravura readings of the Mahabharata, Gurcharan
Das makes a learned and passionate attempt to inform how the great
Indian epic might illuminate our present-day moral dilemmas. Readers
will find his analyses of dharma insightful, challenging, and honest—
doing full justice to the world’s most complex, exciting and honest
poem.
This admirable book offers precisely the kind of reflection that the
epic itself invites—moral, political and public. It shows why the
Mahabharata is a classic: because it is ever timely. This superb book is
knowledgeable, passionate, and even courageous. Grounded in a secure
knowledge of the narrative, it raises key moral problems—from the
doctrine of just war to affirmative action to the nature of suffering—and
it makes striking attempts to link these with contemporary discussions
and issues, both public and personal.’
—Sheldon Pollock, William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian
Studies, Columbia University

‘The book is a wonderful combination of the scholarly and the personal,

+ the academic and the meditative. The basic plan works beautifully, +
building a rich mix of his very, very careful and detailed reading of the
text, his other wide reading, and his life in business; an extraordinary
blend. I found the use of evolutionary biology and the Prisoner’s
Dilemma to explain the pragmatism of the Mahabharata absolutely
brilliant.’
—Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions,
University of Chicago

‘I was very moved by this richly articulated, contemporary meditation

on the Mahabharata and the great human themes it embodies—above all
the question of what life means and what one might do to endow it
with purpose, within the inherently ambiguous and painful contexts in
which we always find ourselves. The book is a kind of miracle: a deeply
sensitive man suddenly decides to leave his usual routines and familiar
roles and to spend some years simply reading the Mahabharata and
seeing what the ancient epic has to tell him; he engages profoundly
with the text, with the bewildering profusion of its messages, its
tormented heroes, and the dramatic events it describes; and he then
finds the space and the right words for a thoughtful, highly personal,
philosophically informed, sceptical, sustained response. Such things

+
 +

happen only rarely in our generation, and we should all be grateful to

Gurcharan Das for this gift.’
—David Shulman, Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem

‘How can we live with moral balance in an arbitrary and uncertain

world? In this wise, passionate, and illuminating book, Gurcharan Das
turns to the classical Indian epic the Mahabharata for answers—and
finds, instead, a life of questioning, an ethical temper tolerant and
suspicious of ideology, in which certainty is no virtue and respect for
the projects of others is the appropriate response to life’s complexities.
Gurcharan Das’s book is a fitting tribute to Ingalls’s scholarly integrity
and Rawls’s insights about pluralism and respect. It is also one of the
best things I’ve read about the contribution of great literature to ethical
thought.’
—Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law
and Ethics, University of Chicago

‘Gurcharan Das is the rare author who can speak to businessmen,

modern-day savants and the uninitiated. This book is a scholarly
discussion of the intellectual framework of the subtleties of dharma, as
+ espoused by the Mahabharata. It brings out Gurcharan Das at his +
intellectual best. A must-read to resolve the moral dilemmas of life.’
—N.R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor, Infosys
Technologies Ltd

‘This book is a triple treat. It provides a subtle reading of episodes in

the Mahabharata. It uses those readings to raise consistently provocative
questions about the character of dharma. And it addresses important
questions about the character of our ethical lives . . . It wears its learning
lightly, prompting one to think, and hence it is a pleasure and a
provocation.’
—Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

‘The Difficulty of Being Good is a remarkable tour de force that connects

an ageless philosophical epic to the travails of contemporary society.
This book is for the liberal Hindu who does not want his religion co-
opted, for the modern Indian who wants to build a fair and inclusive
society and for the global citizen who is rendered asunder by moral
absolutism. The dharmic challenges we face every day resonate
throughout Gurcharan’s book. Reading this book has been an enriching
experience.’
—Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India

vi

+
 +

‘The Mahabharata is one of the outstanding achievements of the human

intellect and imagination and Gurcharan Das addresses its moral conflicts
based on a close reading of classical texts and an informed understanding
of modern philosophical arguments, making this book both instructive
and enjoyable.’
—Andre Bétéille, FBA, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Delhi

‘Gurcharan Das is a delightful story teller. He also invariably has a

point.’
—Rajat Kanta Ray, Vice-Chancellor, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan

‘Storytelling is an ancient art in India but the stories always had a

higher moral purpose. Gurcharan Das has mastered both the art and the
purpose. In this elegantly written book, he weaves many tales, both
personal and epic, to present a moral philosophy for individuals,
corporations, and governments of the twenty-first century.
The recent global economic crisis has revealed deep corruption and
lack of moral insight at the highest echelons of the economy . . .
showing that it is difficult to be good, a constant moral struggle
exemplified in the characters of the Mahabharata and in the stories and
moral tales narrated with such charm and force by Gurcharan Das.’
+ +
—Patrick Olivelle, Chair in the Humanities, Professor of Sanskrit, University
of Texas

‘Gurcharan Das’s personal search for dharma in the ancient epic uncovers
buried signposts to a desirable future polity. The Difficulty of Being Good
is a significant Indian contribution to a new, universal Enlightenment
that is not Western in origin or character. It is a delight to read a book
that wears its learning so elegantly and presents its arguments with
such panache.’
—Sudhir Kakar, author and psychoanalyst

‘The book is entertaining and thought-provoking, and will help many

people see connections between the Mahabharata and contemporary
issues—even when they encounter the epic for the first time. It is a book
for both those for whom it has always been part of their cultural
memory and for those who are reading for the first time this critical
composition from India’s rich and complex history. It offers insights
and suggestions even for scholars of Indian thought, literature and
history.’
—Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Professor of Comparative Religion and
Philosophy, Lancaster University

vii

+
 +

‘This book has done the rare thing of successfully invoking the
Mahabharata to help address the questions that one faces in one’s life.
Unlike many attempts to make the Mahabharata “relevant” to modern
life, this one takes the text seriously as a historical document and does
not gloss over the explicit uncertainties and uncomfortable ambiguities
that the text conveys. It is written in the expository memoir style that
Gurcharan Das used so effectively in India Unbound. The style
personalizes the questions and the quest for answers. It makes the work
come alive and holds one’s interest throughout. The added service that
the author provides is to show how the authors of the Mahabharata
engaged in the same sorts of central ethical issues (with sometimes
remarkably similar responses) as Western thinkers both ancient and
modern.
This book is a work of great insight. The Sanskritist, the philosopher,
and the intelligent lay reader will all benefit from spending time with
this work. There are few works on classical Indian thought for which
this is true. Das is to be congratulated for so effectively speaking to such
diverse audiences.’
—Richard W. Lariviere, Professor of Sanskrit and Provost and Vice Chancellor,
University of Kansas
+ +
‘It took me on a huge intellectual and emotional journey. And with
Gurcharan Das as guide, even familiar paths seemed to lead through
fresh landscapes . . . The secular humanism and intellectual humility
that shines through this beautiful book shows that—along with
everything else—the Mahabharata can provide just what the modern
world needs. Das’s rehabilitation of Yudhishthira is inspiring . . . showing
convincingly that [others] misunderstand his role. I came away feeling
more whole.’
—Dr Ian Proudfoot, Sanskrit scholar, Australian National University

viii

+
 +

For my two teachers:

John Rawls, who taught me philosophy, and
Daniel Ingalls, who taught me Sanskrit

+ +

+
 +

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements xiii
A Note on Rendering Sanskrit into English xiv
The Central Story of the Mahabharata xvi
Dramatis Personae xxv
Genealogical Table xxviii
Chronology xxix

+ Prelude xxxi +
I take an academic holiday
1. Duryodhana’s Envy 1
‘What man of mettle will stand to see his rivals
prosper and himself decline?’
2. Draupadi’s Courage 33
‘Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?’
3. Yudhishthira’s Duty 63
‘I act because I must’
4. Arjuna’s Despair 88
‘There are no victors in war’
5. Bhishma’s Selflessness 117
‘Be intent on the act, not on its fruits’
6. Karna’s Status Anxiety 151
‘How could a doe give birth to a tiger?’

+
 +

xii / Contents

7. Krishna’s Guile 183

‘That is the way it is!’
8. Ashwatthama’s Revenge 213
‘Now I feel the whirligig of Time’
9. Yudhishthira’s Remorse 234
‘This victory feels more like defeat to me’
10. Mahabharata’s Dharma 256
‘Great king, you weep with all creatures’
Conclusion 276
The difficulty of being good

Dharma—The Story of a Word 306

A Short Bibliographic Essay 312
Notes 329
Index 421
+ +

+
 +

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My happiest task is to thank friends, acquaintances and relatives

who encouraged, educated, inspired and generally kept me in
line during my dharma journey. I could write an amusing essay
about how they did this but rather than embarrass them, I shall
merely acknowledge their contribution by naming them below
in alphabetical order. I apologize if I have missed anyone. Dan
Arnold, Dániel Balogh, Andre Bétéille, Jacob Blakesley, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Krishan Chopra, Bhagwan Choudhary, Steven +
+
Collins, P. Cooper, Lance Dane, Larry Dare, Bunu Basnyat Das,
Kim Kanishka Das, Puru Pulakesin Das, Robin Desser, Wendy
Doniger, Stephen Espie, Paul Friedrich, Robert Goldman,
B.N. Goswamy, Vineet Haksar, Alf Hiltebeitel, David Housego,
Ronald Inden, Sudhir Kakar, Matthew Kapstein, Daniel Kurtz-
Phelan, P. Lal, Richard Lariviere, T.N. Madan, Pratap Bhanu
Mehta, Tanya Menon, Udayan Mitra, Lynn Nesbit, Jim Nye,
Martha Nussbaum, Ralph Nicholas, Philip Oldenburg, Patrick
Olivelle, Isabelle Onians, Gieve Patel, Stephen Phillips, Sheldon
Pollock, Ian Proudfoot, Vaughan Pilikian, Chakravarthi Ram-
Prasad, A.K. Ramanujan, Raju Rana, Lloyd Rudolph, Susanne
Rudolph, Ravi Singh, David Shulman, Manjushree Thapa, Romila
Thapar, Tom Teal, Uma Waide and Mike Witzell.

xiii

+
 +

A NOTE ON RENDERING SANSKRIT

INTO ENGLISH

I like to show off my learning as much as the next person but

since this book is for a wider audience I have tried to be reader-
friendly in rendering Sanskrit words into English. Scholars
traditionally use daunting diacritical marks to distinguish between
long and short vowels in Sanskrit. I have dispensed with these
irritations. Sanskrit also employs three forms of ‘s’ and in the
+ interest of simplicity I have reduced them simply to ‘sh’ and ‘s’. +
Thus, I have rendered, for example, the transliterated ‘Krsna’... of
the scholars as the more familiar ‘Krishna’. However, when
quoting a scholar in the notes, I had to naturally stick to the
original transliterated words. Occasionally, I had to break this
rule when distinguishing in the text between two apparently
identical words, such as Krishna, the god, and Krisna, the epithet
of Draupadi (the long ‘a’ at the end denoting the feminine).
I was tempted to drop the final short ‘a’ of Sanskrit as modern
Indian languages tend to. Thus, Krishna becomes ‘Krishan’,
Arjuna becomes ‘Arjun’, Dharma becomes ‘Dharam’ and
Hastinapura becomes ‘Hastinapur’. This is how Indian readers
know the epic names. However, I decided against this for I felt
that the Mahabharata is, after all, a Sanskrit text and it would take
something away from its epic quality.
To avoid cluttering the text with italics I also made the practical
decision of not italicizing the most frequently used Sanskrit
words. These words are dharma, karma, brahmin and kshatriya.

xiv

+
 +

A Note on Rendering Sanskrit into English / xv

I have also preferred not to translate ‘dharma’ and ‘kshatriya’ as

van Buitenen did and fell far short of the mark. Dharma, in any
case, is at the heart of the poem; it is not only untranslatable, but
the Mahabharata’s characters are still trying to figure it out at the
epic’s end.

+ +

+
 +

THE CENTRAL STORY OF

THE MAHABHARATA

The Mahabharata is the story of a futile and terrible war of

annihilation between the children of two brothers of the Bharata
clan. Set in and around Hastinapura, ‘elephant city’, in the fertile
region around modern-day Delhi, it recounts the rivalry between
the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, and the Kauravas, the
hundred sons of his brother, Dhritarashtra.
+ The conflict begins when Dhritarashtra, the elder of two princes, +
is passed over as king because he is blind. Pandu assumes
power, but he has been cursed to die if he has sex. Kunti, his
wife, comes to the rescue of the dynasty. When she was young,
she had looked after the ill-tempered sage Durvasa with
extraordinary hospitality. He had rewarded her with a boon—a
mantra by which she could invoke any god and have a child by
him. Kunti uses the boon to obtain three sons—Yudhishthira,
Bhima and Arjuna—from the gods Dharma, Vayu and Indra
respectively. She also teaches the mantra to Pandu’s second wife,
Madri, who has the younger twins, Nakula and Sahadeva, by the
Ashvins (the divine stars of sunrise and sunset). Despite their
divine parentage, the children are called ‘Pandavas’, the sons of
Pandu.
After a series of wars, Pandu renounces the throne and becomes
a wandering hermit—leaving Dhritarashtra to rule the imperial
city. Soon a rivalry develops over the succession. Prince
Duryodhana, the eldest son of Dhritarashtra, disputes the right

xvi

+
 +

The Central Story of the Mahabharata / xvii

of the eldest Pandava, Yudhishthira, to take over the throne.

Angry and vengeful, Duryodhana attempts to assassinate his
cousins, who are forced to flee for their lives. While they are
away, the five Pandavas jointly marry Princess Draupadi and
also meet their cousin Krishna, who is God, and who becomes
their friend and companion for life.
In the hope of averting conflict, King Dhritarashtra divides the
kingdom, giving the barren half to the Pandavas. Despite their
disadvantages, the accomplished Pandavas work hard and
prosper. They rule justly, expand their territories through
conquests and alliances, and build a striking, grand capital called
Indraprastha (which some archaeologists believe is buried under
present-day Delhi). Soon they are widely acknowledged to have
become the paramount power. To commemorate his rise to
imperial power, Yudhishthira performs the ancient rajasuya
ceremony of consecration where dozens of rulers come laden
with expensive gifts and pay tribute to acknowledge his imperial
+ claim.
+
Intensely envious of his cousins’ success, Duryodhana devises
a scheme with his uncle, Shakuni, to usurp their half of the
kingdom in a rigged game of dice. Yudhishthira loses everything,
including himself and his family, in a grand gambling match in
the Hastinapura assembly. His wife, Queen Draupadi, is dragged
into the assembly, where Duryodhana’s brother, Duhshasana,
attempts to disrobe her. But an extraordinary thing happens.
Each time her dress is being stripped off, another appears, and
this goes on until a pile of clothes is heaped in the middle of the
hall.
As a compromise, the Pandavas are allowed to retain their
patrimony, provided they go into exile for twelve years and
spend a thirteenth in disguise in society without being discovered.
During their wanderings, they face hardship, encounter sages
and enchanted spirits, and have many adventures. In the
thirteenth year, they move to the capital city of the kingdom of

+
 +

xviii / The Central Story of the Mahabharata

Virata, where they have perilous and hilarious escapades. To

avoid being discovered, they assume disguises: Yudhishthira
becomes a dice master at the royal court; Draupadi, the queen’s
handmaiden; Bhima, a cook in the royal kitchen; Nakula, a
groom in the stables; Arjuna dresses like a woman and gets the
job of a eunuch to guard the ladies’ chambers and teach the royal
women dancing; and Sahadeva looks after the royal cattle.
Duryodhana sends spies to find them, but the Pandavas are
undetected during their year of masquerade.
After thirteen years in exile and several attempts on their lives
by the Kauravas, the Pandavas return to reclaim their inheritance.
They have fulfilled the terms of the agreement and now expect
the restoration of their kingdom. But Duryodhana refuses.
Elaborate peace negotiations ensue. Krishna personally leads the
final embassy to the court of Hastinapura in a last-ditch effort to
broker a peace, hoping that his godly stature and neutrality
(somewhat compromised though it is) will help to reach a
+ settlement between the warring cousins. But the intractable +
Duryodhana is unmoved.
Krishna tells the Pandavas, ‘War is the only course left.’ The
mood of the epic then changes to dread and foreboding at the
approaching horror of the war. Both sides make furious
preparations. Yudhishthira assembles seven armies against eleven
of the Kauravas. All the great kingdoms of the time are allied to
one or the other side.
As the war is about to begin, the epic’s focus is on Arjuna, the
greatest warrior of his age, who stands at the head of his troops.
His debonair and confident charioteer, Krishna, halts their chariot
between the two armies. As he surveys the field full of his
kinsmen, Arjuna is filled with a strange pity. He puts down his
magical Gandiva bow and refuses to fight. Krishna doesn’t have
much success in persuading Arjuna until he resorts to his authority
as God. The awestruck Pandava sees the most amazing sights,
and can only say, ‘I salute you. I salute you in front and from
behind and on all sides.’

+
 +

The Central Story of the Mahabharata / xix

The first ten days of the war are indecisive. The ancient
patriarch of the Bharatas, Bhishma, leads the Kaurava army in
repelling the Pandavas successfully. Bhishma is the eldest son of
Shantanu, the Bharata king and ancestor of the Pandavas and
Kauravas. He would have succeeded to the throne had his father
not fallen in love with Satyavati, the daughter of the chief of a
tribe of fishermen. As a condition of their marriage, the bride’s
father was adamant that the kingship should descend on
Satyavati’s children. To make his father happy, Bhishma
renounced his right to the kingdom and vowed to remain celibate
to avoid potential disputes in succeeding generations.
Although he has come out of retirement, Bhishma begins to
decimate the armies of the Pandavas, who realize that their
‘grandfather’ must be eliminated if they are to win. Since Bhishma
had told them that he would never strike a woman—or someone
who had been a woman—the Pandavas call upon their ally,
Shikhandi—who had changed her sex—to appear before Bhishma.
+ Seeing him/her, Bhishma lays down his bow, and Arjuna pierces
+
him with twenty-five arrows. Bhishma falls from his chariot, not
on the ground but on a bed of the arrows with which he had
been transfixed. Because of his remarkable vow of celibacy,
Bhishma had received the gift of choosing his time of death. So,
he prefers to lie on his bed of arrows through to the end of the
war.
After Bhishma’s death, Drona becomes leader of the Kaurava
armies. He has been the revered teacher of martial arts to both
the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Like Bhishma, he accepts his
post reluctantly because of his affection for the Pandavas,
especially his favourite pupil, Arjuna. On the twelfth day of the
war, Drona is able to divert Arjuna to the southern end of the
battlefield, and he creates an impenetrable military formation,
the chakra vyuha, in the form of a lotus-like circular array. In it,
he places the greatest Kaurava warriors, and they advance
menacingly against Yudhishthira.

+
 +

xx / The Central Story of the Mahabharata

The only one in the Pandava forces besides Arjuna who knows
how to penetrate the chakra vyuha is his sixteen-year-old son,
Abhimanyu. Yudhishthira turns to him, but the young warrior
warns his uncle, ‘My father taught me how to enter but not how
to come out.’ Abhimanyu’s arrowhead pierces the chakra vyuha,
and he smashes his way in. Once he is inside, powerful Jayadratha,
ruler of Sindhu, quickly moves his troops and seals the breach.
Bhima and the others are unable to enter, and Abhimanyu is
trapped behind enemy lines. The boy fights valiantly, single-
handedly causing so much destruction that Duryodhana is
frightened. It takes the top six Kaurava generals (including
Karna, Drona, Kripa and Ashwatthama) to subdue the ‘lion’s
cub’.
When Arjuna hears of his son’s death, he weeps bitterly,
blaming himself for not teaching the boy how to exit the military
formation. He vows to kill Jayadratha before sunset the next
day—if not, he says, he will immolate himself. Krishna censures
+ him for this rash oath. On the following day, Arjuna rages over
+
the battlefield, inflicting terrible losses on the enemy. But he
makes no headway against Jayadratha, who is well guarded.
Finally, he reaches Jayadratha at the end of the day. But it is too
late—he must still subdue six warriors who are protecting
Jayadratha—an impossible task in the few minutes before sunset.
Krishna saves the day—he plays a trick on the king of Sindhu,
making him believe that the sun has set. Jayadratha lets down
his guard and Arjuna pierces him with a fierce arrow.
Krishna also kills Drona through trickery. He advises the
Pandavas to kill an elephant named Ashwatthama—also the
name of Drona’s son—and spread the word about his death.
When Drona encounters Yudhishthira, he asks if the rumour is
true; Yudhishthira replies that Ashwatthama—he says ‘elephant’
under his breath—is indeed dead. Hearing this, Drona lays
down his weapons, assumes a yogic posture, and
Dhrishtadyumna, Draupadi’s brother, cuts off his head. This is

+
 +

The Central Story of the Mahabharata / xxi

the only time that Yudhishthira told what was understood as a

lie, and his chariot, which always moved slightly above the
ground, sinks to the earth.
After Drona, Duryodhana appoints Karna as commander-in-
chief of the Kauravas on the sixteenth day of the war. Unknown
to the Pandavas, Karna is the eldest son of Kunti, their mother,
and the sun god. Long before her marriage to Pandu, she had
accidentally invoked the god through a boon, and found herself
with an unwanted child, which was born with protective armour
and earrings of immortality. Ashamed and desperate to hide her
affair, Kunti set the infant afloat on a river, praying for his safety.
Adhiratha, a charioteer, picked up the baby and took it home to
his childless wife, Radha, who brought him up with great
affection. Although he grows up a charioteer’s son, the prince by
birth acquires extraordinary martial skills and yearns to be a
champion warrior. At a tournament of princes, he challenges
Arjuna, but is disqualified because of his low birth. Duryodhana,
+ however, is delighted to discover someone who can match
+
Arjuna. From that day he makes Karna a lifelong ally and friend.
The lowly epithet, ‘charioteer’s son’, nevertheless continues to
dog him. Karna vies for Draupadi’s hand at her swayamvara,
where young, ambitious noblemen have come from afar. To help
her decide, Draupadi poses a difficult test—the winner must
string an extremely stiff bow and with it hit a golden target
suspended in the sky. All the princes fail except Karna, but the
beautiful and haughty princess rejects him, saying, ‘I do not
choose a charioteer!’
Krishna realizes that victory will be difficult with Karna on the
opposite side. So he reveals to him the secret of his royal birth
and asks him to defect. As Kunti’s son, he says, Karna is the
eldest ‘Pandava’. If he crosses over, he will become king. Knowing
his weakness for Draupadi, Krishna entices him with the prospect
of enjoying her—sharing her as a wife with his brothers. This is
a tempting offer. It is his chance to rise from being Duryodhana’s

+
 +

xxii / The Central Story of the Mahabharata

retainer to king of the realm—and to be acknowledged as a

genuine kshatriya or peer. Even so Karna refuses to switch sides,
saying that his ‘real’ parents are the low caste family who have
brought him up, not the royal family to which he had been born.
The seventeenth day of the war goes well for the Kauravas.
Karna betters Yudhishthira twice. The tide, however, begins to
turn in the afternoon. Just before sundown, the epic’s two greatest
heroes meet. Karna shoots a dazzling arrow that is spitting fire,
at Arjuna’s head. Krishna presses down their chariot in the nick
of time. The arrow misses Arjuna’s head but knocks off his
crown. As Arjuna gets ready to retaliate, the left wheel of
Karna’s chariot gets stuck in the bloody mire of the ground. As
he descends to lift it out, Karna reminds Arjuna that the rules of
battle do not permit an enemy to strike a warrior who is not
prepared. Arjuna hesitates but Krishna urges him on, ‘Waste no
more time, go on, shoot . . .’ Arjuna lets loose his Anjalika
weapon at the helpless Karna, striking him on the head—‘the
+ beautiful head, with a face that resembled a lotus of a thousand
+
petals fell down on the earth like the thousand rayed sun at the
close of the day’. Once again, the Pandavas have won unfairly.
The war is almost over now. All the great warriors on the
Kaurava side are dead. In despair, Duryodhana leaves the
battlefield and hides in a lake nearby. The Pandavas manage to
find him and choose Bhima to fight the last duel. As the duel
begins, Krishna doubts if Bhima will be able to defeat his
adversary in a fair fight—he will need some sort of dodge.
Arjuna gets the point, and slaps his left thigh, signalling to
Bhima to strike a blow, unfairly, below the navel. Bhima hurls
his mace at Duryodhana’s thigh, smashing it.
As he lies dying, Duryodhana enumerates the god Krishna’s
many misdeeds, accusing him of perfidy in the way he had all
the Kaurava commanders killed. Krishna’s defence is that once
the peace talks failed, and Duryodhana refused to part with five
villages to the Pandavas, the only thing that mattered was

+
 +

The Central Story of the Mahabharata / xxiii

victory for the just side. Krishna now becomes grave and tells the
victors: ‘Kauravas were great warriors and you could not have
defeated them in a fair fight. So, I had to use deceit, trickery and
magic on your behalf . . . It is evening, let us go home and rest.’
The same night, Ashwatthama, Drona’s son, vows revenge.
Only three Kauravas have survived, and they manage to flee
from the jubilant Pandavas, taking refuge in a forest.
Ashwatthama sees a guileful owl swoop down on crows sleeping
in a tree. ‘This owl has tutored me in war,’ he says, and with his
companions he sets off for the victorious camp of the sleeping
Pandava armies. They set the camp on fire, and Ashwatthama
slays all the Pandava warriors in an orgy of slaughter. The five
Pandava brothers and Draupadi survive miraculously, but all of
Draupadi’s children are killed. Eventually Ashwatthama is
punished for his heinous deed—he has to wander the earth,
alone and anonymous, for three thousand years.
The only one who rejoices at Ashwatthama’s act is
+ Dhritarashtra. When the Pandavas come to console the blind +
king over the death of his children, Dhritarashtra rises to embrace
Bhima, but Krishna, sensing devious thoughts in the old man,
instantly substitutes an iron image of Bhima. The powerfully
built king embraces the statue with all his desperate strength,
and crushes it to pieces. (It was Bhima who had killed his
favourite son, Duryodhana.) Despite the enmity, Yudhishthira
behaves magnanimously towards Dhritarashtra after the
devastating eighteen-day war.
A sense of horror and melancholy dominates the victors’
mood. Almost everyone is dead and there is no joy in ruling over
an empty kingdom. Yudhishthira, in particular, is inconsolable.
Deeply troubled by the hollowness of a victory which was
achieved by crooked means, he decides to abdicate the throne
and retire to the forest—creating a crisis for the state. Bhishma,
the patriarch, lectures the reluctant king on the dharma of a
monarch from his bed of arrows. Yudhishthira is gradually
reconciled to the tragedy of war and to his duty of kingship.

+
 +

xxiv / The Central Story of the Mahabharata

The end of the epic is a time of twilight. After ruling for thirty-
six years, the Pandavas feel weary and disillusioned. Krishna
dies a banal death. As he is resting on the bank of a river, a
hunter mistakes his foot for a bird, killing him with an arrow.
After that the Pandavas decide that it is time to leave the world.
They crown Abhimanyu’s son Parikshit (Arjuna’s grandson) to
continue the dynasty at Hastinapura. The five brothers, along
with Draupadi, set out for the ‘city of the gods’ in the Himalayas.
On the way, they fall one by one, except Yudhishthira, who
alone reaches heaven.

+ +

+
 +

DRAMATIS PERSONAE
(In alphabetical order)

Abhimanyu, son of Arjuna and Subhadra

Adhiratha, adoptive father of Karna
Arjuna, son of Pandu and Kunti, fathered by the god Indra
Ashwatthama, son of Drona
Bharata, son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala, who gave the name
to the dynasty from whom the Pandavas and the Kauravas are
+ +
descended
Bhima, son of Pandu and Kunti, fathered by Vayu (the wind god)
Bhishma, son of Shantanu and Ganga, great-uncle of the Pandavas
and Kauravas
Dharma, the god Dharma, father of Yudhishthira
Dhrishtadyumna, son of Drupada, brother of Draupadi
Dhritarashtra, father of the Kauravas, husband of Gandhari,
brother of Pandu; fathered by Vyasa by levirate (with Ambika)
Draupadi, daughter of Drupada, wife of the Pandavas
Drona, teacher of the Pandavas and Kauravas
Drupada, king of Panchala, father of Dhrishtadyumna and
Draupadi
Duhshasana, second son of Dhritarashtra
Duryodhana, eldest son and heir of Dhritarashtra; also called
Suyodhana

xxv

+
 +

xxvi / Dramatis Personae

Ganga, the river Ganges, mother of Bhishma

Gandhari, princess of Gandhara, wife of Dhritarashtra, mother of
the Kauravas
Janamejaya, great-grandson of Arjuna, at whose snake sacrifice
the Mahabharata is narrated
Karna, son of Kunti by the sun god, adopted by the charioteer
Adhiratha and Radha
Kaurava, any descendant of Kuru, but specifically the children of
Dhritarashtra
Kripa, teacher of the Kauravas and Pandavas
Krishna, son of the Vrishni king Vasudeva by Devaki; brother of
Subhadra, Arjuna’s second wife
Kunti, Pandu’s wife, mother of the three Pandavas, Yudhishthira,
Arjuna and Bhima
Kuru, ancestor of the Bharatas, eponym of the Kauravas
+ +
Madri, Pandu’s second wife, who bore him Nakula and Sahadeva
by the Ashvins; she cremated herself with Pandu, entrusting her
children to Kunti
Nakula, son of Pandu by Madri, fathered by the Ashvins
Pandava, the five sons of Pandu
Pandu, father of the Pandavas; husband of Kunti, brother of
Dhritarashtra; fathered by Vyasa by levirate (with Ambalika)
Parikshit, son of Abhimanyu by Uttara; grandson of Arjuna;
father of Janamejaya
Radha, foster mother of Karna
Sahadeva, youngest of the Pandavas, son of Pandu and Madri;
fathered by the Ashvins
Shakuni, son of the Gandhara king Subala, brother of Gandhari,
maternal uncle of Duryodhana and the Kauravas; also called
Saubala

+
 +

Dramatis Personae / xxvii

Shantanu, great-grandfather of the Pandavas and Kauravas;

grandfather of Pandu and Dhritarashtra; father of Bhishma (with
Ganga); husband of Satyavati
Shikhandi, daughter of Drupada, later became a man; ally of the
Pandavas
Subhadra, daughter of Vasudeva and sister of Krishna; wife of
Arjuna
Vidura, adviser to Dhritarashtra, son of Vyasa by a commoner,
uncle of the Pandavas and Kauravas
Vikarna, a son of Dhritarashtra
Vyasa, epithet of Krishna Dvaipayana, legendary author of the
Mahabharata: premarital son of Satyavati; by levirate, father of
Dhritarashtra (by Ambika), Pandu (by Ambalika), and Vidura
(by a commoner)
Yudhishthira, eldest son of Kunti, fathered by Dharma; heir of
+ Pandu; also called Ajatshatru +

+
 Lunar Dynasty GENEALOGICAL TABLE
Brahma
Atri
Soma
..
.
Nahusa
Yayati
..
.
Bharata
..
.
Kuru
..
.
Ganga Shantanu Satyavati Parasara

Chitrangada Vichitravirya Ambika

Bhishma
Ambalika Vyasa a shudra woman

Dhritarashtra Gandhari
(Shakuni’s sister)
Vidura
KAURAVAS Duryodhana Duhshasana + 98 brothers, 1 sister

Kunti (Krishna’s aunt) Pandu Madri (Shalya’s sister)

(Surya)
(Dharma) (Vayu) (Indra) (Ashvins)
Karna

Draupadi PANDAVAS Yudhishthira Bhima Subhadra Arjuna Nakula Sahadeva

(Dhrishtadyumna (Krishna’s Abhimanyu
Uttara
and Shikhandi’s sister) sister) Parikshit
5 sons
Janamejaya
..
.
 +

CHRONOLOGY

c. 2500–1500 BC* Indus Valley civilization

c. 1500 BC Rig Veda is composed
c. 1200–900 BC Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, Atharva Veda
c. 950 BC Kurukshetra War in the Mahabharata
probably takes place
c. 650–400 BC Early Upanishads are composed
c. 483 BC Death of Gautama, the Buddha
c. 468 BC Death of Mahavira, the founder of
+ Jainism +
c. 400 BC–300 AD Mahabharata is composed (according to
conventional scholarly wisdom; I prefer
the dating of 150 BC–0 AD)
c. 300–100 BC Dharma texts (Dharma Sutras) are
composed
327–25 BC Alexander the Great invades Punjab,
India
c. 324 BC Chandragupta founds the Maurya
dynasty (324–185 BC)
c. 265–232 BC Ashoka reigns
c. 200 BC–200 AD Ramayana is composed
c. 185 BC Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty
(185–73 BC)
c. 100 AD* Manu composes his famous text on
dharma
c. 320–550 AD Gupta dynasty rules from Pataliputra
(Patna)

xxix

+
xxx / Chronology

c. 400 AD Kalidasa writes the play Shakuntala based

on a story in the Mahabharata
788–820 AD Shankara, philosopher, writes a
commentary on the Gita
820–890 AD Anandavardhana, Kashmiri author,
comments on the Mahabharata’s aesthetics
c. 1650–1670 Nilakantha Chaturdhara’s vulgate text
and commentary on the Mahabharata

xxx
 +

PRELUDE
I take an academic holiday

What is here is found elsewhere.

What is not here is nowhere.
—Mahabharata I.56.34–35

In the spring of 2002 I decided to take an academic holiday. My

+ wife thought it a strange resolve. She was familiar with our +
usual holidays, when we armed ourselves with hats and blue
guides and green guides and trudged up and down over piles of
temple stones in faraway places like Khajuraho and Angkor Wat.
She also knew of our visits to our beach house near Alibagh,
where we went away with a dozen books and did nothing else
but read. But she was puzzled at the prospect of an academic
holiday.
As she moved to get up from her chair, I hastened to explain.
I had studied philosophy and read the great books of the West
during college. But I had never read the classics of my own
country. The closest I had come was to take Daniel Ingalls’s
Sanskrit classes at Harvard as an undergraduate.1 Now, forty
years later, I yearned to go back and read the texts of classical
India, if not in the original, at least with a scholar of Sanskrit
nearby. My wife gave me a sceptical look, and after a pause she
said, ‘It’s a little late in the day for a mid-life crisis, isn’t it?’ I
looked at her—she was still a handsome woman with extremely

xxxi

+
 +

xxxii / Prelude

fine skin. ‘Why don’t we go to the Turkish coast instead?’ she

added.
After an absorbing career in multinational companies in six
countries, I had taken early retirement at fifty to become a full-
time writer. My wife and I had settled in Delhi, where I began
to write a Sunday column for the Times of India and other
newspapers. I travelled widely across the country in the 1990s
and from these travels emerged a book, India Unbound. In it I
wrote about India’s economic rise and concluded that it was
increasingly possible to believe that soon, perhaps for the first
time in history, Indians would emerge from a struggle against
want into an age when the large majority would be at ease.
Prosperity had indeed begun to spread across India, but
goodness had not. I was angered and troubled in early 2009 by
a scandal that posed a challenge to our conception of worldly
success. B. Ramalinga Raju had built through talent, skill and
dedication an outstanding and respected software company, and
+ then committed the greatest fraud in Indian corporate history by
+
swindling his company of Rs 7,136 crore. As a result, the public—
both Indian and foreign investors—had lost around Rs 23,000
crore in the value of their shares, and the 50,000 employees of
Satyam faced an uncertain future.
I had met Raju ten years earlier. I had looked him in the eye
and I had seen sincerity, competence and great purpose. Soon
after, I had run into one of his customers in the US and she spoke
glowingly about Satyam’s dedication to quality, reliability and
integrity. There is no tribute greater than a satisfied, passionate
customer, and it explained to my foggy mind, at least in part,
why India had become the world’s second fastest growing
economy. Why should a person of such palpable achievement,
who lacked nothing in life, turn to crime? What was the nature
of moral failure in the case of the investment bankers on Wall
Street who brought the world economy to its knees in 2008?
Greed is too easy an answer. There must be more to it.

+
 +

Prelude / xxxiii

I wondered if the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, held any

answers. The epic is obsessed with questions of right and wrong—
it analyses human failures constantly. Unlike the Greek epics,
where the hero does something wrong and gets on with it, the
action stops in the Mahabharata until every character has weighed
in on the moral dilemma from every possible angle. In the Indian
epic, harmony and happiness come to a society only through
behaviour based on dharma—a complex word that means
variously virtue, duty and law, but is chiefly concerned with
doing the right thing. Would I be able to recover a meaningful
ideal of civic virtue from India’s foundational text?
Moral failure pervaded our public life and hung over it like
Delhi’s smog. One out of five members of the Indian parliament
elected in 2004 had criminal charges against him.2 A survey by
a Harvard professor had found that one out of every four
teachers in government primary schools is absent and one out of
four is simply not teaching.3 A World Bank study found that two
+ out of five doctors do not show up at state primary health
+
centres and that 69 per cent of their medicines are stolen.4 A
cycle rickshaw driver in Kanpur routinely pays a fifth of his
daily earnings in bribes to the police. A farmer cannot hope to
get a clear title to his land without bribing a revenue official and
that too after a humiliating ordeal of countless visits to the
revenue office.
In despair, I watched teachers—once revered as gurus and
moral guides—fail their students; and political leaders, who had
the duty to uphold the law, become lawbreakers. The abuse of
power is a routine matter in the world’s largest democracy, and
the entire political class has united in recent years in order to
prevent political and electoral reform. It was an amazing spectacle
to see the country turning middle class alongside the most
appalling governance. In the midst of a booming private economy,
Indians despair over the delivery of the simplest public goods.
Social scientists think of governance failures as a problem of

+
 +

xxxiv / Prelude

institutions, and the solution, they say, lies in changing the

structure of incentives to enhance accountability. True, but these
failings also have a moral dimension.


When I announced my plan to spend the next few years reading
the Mahabharata, my mother, who lived 400 km away at her
guru’s ashram by the river Beas, reminded me that my restlessness
was not inappropriate to the third stage of the Hindu life. Called
vanaprastha, literally ‘one who goes to the forest’, such a person
spends his time in reflection and searches for life’s meaning. She
said that I was suffering from ‘vanaprastha melancholy’.
In the classical Indian way of life, the first stage is
brahmacharya—the period of adolescence when one is a student
and celibate. In the worldly second stage, called garhasthya,
‘householder’, a person produces, procreates, provides security
+ for the family while engaging in worldly pleasure. At the third +
stage, one begins to disengage from worldly pursuits, and in the
fourth and final stage, sannyasa, one renounces the world in
quest of spiritual release from human bondage.5
My mother had commended my decision to take early
retirement so that I might, as she put it, ‘have a rich and
prolonged third stage’. Now that I was speaking about dharma
and my restlessness, she insinuated that I had detached myself
insufficiently from worldly concerns. While I was not expected
to become a ‘forest-dweller’, she felt that my mental makeup
remained that of a ‘lowly second stage householder’.
I explained in my defence that I was attracted to the old idea
of life’s stages partly because the dharma texts recognized the
value of the second stage, which was the indispensable material
basis of civilization. It was important to remember this in a
country that has long been mesmerized by the romantic figure of
‘the renouncer’, even before the Buddha came along.6 My mother,
however, was spot on in recognizing ‘my third stage melancholy’.

+
 +

Prelude / xxxv

During my second stage, I had felt as though I was waking up

each morning, going to work, and feeding my family—only to
repeat it the following day, as my children would after me and
their children after them. What was the point of it all? Now in
my third stage, I wanted to find a better way to live.
Meanwhile, my friends and acquaintances were incredulous.
‘So, what is this I hear about wanting to go away to read old
books?’ one asked me at a dinner party. ‘Don’t tell me you are
going to turn religious on us!’ exclaimed another. My wife began
to explain my idea of an ‘academic holiday’ to some of the
guests, who reciprocated with suitable looks of sympathy. ‘Tell
us, what books are you planning to read?’ asked a retired civil
servant. A self-proclaimed ‘leftist and secularist’, who had once
been a favourite of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, he had
the gruff, domineering accent of an English aristocrat, not
surprising in a former civil servant of the old school. I admitted
reluctantly that I had been thinking of reading the Mahabharata,
+ the Manusmriti, the Kathopanishad perhaps, and . . .
+
‘Good Lord, man!’ he exclaimed. ‘You haven’t turned saffron,
have you?’
The remark upset me. Saffron is, of course, the colour of
Hindu right-wing nationalism, and I wondered what sort of
secularism is it that regards the reading of Sanskrit texts as a
political act. I was disturbed that I had to fear the intolerance of
my ‘secular’ friends as much as the bigotry of the Hindu Right,
which had become a force in Indian politics over the past two
decades with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
‘Why are you going to read them?’ my persecutor demanded.
‘Well, perhaps, to learn to be good,’ I answered with a weak
smile.
‘No such thing as Hindu ethics,’ he scoffed. ‘It all comes down
to who you are in the pecking order. Frankly, it is too passive for
my taste—all this non-violence business of Gandhi’s. It’s also too
negative—keeping one’s anger in check, not doing wrong, not

+
 +

xxxvi / Prelude

injuring. Give me Marx any day—now that is about changing the

world!’
Surrounded by narrow and rigid positions on both sides, it
was becoming increasingly difficult to be a ‘liberal Hindu’. The
extremism of the ‘secularists’ was a reaction to the intolerance of
the Hindu nationalists who regarded Muslims as their natural
enemies. But the contempt of the secularists for religion per se
prevented them from gaining sympathy. What sort of ideas, I
wondered, might help to give meaning to life when one is in the
midst of fundamentalist persons of all kinds who believe that
they have a monopoly on truth and some are even willing to kill
to prove that?


Hinduism is not a ‘religion’ in the usual sense. It is a civilization
based on a simple metaphysical insight about the unity of the
+ individual and the universe and has self-development as its +
objective. It employs innovative mental experiments of yoga that
evolved in the first half of the first millennium BC, and does not
have the notion of a ‘chosen people’, or a jealous God; it does not
proselytize, does not hunt heretics. It could not be more different
from the great Semitic religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam.7
Hence, I felt I could interrogate its texts in order to learn to live
a secular life in a better way.
I was born a Hindu in the Punjab and had a Hindu upbringing.
Like many in the Indian middle class, I went to an English
medium school that gave me a ‘modern education’. Both my
grandfathers belonged to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect that
had come up in the nineteenth century. My ancestors did not
have the living memory of their own political heritage and this
must have been difficult. They had lived under Muslim rulers
since the thirteenth century and had regarded political life as
something filled with deprivation and fear. After the Muslims,
they saw the rise of the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, and after

+
 +

Prelude / xxxvii

its collapse around 1850, the powerful British arrived with

Christian missionaries in tow. Thus, three powerful, professedly
egalitarian and proselytizing religions surrounded us—Islam,
Sikhism and Christianity. As a result, they were eager to receive
the Gujarati reformer Dayanand Saraswati, who established the
Arya Samaj. He advocated a return to the Vedas, a diminished
role for brahmins and vigorous social reform. He ‘modernized’
our Hinduism.
‘Arya’ in Sanskrit means ‘noble’ among other things. European
scholars in the nineteenth century took this ancient word from
the Vedic texts to propagate a racial theory of ‘Aryan’ origins of
Hindu culture and society based on a common Indo–European
language system. We, in the new Punjabi middle class, embraced
this idea enthusiastically, for it related us racially to the European
Aryans. The Arya Samaj had a positive side in helping to create
a nationalist sentiment among us for freedom and independence
from Britain. In contrast, the invention of an Aryan race in
+ nineteenth century Europe had tragic consequences, culminating
+
in the ideology of Nazi Germany.8 Half a century after the
Second World War, the word ‘Aryan’ evokes repulsive memories
of Nazism and is thoroughly discredited in the West. In India,
however, it has been revived, curiously enough, with the rise of
Hindu nationalism and the ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
My father, however, turned away from the Arya Samaj and
became a passionate mystic. When he was studying to be an
engineer, he was drawn to a kindly guru, who taught him the
bhakti path of direct union with God through devotion and
meditation. The guru belonged to the Radhasoami sect, descended
intellectually from the medieval bhakti and Sufi traditions of
Kabir, Nanak, Rumi and Mirabai. My father found his discourses
‘modern’ for they appealed to his rational, engineer’s temper.
His own decision, he once told me, was made in the scientific
spirit of Blaise Pascal’s wager. If you believe in God, Pascal had
said, and He turns out to exist, then you have obviously made a

+
 +

xxxviii / Prelude

good decision; however, if He does not exist, and you still

believe in Him, you haven’t lost anything; but if you don’t
believe in Him and he does exist, then you are in serious trouble.
Amidst this, my maternal grandmother remained a traditional
Hindu in Lyallpur, where I was born. Her dressing room was
filled with the images of her many gods, prominent among them
being Krishna and Rama, and she would say in the same breath
that there are millions of gods but only one God. Her gods and
goddesses were symbols of reality rather than reality itself (as
the theologian Paul Tillich explained to me in a class at Harvard),
and they helped her to reach one God. Her eclecticism did not
stop there. She would visit the Sikh gurdwara on Mondays and
Wednesdays, a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays and
she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses by holy men,
including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In
between, she made time for Arya Samaj ceremonies.
Amidst this religious chaos I grew up with a liberal attitude
+ that was a mixture of scepticism and sympathy for the Hindu
+
way of life. One of its attractive features is of multiple goals to
the good life. The first goal is to come to grips with kama, ‘human
desire’. I find it reassuring that pleasure has a valued place in the
good life. A second goal is artha, ‘material well-being’, which
makes sense, for how can one be happy in conditions of extreme
deprivation? A third objective of life is dharma or moral well-
being. The final goal is moksha, ‘spiritual liberation’ from our
fragmented, finite and suffering existence. I have always felt that
Indians are sensible, like Aristotle, in believing in multiple paths
to a flourishing life.


When my wife and I returned from the dinner party, we did
what everyone does. We gossiped about who was there, who
said what, and to whom. I was still smarting from the remark
about Hindutva, and I burst out accusingly, ‘I wish you hadn’t

+
 +

Prelude / xxxix

blabbered about my plans! You know what people are like—half

of Delhi will be talking about it in twenty-four hours!’
Soon I calmed down, though, and realized that many Indians
thought of classical Sanskrit texts either in religious or political
terms. Mine, however, was a project in self-cultivation. I wanted
to know how to live my life and I had a feeling that the answer
might lie in examining the four ends of life. My first book, India
Unbound, had examined the second goal of artha; the next one
would be about dharma. I began to feel more secure about my
endeavour—less concerned with what others would say or think
about it. My wife also turned out to be a good sport, and began
to see our ‘academic holiday’ as an opportunity to attend lectures
on Renaissance painting and Chinese ceramics while I went off
to read the Sanskrit texts. So, in the fall of 2002, we found
ourselves at the University of Chicago.
I was an implausible student—a husband, a father of two
grown-up boys, and a taxpayer with considerably less hair than
+ his peers. Wintry and windy Chicago also seemed an unusual
+
choice for ‘a forest-dweller’ at life’s third stage. The city of
Benares, the home of classical learning in north India, would
have been a more conventional choice. But I did not want
to escape into ‘our great classical past’. I wanted to learn about
that past with full consciousness of the present—and also to
learn something about the present in encountering the past.9
Sanskrit pandits in Benares seemed to me impossibly rigid and
they would not have approved of my desire to ‘interrogate’ the
texts.
It was a stray remark by the poet A.K. Ramanujan that finally
pushed me to Chicago. ‘If you don’t experience eternity at
Benares,’ he said, ‘you will at Regenstein.’ He was referring to
the Regenstein Library with its fabulous collection of South
Asian texts under the able stewardship of Jim Nye. Chicago was
a logical choice. The University of Chicago had four Sanskrit
scholars—two big names, Sheldon Pollock and Wendy Doniger,

+
 +

xl / Prelude

both students of Ingalls, and Sanskrit-knowing Buddhist scholars

like Steve Collins, Mathew Kapstein and Dan Arnold.
I had two criteria in mind in selecting a reading list. I wanted
a text from each of the major genres and I wanted it to illuminate
one of the four aims of life. When it came to desire, Kamasutra,
the text on erotic love and sex, was the obvious choice. The
Arthashastra, a text of politics and economics, would help me
with the second goal of artha. In the epic genre, I chose the
Mahabharata because of dharma—its heroes were more human
and fallible, unlike the Ramayana. The Upanishads were the clear
choice for studying the fourth end of moksha. In my second year
I planned to read the Manusmriti, the law book by Manu, which
tries to reconcile the first three ends. The stories from the
Kathasaritsagara would instruct me on how to live. To understand
yoga, I would read the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. If there was time,
Kalidasa’s Shakuntala would be my drama text.
I wanted to read the texts in Sanskrit, but that would have
+ needed a lifetime—given my shallow grasp of the language. I
+
was hungry and impatient. So, I decided on the next best course.
I would arrive early in the morning at Regenstein and follow the
drill I had learned from Daniel Ingalls. I would pull out from the
shelf a volume of the Mahabharata’s Critical Edition. With
Whitney’s grammar on my right and Apte’s dictionary on my
left, I would read a small passage. It was hard labour, but
Wendy Doniger consoled me, saying: ‘Reading Sanskrit is good
for the soul.’ I would tire after an hour or so, and then I would
turn to van Buitenen’s translation and read it for the rest of
the morning. If I had a doubt, I would go back to the original. It
was an unhurried pursuit. I did not want information. I wanted
to be cultivated, and thus I read at leisure with lingering
appreciation.
By the end of my first year, I had become dangerously addicted
to the Mahabharata and had fallen hopelessly behind in the rest
of my reading. The epic is a splendid and moving story, exciting,

+
 +

Prelude / xli

ironic and witty, and with a cast of characters that I became

increasingly attached to. I was also intrigued by its boast:

What is here is found elsewhere.

What is not here is nowhere.10

In the summer I returned to India and went to visit my mother.

On the way the train stopped at a sleepy station, about a
hundred miles north of Delhi. I stepped on to the platform and
discovered that this was no ordinary station—it was historic
Kurukshetra, where the Mahabharata’s futile war of annihilation
had been fought. In the burning heat of the summer afternoon,
I began to imagine the brutal magnificence of the raging, ruthless
battles. I saw a dithering Arjuna, the greatest warrior of his age,
put down his Gandiva bow and refuse to fight—leaving his
debonair and confident charioteer, Krishna, who is also God,
with a problem on his hands. I visualized ruthless Drona grinding
the exhausted Pandava armies into the dust. Suddenly he turns
+ anxiously to his pupil, Yudhishthira, to ask if the rumour about
+
his son’s death is true. Yudhishthira—who had never spoken
false—tells a white lie and his fabulous chariot, which always
travelled slightly above the ground, sinks into the dust. The train
began to move and I jumped in. As I settled back, I felt that the
epic might indeed have something to teach me about the right
way to live in the world.


The Mahabharata tells the story of a futile and terrible war of
annihilation between the children of two brothers of the Bharata
family. The rival cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, both
lay claim to the throne. To resolve the feud, the kingdom is
divided, but the jealous Kauravas are not content, and plot to
usurp the other half of the kingdom through a rigged game of
dice. Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, loses everything in the
game—his kingdom, his brothers, his wife and, indeed, himself—

+
 +

xlii / Prelude

to his rival Duryodhana. Yudhishthira’s wife, Queen Draupadi,

is dragged before Duryodhana in the assembly of the nobles,
where his brother Duhshasana tries to strip her:

When her dress was being stripped off, lord of the people, another
one appeared every time. A terrible roar went up from all the
kings, a shout of approval, as they watched that greatest wonder
on the earth . . . [In the end] a pile of clothes was heaped up in the
middle of the hall, when Duhshasana, tired and ashamed, at last
desisted and sat down.11

With this act of ‘cosmic justice’, the assembly should have been
forced to confront the question of dharma, the central problem of
the Mahabharata. But the elders fail to address it, and the failure
hangs over the entire epic, leading to a destructive and terrible
war between the rivals.
Dharma, the word at the heart of the epic, is in fact
untranslatable. Duty, goodness, justice, law and custom all have
+ something to do with it, but they all fall short. Dharma refers to
+
‘balance’—both moral balance and cosmic balance. It is the order
and balance within each human being which is also reflected in
the order of the cosmos. Dharma derives from the Sanskrit root
dhr, meaning to ‘sustain’.12 It is the moral law that sustains
society,
. the individual and the world. In the dharma texts, it
commonly means the whole range of duties incumbent on each
individual according to his varna, ‘status’, or ashrama, ‘stage of
life’.13 The Mahabharata, however, will also challenge this latter
meaning. This conceptual difficulty, such complexity, is part of
the point.14 Indeed, the Mahabharata is in many ways an extended
attempt to clarify just what dharma is—that is, what exactly
should we do when we are trying to be good in the world.
When I began my quest for dharma, I did not imagine that I
would be undertaking an enterprise quite so bizarre. I tried to
picture the look of shocked incomprehension on Yudhishthira’s
face when he loses his kingdom and his wife in the dice game

+
 +

Prelude / xliii

and this happens at the very moment of his greatest triumph

when he is consecrated ‘king of kings’. He could only suppose
that his world had gone awry. Gradually, I began to realize that
the dice game may be symbolic of the quixotic, vulnerable
human condition in which one knows not why one is born, when
one will die, and why one faces reverses on the way. The only
thing certain, the Mahabharata tells us, is that kala (time or death)
is ‘always cooking us’.15

In this cauldron fashioned from delusion, with the sun as fire and
day and night as kindling wood, the months and seasons as the
ladle for stirring, Time (or Death) cooks all beings: this is the
simple truth.16

Could one depend on dharma to protect one in this uncertain

world? If so, how does a person go about finding dharma? In a
life and death debate with the Yaksha, a tree spirit, who controls
the waters of a lake, thirsty Yudhishthira is asked this very
+ question. The right answer will save him and his brothers; the
+
wrong answer will mean their death. He tells the Yaksha that in
seeking dharma ‘reason is of limited use for it is without
foundation;17 neither are the sacred texts helpful as they are at
odds with one another; nor is there a single sage whose opinion
could be considered authoritative. The truth about dharma is
hidden in a cave.’18
To help me to search in this cave, I had to depend on a
gambling addict and a loser. A curious choice for a guide, you
might think. Yudhishthira is so fraught with frailties to be almost
an ‘un-hero’. His world is off balance and the god, Krishna,
‘constantly feeds this imbalance, fostering disorder’.19 Although
he is a warrior, he lacks physical prowess, distrusts martial
values and feels helpless. What redeems him, however, is that he
insists on not being anything other than himself. Alone, he
confronts the possibility that the universe might not care about
dharma.

+
 +

xliv / Prelude

Originally, the epic set out to narrate a tale of triumph but, in

fact, ended in telling a story of defeat. Early versions of the epic
used to go by the name Jaya, meaning ‘victory’, and the bard, it
seems, did want to narrate a story of triumph. Indeed, the epic
announces unambiguously at the beginning of Book One:

The king who seeks conquest should listen to this history named
Jaya for he will conquer the whole earth and defeat his enemies.20

I felt something was clearly wrong when the epic begins with
a remarkable murderous rite performed by King Janamejaya, the
great-grandson of the valiant hero of the Mahabharata, Arjuna.
He is holding a sacrifice to kill all the world’s snakes in order to
avenge his father, Parikshit, who has been killed by a snake.21
Not a promising start for a heroic epic. The story is also wacky—
it is about a war between the ‘children of a blind pretender
fighting the sons of a man too frail to risk the act of coition’.22 The
winner of the war is reluctant, pacific Yudhishthira, who does
+ not want to fight but who, in fact, gives the order for the war to
+
begin. Then he goes on to win the war, not by skill and excellence
but by deception and trickery. After the bloody victory, he
suffers inconsolably and bitterly, his mind in torment, consumed
by guilt and shame for what has happened:

I have conquered this whole earth . . . But ever since finishing this
tremendous extermination of my kinsmen, which was ultimately
caused by my greed, a terrible pain aches in my heart without
stopping . . . This victory looks more like defeat to me.23

The victory ‘looks more like defeat’ to Yudhishthira because he

is left wondering what the ridiculous war has been all about.
They try to calm his burning grief but not very convincingly.
Yudhishthira has seen through the disturbing chaos of the world—
too much envy, hypocrisy, greed, ego and revenge on one side,
and too much deceit on the other and instigated by no less than
Krishna, the God.24 Yudhishthira’s mournful regret at the war’s

+
 +

Prelude / xlv

end is the all-too-familiar sadness for the defective human

condition. The Mahabharata is a profoundly ironic text with a
‘very modern sense of the absurd’.25
Yudhishthira persists in his Faustian search for dharma until
the end. He hopes to find goodness in heaven but he encounters
the villainous Duryodhana instead. In hell, he finds his virtuous
wife and his brothers rather than the wicked. The old look of
incomprehension appears on his face, which reminded me of
Sisyphus, the Greek hero, who was punished for betraying
secrets of the gods to men, and who was condemned to push a
huge rock up a hill. Each time he nears the peak, the stone rolls
down to the bottom and Sisyphus must begin all over again.
Yudhishthira has the same look on his face as Sisyphus when he
sees the rock rolling back down. It is the realization that life may
well be absurd and futile.
I had hoped that my search for dharma might help to lift me
out of my own third stage melancholy. For thirty years I had
+ gone to work each morning. I had fed and looked after my
+
family. My wife and I had raised two children. Gradually, I had
moved up the corporate hierarchy with higher pay and more
responsibility. At fifty, I asked myself, what had I really achieved?
What had all this been for? Is this all there was to life?
I had been tremendously competitive throughout my corporate
life, but I could not reconcile to my boss’s view, who felt ‘it is not
enough to do well. Someone has to lose, and you must be the
one to win’. Duryodhana would have approved of my boss’s
big-chested sentiments, but I wondered, once one’s youth, vigour
and the thrill of winning are gone, what happens then? How
long could an adult be expected to be motivated by a 0.5 per cent
gain in the monthly market share of Vicks Vaporub or Pampers?
I felt weary by the time I was fifty, and it was this feeling of
futility that drove me, in part, to early retirement. My kshatriya-
like craving to win was disappearing and my job had begun to
resemble the futile labours of Yudhishthira. I identified with

+
 +

xlvi / Prelude

Karna’s sense of mortality in the Mahabharata, who says, ‘I see it

now: this world is swiftly passing.’26
Thoughts such as these—of life’s futility, of one’s mortality,
and the relentless passage of time—tend to drive one to religion.
Instead, they made me ask, like Iris Murdoch, if virtue is the
main thing of worth in our life.27 The familiar pain of being alive
and being human made me admire Yudhishthira’s commitment
to dharma all the more—to satya, ‘truth’, ahimsa, ‘non-violence’
and anrishamsya, ‘compassion’.28 I wondered if acts of goodness
might be one of the very few things of genuine worth in this
world, and might give meaning to my life.
In my second year of study, I focused more and more on the
Mahabharata. My other readings suffered but this book began to
take shape. I realized that each major hero in the epic embodies
a striking virtue or a failing—and the hero’s story is an attempt
to clarify this moral idea, whose significance goes well beyond
the narrative to the very heart of dharma. Duryodhana has many
+ flaws, but the driving one is envy, and in Chapter 1, I examine
+
this destructive vice in our private and public lives. Arjuna’s
despair over killing his kinsmen is a celebrated protest against
war in Chapter 4, and I raise the question if it is possible to have
‘just’ wars. Bhishma’s selflessness in Chapter 5 made me wonder
if it is possible for a human being to ‘be intent on the act and not
its fruits’; I asked myself if a person’s ego could shrink that far—
in other words, is karma yoga as hopelessly idealistic as Marx’s
notion of equality? Karna’s anxiety over his social position in
Chapter 6 trumps his finer qualities and made me think about
the place of inequality and caste in human society. Ashwatthama’s
awful revenge in Chapter 8 set me thinking about forgiveness
and retributive justice in our lives. Yudhishthira’s remorse after
the war in Chapter 9 made me examine the related ideas of grief,
reconciliation and non-violence. And so on. As I pored over the
narrative of each hero, I realized that my own understanding of
dharma was growing deeper. To the sceptical reader, I might

+
 +

Prelude / xlvii

suggest dipping into Chapter 4 or 6 to get a quick idea about

what I am doing in this book, although my favourites are
Chapter 5 and 10.


The Mahabharata is unique in engaging with the world of politics.
India’s philosophical traditions have tended to devalue the realm
of human action, which is supposed to deal with the world of
‘appearances’, not of reality or of the eternal soul. Indeed, a
central episode in the epic dramatizes the choice between moral
purity and human action. King Yudhishthira feels guilty after the
war for ‘having killed those who ought not to be killed’. He feels
trapped between the contradictory pulls of ruling a state and of
being good, and wants to leave the world to become a non-
violent ascetic. To avert a crisis of the throne, the dying Bhishma,
his grandfather, tries to dissuade him, teaching him that the
+ dharma of a political leader cannot be moral perfection. Politics +
is an arena of force. An upright statesman must learn to be
prudent and follow a middle path. A king must wield danda, ‘the
rod of force’, embodied in retributive justice in order to protect
the innocent.29
The Mahabharata is suspicious of ideology. It rejects the idealistic,
pacifist position of Yudhishthira as well as Duryodhana’s amoral
view. Its own position veers towards the pragmatic evolutionary
principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the
world but do not allow yourself to be exploited. Turning the
other cheek sends a wrong signal to cheats. With my background
in Western philosophy, I was tempted to view the ideas of the
epic, especially dharma, from a modern viewpoint. More than
once I had to warn myself to beware of transposing contemporary
ideas on to another historical context, but I am not sure I
succeeded in this.30
I sometimes wonder why a pre-modern text like the Mahabharata
ought to matter in our postmodern world. What sort of meaning

+
 +

xlviii / Prelude

does the past hold for us? What is the relationship between the
original historical meaning of the text (assuming we can discover
it) and its meaning to our present times? Take, for example, the
game of dice. If the episode is merely an enactment of an ancient
ritual then it obviously has limited moral significance. But the
Mahabharata seeks other explanations, for example, in
Yudhishthira’s weakness for gambling, which suggests that the
epic believes that the game does have moral meaning. The point
is that we should not be guilty of reading too much ‘into’ the
text, but try to read ‘out’ as much as we can for our lives. There
may also be more than one meaning. I find myself sometimes
using expressions such as: ‘What is the epic telling us?’ The fact
is that the epic may be saying a multiplicity of things to different
readers at different times in history. There is no one meaning.
Hence, one should not expect too much coherence in it, especially
when it comes to the ambiguous and even unsolvable nature of
political power. The good news is that it is perfectly permissible
+ to interrogate the text as I have done, and the Mahabharata would
+
even applaud it.31
Of course, the Mahabharata is also a thrilling story. I wanted to
share my excitement of the narrative—its simple and direct
language comes through even in translation. As I pick up the
thread of the story in each chapter, I quote extensively in order
to give the reader a ‘feel’ for the text. I also follow the epic’s
example: I stop the action from time to time in order to examine
more closely the moral idea that the action has thrown up, trying
to understand how the idea relates to our daily lives in both a
personal and a broader social and political sense. For the reader’s
convenience, I have provided a summary of the central story at
the beginning of the book, as well as a dramatis personae and a
tree of the Bharata family. I have also narrated the story of the
historical evolution of the word dharma at the end of the book.
The Mahabharata winds its way leisurely, with a steady aim,
through masses of elaborate treatises on law, philosophy, religion,

+
 +

Prelude / xlix

custom, even geography and cosmography, together with a

formidable array of episodes and legends, piled up at various
distances along its course.32
Interwoven with the main events of the narrative are fascinating
subplots: the romance of Nala and Damayanti, written with such
simplicity that I was able to read it in my first year Sanskrit class
with Daniel Ingalls; the legend of Savitri, whose devotion to her
dead husband persuades Yama, the god of death, to restore him
to life; descriptions of places of pilgrimage; and many other
myths and legends. Indeed, the Mahabharata is a virtual
encyclopaedia of ancient India. It is an important source of
information about the life of the times and the evolution of
Hinduism and the influence of Buddhism.33 Thus, it is said, ‘the
Mahabharata is not a text but a tradition’.
The clash of ideas is especially dramatic and noisy in India, a
country where cultural memories are preserved with more loyalty
and steadfastness than almost anywhere else. The centuries
+ during which the epic took shape were a period of transition
+
from the religion of Vedic sacrifice to the sectarian, internalized
worship of later Hinduism, and different sections of the poem
express varying and sometimes contradictory beliefs. Clashes in
India do not lead to rejections or radical reversals but result in
accretions and steady proliferation. This is the synthetic Indian
way. The epic has been retold in written and oral vernacular
versions throughout South and Southeast Asia and has always
enjoyed immense popularity.34 Its various incidents have been
portrayed in Indian miniature paintings and in sculpted relief in
temples across India and far away in Borobudur in Indonesia
and Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
The entire Mahabharata is made up of almost 100,000 couplets—
its length is seven times that of the Iliad and the Odyssey
combined—divided into eighteen parvans or ‘books’.35 Its author
is said to be the sage Vyasa (literally ‘the compiler’), who
appears as a character in the poem. More likely it was composed

+
 +

l / Prelude

by a great number of bardic poets and revised by priests who

added substantially to the ever-expanding text over a long period
and was passed on for generations by oral tradition. Professional
sutas, ‘bards’, were the original poets and singers when
Brahminism had not separated its priest caste greatly from other
Aryans. The brahmin redaction, which is all that now remains,
took its present form between 200 BC and AD 200.’36 Comparing
over a hundred different versions from different parts of the
country, Sanskrit scholars in the twentieth century published a
Critical Edition of the epic under V.S. Sukthankar’s leadership at
the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.37
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have invited many acts of homage
from translators in many languages. John Keats, the English
poet, was so taken with an Elizabethan verse translation of
‘deep-browed’ Homer that he published a sonnet in its honour,
entitled ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. It had left
him with a combined sense of shock and uplift, and he felt like:
+ +
some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.

The Mahabharata has not been so fortunate. It has had no

Chapman, no Lattimore. The only full-scale English translation is
by K.M. Ganguly from the late nineteenth century and it is
‘grating and refractory’. The University of Chicago Press’s project
remains incomplete, although a fine translation of Books 11 and
12 by James Fitzgerald has appeared recently in a fourth volume.
There is hope of a new translation of the epic in a beautiful
parallel text (Sanskrit/English) edition on paper of rare quality
in the Clay Sanskrit Library (CSL). Ten volumes have appeared,
of which my favourites are the battle books, translated by
Vaughan Pilikian (Drona), Adam Bowles (Karna) and Justin
Meiland (Shalya).
For the beginner the short prose versions into English by R.K.
Narayan or C.V. Narasimhan are a good place to start. They

+
 +

Prelude / li

capture the weft and warp of the story, although neither has the
majestic music of the original in the same way as Pilikian’s
poetic translation of the Drona (CSL) or W.J. Johnson’s verse
version of the tenth book, Sauptikaparvan.


The Mahabharata is about our incomplete lives, about good
people acting badly, about how difficult it is to be good in this
world. It turned out to be a fine guide in my quest to make some
sort of sense out of life at its third stage. I set out with the
assumption that ‘nature does not give a man virtue; the process
of becoming a good man is an art’. I am not sure if the Mahabharata
has taught me the art of which Seneca speaks. If anything it has
probably made me more ambivalent. Even at the end, the Pandava
heroes are still looking for dharma which is hidden in a cave.
Nevertheless, although human perfection may be illusory,
+ dharma may be ‘subtle’, and there are limits to what moral +
education can achieve, the epic leaves one with the confidence
that it is in our nature also to be good. This thought more than
any other helped to assuage my ‘third stage melancholy’. The
Mahabharata believes that our lives should not have to be so cruel
and humiliating. This explains its refrain, ‘dharma leads to
victory!’ Although it is spoken with irony at times, the epic
genuinely desires that our relationships be more honest and fair.
Since the epic is a narrative, the personal viewpoint dominates.
But the story stops often enough when the impersonal viewpoint
takes over. Goethe pointed out long ago that the impersonal
viewpoint within us produces a desire for goodness, fairness and
equality, while the personal one wishes the opposite, seeking
only one’s own gain, often at the expense of others.38 This conflict
between our divided selves underlies the dilemmas that are
faced both by the epic’s heroes and by us. Hence, it leaves us
with an ‘awareness of the possibilities of life’.39
My academic holiday turned out to be a much-needed

+
 +

lii / Prelude

corrective to my stereotypical view of the ‘spirituality’ of India in

contrast to the ‘rationality’ of the West.40 From the beginning, the
West has sought for what was ‘wondrous in the East’ and it
seemed to find it in India’s religious and spiritual identity. This
focus on the exotic neglected the ‘deep-seated heterogeneity of
Indian traditions’.41 Indians, for their part, have been happy to
embrace this self-image of ‘spirituality’ as a way to recover their
self-esteem after long years of colonial history. It makes them
feel superior to the ‘materialistic’ West. But they have paid a
price. In their obsession with moksha, the ‘spiritual’ end, they
sometimes lose sight these days of the three worldly goals—
dharma, artha, and kama—which are needed to lead a more
balanced life. These are the very pursuits that the Mahabharata
commends to its listeners:

When this great incomparable tale, esteemed

By dispassionate men of wide erudition,
+ Is studied in detail, their spreading insight +
Into the three pursuits will conquer the earth.42

+
 +

DURYODHANA’S ENVY
‘What man of mettle will stand to see his
rivals prosper and himself decline?’

Why should one like you envy Yudhishthira? . . . Be content with what
you have, stay with your own dharma—that is the way to happiness.
+ —Dhritarashtra to Duryodhana,
+
Mahabharata II.5.3, 61

‘I am scorched by envy’

The Mahabharata is set in and around Hastinapura, ‘city of the

elephant’, in the fertile region around modern-day Delhi. It is the
story of the rivalry between cousins, the Pandavas and the
Kauravas, who are descended from King Bharata. The Pandavas
are the five sons of the pale and sickly Pandu; the Kauravas are
the hundred sons of his blind brother, Dhritarashtra. The conflict
begins when Dhritarashtra, the elder of the two princes, is
passed over as king because of blindness. Pandu assumes power.
But Pandu has been cursed to die if he has sex. So, he turns to
niyoga—employing a surrogate to obtain an heir. In this way,
Pandu has five sons from his two wives—Yudhishthira, Bhima,
Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva. After a series of wars, he renounces
the throne to become a religious hermit—leaving blind
Dhritarashtra to rule the imperial city.

+
 +

2 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Soon there is rivalry over the succession. Prince Duryodhana,

the eldest son of Dhritarashtra, disputes the right of the eldest
Pandava, Yudhishthira, to take over the throne. Angry and
vengeful, Duryodhana threatens, abuses, and attempts to
assassinate the Pandavas, who are forced to flee the kingdom.
During their exile the five brothers jointly marry Princess
Draupadi and meet their cousin Krishna, who is God, and who
becomes their friend and companion for life.
In the hope of stopping the conflict between the cousins,
Dhritarashtra divides the kingdom, giving the barren half to the
Pandavas. Despite their disadvantages, the accomplished
Pandavas work hard, clear a forest to live in, and prosper. They
rule justly and expand their territories through conquests and
alliances, and they build a striking, grand capital called
Indraprastha, which some archaeologists believe is buried under
present-day Delhi. Soon they are widely acknowledged to have
become the paramount power, and the Kauravas grow jealous
+ again. +
To commemorate his rise to imperial power, Yudhishthira
performs rajasuya, the ancient ceremony of consecration. Dozens
of rulers come laden with expensive gifts to acknowledge his
imperial claim. Duryodhana comes as well to participate in his
cousin’s festivities. As a close relative, he has been assigned, ill-
advisedly it turns out, the responsibility of overseeing the
collection of tribute.
We join the action in Book Two of the Mahabharata as Prince
Duryodhana is returning home from the grand and opulent
ceremony, accompanied by his uncle, Shakuni Saubala. He is
sulking as he remembers his humiliation when he fell into the
pool in the amazing palace of the Pandavas.

He thought it was land and fell into the water with his clothes on
. . . Mighty Bhimasena saw him that way, as did Arjuna and the
twins, and they burst out laughing. A choleric man, he did not
suffer their mockery; to save face he did not look at them.2

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 3

‘Scorched by envy’ of his cousin Yudhishthira, Duryodhana is

sunk in gloomy thought.3 Seeing him thus, Shakuni asks, ‘What
is the reason that you travel with so many sighs?’4 Duryodhana
replies:

I saw the earth entire under Yudhishthira’s sway, conquered by

the majesty of the weapons of the great spirited Arjuna. I saw their
grand sacrifice, Uncle . . . Rancour has filled me, and burning day
and night I am drying up like a shrunken pond in the hot season.5

The memory of ‘those manifold riches which the kings heaped’

upon Yudhishthira as they ‘waited upon him like tax-paying
commoners’ makes him prey to envy.6 He says:

For what man of mettle in this world will have patience when he
sees his rivals prosper and himself decline? . . . When I see their
fortune and that splendid hall and the mockery of the guards, I
burn as if with fire.7
+ Shakuni consoles him, saying that it is useless to brood over the
+
good fortune of his cousins. They cannot be defeated in battle;
they are far superior warriors, and have made important alliances
which give them immense power. One needs clever means.
Shakuni suggests a gambling match.

[Yudhishthira] loves to gamble but does not know how to play. If

the lordly king is challenged he will not be able to resist. I am a
shrewd gambler, and I don’t have any match on earth . . . Challenge
him to a game of dice . . . I will [play on your behalf and] defeat
him.8

Duryodhana likes the idea, and together they hatch a conspiracy.

He asks his uncle to work on his father. Thus, a few days later
king Dhritarashtra summons his son:

My son, what is the reason that you are so sorely aggrieved?

Shakuni here tells me that you looked pale and yellow and wan
and that you are brooding . . . You wear fine clothes, you eat [the

+
 +

4 / The Difficulty of Being Good

best of] meats, purebred horses carry you. [You have] costly beds
and charming women, well-appointed houses and all the recreation
you want . . . Why do you pine, my son?9

Duryodhana tells his father that these pleasures do not satisfy

him for he bears an awesome grudge against his more successful
cousin. ‘Having seen the all-surpassing wealth of the Pandava, I
find no peace in my burning heart,’ he says. Words come
cheaply to the blind king, and he counsels his son to abide by the
dharma of the kshatriya, behave and fight honourably, and not
pursue wealth.

Do not hate the Pandavas! One who hates takes on as much grief
as in death. Why should one like you envy Yudhishthira, a simple
man who has the same goals as you, the same friends, and does not
hate you? Why do you, my son, a prince, his equal in birth and
prowess, covet your brother’s fortune . . . Be content with what
you have, stay with your own dharma—that way lies happiness.10
+ +
Duryodhana counters his father with the big-chested ethic of the
warrior, which is to put down his enemies before they become
dangerous, and to win at any cost. That is the true dharma of the
kshatriya, he says.

Low is the man, they say, who is incapable of indignation . . .

Discontent is at the root of prosperity. That is why I want to be
dissatisfied. Only he who reaches for the heights, king, is the
ultimate politician. Should we not pursue selfish ways when we
have power or are rich?11

Duryodhana, thus, makes a virtue of his envy, cloaking it in a

philosophy of egoism and the amoral pursuit of power:

No one, lord of the people, is born anyone’s enemy . . . If one

watches in his folly the rise of his enemy’s side, the other will cut
his root, like a swelling disease. An enemy, however tiny, whose
might grows on and [who eventually] destroys one, is like an

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 5

anthill [who] destroys the tree . . . As long as I fail to recover the

power from the Pandavas I shall be in danger.12

Gradually he succeeds in persuading his father, who has always

had a weakness for his eldest son. The king summons his
counsellor and half-brother, Vidura, before whom he disguises
his decision as an act of fate. ‘It is ordained,’ he says, and
commands him to go and invite Yudhishthira for a ‘friendly
game of dice’. Vidura is not taken in by this hypocritical talk. He
is hugely distressed, and leaves dejectedly on his mission.
Yudhishthira smells trouble as soon as he receives the invitation.
He knows that Shakuni cheats. But he cannot refuse his uncle,
who is like a father to him. He says:

It sounds like the most dangerous dice players will be there, sure
to resort to tricks and deceit . . . [But] I shall not refuse to play
dice at Dhritarashtra’s command; a son must respect his father . . .
I shall not be able to refuse; that is my eternal vow.13
+ +
Besides, a game of dice is part of the ritual of imperial
consecration, required of the king in the Vedic rajasuya ceremony.
So, Yudhishthira agrees reluctantly, knowing that disaster awaits.14
Indeed, the game of dice is a grand affair in a specially built
hall of a thousand pillars adorned by gems and filled with kings
and noblemen. Duryodhana announces that his uncle Shakuni
will play on his behalf. It is clear to Yudhishthira that the
‘friendly game of dice’ is, in fact, a duel, but he cannot refuse a
challenge and must stand by his word, even when the challenge
is dodgy.
They begin to play. Starting modestly with a handful of pearls,
the stakes rise quickly. Yudhishthira slowly slips into a gambler’s
frenzy, blind to the consequences, forgetting himself. He hears
only the clatter of the rolling dice, followed by Shakuni’s chant,
‘Won!’ and cheers from the Kauravas’ side. He begins to lose,
and lose consistently. By the end of round ten, halfway through
the game, he has lost pearls, gold, his finely caparisoned chariot,

+
 +

6 / The Difficulty of Being Good

a thousand elephants, choice horses, male and female slaves, and

an army of chariots and charioteers.
Vidura, standing beside King Dhritarashtra, sees disaster ahead.
He tries to stop the game. Appealing to the blind king to give up
his son’s cause for the greater good of the kingdom, he argues:

To save the family, abandon an individual. To save the village,

abandon a family; to save the country, abandon a village. To save
the soul, abandon the earth.15

But the hypocritical king is so delighted at seeing his son winning,

he ignores his counsellor. Shakuni prods his rival to keep playing.
Yudhishthira knows that Shakuni is cheating, but he is spellbound.
Besides, to pull out now would be dishonourable. Thus, the
game enters a crucial stage. In the next four throws Yudhishthira
loses all his wealth and his kingdom. Then he stakes his brothers
one by one and loses them. Finally, he loses himself and becomes
a slave of Duryodhana. Shakuni says:
+ +
There is only your precious queen left, and there is also one throw
of the dice remaining. Stake her and win yourself [and all you have
lost] back with her.16

Yudhishthira agrees, saying ‘I play you for her’. Feelings of

revulsion and horror fill the assembly hall. The elders, in dismay,
break into a sweat. Vidura buries his face in his hands. Only
King Dhritarashtra is exhilarated. No one dares to stop the
‘universal sovereign’ from wagering his queen. Shakuni throws
the dice and cries out joyfully, ‘We have won!’

‘A friendly game of dice’

‘So much for a friendly game of dice!’17 Although most of us do

not go about trapping our neighbours in dice games, we do
suffer universally from envy. I don’t know anyone who is
immune. Even as a child I remember envy used to make my
world rotten. It has the terrible ability to wreak damage in public

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 7

life as well, leaving everyone worse off. It was envy of the Jews
which led, in part, to the Holocaust during World War II. In
socialist societies, it is often behind extortionate tax rates. So, it
is a good place to begin my dharma quest.
But before that I want to address a question that has been
nagging at me—why did Yudhishthira agree to play this
disastrous game, especially when he knew that Shakuni was a
far better player and also cheated? It is not clear from the text if
Shakuni cheated that day, but he had earlier confided in
Duryodhana, ‘I shall cheat him, my lord, win and seize his
celestial fortune. Summon him!’18
Shakuni is confident that Yudhishthira will not refuse to play
because he had taken an oath. The sage Vyasa, the narrator of
the epic, had warned Yudhishthira during his royal consecration
ceremony: ‘At the end of thirteen years, bull of Bharatas, the
entire race of kshatriyas will be wiped out and you will be the
instrument of their destruction.’19 As soon as he heard this,
+ Yudhishthira grew depressed. He naively vowed not to say ‘no’,
+
nor to refuse anything, hoping in this way to avoid conflict with
others, and thus, to ‘blunt the edge of fate’. It turned out, of
course, to be a ruinous vow, for it gave Duryodhana and Shakuni
the confidence to challenge him, knowing that he would not
refuse.
A second explanation for his ruinous decision is that
Yudhishthira knows that he is expected to play dice as a part of
the ancient Vedic rajasuya ritual to consecrate him ‘universal
sovereign’.20 The purpose of this ancient ritual was to re-create a
social and cosmic order, heralding the ‘birth’ of the king.21 The
ritual game reproduces in miniature the model of the cosmos,
allowing the players to fashion the cosmos in the right manner.
The four sides of the dice also symbolize the four Ages. The king
is the maker of the Age, and the ceremonial dice game played at
his consecration, like the gambling of Shiva in mythology,
determines what kind of cosmic age will come up next—a

+
 +

8 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Golden Age or the degraded Kali Age. The fate of the world,
thus, hangs on this game of dice.22 However, it is purely a ritual
according to the manuals of the brahmins, and not this perversion
that the epic dramatizes.
A third and simpler explanation is that Yudhishthira was
addicted to gambling. Shakuni says that he ‘loves to play but has
little skill’.23 In the next book of the epic, Yudhishthira will,
indeed, confess to this weakness. And later, when the Pandavas
are in disguise, he will play a gambling instructor to the king of
Virata. Still, it is hard to believe that this most moral of human
beings, incapable of telling a lie, cannot resist the sound of dice
like the proverbial gambler of the Rig Veda: ‘When I swear I will
not play with them, I am left behind by my friends as they
depart. But when the brown dice raise their voice as they are
thrown down, I run at once to rendezvous with them, like a
woman to her lover.’24
If Yudhishthira knew his weakness, why did he allow himself
+ +
to get into a situation that could escalate into tragedy? Plato
thought it was impossible for rational beings to do wrong
knowingly.25 But Aristotle disagreed, and he felt that Plato’s
view contradicted the observed facts about ordinary human
beings. He believed that a person may have the knowledge but
may not use it.26 Indian thinkers seem to have shared Aristotle’s
practical view. They believed that ‘people do, in fact, act against
their moral convictions and this is an unhappy fact about
ourselves’. 27
Games have been used throughout history to understand
human behaviour and even to help unravel moral dilemmas.28 In
this particular game everything seems to have gone wrong. The
king was expected to preside over a ritual and not become a
player in the gambling duel. It was in the wrong place—it should
have been held in Yudhishthira’s own assembly hall in the
Pandavas’ city of Indraprastha, not in the Kauravas’ city of
Hastinapura. According to the ritual, the king ought to have

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 9

been ceremonially installed on a throne, after taking ‘three Vishnu

steps’. In the Vedic ceremony, the king takes a step ‘in each of
the five directions’ to legitimize the physical battles over space
that had been won by Arjuna, Bhima and the other Pandavas.29
What then is one to make of this dice game which was meant
to create order but is destroying it? Is it a signal to the audience
that the world of the Mahabharata has gone awry? It has become
vishama, ‘uneven’, and even the god Krishna’s attempts to ‘even’
it will only ‘make it spiral downwards to destruction’.30 Most of
the characters in the epic hope that dharma will help to even it.
The loaded game of dice is a metaphor for the vulnerable
human life in which death and kala, ‘time’, inevitably triumph.
The Mahabharata keeps reminding us that kala is always ‘cooking’
us.31 In an essay, David Shulman, the Sanskrit scholar, describes
Yudhishthira’s lonely and opaque situation by asking us to
imagine if our world were ‘impenetrably enigmatic; that blindness
is far more than a metaphor for human perception . . . Assume,
+ too, that life is a dice game, governed by rules known to be
+
deceptive, in which the least experienced, least adequate player
is nevertheless pushed to the point of staking everything he has
including, in the end, himself, with the certainty of losing . . .
Assume a world in which each of the players in this game must
be seen to die in most cases violently and unfairly; in which,
moreover, the poles of life and death are present in every move
with the death pole always strangely privileged, cognitively and
metaphysically, so that death is, in effect, the only possible
outcome of the game. In such a world, one mostly fights for
time.’32
The dice game foreshadows the apocalyptic war between the
Pandavas and the Kauravas over a claim to the kingdom that is
dubious on both sides. The ‘least adequate player’ is
Yudhishthira—a good man, addicted to gambling. He does not
want to fight the war, yet it is he who will give the order for the
war to begin. He will win the war in the end, not only by skill

+
 +

10 / The Difficulty of Being Good

and excellence, but by deception and trickery. After the victory,

there will be no pleasure in ruling over an empty kingdom, as
everyone will be dead.
Is this the epic’s way of telling us that ours is an enigmatic,
deficient and incompetent world where the ordinary human
being does not know why he is born or when he will die, but
only that he will? ‘The Mahabharata sees a vice behind every
virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind
every victory, an uncompleted ritual behind every completed
sacrifice.’33

Duryodhana’s envy in this ‘uneven world’

What makes for uncertainty in our lives is often our own frailties.
The moral flaws of human beings make our world full of
vaishamya, ‘unevenness’, and bring about the nasty surprises that
make us vulnerable. Duryodhana is one of the chief causes of
+ ‘unevenness’ in the Mahabharata and I felt that my education in +
dharma had to begin with him. He suffers from so many vices
(pride, greed, anger, hatred, an excess of ego, etc.), but his most
dangerous defect is envy—which is also the driving force of
calamity in the Mahabharata.
Duryodhana realizes at his cousin’s consecration that he feels
inferior before the success of the Pandavas. ‘What man of mettle
will stand to see his rivals prosper and himself decline?’ is his
envious reaction to Yudhishthira’s good fortune. It is his way of
saying, ‘Why not me?’—the age-old question of the envious
person. Envy, of course, is ‘inherent in the nature of man’,
according to Immanuel Kant.34 Frankly, I have not met a single
person who was free of envy, although some claimed to be. Put
two human beings together and there will be envy. Envy is so
pervasive, so natural, that one is often not aware of it. The
universal human tendency to envy forces the Mahabharata towards
a devastating conclusion. It believes that an envious person
cannot be truthful. Such a person cannot be trusted for envy

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 11

takes away some of an individual’s liberty. And ‘freedom is

acquired by a good man, possessing the truth’.35
Envy involves an envier (Duryodhana), an envied or rival
(Yudhishthira), and a possession (the Pandavas’ talent for success).
The possession can be an object (the throne) but it can also be a
talent such as Arjuna’s ability with the bow. In this case,
Duryodhana’s envy may have been incited by Yudhishthira’s
recent rise in wealth and power, but he is smart enough to know
that his envy ultimately relates to the Pandavas’ ability to acquire
the possession. Hence, he does not merely want the throne but
he also wants to destroy the Pandavas.
Duryodhana’s envy makes him hate the Pandavas. That, too,
one can understand, for ‘hatred always accompanies envy’.
Duryodhana thinks obsessively about the wealth and the power
of the Pandavas. He grows anxious and mean-hearted, pale and
sickly. He betrays another characteristic of envy. It is a colossal
waste of mental energy and this is perhaps why writers across
+ the ages have associated it with ill health. Horace, the Roman +
lyric poet, said that those who were inflicted by envy grew thin.
Shakespeare’s Cassius became ‘lean and hungry’. Clearly, envy
is a health hazard.
Duryodhana decides that he cannot be happy unless he can
wreck the Pandavas’ happiness. Schopenhauer, the German
philosopher, captures this characteristic of envy in a devastating
portrait:

Because they feel unhappy, [they] cannot bear the sight of

someone they think is happy . . . in the boundless egotism of
our nature there is joined more or less in every human
breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancour, and malice,
accumulated like the venom in a serpent’s tooth.36

The human tendency to evaluate one’s well-being by comparing

it with that of another is the cause of Duryodhana’s distress.
Duryodhana is at least open about his envy, but his father’s
envy is hidden. It is so secretive, in fact, that the blind king

+
 +

12 / The Difficulty of Being Good

himself is often not aware of it, let alone admit to it.37 Dhritarashtra
is a hypocrite—and hence, more dangerous. He has found clever
ways of dealing with his envy so that the world will have a
better opinion of him and, equally important, that he will retain
a better opinion of himself. Even as he pretends to be virtuous,
secretly he wants to see his son act out his own deepest
desires.
Like Polonius in Hamlet, Dhritarashtra gives pious advice,
counselling his son to be just and virtuous, but he is silently
pleased with Duryodhana’s plan to trap Yudhishthira in the dice
game. ‘It is the father who fails his son, and not the other way
around.’38 Dhritarashtra’s envy slips out at unguarded moments.
Bhima cannot forget the unrestrained rejoicing on the blind
father’s face as Yudhishthira keeps losing. At each throw of the
dice, the hypocrite’s mask falls. In the next chapter, he will
‘generously’ return his son’s dishonest winnings (ostensibly as a
boon to the virtuous Draupadi), but his real motive will be fear.
+ He will be scared by evil omens.
+
Such hidden, hypocritical envy has often been considered
more dangerous than Duryodhana’s more open and honest
feelings. The ancient Greeks realized that the very fact that one
is successful and prosperous is a good reason for one to be
envied. They thought man to be naturally envious—‘envy being
part of his basic character and disposition’.39 So, they were open
about it. Since envy could not be suppressed, the Greeks devised
a way to deal with it by ostracizing successful people, especially
popular politicians. Aristides the Just was shunned, according to
Plutarch, because he was too good. ‘I am fed up with hearing
him being called too virtuous,’ an Athenian is said to have
remarked. They exiled their statesman Themistocles for living
lavishly and putting on superior airs. Ostracism meant having to
go away for ten years in order to give time for envy ‘to cool off’.
Socrates might have been put to death for the same reason—
‘envy for his great integrity and virtue’.40

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 13

The Greeks were not alone in driving out outstanding statesmen

and generals. Winston Churchill, the popular wartime premier,
was defeated in the 1945 elections. Many Conservatives
interpreted his defeat as the result of envy and resentment, and
a fear that he might acquire too much power or become too
popular. De Gaulle suffered a similar fate in 1946.41
If the Greeks institutionalized how to deal with envy through
ostracism, Indians coped with it by renouncing it. No one would
be envious of worldly success if you renounce it, and hope for
compensation in another world. Even before the Buddha, the
‘Renouncer’ had become a perennial hero in India. I have known
a number of very successful Indians who worried constantly that
things might be going too well. They feared that their good
fortune would not last and soon there would be a reversal. For
this reason, many parents in India place a small black dot on a
child’s face to ward off retaliation by the envious.
The Chinese, on the other hand, cope with envy by appearing
+ to be excessively and hypocritically modest and seek to disparage
+
their achievements. ‘O sir, I am your mean and humble servant
who just happened to hit upon this idea,’ is not an uncommon
refrain. If one sets too high a value on one’s abilities, it makes
one commit the social offence of regarding oneself as better than
others. Thus, the well-known Chinese fear of ‘losing face’ is a
ritualized attitude, in part, to avoid envy.42

‘A kshatriya’s duty is to prevail’

Duryodhana is not ashamed of his envy because it is part of a

larger and consistent egoistic philosophical outlook. When he is
feeling low, filled with hatred for the Pandavas, his father
Dhritarashtra tries to comfort him, counselling him not to covet
what belongs to Yudhishthira:

Envy of another is ignoble behaviour. Be content with what you

have. Perform your own duty—therein lies happiness.43

+
 +

14 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Duryodhana disagrees. He replies that his duty is to win at all

costs. A smart person pursues power and uses it to exact as
much as possible from the weak. If he does not do that he leaves
himself vulnerable to attack from an enemy:

A kshatriya’s duty is to prevail, great king. Whether by virtuous

means or not . . . O bull among Bharatas, he should go out like a
charioteer and whip every corner of the earth into submission.44

Accordingly, he is not embarrassed about feeling envious because

it is a form of discontent that will lead to ambition:

Discontent is the root of success; this is why I desire it. Only the
person who reaches for the heights, noble lord, becomes the
ultimate leader.45

His envy goads him to act against his rivals, the Pandavas. No
means are too foul for he has to win at any cost. He tries
poisoning them, drowning them, and burning them alive; he lets
+ +
serpents loose upon them. Trapping Yudhishthira in a game is
merely the latest in a string of actions to wipe out his enemies.
In Bhasa’s classical play, Dutavakya, whose hero happens to be
Duryodhana, he tells Krishna the same thing about what is
necessary to gain power:

Kingship is enjoyed by brave princes after conquering their foes in

battle. It cannot be had by begging, nor is it conferred upon the
poor in this world. If they desire to become kings, let them venture
forth on the battlefield, or else let them at their will enter a
hermitage, sought for peace by men of tranquil minds.46

Like Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, Duryodhana sees morality

as a veiled way to protect the interests of the powerful.47 As he
sees it, what people call ‘dharma’ is really a clever way of
advancing those interests.
Duryodhana’s view of the world is by no means unique.
Conquerors and rulers throughout history have espoused it. It is

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 15

called ‘realism’ or ‘realpolitik’ by students of international politics.

In India, its chief advocate was Kautilya, who wrote the classic
treatise Arthashastra. In the West, this viewpoint was made
famous by Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, who argued
that if men do not conquer when they can, they only reveal
weakness and invite attack. ‘By a necessity of nature’ (a phrase
Hobbes made popular) they conquer when they can. Hobbes
translated Thucydides’s classic history of the Peloponnesian War,
which is the foundation stone of ‘Realist’ thinking about
international relations. In it, Athenian generals who were about
to conquer Melos, a Spartan colony, said much the same to the
people of Melos in 416 BC: ‘They who have the odds of power
exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions
as they can get . . . [men] will everywhere reign over those such
as they be too strong for . . .’48
The Mahabharata is clearly embarrassed by Duryodhana’s matsya
nyaya, ‘big-fish-eats-small-fish’ view of the world, which is the
+ Indian equivalent of the law of the jungle, a metaphor for the
+
vicious, violent aspects of human nature. Later when Arjuna will
urge Yudhishthira not to renounce the throne, he will remind
him that violence is the way of the world: ‘I see no being which
lives in the world without violence. Creatures exist at one
another’s expense; the strong eat the weak. The mongoose eats
mice, as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, your
majesty, and wild beasts eat the dog.’49 Bhishma, their grandfather,
will employ this anarchic image of disorder in the natural world
in order to justify danda, ‘retributive justice’ and the rule of law
and order, by a tough but just king.50
Other characters in the Mahabharata will contest Duryodhana’s
egoistic philosophy. Yudhishthira, in particular, will offer a
competing view of the world, based on dharma, which he
explains is a universal duty of righteousness, applicable to all
and founded on non-violence, truth and a concern for others. So
too will Vidura, whose moral thinking is based on the

+
 +

16 / The Difficulty of Being Good

consequences of actions rather than duty. He reminds us on a

number of occasions that there were evil portents when
Duryodhana was born:

Wicked Duryodhana, killer of Bharata’s line,

Shrieked, they say, the jackal’s chilling scream,
The moment he was born. It is he who will cause
The destruction of you all!51

If a kshatriya soldier’s duty is to prevail at any cost, and if the

prize is kingship, then the game of dice is not an unreasonable
strategy. Duryodhana, however, does have a reasonable claim to
the Hastinapura throne. Recall that there were two lines of
succession. His father was the older son, but was born blind.
Hence, the throne went to Pandu, his half-brother, who was the
son of the second wife. His eldest son, Yudhishthira, was born a
few minutes before Duryodhana, and this is at the heart of the
Pandavas’ legal claim to the kingdom. Since Pandu could not
+ +
have sex, Yudhishthira was born from a god, who acted as proxy
to give Kunti a son. On the other hand, Duryodhana was born
naturally to Dhritarashtra and not by proxy. Hence, Duryodhana’s
claim to the kingdom might be stronger. In any case, this is
academic. After Dhritarashtra divided the kingdom between the
Kauravas and the Pandavas, Duryodhana’s claim to the original,
undivided kingdom disappeared.
Duryodhana might still argue that Yudhishthira was addicted
to gambling—so, he was merely taking advantage of a weakness
in the character of his adversary, who clearly made a bad
decision to play. But Yudhishthira could easily counter, saying
that he was innocently following an ancient Vedic rajasuya
sacrifice, as a part of his consecration ceremony.52 He was duped
into playing against a cheat. Although Shakuni does admit that
he cheats, Duryodhana could retort that there was no hard
evidence of cheating on that day—Yudhishthira just happened to
be playing against a better player. It is always tempting to see

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 17

human beings as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, but this is not the Mahabharata’s
way.53 It never makes the choice easy.
Once the war begins, Duryodhana will grow as a character. He
will prove himself to be a highly skilled commander and will
rise in our esteem. He is brave and he possesses shri—an
indispensable quality in a great, charismatic ruler. His flaw is his
unwillingness to accept Krishna’s divinity, at least according to
the Vaishnav reading of the text;54 he stands up to God, and
asserts man’s priority in the greater scheme of things.
In the end, there is something heroic about him as he lies
dying on the battlefield. He evokes admiration as he defiantly
recounts Krishna’s wrongdoings. He proclaims that if the
Pandavas had fought honestly, not deceitfully, he would have
won. Unrepentant, and without self-pity, he declares:

Whose end is more admirable than mine? Who else could bring his
life to a close with such nobility? I shall dwell in heaven with my
+ brothers and friends. You will spend your days in despair, in +
sorrow.55

Eternal sickness or healthy competitiveness?

The sort of envy evinced by Duryodhana was not unfamiliar to

me when I was growing up in Simla. My mother had a great and
unfulfilled desire to be a part of Simla’s fashionable society. She
envied those who belonged to ‘the club’, the glamorous Amateur
Dramatic Club. She must have transmitted this to me, for I grew
up with an acute concern over my position in society, comparing
myself to those who had things that I did not possess, boys who
were more attractive to girls than I was, and especially those
who made it to the school cricket team.
My father, however, had a sunnier temperament, and he saw
a positive side to envy. It fostered a healthy competitive spirit, a
desire to better oneself. He pointed out the example of a daughter
of a poor relative of ours. She had always been discriminated

+
 +

18 / The Difficulty of Being Good

against by her family, who preferred and pampered her brother.

Envy drove her to work hard at studies and aspire to a better
life. She succeeded. She sat for a competitive exam, got into the
coveted Indian Administrative Service, and went on to become
a powerful civil servant. Her spoiled brother grew into a
mediocrity. Drona, the archery teacher of the Kauravas and
Pandavas, I recalled, had also exploited envy between the cousins
to raise the level of their overall performance.
It is thus possible for the envier to want something but
without wishing the envied to lose it at the same time. This
positive sort of envy that my father alluded to leads to ambition,
to want to emulate the successful, but without the malicious
desire to deprive the rival of the possession. This is called
‘benign’ or ‘emulative’ envy and it is the one on display when
one says to a friend, ‘I envy you for such and such skill.’ One
obviously does not want to deprive the friend of the talent or the
skill. Nor is one filled with pain in the case of benign envy.
+ While all this may be true, the Mahabharata would have thought
+
this a marginal aspect of envy, probably deserving of a different
name. The epic would have considered my father naïve. The epic
says: ‘The man who envies other people for their conduct,
beauty, courage, family lineage, happiness, success and favour
has an eternal sickness.’56 To prove the point Duryodhana does
grow physically sick after witnessing the enormous success of
his cousins. So did my mother. She grew weak and was acutely
depressed for several weeks. The doctor could not make anything
of it. One day I overheard her tell my aunt that she thought that
the cause of her depression was our attractive and sophisticated
neighbour, who was also popular in Simla’s ‘high society’. She
was an accomplished woman and each success of hers seemed to
affect my mother in a negative way. Gore Vidal, I think, expressed
my mother’s emotion in a more brutal way: ‘Whenever a friend
succeeds a little,’ he wrote, ‘something in me dies.’57
John Rawls, my teacher at Harvard, would have characterized

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 19

my mother’s sentiment as ‘general envy’ of Simla’s high society.

General envy, he explains, does not have a particular person as
its object, and is experienced by the less advantaged for those
better situated.58 Duryodhana’s ‘special envy’, on the other hand,
is specific to the Pandavas. It covets the specific things that the
other person possesses. Occasionally, general envy can become
specific as my mother’s did when it became concentrated on our
neighbour.
When I grew up and entered the business world I encountered
both the healthy envy (that my father spoke about) and the
negative and destructive faces of envy. As a young manager, I
felt envious of my rivals and it spurred me to improve, but on
occasion, it threatened to get out of control too. Many of my
customers were petty wholesalers of the merchant caste, who
were objects of deep envy in the small towns of India. During
my travels, I found that people were quite happy to borrow from
them, but they scorned and abused them behind their back and
+ never mixed with them socially. The Bania trader has always
+
been more prosperous than the locals and was envied for his
wealth in many parts of Asia and Africa. This envy occasionally
turns violent, as it did in Idi Amin Dada’s Uganda when
thousands of Indian families were expelled in 1972.
The envy I encountered in the business world, however, was
nothing compared to what I would see later in the academic
world. ‘The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little
is at stake,’ Henry Kissinger was fond of saying.59 There is a
certain misery attached to the academic life, no doubt, in which
envy plays a considerable part. As Max Weber noted, ‘Do you
think that, year after year, you will be able to stand to see one
mediocrity after another promoted over you, and still not become
embittered and dejected? Of course, the answer is always:
“Naturally, I live only for my calling.” Only in a very few cases
have I found [young academics] able to undergo it without
suffering spiritual damage.’60

+
 +

20 / The Difficulty of Being Good

The Jews have been victim to a general envy by the unsuccessful

for the successful. Forced out of their homeland 2,000 years ago
by Roman oppression, they spread across Europe and prospered
spectacularly in many places, including Vienna and Berlin, till
Hitler took over. Joseph Epstein tells us that in the ‘Vienna of
1936, a city that was 90 per cent Catholic and 9 per cent Jewish,
Jews accounted for 60 per cent of the city’s lawyers, more than
half its physicians, more than 90 per cent of its advertising
executives, and 123 of its 174 newspaper editors. And this is not
to mention the prominent places Jews held in banking, retailing,
and intellectual and artistic life. The numbers four or five years
earlier for Berlin are said to have been roughly similar.’61
Is it surprising that Nazism had its greatest resonance in these
two cities? Before killing the Jews, Germans and Austrians felt
the need to humiliate their victims: ‘They had Jewish women
cleaning floors, had Jewish physicians scrubbing the cobblestone
streets of Vienna with toothbrushes as Nazi youth urinated on
+ them and forced elderly Jews to do hundreds of deep knee bends +
until they fainted or sometimes died. All this suggests a vicious
evening of the score that has the ugly imprint of envy on the
loose. The Jews in Germany and Austria had succeeded not only
beyond their numbers but also, in the eyes of the envious,
beyond their right—and now they would be made to pay for it.
Envy was being acted out, as never before.’62 It led to the murder
of six million Jews in the Second World War.
Today, I find envy laced through the statements of European
and Indian intellectuals about America. Arundhati Roy’s essay
after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington is an
example. Like many anti-American intellectuals writing in the
days after the attack, Roy claimed that it was the direct result of
American foreign policy—the implication being that America
somehow deserved what had happened. There is widespread
anti-American sentiment in the world which regards the United
States as arrogant, indifferent to human suffering, consumerist,

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 21

and contemptuous of international law. Much of this is probably

correct, but I find that some of it is inspired by envy of America’s
success.
What begins initially as envy of America slowly turns into a
visceral hatred of the ‘American Empire’. As a result of this India
almost lost the Indo–US nuclear deal in 2008 and a historic
opportunity to climb to world power status because of the
intransigence of Leftist parties in the Parliament. Most Indians
found it inexplicable that the Left could quibble over a treaty
that was so obviously in their nation’s self-interest. There is
much to criticize about America’s behaviour, but it should not
come at one’s own expense.
Envy of America, and anti-Americanism in general, often gets
transferred to global institutions like the World Bank that are
seen to be under American control. It came as a shock to me that
the city of Delhi is endowed with more water than most cities.
Delhi has 300 litres per person per day of treated water available
+ compared to Paris with 150 or London with 171. Yet people in +
Paris and London get water twenty-four hours a day while
Delhi’s residents get it only for four hours on the average. The
poor in Delhi (and our other cities) have to depend on water
tankers, and when the tanker is late there is a scramble and even
a riot. Recently, a tanker driver was late. Fearing for his life, he
took off at high speed and crushed a child in the chaos.
Delhi’s government, to its credit, decided to fix the problem in
2004. It enlisted the service of World Bank experts, who had
solved similar problems in other countries. They came up with
a plan to professionalize the water board and insulate it from
politicians who were mostly responsible for the distribution
problems. When the Left-leaning NGO Parivartan discovered
that Delhi was about to take a World Bank loan and change its
management, it mounted a huge and successful campaign in the
media, claiming falsely ‘privatization’ and ‘sell out to the World
Bank’. I discovered later that Parivartan had been profoundly
influenced by the employees of the water authority, who were

+
 +

22 / The Difficulty of Being Good

afraid that better-performing employees might advance more

rapidly in a professional system of management. It was thus
envy of poor performers for high performers combined with an
anti-Americanism (that was subconsciously rooted) that killed
Delhi’s water reforms. Sadly, Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of
Delhi, got scared by the ‘fear’ campaign unleased by the press,
and dropped the excellent World Bank plan. With this died the
prospect of water for twenty-four hours a day in Delhi.

An Indian morality play

In 2007, Anil Ambani was the fifth richest person in the world
according to the Forbes list of billionaires, but he was consumed
with a Duryodhana-like envy for his more accomplished older
brother, Mukesh, who was placed a notch higher on the list. Each
brother had his Shakuni, who was happy to rig a game of dice
in order to win the prize and destroy the other brother. Sibling
+ rivalry inside India’s wealthiest family had been the longest- +
running soap opera in the country, having mesmerized millions
for the past four years. It mattered to the nation because
enterprises of the two brothers accounted for 3 per cent of India’s
GDP, 10 per cent of government tax revenues and 14 per cent of
India’s exports. Millions of shareholders worried if their epic
fight might lay waste their lifelong savings. I saw in this corporate
and family feud a morality play and I wondered if the Mahabharata
could shed some light.
The first scene of the play opens in Mumbai’s Kabutarkhana in
1964. The Ambani children are growing up in a single room in
a fifth floor walk-up ‘chawl’ along with six members of their
family. Their father, Dhirubhai Ambani, has just set himself up
as a trader in synthetic yarn in the Pydhonie market. The son of
a modest schoolteacher from a village near Porbandar in Gujarat
(not far from where Mahatma Gandhi was born), Dhirubhai has
returned form Aden with Rs 15,000 in capital.63 He discovers that
the demand for nylon and polyester fabrics is monumental

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 23

whereas supply is scarce because of rigid government controls

on production and imports. This is due to India’s socialist,
command economy, created by Jawaharlal Nehru. Businesses
have to contend with dozens of controls, which Indians wryly
call ‘Licence Raj’.64 Dhirubhai takes great risks and soon corners
government licences in the black market, and begins to make
large monopoly profits. His competitors cry ‘foul’; his critics call
him ‘corrupt’. He understands what Leftist politicians do not—
polyester is destined to become a fabric for the poor whereas
they tax and control it as though it was a luxury of the rich.
Hence, the mismatch between demand and supply and a black
market.
Act Two: Dhirubhai ploughs his profits from trading into a
technologically advanced factory to make synthetic textiles, which
is up and running in record time thanks to his proximity to
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s secretary. The village boy soon
becomes a master gamesman of the Licence Raj, manipulating a
+ decaying and corrupt regime of controls to his advantage. He +
integrates backwards to create an outstanding petrochemicals
company, which first makes the raw material for the textiles—
polyester fibre—and then basic polymers and chemicals, until he
reaches the magic raw material, petroleum.
By now his sons are grown up. They are back from business
school in America and have plunged into his company, Reliance,
which is growing at a scorching pace. Opponents predict its fall
after the economic reforms in the 1990s, but Reliance continues
to expand and soon it becomes India’s largest company. It builds
the world’s largest oil refinery in the shortest time, thanks to the
project management skills of Mukesh. Next, the company begins
to explore for oil and gas. As luck would have it, Reliance makes
the biggest petroleum find in the world in a decade—a mountain
of gas off the shore of Andhra Pradesh. It is monumental and
holds the promise of easing the import burden of a fast growing,
energy-starved nation. From the ‘prince of polyester’ Dhirubhai
has become the undisputed king of industrial India.65

+
 +

24 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Act Three opens in 2002 when the ‘king’ is dead. Three and a
half million middle class shareholders (the largest in any
enterprise in the world), who have become rich beyond their
dreams, mourn his death. He leaves behind two highly
accomplished sons, and power passes to the older, more sober
Mukesh. The younger, flamboyant Anil marries a film star, Tina
Munim. He loves glamour and cultivates powerful politicians,
and this does not go down well with the serious, older brother.
Mukesh tries to marginalize his brother, but Anil retaliates.
Filled with monumental envy for ‘the new king’, he launches an
attack on his brother. In the fight, governance failures are revealed
for the first time (about the family’s shareholding and the
ownership structure of their new telecom venture). The stock
plunges and the country watches in fear the unfolding of an
awesome tragedy. Finally, their mother—an anguished, Kunti-
like figure caught in the middle—intervenes and splits the
kingdom as Dhritarashtra did in the Mahabharata. Three years
+ later, both sons have prospered beyond their dreams and the
+
value of the empire of each brother is more than double that of
the undivided kingdom.
The Ambani saga raises troubling moral questions. It is a
classic rags-to-riches story—the ascent of a simple village boy,
who against all odds creates a world class, globally competitive
enterprise that brings enormous prosperity to millions. But it is
also a tale of deceit, bribery and the manipulation of a decaying
and corrupt ‘Licence Raj’. Ambani’s defenders argue that since
his enterprises brought so much good to society, what was the
harm if he manipulated an evil system and bribed politicians
and bureaucrats? The government itself realized its problems
and has been dismantling the system since 1991. But Ambani’s
opponents counter, saying that it is never justified to break a law.
Ends cannot justify the means. Others believe that the uncertain
business world is full of danger and surprise, and a certain
amount of deception is necessary for business success.

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 25

Anil’s envy of Mukesh is as dangerous as Duryodhana’s. He

cannot bear the fact that his brother has far more power and
fame than he does. He burns inside each time the media extols
Mukesh’s awesome managerial skills. Had the mother not
intervened, the rivalry might have hurtled uncontrollably towards
a Kurukshetra-like war, which might have destroyed the whole
enterprise, and with it the lives of millions of people. The drama
is by no means over. In 2009, Mukesh had moved up to the third
richest person in the world while Anil had slid to number seven.
There continued to be a huge amount of bad blood and dozens
of court cases were pending between the two brothers. Mukesh
too had a Duryodhana in him—he had denied his brother his fair
share of the kingdom until the mother had to intervene.
Nevertheless, my father’s view about the positive and
competitive side of envy had also been vindicated. Envy had
driven Anil to perform to great heights, and the value of the
enterprises of each brother was far greater than if they had
+ remained united. Dharma draws a fine line between the positive +
and negative sides of competition, and it is easily crossed as we
have seen recently in the global financial crisis in 2008.
Competition did put great pressure on investment bankers,
rating agencies and other players to bend the rules of decent
conduct in the market for US housing mortgages. But when they
justified their acts as rational behaviour based on the healthy
competition, they slipped into the arena of self-deception. To
meet the relentless demand of the bottom line and the incentive
of a huge but unseemly bonus, many senior executives
compromised their character.

‘Nobody shall be the favourite’

Envy also supplies the psychological foundations for our quest

for justice, especially for equality.66 And this too can take both
good and bad forms. Freud wrote that our desire for justice is the
product of childhood envy of other children, which makes one
hunger for equal treatment and brings about a ‘group spirit’. He

+
 +

26 / The Difficulty of Being Good

adds, ‘If one cannot be the favourite oneself, at all events nobody
else shall be the favorite.’67 The Mahabharata is aware of these
psychological roots of human motivation. In it, Drona, the martial
teacher, is as accomplished as he is insensitive, and makes the
mistake of treating the brilliant Arjuna differently from the
others. Duryodhana reacts predictably to the incipient teacher’s
pet. Since he cannot tolerate the lavish praise constantly heaped
on his cousin, he does whatever he can to bring Arjuna down to
his level.
Envy is thus a leveller, and it levels downwards. Instead of
motivating one to better performance, as my father thought it
could, envy prefers to see the other person fall. The envious
person is willing to see both sides lose. ‘Envy is collectively
disadvantageous; the individual who envies another is prepared
to do things that make them both worse off, if only the discrepancy
between them is sufficiently reduced,’ says John Rawls.68 This is
precisely what I experienced when I worked in Bombay in the
+ 1980s. The factory next to ours, belonging to the Dutch electronics +
company Phillips, suffered from a debilitating strike that lasted
almost a year. I worried—I did not want their militant union to
contaminate ours—because their trade union leader had the
same psychological make-up as Duryodhana’s. He was overheard
saying, ‘I don’t care if we sink this factory with our strike as long
as the Dutch manager goes down with us.’ The statement sent a
shiver down my spine.
When this sort of attitude gets institutionalized and forms the
mental make-up of a militant trade union movement, the result
could be de-industrialization. This is what happened in West
Bengal and Kerala after these two Indian states came under
communist rule. The communist cadres preferred to sink the
economy of the state rather than compromise with the capitalists.
As a result, company after company left Bengal for other parts of
India, and both states stopped receiving new investment. Even
today, the memory of that militancy survives, and it is difficult
for these two states to attract industry.

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 27

To avoid this sort of calamitous result, John Rawls argues that

a just and sensible society ought to do something in order ‘to
mitigate if not prevent’ the conditions that bring about envy.
Since modern democracies cannot adopt the sensible Greek
solution of exiling its successful citizens, they take the sting out
of capitalist inequality by taxing the rich at a progressive rate.
Universal and high quality education and health care can also
help to create more equality of opportunity, and help to reduce
envy. Rawls makes the excellent point that ‘plurality of voluntary
associations (churches, clubs, unions and other groupings) in a
well-ordered society, each with its own secure internal life, tends
to reduce the visibility, or at least the painful visibility, of
variations in men’s prospects’.69 Alexis de Tocqueville, the French
aristocrat who visited America in the 1830s, noted that there was
greater envy in democratic, egalitarian America compared to
feudal Europe but the American disposition to form associations
was a ‘safety valve’.
+ In a well-ordered society, one cannot merely dismiss envy as
+
a human frailty. One ought to design institutions that help to
diminish it, or, alternatively, face its consequences, as the French
did in 1789 or as the Kauravas and the Pandavas did on the
battlefield at Kurukshetra. Nietzsche thought the French
Revolution was fired by the sentiment of envy of the masses
against the classes. Sometimes resentment over social inequality
is so great that it wounds one’s self-respect.70 Such envy is
understandable, especially when it is exacerbated by ostentatious
display by the well-off. It tends to demean the situation of those
who have less. Although it is a psychological state, social
institutions can and ought to mitigate such envy.
If the advantages of the better-off are a return for their
contribution to improving the situation of the worst-off—this is
Rawls’s solution—the inequality will be perceived as just, and
there will be fewer reasons to feel envious. If the lowest worker
believes that his salary will grow significantly if his company

+
 +

28 / The Difficulty of Being Good

performs well, then he will not resent an outstanding CEO who

earns fifty times more than he does. Rawls believes that
inequalities can be justified because the basis for inequality could
be agreed to in a hypothetical situation by similarly placed
rational human beings who are ignorant of their eventual place
in society. The only caveat he places is that these rational human
beings do not suffer from an excess of envy.71
I have always believed that it is none of my business how
much Mukesh and Anil Ambani earn and how the brothers
spend their money as long as they create vast numbers of new
jobs and pay their taxes. I believe that in a poor country like
India it is more important to remove poverty than to worry
about inequality. However, this belief was shaken in a
conversation I had with an employee of the scandal-ridden
Satyam, a company that I alluded to in the Prelude. She said that
she and many of her colleagues at Satyam continued to support
B. Ramalinga Raju, the disgraced founder of their company, even
+ after his fraud was exposed. It was only after she discovered that +
the IT czar owned a thousand designer suits, 321 pairs of shoes
and 310 belts that she turned against him. ‘When I was burning
the midnight oil, he was buying belts!’ she raged. So, inequality
does matter, and the public anger at the ‘obscene’ salaries and
bonuses on Wall Street was justified in 2008 when the world
economy went into a recession.

If greed is the sin of capitalism,

envy is the vice of socialism

The Mahabharata is just as interested as the nineteenth century

Utopians in the best way to order society. Seeing Duryodhana’s
envy run amok, it will pose the question if there is another way
to live. When he is in exile, Yudhishthira, through his example,
will offer an alternative life of harmony and non-violence in
contrast to Duryodhana’s life of brutal competition, which many
think was responsible for bringing the global economy to its

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 29

knees in 2008. The earlier socialist dream was a reaction to the

cruel excesses of the industrial revolutions in the West, and it
envisioned a future of harmony rather than a life of excessive
competition, exemplified most recently by Wall Street’s
investment bankers.
Capitalist greed gives one the permission to grow rich beyond
one’s dreams. Socialism seeks a society of equality. But Marxists
seek this equality by ‘soaking the rich’. In a perpetual class
struggle, they wish to bring down the aristocracy, the rentier
class and the bourgeoisie. In this there is more than a hint of the
general envy of the poor for the rich. Leftists regard income
inequality as a psychic wound that is uniquely worthy of state
intervention. Lord Layard goes to the extent of saying that those
who work too hard and excessive hours may improve their own
income, but they create a problem for the others, who feel
dissatisfied. The rat race forces people to spend less time with
their families and in community activities, and reduces the
+ overall contentment of the community. Hence, he makes a bizarre
+
suggestion—tax those who work too hard. This will, he feels,
tame the rat race, reduce envy, and improve overall human
happiness.72
By creating more equality socialism was supposed to eliminate
human envy. But the opposite happened. Oddly enough, as
levelling increases in society, it actually increases envy.73 The
Soviet Union was pervaded with envy because tiny differences,
such as a new tablecloth, got exaggerated in neighbours’ eyes. If
greed is the vice of capitalism, envy is the flaw of socialism.
‘From each according to ability and to each according to his
need’ was the rallying cry of Marxism as it set out to create a
classless, egalitarian society. Socialist societies, however, turned
out to be the most envious in history. ‘The searing heartburn of
envy causes a choking feeling in the throat, squeezes the eyes out
of their sockets,’ says a character in Y. Olesha’s 1929 novella set
in the Soviet Union, where turning in your neighbour for his

+
 +

30 / The Difficulty of Being Good

perceived advantage became a way of life.74 Envy is felt more

strongly between near equals than those widely separated in
fortune. It does not make sense to envy the Queen of England.
As a libertarian, I have deep misgivings about the attempts of
the state to create excessive equality. Envy will rise as the
number of differences among people diminish; the fewer
differences will result in fewer standards to measure one against,
and since most will not measure up, there will be greater envy.
I would opt for a more diverse society where more people will
be good at something. I fear, like Immanuel Kant, in artificially
enforcing excessive equality. Kant felt that ‘inequality among
men is a rich source of much that is evil, but also of everything
that is good’. He believed that inequality among social classes is
an impetus to liberty because it makes people strive to better
themselves.
To be fair to my leftist egalitarian friends, I will concede that
what drives many of them is not envy but resentment, a different
+ moral idea. Many socialists do not suffer from envy for the
+
better-off but they resent the inherently unjust distribution of
income and power in our social arrangements. What upsets them
is the unequal arrangements rather than those who are better off.
Resentment, in this sense, is a rational and impersonal moral
emotion, which can also drive one to change the world for the
better.
Socialism in its various forms has often appealed to persons in
comfortable circumstances, who suffer from guilt—that they are
the cause of envy among the less advantaged.75 Some of them
believe that the aim of equality is to compensate people for
undeserved bad luck—being born with poor native endowments,
bad parents, disagreeable personalities, accidents and illness,
and so on.76 Hence, they look to the state as a great insurance
company, which takes from people who have benefited from
cosmic good luck to compensate those with bad luck.
Clearly, envy is related to inequality and societies have dealt

+
 +

Duryodhana’s Envy / 31

with it in various ways. The ancient Greeks, who believed in

‘moral luck’, ostracized those who had too much of it; the
Chinese act self-deprecatingly in order to reduce envy and thus
‘save face’; Indians preach renunciation and hope for
compensation in another world. In modern democracies, the
Left’s solution against envy is to have an extensive welfare state,
and thereby diminish inequality. The Right is suspicious of
egalitarianism because the impulse for equality usually curbs
liberty. However, neither the Left nor the Right would quarrel
with the goal of a just society in which inequalities are perceived
to be fair and deserved and hence cause less envy.

Can dharma make us less vulnerable?

During my ‘academic holiday’ in Chicago, Martha Nussbaum,

the philosopher, introduced me to a poem about envy by the
Greek poet Pindar, which speaks about ‘the way lies can make
+ the world rotten’.77 Pindar compares human beings to a vulnerable +
vine. The excellence of a young person is also vulnerable, like a
plant that is constantly in need of nourishment and protection.
Nussbaum asks if human reason might save a person from the
vagaries of luck, human envy and other unexpected reverses in
life. The answer of the ancient Greeks was, of course, ‘yes’.
In the same vein, I wondered if dharma might play the same
role in the Mahabharata as reason does among the ancient Greeks.
Can a life lived according to dharma diminish the vulnerability
of human beings to the ‘unevenness’ of the world engendered by
Duryodhana’s envy, for example? Yudhishthira hopes so,
particularly as life has a way of presenting itself to him in the
form of an enigmatic game of dice, ‘governed by rules known to
be deceptive, in which the least experienced, least adequate
player is nevertheless pushed to the point of staking everything
he has including, in the end, himself, with the certainty of
losing’.78 The look of shocked incomprehension on his face is a
silent cry, wanting to know why tragedy has befallen him at the

+
 +

32 / The Difficulty of Being Good

moment of his greatest triumph when he had been consecrated

‘universal sovereign’. It is not unreasonable for him to look to
dharma to insulate him from reverses and help him to navigate
through the many crises of governance that will be fed by
Duryodhana’s adharma.
Dharma is easiest to spot by its absence: the Mahabharata
employs the pedagogical technique of teaching about dharma
via its opposite, adharma. Duryodhana’s envy is adharma. Yet, it
is a natural and universal emotion, common to all human beings.
It is all-pervasive and hence the proverb: ‘If envy were a fever
the whole world would be ill’. It is also fearsome. When a person
is unable to tolerate the good fortune of others, and when she
cannot have what they do, she prefers to spoil it for everyone.
This ability to make everyone worse off means that not only
ordinary human beings but also rulers must take envy seriously,
and not dismiss it merely as human frailty. We ought to be
concerned about its terrible ability to damage both our personal
+ and our public life. The Mahabharata does not think envy is a sin. +
It is just ‘poor mental hygiene’.79 It makes Duryodhana pale and
sickly and shrivels his heart. It gives him a very low opinion of
himself until Shakuni rescues him with the idea of trapping his
rival in a dice game.
For one who goes through life rigging dice games, Duryodhana
turns out to have a positive side. He grows on us. His integrity
lies, oddly enough, in his adherence to principle. One may not
agree with his egoistic philosophy, but he is consistent, unlike his
hypocritical and cowardly father. There is something heroically
Faustian in the way he stands up to Krishna, the God. As he lies
dying on the battlefield, he elicits our grudging admiration.
Duryodhana’s character points to an attractive feature of the
Mahabharata, which refuses to slot people into rigid compartments.
It is more relaxed in its boundaries, not judging human beings as
inherently good or bad. Nor is it morally conservative, unlike
Christian texts with their ‘horror of sensuality’ and their belief in
a radically corrupt human nature that is a victim of ‘original sin’.

+
 +

DRAUPADI’S COURAGE
‘Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?’

What is left of the dharma of kings? . . . This ancient eternal dharma is

lost among the Kauravas . . . For this foul man, disgrace of the Kauravas,
is molesting me, and I cannot bear it.
+ —Draupadi, as Duhshasana tries to disrobe
+
her in the assembly, Mahabharata, II.62.121

‘What son of a king would wager his wife?’

As soon as Shakuni cries ‘jitam’, Duryodhana realizes that he has

won the game of dice—and with it Yudhishthira’s wife Draupadi,
the desperate Pandava king’s final wager. ‘Drunk with pride’ he
orders the messenger to go to the queen’s chambers.2

. . . bring Draupadi
The beloved wife whom the Pandavas honour
Let her sweep the house and run our errands
What a joy to watch!3

Vidura, Duryodhana’s fearless counsellor, tries to dissuade him

from claiming his prize.

You don’t know it, fool, you are tied in a noose!

33

+
 +

34 / The Difficulty of Being Good

. . . you are a deer provoking a tiger’s wrath . . .

She is not a slave yet. Bharata! I think she was staked
when the king was no longer his own master.4

But Duryodhana refuses to listen. Impatiently, he commands the

royal messenger, who speeds off on his master’s orders. The
messenger enters the queen’s chambers, like ‘a dog in a lion’s
den, crawling up to the Queen of the Pandavas’.5 He says:

Intoxicated on dice, Yudhishthira has lost you, O Draupadi . . .

You must come now to Dhritarashtra’s house . . .6

Hearing this, Draupadi rages:

What son of a king would wager his wife?

The king is befooled and crazed by the game.7

She tells the messenger to go back to the assembly and ask her
husband:
+ Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?8 +
When the messenger returns and puts the question to him,
Yudhishthira does not stir, as though he has lost consciousness.
Since he makes no reply, Duryodhana intervenes, ‘Let Draupadi
come here and ask the question herself. All the people want to
hear what she has to say.’ The messenger obediently returns to
Draupadi and says:

The kings in the hall are summoning you—it seems the fall of the
Kurus has come! Princess, when you are led into that hall, the
king will be too weak to protect our fortunes.9

Meanwhile, Duryodhana gets impatient, and orders his brother

to fetch Draupadi.
And quickly angry Duhshasana
Came rushing to her with a thunderous roar;
By the long-tressed black and flowing hair
Duhshasana grabbed the wife of a king.10

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 35

And as she was dragged, she bent her body

And whispered softly, ‘It is now my month!
This is my sole garment, man of slow wit,
You cannot take me to the hall, you churl!’11

But Duhshasana continues to drag her by the hair. She appeals

to his good sense not to debase her. Duhshasana replies:

Come, come . . . you are won . . . enjoy the Kurus . . .

With slaves one delights as one wishes.12

Draupadi warns him that he has lost his sanity.

‘Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?’

When Draupadi enters, the assembly is in shock at the sight of

the queen thus dragged. No one speaks. She throws a scornful
glance at her husbands.

+ Not the kingdom lost, nor the riches looted +

Not the precious jewels plundered did hurt
As much as did her sidelong glance.13

No one has answered her question, ‘whom did you lose first,
yourself or me’, and the problem hangs uncomfortably over the
entire assembly. Finally, Bhishma, the grandfather of the warring
cousins, rises to speak. He is the eldest and most respected in the
assembly. Having renounced the throne when he was young, he
has lived his life selflessly, and looked after the affairs of the
kingdom as trustee for two generations. Used to dealing with
matters of state, he looks upon Draupadi’s question as a legal
challenge.
It is true, Bhishma begins, that a person who has lost himself
in the game is no longer free to stake what no longer belongs to
him. Since Yudhishthira did lose himself first, he was not
competent to stake Draupadi. If that is so, then she is free. On the
other hand, Bhishma continues, a wife does belong to a husband,

+
 +

36 / The Difficulty of Being Good

in the sense that a wife is expected to act upon a husband’s

orders, which means that even if he is not free, she is legally his
and he is allowed to stake her.14 Moreover, no one forced
Yudhishthira to gamble. He knew that Shakuni has no equal in
dicing. He played voluntarily and never complained that Shakuni
was cheating. Bhishma concludes in great distress that the matter
is complex, and he cannot resolve Draupadi’s dilemma:

As dharma is subtle, my dear, I fail

To resolve your question in the proper way.15

Draupadi is upset at Bhishma’s reply. As Duhshasana hurls

nasty insults at her, her eyes are filled with tears as she explains
her husband’s actions:

. . . he was challenged, the king,

By cunning, ignoble, and evil tricksters
Who love to game; he had never much tried it.
Why do you say he was left a choice?
+ +
The elders remain silent, but Vikarna, a younger brother of
Duryodhana, is so moved by Draupadi’s grief that he gets up
and rebukes them: ‘We have to answer her question or we shall
all go to hell,’ he says.

Ye best of men, they recount four vices that are the curse of a king:
hunting, drinking, dicing, and fornicating. A man with these
addictions abandons dharma, and the world does not condone his
immoderate deeds. The son of Pandu was intoxicated by one such
vice when the cheating gamblers challenged him and when he
staked Draupadi. The innocent Draupadi is, besides, the common
wife of all of Pandu’s sons. Yudhishthira staked her when he had
already gambled away his own freedom. It was Saubala’s idea to
stake Draupadi. Considering all this, I do not think she has been
won.16

There is a roar of approval in the assembly. The nobles begin to

praise young Vikarna and condemn Shakuni. Vikarna has, indeed,

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 37

complicated things by suggesting that Yudhishthira was not

competent to stake Draupadi as she was the wife of all the five
Pandavas, not just his. Seeing the tide turning against the
Kauravas, Karna now rises. Karna has never got over the
humiliation of being rejected by Draupadi. He had won her
fairly at her swayamvara in a difficult test that she had posed to
all her suitors. But she rejected him, saying, ‘I do not choose a
charioteer!’ She had chosen the handsome Pandava, Arjuna,
instead.
When the clamour subsides, Karna argues that everyone in the
assembly saw Yudhishthira make the bet, and everyone saw him
lose all that he owned. Since Draupadi is part of ‘all that he
owned’, she was won fairly, according to the law. Moreover,
Draupadi was mentioned by name when the bet was placed and
none of the Pandavas contested it at the time. Besides, he adds,
a virtuous woman has only one husband. Draupadi shares the
five Pandava brothers—making her a slut who ought to be
+ stripped in public.17 +
The nobles are shocked. They know that Karna’s last argument
is false. They are aware that after winning Draupadi’s heart with
his extraordinary display of the bow, Arjuna had brought her
home in the company of his brothers. At the door, they had
shouted to Kunti, ‘See what we have brought, mother.’ Without
looking up, Kunti had replied, ‘Well, I hope you will share it
equally.’ And they did, and this is how she got five husbands.

‘What is to be done’

In the second century BC, the Vedic exegete Jaimini, who worked
on the most important dharma manuals, was fond of saying that
all Vedic texts consisted of injunctions to act. He thus defined
dharma in a practical, action-oriented way—‘what is to be done’.
But dharma also means ‘law’ and Draupadi makes a legal
argument on the assumption that it is more likely to resonate
with the rulers in the assembly. She is using a familiar strategy

+
 +

38 / The Difficulty of Being Good

in the epic when she sends the messenger back with a question
about the sequence of the stakes. Prashna is ‘question’ in Sanskrit,
but it can also mean riddle or puzzle. It points to a ‘baffling,
ultimately insoluble crystallization of conflict articulated along
opposing lines of interpretation’.18
It is curious that the messenger, deliberately or innocently,
puts Draupadi’s question in a way that is different from the way
she had asked it. He asks, ‘As the owner of whom did you lose
us?’ Thus, he sharpens the focus.19 At the time of the epic, a
husband’s authority over his wife was complete; indeed, his
honour depended on his legitimately ‘owning’ his woman’s
sexuality. To expect Bhishma or anyone else in the assembly on
that day to answer differently would have required the person to
step outside his moral paradigm of patriarchy.20 But what is less
clear is whether the husband loses this authority when he himself
is no longer free. If Yudhishthira had lost himself first, he was no
longer free; as a slave he did not own anything, and if he did not
+ own her, then he could not stake her or lose her.21 The question,
+
as he puts it, also has a psychological focus, pointing to
Yudhishthira’s accountability. Was he a master of his faculties?
Or was he temporarily deranged by the gambler’s frenzy? When
Vidura warns Duryodhana: ‘I think she was staked when the
king was no longer his own master,’ he might be suggesting the
possibility of a defence based on ‘temporary insanity’. Draupadi
herself observes that ‘the king is befooled and crazed by the
game’.
Draupadi disagrees with the Kauravas’ claim that Yudhishthira
knowingly joined the game, voluntarily staked his wife, and
never complained about Shakuni cheating; thus, he lost in a fair
contest. Draupadi believes that ‘her husband was forced to
respond to a challenge made by cheats’.22 Shakuni was notorious
for cheating, and her husband had warned him at the beginning
of the game: ‘Shakuni, don’t defeat us by crooked means and
cruelly.’23 She sees more clearly than others that the game was a

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 39

political conspiracy of Duryodhana and Shakuni, with the

complicity of Dhritarashtra. It was an act of realpolitik to usurp
the Pandavas’ half of the kingdom—making Yudhishthira the
victim of ‘a vast right-wing conspiracy’.24 Right-wing, because it
was in support of the incumbent King Dhritarashtra’s vested
interest.
Draupadi will not leave it there. She will turn her legal
challenge into a moral one. Knowing that dharma can mean both
what is ‘lawful’ and what is ‘right’, the real question that she is
leading to is: Is it right or fair that a woman, let alone a queen,
become a slave because her husband staked her in a gambling
game? Her assumption is that the law, too often, reflects the will
of the powerful in society and diverges from the right thing to
do. It is especially true for those who are vulnerable and
powerless—the poor, the low castes, slaves and women—and
historically it has been the role of the Left to fight to change that.
This is the subtext of her second question, ‘what is the dharma
+ of the king?’
+

‘This foul man, disgrace of the Kauravas,

is molesting me, and I cannot bear it!’

Draupadi’s arguments are not enough to overturn Karna’s call to

strip her. Duhshasana forcibly lays hold of her robe, and in the
midst of the assembly begins to undress her.25 Draupadi cries
out:

. . . this foul man, disgrace of the Kauravas, is molesting me, and

I cannot bear it any longer!26

Then an extraordinary thing happens:

When her dress was being stripped off, lord of the people, another
similar dress appeared every time. A terrible roar went up from all
the kings, a shout of approval, as they watched that greatest
wonder on earth . . . [And in the end] a pile of clothes was heaped

+
 +

40 / The Difficulty of Being Good

up in the middle of the hall, when Duhshasana, tired and ashamed,

at last desisted and sat down.27

The men in the assembly raise a cry of ‘Shame! Shame!’ They

clamour for an answer to Draupadi’s question. Widely respected
Vidura, born of a low caste woman, now rises, waves his hands,
and gradually silences the assembly. He says:

Draupadi, having raised the question, now weeps piteously as she

has none left to protect her. You have given no answer. If you do
not do so, men in this hall, dharma will be offended . . . If a person
comes with a grievance and raises a question about dharma, it
must be resolved without partiality.28

Vidura quotes the sage Kashyapa about the immorality of

remaining silent when there is evil afoot. When honest persons
fail in their duty to speak up, they ‘wound’ dharma and commit
adharma.29 Thus, the leader of the conspiracy earns half the
+ penalty; the immediate culprit a quarter; and the witnesses who +
do not speak up are also guilty by a quarter.30
The kings and nobles, however, remain silent. Karna speaks to
Draupadi, ‘Dear lady, you are the wife of a slave, without right
to property; you have no master, and are property yourself.’31
Turning impatiently to Duhshasana, he says, ‘Take away this
serving girl to the inner apartments.’
Draupadi reflects on her fate in bitter puzzlement:

Methinks that Time is out of joint—[the Kurus allow] their

innocent daughter and daughter-in-law to be molested! What
greater humiliation than that . . . a woman of virtue and beauty,
now must invade the men’s hall? What is left of the dharma of the
kings?32

Crazed by success, Duryodhana looks invitingly at Draupadi

and exposes his left thigh. Bhima, her second husband, is enraged
by this insult and vows to break that thigh one day with a club.
Vidura warns the Kauravas that they have overplayed their

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 41

hand. Fate will catch up. At that moment, as though in response

to his warning, a jackal howls, donkeys bray, and grisly birds
shriek. The men in the assembly see in these omens portents of
evil, and so does the blind Dhritarashtra. He reproaches his son,
and turns to make amends to Draupadi. Referring to her as a
righteous wife, he says:

Choose a boon from me, Panchali, whatever you wish; for you are
to me the most distinguished of my daughters-in-law, bent as you
are on dharma!33

She asks for the Pandavas’ freedom. The old king restores their
kingdom and all they had lost. And there the story ends, at least
for now. Meanwhile, Draupadi’s unanswered question ‘hovers
over the entire Mahabharata: no one ever resolves it, and
Yudhishthira is still trying to figure it out in the end.’34

‘What is left of the dharma of the kings?’

+ +
Draupadi’s never-ending sari that protected her from becoming
naked is often the first picture that comes to Indian minds at the
thought of the Mahabharata. Not surprisingly, this scene has been
portrayed with great panache in cinema and the stage versions,
including Peter Brook’s. After the hugely successful television
series, a company marketed a ‘Draupadi Collection’ of saris that
presumably did not stretch infinitely.35
What did, in fact, happen that day? How did an inexhaustible
stream of garment appear from nowhere to protect Draupadi?
Popular versions of the epic, as well as many respectable ancient
bhakti redactions, invariably show Krishna coming to her rescue.
We shall never know what the original Mahabharata was like, but
it seems clear to many scholars that the epic was reworked early
on, as early as the first century BC, by Vaishnav redactors to
glorify Krishna. The disrobing of Draupadi gave them an
opportunity to bring in Krishna in order to save her.36 As her
clothes are being unravelled, she thinks of Krishna and appeals

+
 +

42 / The Difficulty of Being Good

to him: ‘Dost thou not see the humiliation the Kauravas are
forcing upon me? . . . O Krishna, save a distressed soul sinking
amid the Kauravas.’37 In the scholarly Pune Critical Edition of the
epic, however, there is no Krishna, and the miracle is left
unexplained. Franklin Edgerton, editor of Book Two of the epic,
the Sabhaparvan, had the unenviable task of having to select from
more than a hundred manuscripts. In the end he and his
colleagues decided on the version without Krishna. He argued
that it was ‘cosmic justice’ that protected her—she was a chaste
and a just woman committed to dharma.38
Edgerton argues forcefully, ‘No prayer by Draupadi; no
explanation of the miraculous replacement of one garment by
another; no mention of Krishna or any superhuman agency. It is
apparently implied (though not stated) that cosmic justice
automatically, or “magically” if you like, prevented the chaste
Draupadi from being stripped in public. It is perhaps not strange
that later redactors felt it necessary to embroider the story. Yet to
+ me, at least, the original form, in its brevity, simplicity, and rapid
+
movement appeals very forcefully.’39 I tend to agree with
Edgerton. I believe the narrative is stronger without Krishna. The
text is briefer, simpler and quicker. It helps build Draupadi’s
character—it is her own agency, her own dharma, which is
responsible for the miracle rather than God’s intervention. It
vindicates her courage as she stands up to the political and social
order, reminding the rulers about the dharma of the king. No
wonder feminists applaud this tough, eloquent and resilient
heroine of the Mahabharata.
The public disrobing of Draupadi is consistent with the moral
paradigm of patriarchy. This is a climactic moment for the
Kauravas—they have ‘defeated’ and humiliated the Pandavas.40
Karna’s revolting remarks show how a patriarchal culture divides
women into two types: angels and whores. Ever since the ‘defeat’
of the Pandavas, Draupadi is considered to be in the latter
category; accordingly, if she has suffered a calamity, she deserves

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 43

it. The stereotype of big-chested masculinity encourages the

thought that a ‘real man’ does not need anyone. Instead of
thinking that this unhappy person could have been ‘me’, one
thinks that ‘I am above all this’ or ‘I could never suffer that’.
All cultures, I suspect, contain the seeds of violence when it
comes to female sexuality, and I learned something about
Draupadi’s situation from Tolstoy’s famous novella The Kreutzer
Sonata. The novella grew out of the Russian writer’s own
relationship with his wife, and it describes the events that lead to
her murder. The husband has violent and humiliating sex with
her, and he feels miserable each time he rapes her. Since she is
merely an object of bestial desire, he decides that he must kill her
to put an end to his misery. After her death, she becomes
‘human’ in his eyes, and he even begins to have compassionate
feelings for her. The murdering husband concludes that women
will never be treated as full human beings as long as sexual
intercourse exists. They will always be humiliated. The Kauravas’
+ wish to humiliate Draupadi and turn her into a slave may well
+
be related to the disgust that many men feel towards the sexual
act. Tolstoy’s diaries describe how ‘the tension mounts and
mounts inside him until he has to use his wife, and then he
despises her, despises himself, and wants to use force against her
to stop the cycle from continuing.’41
The attempted disrobing of Draupadi is a clear insult to
womanhood. And this affront upset the cosmic balance of dharma.
Hence, there were omens and they changed the story’s outcome.
According to an ancient dharma text: ‘Where women are
honoured and worshipped, all gods become pleased; if women
are unnecessarily insulted, a great disaster must be on the way.’
The fact that Draupadi had five husbands has troubled Indians
for centuries. They have never quite accepted Karna’s fantasy
about Draupadi’s extraordinary libido. Nor have they fully bought
the ingenuous story of Kunti telling her sons to share her
equally. Historically, it was common for men, especially kings,

+
 +

44 / The Difficulty of Being Good

to have more than one wife, but for a woman to legitimately

have multiple husbands was unheard of. Yes, polyandry
did exist on the margin among the Himalayan tribes, and it
still does, but there is no evidence that this ever was
an extensive practice. So, what is the Mahabharata trying to tell
us?
I believe it is throwing a challenge to the audience’s paradigm
of patriarchy. The Mahabharata’s women are not meek. The
Pandavas’ mother, Kunti, asserts her sexual freedom when she
discovers that her husband is incapable of coitus. One day, while
out hunting, her husband Pandu shot a deer as it was mating
with a doe. He did not realize that the deer was an ascetic in
animal form, and as revenge the recluse cursed Pandu to die the
moment he tried to make love to a woman. Kunti came to the
rescue of the dynasty. She invoked a mantra given to her by a
sage. ‘May you be the mother of godly children!’ the sage had
said to her in gratitude for serving him selflessly. Thus, the five
+ Pandavas were fathered by the gods: Yudhishthira by the god
+
Dharma, Bhima by Vayu, the wind, Arjuna by Indra, and the
twins, Nakula and Sahadeva, by the Ashvins. Despite this
parentage, these children are misleadingly known as the
‘Pandavas’ or ‘sons of Pandu’, which biologically, at least, they
are not. In an attempt to be precise, the epic also refers to the
three sons of Kunti as Kaunteyas.
Draupadi and Kunti are not the only assertive women in the
epic. A third, Satyavati, had saved the Bharata dynasty earlier
when Bhishma had refused her request to service her son’s
widows and produce an heir by the law of levirate. No virgin
bride herself, Satyavati reveals that she has an illegitimate son
from an alliance with a sage before her marriage to Bhishma’s
father. She summons this son, Vyasa, who turns out to be the
author of the Mahabharata, and has him impregnate her daughters-
in-law. Though the widows agree, they are not enamoured of
Vyasa, who is old and ugly and smells of fish—his beard is red,

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 45

his hair orange. In fact, they are both frightened—one screws her
eyes shut while they are having sex; the other turns white with
fear. Both become pregnant; the first gives birth to a blind child,
Dhritarashtra, and the second to the pale and sickly Pandu.42 He
begets a bastard, the good Vidura, by a maid.
The surprising freedom enjoyed by the epic’s feisty women is
a feminist’s dream, and some of this open-mindedness towards
women may have existed in the society of those times.43 The
Arthashastra, a contemporary text of 300 AD, tells us that the
Mauryan empire and post-Mauryan times were a cosmopolitan
age, which allowed space to women in both the court and the
village. Women archers were bodyguards of the king; women
were spies in the intelligence services; women ascetics were a
common sight; royal and upper class women generously donated
to Buddhist monasteries. The Mahabharata reflects this autonomy.44
Oddly enough, Draupadi has come in for criticism for asking
her famous question. In 1967, Iravati Karve, a distinguished
+ anthropologist, wrote that Draupadi ‘was only a young bride of +
the house, [yet] she spoke in the assembly of men, something she
must have known she must not do. Over and above to pretend
that she could understand the questions that baffled her elders—
that was inexcusable arrogance . . . [which is why her husband]
called her “a lady pundit”, hardly a complimentary epithet.’45 I
find it difficult to agree with Karve. I think one admires Draupadi
precisely because she is bold and courageous and attempts to
save herself and the Pandavas.
Karve, however, argues that the question put Draupadi in
greater jeopardy: ‘She risked losing her husband as well as her
freedom. Draupadi’s question was not only foolish, it was terrible.
No matter what answer was given, her position was desperate.
If Bhishma told her her husband’s rights over her did not cease,
that even though he became a slave, she was in his power and
he had the right to stake her, her slavery would have been
confirmed. If Bhishma had argued that because of this slavery
her husband had no more rights over her, then her plight would

+
 +

46 / The Difficulty of Being Good

have been truly pitiable . . . if her relationship with her husband

was destroyed she would have been truly widowed.’46
Karve’s point is that in a patriarchal society a married woman’s
very existence and identity depended on her husband; to lose
one’s husband was akin to suicide. Obviously both alternatives
were bad, but I think it is debatable if being a widow was a
worse fate than becoming a slave of the Kauravas. In any case,
what is important is that Draupadi did save the Pandavas from
becoming slaves with her wit, courage and her knowledge of the
law.

‘Dharma is subtle’

Draupadi’s insistent second question—‘What is the dharma of

the king?’—unsettles the assembly because it goes well beyond
her initial legal question about whether she has been won fairly.
This time the noble kshatriyas are forced to think about right and
+ wrong, something they are not using to doing in their daily +
exercise of power. Since Draupadi’s question suggests that she
does not think that what is lawful is necessarily right, dharma
must mean something other than what is customary. If Draupadi’s
words do not persuade them, the miracle—which covered the
queen with an endless sari—certainly puts them on notice.
Bhishma has understood this distinction and hence he
commends Draupadi for reminding everyone about dharma
when everyone had forgotten it. Even though he does not have
an answer, he praises her:

Whereas the Kurus are set on greed and delusion . . . [righteous

Draupadi] though you have suffered much, you still look to
dharma . . . and the course of dharma is sovereign . . . [however]
I cannot answer [your] question decisively, because the matter is
subtle.47

The Mahabharata will keep returning to Bhishma’s conclusion

that ‘dharma is subtle’. Sukshma is the word in Sanskrit. Draupadi,

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 47

Dhritarashtra, and others will repeat this phrase every time

when they are in genuine difficulty. ‘Dharma is subtle’, I think,
because it does not deal with matters of fact (like, say, the rivers
of Asia). It deals with opinions about how we ought to behave.48
The world of facts (and even the world of power) is more
straightforward. Hence, moral dilemmas are confusing. When I
make a moral judgement about somebody’s action, I must make
the same judgement about a similar act in similar circumstances—
in other words, what kind of behaviour am I ready to prescribe
to myself, given that I am prescribing it for everybody in the
same situation?49 This sort of reasoning does not come naturally
to human beings.
Draupadi’s insistent question also raises the issue about who
has the authority to decide about dharma. It is curious that no
one in the Hastinapura assembly that day appealed to God to
decide who is right and who is wrong. This is because God is not
expected to be an authority on dharma among Hindus, Buddhists
+ or Jains. Human reason and the ‘search for a rational basis of +
dharma is often compatible with these religious traditions’.50 But
if God is not an authority, then who is? Who is responsible for
dharma? In his influential law book, Manu cited plural authorities
for dharma two thousand years ago:

The root of dharma is the entire Veda, the tradition and customs
of those who know the Vedas, the conduct of virtuous people, and
what is satisfactory to oneself.51

But the Mahabharata, in its typically sceptical way, challenges

Manu and questions if the Vedas can be arbiters of true dharma:

In the opinion of the world the words of the Vedas are contradictory.
How can there be scriptural authority over whether something is
a true conclusion or not when such contradiction exists?52

The epic also wonders if the wise can be relied upon to be

authorities on dharma: ‘intelligence appears differently in different

+
 +

48 / The Difficulty of Being Good

men. They all take delight in their own different understanding

of things’.53
If God is not the arbiter of dharma, and if the Vedas are
contradictory, and if wise persons cannot agree about right and
wrong, where does it leave the ordinary individual? Kulluka,
who wrote a commentary in the fifteenth century on Manu’s
verse quoted above, declares that the ‘satisfaction of the mind is
the only authority in cases of conflicting alternatives’.54 The
classical poet, Kalidasa, who lived in the fifth century AD, was of
the same view: ‘In matters where doubt intervenes, the [natural]
inclination of the heart of the good person becomes the “authority”
or the decisive factor.’55 This explains why the characters in the
Mahabharata and in other texts of the classical Indian tradition
prefer to depend on reason rather than on blind faith.56
One should not imagine for a moment, however, that the
Mahabharata rejects God. It devotes much energy in the didactic
books to explaining how one attains moksha, the fourth and
+ supreme spiritual end of the Hindu life: liberation from human
+
bondage. The Mahabharata, in fact, makes fun of non-believers:

I was a learned scholar who favoured reason and rejected the

Vedas, devoted to the worthless sciences of logic and speculative
reasoning. In assemblies of learned men I was an eloquent speaker
employing reason and logic, decrying the recitation of the Vedas
and speaking arrogantly to brahmins. I was an atheist, doubtful of
everything, a fool who thought himself a great scholar. This
present position of mine as a jackal is the result I have gained from
this.57

The idea of dharma based on one’s reason, thus, sits side by side
with deep faith in the existence of God in the Mahabharata. But
it is left to individuals to decide how to best order their lives.
Given the plurality of authorities, one has to depend on oneself.
No wonder the epic says ‘dharma is subtle’.
The concept of dharma evolved over time, its meaning shifting

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 49

from a ‘ritual ethics of deeds’ to a more personal virtue based on

one’s conscience.58 In earlier Vedic times dharma meant doing
visible ‘good deeds’ endorsed by society, and Sanskrit scholars
generally translate this earlier meaning of dharma as ‘merit’.
Often these deeds were specific to one’s caste, and this concept
is called sva-dharma. With the rise of yoga sects, Buddhism and
Jainism, this meaning of dharma gradually changed to mean
social harmony, the cultivation of an ethical self, and to actions
required of all castes. In this sense, dharma has universal appeal
and is called sadharana-dharma. In the latter sense, dharma has to
do with basic traits rather than specific deeds, and the Mahabharata
articulates these character traits in a number of places. It refers
to ‘not harming others, being truthful, not getting angry’.59
Bhishma mentions a longer list of nine traits, which includes
‘lack of malice and rectitude’.60 While these are still visible deeds
which accumulate good karma, they are now quite obviously
inner traits or attitudes which determine one’s character. This
+ marked a change in the way that society thought about dharma +
and karma.61
Both these senses of dharma co-exist in the Mahabharata. Since
they are often contradictory, they contribute to dramatic tension
in the story. When Draupadi uses ‘dharma’, she has its former
meaning in mind. Given her bias for action and for the kshatriya
ethic, she usually thinks of dharma as sva-dharma. When
Yudhishthira uses the word, he usually means universal, ethical
dictates of his conscience and of sadharana-dharma. Draupadi and
his brother Bhima use ‘dharma’ to awaken Yudhishthira’s sense
of his duty as a kshatriya warrior, usually to get him to act as we
shall see in the book, when the Pandavas are in exile:

If we are to observe our own dharma . . . it is in war that our task

lies . . . Others have stolen our kingdom . . . [Your idea of] dharma
is not dharma, it is wrong dharma! . . . O king of men, by
scrapping a lesser dharma, a man obtains a greater dharma, and
he is judged to be wise.62

+
 +

50 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Thus, Yudhishthira finds himself in a moral dilemma. Should he

obey his duty to his family, his kshatriya caste and kingship, or
should he insist on observing the dictates of his own conscience
and stick to his word? There is no easy answer and he suffers.
Duryodhana shows contempt for the newer ethical meaning,
seeing in it a sign of weakness. But Arjuna is able to see both
sides of dharma. When he puts down his bow and refuses to
fight in the Gita, he is acting according to the dictates of his
conscience. At other times, especially in the battle books, Arjuna
is delighted to play the role of the most famous kshatriya
warrior of his time. Being able to negotiate both senses of
dharma, the universal and the particular, Arjuna goes on to
become the most admired of the Pandavas, who is tough yet
gentle.
Overall, the Mahabharata’s characters are aware of both
meanings of dharma, but each one uses the word to suit specific
ends. They repeat the epic’s classic formula, ‘Where there is
+ dharma, there is victory!’ But what they actually mean can be +
ambiguous. Unwilling to face the contradictions, they hope that
both senses of dharma are possible, and that both together will
bring victory. One can fight a ‘just war’ as a kshatriya soldier and
still be, by and large, a good, honest and peaceful human being.
Once in a while, our heroes do get into a muddle, and then they
wriggle out by exclaiming, ‘dharma is subtle’.

A woman and a slave are the property of others

When Draupadi saved the Pandavas from slavery on that fateful

day in Hastinapura’s assembly, she made us all aware that to be
free is the essence of being human. But what if Draupadi had not
succeeded in rescuing her family, and what if they and she had
become slaves? It is an unthinkable prospect for us moderns, but
slavery was the common fate of losers in the ancient world.
Andromache, the beautiful and loyal wife of the renowned
Trojan warrior Hector, became a slave. Homer tells us in the Iliad

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 51

how the lovely queen lost her freedom when her husband
was slain by Achilles. This led to the defeat of Troy by the
Greeks. Andromache’s child, Astyanax, was thrown down the
Trojan walls by the Greeks, because they feared that he might
grow up and avenge his father and the city. Euripides wrote a
powerful drama about this. As a prize of war, he tells us that
Andromache is expected to sleep with the son of her husband’s
killer. Just before going to bed with him she mourns her husband:
‘Husband, you were too young to die and leave me widowed in
our home . . . Ah, Hector, you have brought utter desolation to
your parents. But who will mourn you as I shall? Mine is the
bitterest regret of all, because you did not die in bed and
stretching out your arms to me give me some tender word that
I might have treasured in my tears by night and day.’63
Both Draupadi and Andromache wrestled with the dilemmas
of becoming unfree. Both women were mature and faithful
women. Both faced a reversal in fortune and had to deal with a
+ fate that is especially cruel to women. In doing so, both women
+
displayed dignity and nobility as they strived to do the right
thing. They often bring out the contrast between heroic female
qualities and less-than-heroic male ones. Whereas the ‘cosmic
justice’ of dharma came to the aid of feisty Draupadi, who
fought back spiritedly, Andromache was not as fortunate.
Draupadi was clearly disappointed at Bhishma’s suggestion that
a woman and a slave are not free and are the property of others.
So was I, frankly, for Bhishma is one of the more remarkable and
admirable characters in the Mahabharata. But to expect him to
have spoken out against slavery and patriarchy is to super-
impose contemporary values onto his world.
My own thoughts turned from Draupadi to mid-seventeenth-
century England when a scholar named John Locke wrote the
Second Treatise Concerning Civil Government. He did not sign his
name to it but only acknowledged his authorship in his will. In
the treatise, Locke speaks about human beings having certain

+
 +

52 / The Difficulty of Being Good

natural rights—such as the right to liberty—that existed in a state

of nature. Civil society comes afterwards and so does political
authority, whose purpose is to protect these rights. Locke
expressed the radical view that is also found in the Mahabharata
and the Gita that government is morally obliged to serve the
people.64
Locke’s ideas spread quickly, and by the eighteenth century,
they contributed to an intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment.
As a result slavery became a metaphor for everything that was
evil in political and social relations among human beings. The
metaphor, however, took root precisely at a time when Europeans
were enslaving vast numbers of non-Europeans, so much so that
by the mid-eighteenth century the slave trade came to underwrite
the global economic system. Ironically, this economy based on
involuntary servitude contributed to the spread of the very
Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality around the world
and eventually undermined the notion that one human being
+ could be the property of another.65 +
In 1776, Locke’s ideas gave birth to the American Declaration
of Independence, which stated that it was a ‘self-evident’ truth
that all men are created equal, but it denied this truth to slaves
and women. John C. Calhoun, the influential American Vice
President, declared that slavery was a positive good: ‘I hold that
in the present state of civilization, where two races of different
origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences,
as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now
existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of
an evil, a good—a positive good.’ The United States was thus
born with the birth defect of slavery, which was approved by
democratic majorities and enshrined in its constitution. Abraham
Lincoln, in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, had to refer
to a principle of equality that lay beyond the American
constitution in order to argue against slavery. It took a bloody
civil war and the death of over a million persons, including
620,000 soldiers, to end slavery in the United States in 1865.

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 53

Ironically, John Locke himself believed that black Africans

were inferior to Europeans and he authored the notorious
‘Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina’ in one of the southern
states in America, in which a ‘freeman’ was allowed to have
‘absolute power and authority over his negro slaves’. His famous
contemporary, the respected philosopher David Hume, also
suspected ‘negroes to be naturally inferior to whites’. ‘There
scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even
any individual eminent either in action or speculation,’ he wrote.
Even Immanuel Kant was guilty of the European blindness of
regarding non-Europeans (particularly native Americans and
Africans) as unequal human beings.66 I wondered that if the
greatest modern thinkers of the Western world—Locke, Hume
and Kant—were not immune to racism, it did seem to suggest
that slavery was not simply a matter of global economic
inequality, but was about the very real difficulty that human
beings have in being able to universalize the human experience
+ to all persons.
+
Today, no state in the world permits slavery and it is hard to
imagine anyone defending this institution. In India, we have
expiated for our past sins against the ‘untouchable’ Dalits with
an extensive programme of affirmative action. To this extent,
humanity seems to have made progress and human beings have
evolved morally. Nevertheless, slavery continues to exist in
pockets in a furtive manner in parts of the world. When a ship
carrying hundreds of people was turned away from Benin,
Africa in March 2001, officials suspected that the children on
board were human slaves. A few years earlier in Madhol, Sudan,
an Arab trader had sold 132 former slaves, women and children,
for $13,200 (in Sudanese money) to a member of Christian
Solidarity International. These incidents drew attention to the
persistence of the slave trade, and at this moment, according to
Anti-Slavery International, roughly 20 million men, women and
children are being held against their will as modern-day slaves.67

+
 +

54 / The Difficulty of Being Good

The great Indian bureaucrat

What makes Draupadi’s second question about ‘dharma of the

king’ admirable is her concern for accountability in public life.
There will always be nasty types—Shakuni, Duryodhana,
Duhshasana—but if public institutions are accountable, they will
be punished. Today in India, we despair over the almost complete
erosion of accountability in our bureaucracy—an institution that
my grandfather used to be so proud of in the 1950s that he and
his friends called it our ‘steel frame’. Duryodhana’s misbehaviour
in the assembly reminded me of the innumerable and daily
lapses of our corrupt public servants. As long as it is correctly
noted in the file, their world is in order, and who cares about the
real people outside.
Every year over 100,000 pilgrims gather annually on the banks
of the Narmada river at a place called Dharaji, in the district of
Dewas in Madhya Pradesh. They have been doing so for years
+ and the date of this religious gathering is well known to the +
district authority. There is a dam nearby which releases water
into the river for generating electricity at 690 cubic metres per
second. On 7 May 2005, I read in the newspaper that sixty-two
people had drowned at Dharaji. An enquiry revealed subsequently
that the district authority had, indeed, sent a letter to the Indira
Sagar power plant not to release the water between 7 p.m. and
9 p.m. on that day. But they had sent it by ordinary mail and it
did not arrive on time. The enquiry also showed that telephones
and faxes were functioning at both the district headquarters and
the dam site. The bureaucrat who had conducted the enquiry,
however, exonerated the district collector, Ashish Srivastava and
the police superintendent, R.K. Chaudhary. He felt that the
government was not negligent for it had done its job by drafting
the letter and a copy was in the files.
A friend of mine from my schooldays, Arun Shourie, recounts
his experience as minister of administrative reform. On 13 April
1999, a query came to his department from the ministry of steel:

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 55

‘Can officers use inks other than blue or black?’68 It seems two
officers in Steel had made notings on official files in green and
red inks, and this had raised eyebrows. There were serious
consultations in Shourie’s department and it was decided that
since the matter concerned ink, the Directorate of Printing had to
be consulted, and so an OM, an ‘office memorandum’, was sent
to it on 3 May. On 21 May a reply came, saying that the matter
had been deliberated in the Directorate and no rules were found
about the use of different inks. However, they opined that heads
of departments may be allowed to use colours while other
officers must confine themselves to blue and black ink. They
suggested that the department of personnel in the home ministry
may be consulted on this matter.
It was now the department of personnel’s turn to start holding
meetings on the subject of inks, and after three weeks they wrote
back on 6 July to say that the matter concerned the Manual of
Office Procedures, and since this was regulated by the department
+ of administrative reform, it was in their competence to decide.
+
Like good bureaucrats, they had thrown the ball back. The
matter was next discussed at a Senior Level Officers’ meeting in
the department of administrative reform; it was agreed that
longevity of inks was an issue on government records and so, on
12 August, a letter was sent to the Director General, department
of archives, asking for his opinion. On 27 August a reply came
that as regards fountain pens blue/black ought to be prescribed
but in the case of ballpoint pens blue, black, red and green could
be permitted. But whatever ink was used its quality ought to
comply with the Bureau of Indian Standards.
At the next Senior Officers’ meeting, the chairman of the
department of administrative reforms felt that before deciding
on this matter, the manual of the armed forces, particularly the
army, should be consulted. Accordingly, a letter was sent on 4
October to the joint secretary in the ministry of defence, who
replied on 22 December that red colour ink is used by the chiefs

+
 +

56 / The Difficulty of Being Good

of army, navy and air force; green colour is used by principal

staff officers; and blue is used by all other officers. After several
months of deliberations, the department of administrative reforms
finally passed an order on 28 March, amending the Manual of
Office Procedures: ‘Initial drafting will be done in black or blue
ink. Modifications in the draft at subsequent levels may be made
in green and red ink by the officers so as to distinguish the
corrections made.’ Hierarchy was observed in the order: ‘Only
an officer of the level of joint secretary and above may use green
or red ink in rare cases.’
Arun Shourie adds with irony, ‘A good bureaucratic solution:
discretion allowed but circumscribed.’
If Draupadi were to appear in India in the twenty-first century,
she would remind our public officials that they are among the
brightest in the world, having been selected through a very
rigorous examination process. She would tell them that one-third
of the world’s poor reside in India and bureaucratic corruption
+ is the main obstacle to their development. It is the poor who are
+
most reliant on public services and the least capable of paying
bribes. In 2005, Transparency International ranked India 90 out
of 146 countries, with a score of 2.8 out of 10 (scores below 3
indicate ‘rampant corruption’). Of the eleven public services
surveyed, India’s police are the most corrupt, with 80 per cent
of the citizens admitting that they had paid bribes to get their
work done. Of the citizens who had dealt with the legal system,
40 per cent had paid a bribe to influence the court. One in three
parents reported paying a bribe in dealing with a government
school or a primary health centre. So, Draupadi would remind
the 20 million employees of the government that there is plenty
to be done without worrying about the colour of ink on
government files. As to government officials—they should stop
and ponder over Draupadi’s question about dharma each time
they plan to entangle us in red tape.

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 57

Draupadi and my dharma education

In its first book, the Adiparvan, the Mahabharata predicts that the
dice game would become a turning point of the entire epic:

I did not hope for victory, O Sanjaya, when I heard that poor
Draupadi was dragged into the royal assembly with voice choked
with tears, wearing only a single piece of clothing. She had five
husbands but still she was as if without any protector and hence
[she was] publicly humiliated.

Draupadi did not let the Pandavas forget her humiliation, goading
them on to fight and avenge her honour. This led to a horrific
war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, a war that was not
only for the throne but was also for dharma, as the Gita tells us
in its famous opening lines.69
Draupadi’s questions were a defining moment in my own
quest for dharma. I could understand that no one was able to
+ resolve Draupadi’s dilemmas on that day. Her legal question +
was a terrifying social and moral challenge to the society of her
time, when everyone believed that a wife was a husband’s
property, and not an independent and free agent. ‘If Draupadi’s
questions were properly answered, it would have required a
“paradigm shift” in India’s social thought.’70 What I find appalling,
however, is that women and the poor continue to be treated in
many communities in contemporary India as though they were
‘property’.
It is easy to dismiss Duryodhana as a villain, but there is
clearly more to him. I admire him for his coherent, consistent
worldview even though I do not share it. His amoral philosophy
is unfortunately followed by too many contemporary political
leaders, who also believe that realpolitik and ‘balance of power’
are the only basis for diplomacy and peace. Duryodhana thinks
rightly that the dharma of the king is to further the interest of the
state; but he is wrong in believing that it can be achieved only
through security and power. In his geopolitical world there are

+
 +

58 / The Difficulty of Being Good

only friends and foes and a ruler’s neighbour is bound to be a

foe. Since Yudhishthira is a neighbour who has become powerful,
he is a foe. Hence, Duryodhana feels compelled to bring him
down. If not, Yudhishthira might gobble his kingdom up one
day. This dodgy view is sanctioned by the classic text on statecraft,
Arthashastra, an indispensable primer of the kshatriya ruler. Of
this, more later.
Neither Duryodhana nor his blind father counted on Draupadi’s
ability to change the agenda from power to dharma. Her
admonition about ‘the dharma of the kings’ resonates with the
assembly because they know that dharma is meant to guide the
just ruler while protecting the interests of the state. Where
dharma prevails, there will be the rule of law and justice, and the
king who follows the path of dharma is known as ‘dharma
raja’.71 Even the Machiavellian Arthashastra teaches the ideal king
to ‘establish the rule of dharma by commands and directives,
and discipline among the people by the extension of education’.72
+ The most powerful ruler or his minister could not place himself
+
above dharma—his subjects would immediately know his
violations and chastise him. Thus, a long and hallowed tradition
supports Draupadi’s reprimand to the Kaurava kings.
I believe that Draupadi’s example is an inspiration to free
citizens in all democracies. Her question about the dharma of the
king should embolden citizens to question the dharma of public
officials, especially when they confront the pervasive governance
failures around them. These failures are commonplace and they
range from sending troops to fight unnecessary wars in places
like Iraq to the absence of schoolteachers in government schools
in India. They test the moral fabric of society. When there is no
other recourse, citizens must be prepared to follow the Pandavas
and wage a Kurukshetra-like war on the corrupt.
Draupadi’s call for accountability in public life is similar to
Antigone’s in Sophocles’s tragedy of the same name.73 In both
cases, it is a clash between an individual and the power of the

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 59

state. Creon, the ruler of Thebes, forbids his niece Antigone from
giving her brother Polyneices an honourable burial because the
latter is supposedly a traitor. However, Antigone, like Draupadi,
appeals to a universal dharma, a sense of justice that is higher
than the law of the state. She argues that Polyneices was not a
criminal but a political prisoner, who was guilty of plotting to
save the state and the people from a tyrant. Since her higher
dharma trumps the king’s writ, she must be allowed to honour
her brother and give his dead body a decent burial. Although
both Draupadi and Antigone have little hope of success, they are
not afraid to challenge the ruler’s brute power by appealing to a
higher dharma. Since the king’s law, as they see it, is defective,
dharma must mean something other than what is legal or
customary.
Draupadi’s question also brought home to me the immorality
of silence. Vidura accuses the nobles, kings and the wise elders—
all the less-than-mad Kauravas, who stand by silently as Draupadi
+ is dragged by her hair before their eyes. When honest persons
+
fail in their duty to speak up, they ‘wound’ dharma, and they
ought to be punished, says the sage Kashyapa. In answer to her
heart-rending appeal, Bhishma ought to have leaped up and
felled Duhshasana to the ground instead of arguing over legal
intricacies.
A similar conspiracy of silence diminished the office of the
President of India in the summer of 2007. The official candidate
for the largely ceremonial office was a woman Congress party
leader, Pratibha Patil, against whom there were extensive
corruption charges that were widely reported in the press. She
had started a cooperative bank in Maharashtra whose licence
was cancelled by the Reserve Bank. Her bank had given ‘illegal
loans’ to her relatives that exceeded the bank’s share capital. It
had also given a loan to her sugar mill which was never repaid.
The bank waived these loans, and this drove it into liquidation.
The government liquidator of the bank, P.D. Nigam, said, ‘The

+
 +

60 / The Difficulty of Being Good

fact that relatives of the founder chairperson (Pratibha Patil)

were among those indiscriminately granted loans and that some
illegal loan waivers were done has come up in our audit.’ Six of
the top ten defaulters in Pratibha Patil’s bank were linked to her
relatives.
In July 2007, the nation had a Bhishma-like person of
unquestionable integrity in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
But he remained largely silent, deferring to his party’s choice of
the presidential candidate. In passing, he called it ‘mudslinging’
by the opposition, and the nation believed him. In any case, the
Congress had the votes and Pratibha Patil replaced perhaps the
most upright and popular president in Indian history. After that,
the charges were never investigated
Before the scene ends in the Sabhaparvan, Duryodhana sees
another opportunity for making trouble—this time to create
dissension between the Pandava brothers. He asks Yudhishthira’s
brothers to tell the assembly whether their brother was in the
+ right to stake them and his wife. This puts the Pandavas in a fix.
+
They can either free Draupadi by declaring that Yudhishthira
was wrong—that he spoke falsely in wagering her. Or they can
uphold their brother’s honour and reputation, and sacrifice
Draupadi. Bhima replies that King Yudhishthira is their elder
brother, and if he considers that he has been beaten in a fair
contest, then all the Pandavas have lost fairly. ‘I feel tied by the
noose of dharma,’ he adds. His brother, Arjuna, however, thinks
that the nature of the ‘self’ might be at stake in Draupadi’s
question:

The king was our master when first he played us . . .

That you should decide, ye Kurus assembled.74

Arjuna’s statement has philosophical implications. When Arjuna

asks in what sense King Yudhishthira was ‘our master’ he raises
a doubt about the status of the ‘consciousness’ that gambled and
lost. Was it the unreliable, phenomenal ‘self’ of Yudhishthira

+
 +

Draupadi’s Courage / 61

who gambled away the kingdom? We can all relate to this

capricious consciousness within us that keeps changing from
moment to moment like an unreliable movie in our minds. Or
was it Yudhishthira’s timeless atman, unchanging soul? If the
‘self’ was that of fickle consciousness, then the gambler may well
have been a narrative fiction. Perhaps the kingdom is not really
lost. ‘It is dangerous to claim to be a self.’75
This may also be why Yudhishthira remains quiet. Alf
Hiltebeitel, the Mahabharata scholar, asks: ‘Should he claim to be
a self who wagered Draupadi first, [then] he [would] simply lie
and lose her forever. If he claims to be a self who wagered her
after he lost himself, he might keep her [albeit in slavery] . . .
Indeed, should he claim, like Nala, that in betting and losing his
wife “I myself was not its doer”, the self he wagered would be
counterfeit, making him a more deceiving gambler than
Shakuni.’76 More than Draupadi’s humiliation, what Duryodhana
cares about is to prove that Yudhishthira is a liar, not the great
+ man of dharma that the world believes him to be. Clearly,
+
Draupadi and the Pandavas have gone and confused the assembly
with irrelevant issues about what it means to wager one’s soul
and about the nature of the self and of truth.77
Walter Lippmann, the distinguished American public
intellectual, said in a speech in 1941 that people do not become
happy by satisfying desires. Happiness comes from upholding a
certain balance, by living according to a system of beliefs that
restrains them and gives coherence to their desires. ‘Above all
the other necessities of human nature, above the satisfaction of
any other need, above hunger, love, pleasure, fame—even life
itself—what a man most needs is the conviction that he is
contained within the discipline of an ordered existence.’78
Lippmann did not realize it but he was addressing Draupadi’s
question. He was speaking about dharma, which also means
upholding a certain balance. Dharma is precisely this ‘discipline
of ordered existence’, a ‘belief system that restrains and gives

+
 +

62 / The Difficulty of Being Good

coherence to desires’. Persistently, the epic keeps asking, how are

we to achieve the right balance in our individual and collective
lives? Although dramatic, what happened to Draupadi is not
unique. Our own public figures constantly challenge this balance
of dharma in our ‘uneven’ world. The transgressions of
Duryodhana and the surrounding conspiracies of silence are not
dissimilar to the same sickeningly banal acts in our contemporary
life.

+ +

+
 +

YUDHISHTHIRA’S DUTY
‘I act because I must’

I act because I must. Whether it bears fruits or not, buxom Draupadi,

I do my duty like any householder.

—Yudhishthira in exile, to Draupadi, Mahabharata, III.32.2–4

+ +

‘Dharma, I find, does not protect you’

As though once were not enough, Yudhishthira goes on to play

a second game of dice with the Kauravas. He loses again and is
banished for thirteen years. In accordance with the terms of the
agreement, he must go into exile for twelve years and spend a
thirteenth in disguise in society without being discovered. If
discovered during that thirteenth year, he must repeat the
punishment. After losing, Yudhishthira sets off into the jungles,
accompanied by Draupadi and his brothers.
One day, a few years after the game of dice, the Pandavas are
feeling particularly low in the Dvaita forest. Draupadi is in tears
as she thinks about her royal husband sleeping on the hard earth
when he is accustomed to sheets of silk and pillows of down. He
eats roots from the forest when he ought to be feasting like a
king, served by thousands of retainers. Draupadi laments:

63

+
 +

64 / The Difficulty of Being Good

I remember your old bed and I pity you, great king, so unworthy
of hardship . . . sorrow stifles me . . . I saw you bright as a sun,
well oiled with sandal paste, now I see you dirty and muddy . . .
I have seen you dressed in bright and expensive silks . . . and now
I see you wearing bark!1

She cannot get over the bitter memory of her humiliation in the
assembly, especially since the Kauravas snatched their kingdom
through a rigged game.

That crook with his gang has brought this suffering on a man like
you . . . You are upright, gentle, bountiful, modest, truthful—how
could the spirit of gambling swoop down on you? My mind has
become utterly bewildered and burns with grief as I see this sorrow
of yours and this great distress.2

She asks Yudhishthira, what is the point of being good when it

only brings grief? What kind of world is it where the bad seem
+ to be rewarded while the good, who uphold dharma, suffer such +
hardship?

Dharma is supposed to protect the good king, but I find that it

doesn’t protect you. You have never strayed. You have always
treated everyone alike. Even after winning all the earth, your head
did not grow. After losing the crooked game of dice, you remained
faithful to your word.3

Draupadi has raised the classic problem of unmerited suffering:

‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ When things were
going so well for Yudhishthira, why did tragedy have to strike?
She cries out in anger:

When I see noble, moral and modest persons harassed in this way,
and the evil and ignoble flourishing and happy, I stagger with
wonder. I can only condemn the Placer, who allows such outrage.4

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 65

‘Why be good?’

Isn’t it better, Draupadi tells her husband, to give up this forest

living, raise an army, and fight the evil Kauravas for what is
rightfully theirs?

I think, king of men, it is time to use your authority on the greedy

Dhartarashtras, who are always offensive. There is no more time
to ply the Kurus with forgiveness: and when the time for authority
has come, authority must be employed. The meek are despised, but
people shrink from the severe: he is a king who knows both.5

Yudhishthira responds by reminding Draupadi that he has given

his word. To fight, he says to her, is easy; to forgive is more
difficult. To be patient is not to be weak; to seek peace is always
the wiser course. Draupadi, however, wonders why her husband
does not feel outrage, like a kshatriya warrior, at the injustice of
their situation.

+ Why doesn’t your anger blaze? . . . Truly, O best of the Bharatas, +

you have no anger, else why is it that your mind is not moved at
the sight of your brothers and me?6

Yudhishthira explains to Draupadi that forbearance is superior

to anger.7 But she feels frustrated, and wonders why her husband
has adopted a stubborn pacifism while their enemies exploit his
goodness. Power, Draupadi argues, is what really counts in the
world. ‘Why be good?’ she asks her husband. Yudhishthira
answers her patiently in a sparkling dialogue in the Vanaparvan,
which presages much thinking about ethics in the major schools
of Western moral philosophy.
Yudhishthira is taken aback by the strength of Draupadi’s
emotion, and he gently explains to her why he must be good. He
says:

I do not act for the sake of the fruits of dharma. I act because I
must. Whether it bears fruits or not, buxom Draupadi, I do my
duty like any householder . . . I obey dharma, full-hipped woman,

+
 +

66 / The Difficulty of Being Good

not for its rewards . . . but by its nature my mind is beholden to

dharma.8

In a typically modest way, Yudhishthira expresses his instinctive

sense of duty: ‘I act because I must’. He does not follow dharma
because of any hope of reward that might come. He acts from a
sense of what he has to do. Dharma or ‘what he has to do’ is a
standard of conduct, and a society needs standards. ‘He who
doubts dharma finds in nothing else a standard,’ Yudhishthira
says, ‘and ends in setting himself as a standard.’9 He is saying, in
effect, that following dharma is its own reward. When one acts
thus, it is motives and not consequences that are important.
Krishna will elaborate this idea later—of acting without thinking
of the ‘fruits’ of one’s action. I will raise the question if it is
possible for ordinary human beings to act in this selfless manner.
I confess that I have not met many individuals who had
Yudhishthira’s instinctive sense of duty, and who did what they
+ did because they had to. One of the very few was the new and +
young CEO of a company, whose board I joined in the late 1990s.
Seventy per cent of the company’s production was sold to a
government company that insisted on receiving 2 per cent of the
invoice as a kickback in cash. The bribe was shared systematically
among a number of employees in the state-owned company. Our
new CEO refused to pay the bribe. As a result, our company’s
bills were unpaid for nine months. He tried everything—cajoling,
political influence, cutting off supplies—but nothing worked. As
the receivables mounted, we discovered one painful morning
that our company was bankrupt and would cease operations in
two weeks, and 829 people would lose their jobs.
In an emergency meeting of the board of directors, the CEO
wanted the board’s advice. It was the first time that the board
heard about these improper payments, although they had been
going on for decades. My first reaction was to rush for cover.
Was I liable as an independent director? Should I resign from the
board? Then I thought about the future of our 829 employees. As

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 67

we dug deeper into this ugly mess, we discovered that our CEO
had explored all possible options. It seemed to come to an
either/or—either to pay the bribe and save the company or to
refuse and close it.
Most board members were of the view that since this was the
way that things had always been done, we should pay the bribe
and get on with it. They were upset with the CEO for having
rocked the boat. A few of us, including the new CEO and I, were
opposed and we prevailed in the end. The board decided to close
the company’s government business and retain only the 30 per
cent business with private sector customers. This meant that the
company would limp along for a while. The CEO promised to
try vigorously to replace the lost business by gaining new
customers in the private sector. Sadly, 390 workers lost their
jobs. I felt guilty about that, but I think we did the right thing.
I admired the CEO for standing up like Yudhishthira. He
claimed that we were unlucky to do business with the
+ government, where kickbacks were standard practice. ‘It is +
somebody’s money in the private sector and they won’t allow it
to be stolen in kickbacks,’ he added. I reflected on the initial
reaction of most board members and I realized they had been
persuaded to change their minds because of the fear of disclosure
by the auditors. I wondered if people are only honest because of
the fear of punishment. I later asked the CEO why he had
decided to blow the whistle and made his own life difficult. He
mumbled something about not having had a choice—it was a
sense of duty, not a fear of disclosure in his case.
Yudhishthira does not elaborate on his laconic statement, ‘I act
because I must’, and this is why Draupadi remains confused.
Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth century German philosopher, in
trying to understand this sense of duty, said: ‘When moral worth
is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those
inner principles of action that one does not see.’10 These ‘inner
principles’ led me to think about human motives. I was reminded
of a newspaper report about a young man who jumped into the

+
 +

68 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Arabian Sea on a crowded beach and saved a child from

drowning. He instantly became a hero. But he confessed a few
days later to the Times of India that he might not have jumped if
no one had been watching. He did it, he said, to impress his
friends on a college trip, and particularly one girl. Yudhishthira
(or even the CEO) might have jumped even if no one had been
looking. So, motives do matter when it comes to duty.
‘But a child was saved in the end,’ the young man might have
protested. ‘So, who cares about my motives?’ He would have a
point. Consequences of one’s acts do matter, but so do motives
in trying to understand why we behave morally. Where does our
sense of duty come from? David Hume, the Scottish philosopher,
argued that our moral sense originated in human sentiments.
‘The sentiments, dependent on humanity, are the origin of morals,’
he said.11 Kant also felt that one’s sense of duty originates in
one’s humanity, but he added that the ‘noble descent’ of duty
lies in the ‘autonomy of the rational being’. Kant located the
+ origin of dharma in man’s ability to reason, and the ability to +
reason underpins man’s autonomy. ‘This condition,’ Kant wrote,
‘requires that a person never be used as a means when it is an
end in itself.’12
Whereas Kant justified duty based on man’s humanity and
reason, earlier Western thinkers had appealed to ‘natural law’.
They claimed that human beings have inside their nature a law
or a guide to what is right and wrong. Christian thinkers like
Thomas Aquinas offered a brilliant exposition of natural law
theory in the Middle Ages. Later, John Locke provided an
influential variant of this idea based on ‘natural rights’. He
argued that human beings had certain rights when they started
out in a state of nature, and these rights continued even when
that state of nature was over and they became citizens of a civil
society.13 Locke’s notion of human rights, as we know, had a
deep influence on the making of the American and other
constitutions and continues to hold sway in the moral and
political debates of today.

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 69

Yudhishthira’s answer to Draupadi implies that consequences

or ends do not justify the means. Although the Pandavas have a
perfectly legitimate end in regaining their stolen kingdom, they
must recover it only by honest means, without compromising
dharma. He says that he gave his word when he lost the dice
game and he must now abide by his promise. Mahatma Gandhi’s
refrain to Indians in the first half of the twentieth century was
similar. Although throwing off the foreign yoke was a just cause,
he felt that Indians had to adopt the right means in winning
freedom of their country.
Draupadi, however, does not believe that this principle works
in politics, especially when one’s political opponents are ready to
employ ‘dirty tricks’ to gain power. In contemporary democracies
politicians may not ‘steal’ an election through a dice game and
they usually do not tell outright lies, but they always use ‘spin’
in order to ‘package’ themselves in a way that maintains their
popularity. Draupadi merely wants to use the same tactics as her
+ enemies in order to level the playing field. +

‘To save the family, abandon the individual’

Yudhishthira senses that Draupadi is dissatisfied with his duty-

based answer to her question, ‘Why be good?’. Hence, he takes
a different tack, shifting his focus to the consequences and away
from intentions: he offers heaven as the reward for being good.

He who resolutely follows dharma, O beautiful woman, attains to

infinitude hereafter.14

But Draupadi remains unmoved. Yudhishthira then tries another

approach. He appeals to her based on the law of karma, which
teaches that human deeds will inevitably have consequences.
‘Knowing that acts bear [karmic] fruit, the wise man is content
even with a little,’ he says.15 The law of karma is rooted deeply
in the innate human belief in the efficacy of action. Human
beings act on the assumption that their desires, intentions and

+
 +

70 / The Difficulty of Being Good

actions will lead to an intended goal. As Manu, the Indian

lawgiver, explains:

. . . it is impossible to be free from desire . . . Intention is the root

of desire . . . Nowhere in this world do we see any activity done by
a man free from desire; for whatever that a man may do, it is the
work of someone who desired it.16

Human desire and intentions work on our innate belief in

cause and effect, and this assumption led ancient Indians to
postulate a dharma based on the consequences of human action—
and, accordingly, a harmonious, cosmic law of karma. This is
why Draupadi is outraged when she sees the virtuous Pandavas
suffering in the forest. It creates a dilemma in her mind. What
keeps the Pandavas going is their belief that virtue will be
rewarded eventually. In fact, the sage Markandeya reassures
Yudhishthira that actions always bear fruit. Those fruits, according
to the law of karma, might emerge in this world, but they might
+ also emerge in another world.17 +
There are others in the epic who also judge the rightness of an
action from its results. The respected counsellor Vidura, who is
half-brother of King Dhritarashtra, appeals repeatedly to the
king to stop his wicked son from proceeding with the dice game.
Vidura believes that an act is good only if it promotes good
consequences. And an act that promotes the good of many
persons is better than one which promotes the good of a few. He
is against the dice game not only because of the deception
involved, but because it will eventually create strife and harm
the interests of the country and the people. As a true
‘consequentialist’, he says:

To save the family, [one must] abandon an individual. To save the

village, abandon a family; to save the country, abandon the
village.18

Vidura’s position is that if an action produces good consequences,

then it is good. Yudhishthira might not have abandoned an

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 71

individual for the sake of the family. His sense of duty to ahimsa,
non-violence, might not have allowed him to sacrifice even a
single human life. He goes further than Kant: he looks upon all
sentient beings (not just human beings) as ends in themselves.
When one sacrifices an individual for a village then one treats
that individual as a means rather than an end.
It is dilemmas such as these—between intentions and
consequences, and ends and means—that make dharma subtle,
as Bhishma pointed out to Draupadi in the assembly. Perhaps
because he feels guilty for not ‘saving’ Draupadi on that day,
Bhishma will return to the difficulty of being good in Book
Twelve when it comes to a trade-off between telling the truth
and saving a life. He tells Yudhishthira about Kaushika, an
ascetic without much learning, who is accosted one day by a
group of thieving cut-throats who are seeking the man who had
witnessed their crime. Kaushika had seen the witness run into
the forest and he knows that if he reveals it, he is issuing a death
+ sentence. He must choose between the dharma of satya, telling
+
the truth, or of ahimsa, saving a life.
Kaushika chooses the duty of satya over ahimsa. The robbers
catch and kill their prey, and the ascetic ends in a gruesome hell
because he failed to understand that dharma in this instance
required him to tell a ‘white lie’ to the villains. Bhishma explains
that while ‘there is nothing higher than the truth’,

the thing most difficult to understand in the whole world . . . is

that truth should not be spoken and that falsehood should be
spoken, where falsehood would be truth, or truth falsehood. Someone
simple is dumbfounded in that circumstance where truth is not
fixed . . . If escape is possible by not singing your song, then you
should not let out the smallest note. But if your not singing would
arouse suspicion, then you absolutely have to sing away.19

In Western literature, the most dramatic example of this trade-

off came in a question posed by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The

+
 +

72 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Brothers Karamazov. Ivan asks whether it is justified to torture a

child in order to bring incalculable happiness to the rest of
humanity?

Tell me honestly, I challenge you—answer me: imagine that

you are charged with building the edifice of human destiny,
the ultimate aim of which is to bring people happiness, to
give them peace and contentment at last, but that in order to
achieve this it is essential and unavoidable to torture just
one little speck of creation, that same little child beating her
chest with her little fists, and imagine that this edifice has to
be erected on her unexpiated tears. Would you agree to be
the architect under those conditions? Tell me honestly!20

Alyosha, his brother, does not have an answer, and Dostoevsky

seems to feel that such questions are unsolvable. This is perhaps
why dharma is ‘subtle’. But Yudhishthira, with his commitment
to the absolute principle of ahimsa, ‘non-violence’, would probably
+ have refused to torture the child no matter how benign the +
consequences. Bhishma and Krishna—like most political leaders
who have to run a state—would have chosen the more practical
approach of looking at the consequences of an action.21 The
sensible Vidura, who is also close to power, would have argued
that by sacrificing one child, he would have been able to save
millions of children from suffering in the future—saving them
from disease, hunger, violence and other forms of pain. The ethic
of absolute standards and perfection appeals more to those who
are far removed from public office like Yudhishthira when he is
in the forest.
In our present ethical mood, we intensely admire an individual
like Yudhishthira. The nineteenth-century public, however, was
influenced by Jeremy Bentham, whose Utilitarian philosophy
focused on consequences. He judged an act to be ‘good’ or moral
by the net amount of pleasure or happiness it produced. Bentham
would answer Draupadi’s question like Vidura: what is good is
that which promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 73

number. Bentham too may have sacrificed a family for the sake
of a village or tortured one child in order to save all children
from suffering. The great divide in ethical thinking is between
those who judge an act based on its consequences versus those
who judge it based on duty or some rule.
The attraction of Consequentialism is its simplicity. I can
quickly tell if I am being good by examining the consequences of
my act. Everyone is equal in the equation, whether a servant or
a master.22 My criticism of it is that it ignores the justice or
fairness in the distribution of goods. It is indifferent to the needs
of the weak and the poor as long as society’s overall satisfaction
is maximized. 23 Indeed, it is all too easy to ignore the
circumstances and the freedom of a minority in maximizing the
welfare of society as a whole.24

‘Dharma is a ship that guides one to the farthest shore’

+ We return to husband and wife in the Dvaita forest. Yudhishthira +

can see that his ‘beautiful’ Draupadi is still not satisfied, and he
gropes for another answer to her question, ‘Why be good?’ He
turns to the social benefits of moral action. He compares dharma
to a ship that allows human beings to journey through life, just
as it allows a merchant to travel to the farthest shores. ‘Were
dharma to be fruitless,’ he says, ’the whole world would sink
into a bottomless darkness . . . and [people] would live like
cattle.’25 His assumption is that human beings can live together
only if they cooperate. If people do not trust each other, the
social order will collapse. Our moral rules, such as ahimsa, ‘not
hurting others’, or satya, ‘telling the truth’, are, in fact, rules for
cooperation, without which we would ‘sink into a bottomless
darkness’, he says.
David Hume also felt that the rules of a society were a social
creation. While at the individual’s level moral rules may well be
inviolate injunctions that a person must follow unquestioningly,
at society’s level they are justified by social utility. This justification

+
 +

74 / The Difficulty of Being Good

of morality is sometimes called Indirect Utilitarianism. Its

attraction lies in its ability to combine both the approaches—one
that judges the goodness of an act by looking at its consequences
and the other of looking to the intentions behind the act. In the
case of Yudhishthira—he can still act based on principle and
observe dharma because he regards it a duty. Moral rules, such
as ahimsa, ‘not hurting others’, or satya, ‘telling the truth’, are
imperative duties for him. The duties themselves, however, are
justified separately by their ability to produce positive
consequences—i.e. keeping society going or keeping ‘the ship
afloat’, as he puts it. This argument combines, somewhat
opportunistically, the best in both the ‘consequences’ and ‘duty’
or ‘intention’-based moral positions.
Draupadi does not immediately respond to her husband, but
I suspect she would have accepted this argument. This is one of
the fundamental themes of the epic and it repeats it often in the
form of an abstract axiom: ‘Where there is dharma, there is
+ victory’.26 By this, the epic means that dharma yields good fruits +
not only for the individual but for society as a whole. Indeed,
Draupadi’s frustration in this case is not with the principle. She
is disappointed with her husband for ignoring the social
consequences of his actions. In her view, he neglects the dharma
of the king and of the ruling kshatriya caste. Because of his bull-
headed insistence on remaining in the forest, she feels he lets his
people down, and fails to uphold dharma. The king’s dharma is
to ensure that society functions harmoniously. How can he
observe this dharma if he is unwilling to fight, regain his kingdom,
and be a dharmic king?

‘Why cover yourself in tatters of dharma and

throw away artha and kama?’

Having overheard Draupadi make a heroic but unsuccessful

effort to get his older brother Yudhishthira to get up and fight,
Bhima joins them now. He confesses that he cannot get over the

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 75

theft of their kingdom and he exhorts Yudhishthira to get up and

fight to recover what is rightfully theirs. He uses a different
argument, however, and without realizing it, offers another
answer to Draupadi’s question, ‘Why be good?’ By remaining in
the forest, he says, the Pandavas are neglecting the three aims of
a good and flourishing life. The classical Indian texts enjoin an
individual to pursue kama, ‘pleasure’, artha, ‘material well-being’,
and dharma, ‘righteousness’, in order to fulfil life’s purpose.

Why should we dwell in this austere wilderness and miss out on

dharma, artha and kama? . . . Why cover yourself in some tatters
of dharma, king, and throw away artha, which is the [material]
basis for [the pursuit of] dharma and kama?27

Bhima does not mention the fourth aim, suggesting that, perhaps,
the last aim of moksha, ‘spiritual liberation’, may have been
added later. He makes the sensible point that it is difficult to be
virtuous in conditions of extreme deprivation when one is
+ constantly thinking of the next meal. ‘But one who is destitute of
+
wealth cannot practise dharma.’28 A person needs a minimal
level of material security even to practise dharma properly.
Bhima concedes that when the three aims of life come into
conflict, dharma trumps the other two. It disciplines the pursuit
of pleasure and wealth, and thus provides balance to a good
human life. But by remaining in the forest, Yudhishthira neglects
the other two aims of life, and thereby fails to fulfil life’s
purpose. The ancient Greeks reached a similar conclusion. They
also believed that human life had a telos, ‘purpose’, and Aristotle
felt that the human life had multiple ends, and virtue was one of
them.


In this dialogue, the Mahabharata has offered a number of answers
to Draupadi’s question, ‘Why be virtuous?’ Yudhishthira’s first
answer is instinctive—he ‘acts because he must’. He follows

+
 +

76 / The Difficulty of Being Good

dharma because it is there and he feels it his duty to follow it.

Yudhishthira feels an inclination, a svabhava, a ‘predisposition to
act in a certain way’.29 He upholds the truth and he sticks to his
promise because he has an inner disposition to do so. This is an
important distinction, one similar to the ancient Greek idea of
‘character’, and it is a dimension absent from the approaches
based on ‘duty’ and ‘consequences’. Whatever the temptations or
the advantages of raising an army in order to recover his kingdom,
Yudhishthira will not break his vow to King Dhritarashtra.

. . . the promise I made is a true one, remember

I choose over life and eternity, dharma
Neither kingdom, nor sons, neither glory nor wealth,
Can even come up to a fraction of the Truth!30

Since this answer does not appeal to Draupadi, the epic offers
several other arguments based on the consequences of one’s
behaviour. The first is the standard religious one: a person will
+ go to heaven if she is good. The second is the law of karma. The
+
third is the more general benefit of virtuous behaviour to society.
Finally, the epic offers, via Bhima, an answer that students of
ethics know as ‘virtue ethics’. It connects ‘being good’ with
character and fulfilling the purpose of human life. A good and
flourishing life demands that a human being observe dharma.
Yudhishthira did not succeed in convincing Draupadi on that
day. The question ‘Why be good?’ is left hanging in the air and
it will hang over the epic till the end, when the Pandavas will
still be searching for an answer. Yudhishthira, however, is sad
and contrite. He feels that he has let his family down. ‘I do not
blame you for your bitterness. For my wrong course brought this
misery upon you,’ he says.31 Both Draupadi and Bhima try to
cheer him up, saying that victory will ultimately follow if they
pursue the kshatriya’s dharma. But Yudhishthira is unconvinced
for dharma to him is a deeply personal matter. Being truthful
and non-violent has little to do with being a kshatriya warrior.

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 77

To her dismay, Draupadi can sense his real and bull-headed

commitment to his sense of duty.32

‘That is the way it is!’

‘It is not the Indian style to send heroes off to the forest and then
continue, “After twelve years they came back”. The romance of
the forest was too gripping and the theme of the prince exiled
too popular.’33 During their wanderings the Pandavas face many
hardships, encounter sages and enchanted spirits, and have
many adventures. In the thirteenth year, they move to the capital
city of the king of Virata. To avoid being discovered, they
assume disguises: Yudhishthira becomes a dice master at the
royal court; Draupadi, the queen’s handmaiden; Bhima, a cook
in the royal kitchen; Arjuna dresses like a woman and gets the
job of a eunuch to guard the ladies’ chambers and to teach the
royal women dancing; Nakula becomes a groom in the stables;
and Sahadeva looks after the royal cattle. Duryodhana sends
+ +
spies to find them, but they remain undetected during their year
of masquerade.
After thirteen years of exile and adventure, including several
attempts on their lives by the Kauravas, the Pandavas return to
reclaim their inheritance. They have fulfilled the terms of the
agreement and now expect their rightful share of the kingdom.
But Duryodhana refuses. Elaborate peace negotiations follow
between the two sides. Duryodhana, however, remains adamant.
So, war becomes inevitable.
The decision to declare war is an awkward moment for
Yudhishthira who is dedicated to preserving dharma. Lamenting
the failure of the peace negotiations, Yudhishthira says that ‘war
is evil in any form’.34 He goes on to say:

The ultimate disaster for which I dwelled in the forest and suffered
is upon us in spite of all our striving . . . For how can war be
waged with men who we must not kill? How can we win if we
must kill our gurus and elders?35

+
 +

78 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Yudhishthira’s brothers try to reassure their elder brother. They

remind him of his duty to his family, to his kshatriya heritage
and to his people—he is a king, after all. There is much discussion
among the mighty warriors about the rightness of war. To stop
the endless debate Krishna exclaims impatiently and bluntly,
‘That is the way it is!’36
The Pandavas’ decision to go to war marks a turning point in
Yudhishthira’s thinking about dharma. Yudhishthira has evolved
from a guileless idealist who stands for absolute moral standards
into a pragmatist who understands the limitations of those who
have to rule a state.37 Sanjaya, the emissary of the Kauravas in
the second peace negotiations, does not realize this change. He
suggests to Yudhishthira: ‘Do not destroy yourself! If the Kurus
will not grant you your share . . . without resorting to war, then
in my opinion, a life of begging . . . would be better than winning
your kingdom through war.’38 The earlier Yudhishthira in the
forest might have accepted this suggestion to turn the other
+ cheek; now, he finds it preposterous. Sanjaya chides him:
+

. . . if you must commit an evil act of such hostility, Parthas, after

all this time, why then, Pandavas, did you have to live in the forest
for those successive years, in miserable exile, just because it was
right? . . . And why have you spent these successive years in the
forests if you want to fight now, Pandava, when you have lost so
much time? It is a foolish man who fights . . .39

Yudhishthira’s answer comes as a surprise:

. . . in times of trouble one’s duty alters. When one’s livelihood is

disrupted and one is totally poverty-stricken, one should wish for
other means to carry out one’s prescribed duties . . . which means
that in dire situations one may perform normally improper acts.40

Chastened by thirteen harsh years in exile, Yudhishthira has

become pragmatic. As he takes charge of the war effort, and
assumes ‘complete control of his brothers and his allies’,41 he also

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 79

recognizes the limits of absolute goodness. He agrees with his

ally, Satyaki: ‘No law can be found against killing enemies who
are plotting to kill us.’42 He tells Sanjaya, ‘I am just as capable of
peace as I am of war . . . as I am of gentleness and severity.’43 His
new, down-to-earth view of dharma is grounded in self-interest
but without being amoral. His new position avoids both
ideological extremes—the Hobbesian amorality of Duryodhana
as well as the idealistic super-morality of the earlier Yudhishthira
in exile.
I approve of this prudent Yudhishthira. One should be realistic
and pursue only what is attainable. Unnecessarily demanding
ideals are easily discredited. Although ‘prudence’ does not have
a high moral purchase these days—it suggests a person who is
self-interested and expedient—I believe one can be ‘prudent’
when one’s own interest is not involved. A ‘prudent’ mother is
concerned for her child’s welfare. A ‘prudent’ person looks at the
future consequences of actions. These do not make them selfish
+ actions. They are compatible with acting considerately and bearing
+
in mind the interest of others. Accordingly, this new Yudhishthira,
however different he may appear on the surface, is the
Yudhishthira who at the epic’s end will hold up the virtues of
ahimsa, ‘non-violence’, and anrishamsya, ‘compassion’, as the
highest dharma.44
Yudhishthira’s moral journey from Book Three (Vanaparvan)
to Book Five (Udyogaparvan) of the epic has brought him to a
rational and sensible position. Indeed, Machiavelli might have
been addressing the earlier Yudhishthira when he wrote, ‘a man
who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin
among so many who are not so good’.45 Yudhishthira’s new
position is more akin to the evolutionary principle of reciprocal
altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow
yourself to be exploited. Recent insights of evolutionary scientists
throw some light on this pragmatic middle ground, in terms of
both how we live and how we ought to.46 There is always a risk

+
 +

80 / The Difficulty of Being Good

in deriving moral values from nature’s workings; an unwarranted

inference from what ‘is’ to what ‘ought to be’—this is what
philosophers call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. There is also a risk in
over-reading the data of the young discipline of evolutionary
biology. Still, I believe that it can illuminate the moral temper of
the Mahabharata.
To be sure, human beings have evolved through a long struggle
in which only the fittest have passed on their genes. But to
conclude that life is a tooth-and-claw struggle—or that morality
is merely in the interest of the strong, as Duryodhana claims—
is a mistake. Nature is full of examples of dharma-like goodness.
Dolphins will help lift an injured companion for hours to help it
survive. Blackbirds and thrushes give warning calls when they
spot a hawk even if it means risking their own lives.
Evolutionary biology assumes that societies have developed
moral principles in order to get people to cooperate. Moral rules
are grounded in human self-interest but are tempered by our
+ need to live with others—a pragmatic assumption that also runs
+
through the Mahabharata. So, where might our dharma-like
behaviour originate? In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
speculated that in the course of evolution, if a person helped
another, he would also receive help in return. ‘From this low
motive,’ Darwin wrote, ‘he might acquire the habit of aiding his
fellows; and the habit of performing benevolent actions.’47 This
thought of Darwin’s led biologists to hypothesize that ‘an
individual who maximizes his friendships and minimizes his
antagonisms will have an evolutionary advantage, and selection
should favour those characters that promote the optimization of
personal relationships’.48 One observes that human beings do
tend to behave altruistically towards their relatives and this
suggests a link of reciprocity with kin selection in evolution: ‘A
gene that repaid kindness with kindness could thus have spread
through the extended family and by interbreeding to other
families.’49

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 81

To see how such a ‘reciprocal altruism’ might work in practice,

let us look at the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma.50 It might help
explain why Yudhishthira changes his moral position in the
Mahabharata. In this game, the police are trying to get two
prisoners to confess to a jointly committed crime. If one of them
confesses, he will be let off and the other will spend his life in
jail. If neither confesses, both will spend minimal time in jail. If
both confess, then both will have to spend seven years in jail. The
logical selfish strategy is to confess, betray your partner, and
hope that he won’t betray you. The ‘altruistic’ strategy is not to
confess, but then you run the risk of spending your life in jail if
your partner betrays you. The best strategy is collaborative—
neither should confess. In that case, both would be free after
spending a minimal time in jail.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma teaches us something about how
strangers cooperate in society. A round-robin tournament of the
Prisoner’s Dilemma was held in which contestants played two
+ hundred games with one player and then moved to the next, the
+
objective being to minimize the time in jail. The reason for
repeating the games was to simulate real life, in which people
meet each other repeatedly in large, anonymous cities. The
winner of the game was neither altruistic nor egoistic—but the
person who used a strategy called ‘tit-for-tat’, or what Indians
call ‘nehle pe dehla’.51 ‘Tit-for-tat’ is in effect ‘reciprocal altruism’:
do not confess on the first move; this sends a signal to your
opponent that you are a nice person; from the second move
onwards, however, mimic what your opponent does; if he is nice
to you, reciprocate by being nice; if he is selfish, punish him in
kind. This sends a message to the Duryodhanas of the world that
you will retaliate if necessary.
Each time that the tournament was replayed, ‘tit-for-tat’ or
reciprocity won. Those who followed the selfish strategy always
lost. Those who tried to be good like the earlier Yudhishthira in
the forest also lost. Neither pure meanness nor pure goodness

+
 +

82 / The Difficulty of Being Good

paid off.52 I learned from this game that the principle of reciprocity
keeps cheats like Duryodhana in check. In contrast Mahatma
Gandhi’s and Jesus’s teaching about turning the other cheek
sends them a wrong signal that cheating pays. So, Draupadi does
have a point when she tells Yudhishthira to get up and raise an
army. What she is saying, in effect, is ‘do not be a sucker’—
counter meanness with meanness.
However, ‘tit-for-tat’ should not be confused with an aggressive
strategy. It calls for presenting a friendly face to the world—the
first move in the game is always to be nice. Yudhishthira presents
an affable face during the interminable peace negotiations. And
he will make an exceptionally generous offer to Duryodhana, as
we shall soon see. The difference is that Yudhishthira is no
longer willing to be exploited. It has taken him thirteen long
years to realize that Draupadi may have been right.
It does seem extraordinary that evolutionary biology and the
Prisoner’s Dilemma should be able to shed light on the pragmatic
+ temper of the Mahabharata. When Yudhishthira gave the order to +
start the war—albeit reluctantly—he acted like a reciprocal altruist
and became a prudent ruler of the middle path. It is a path
somewhere between the ‘amoral realism’ of Duryodhana and the
‘ethical idealism’ of the earlier Yudhishthira in the forest. Having
said that, we still admire this earlier Yudhishthira who
instinctively told Draupadi, ‘I act because I must.’ Although we
cannot be like him, he does appeal to our ideals, and every
society needs ideals. As always, Oscar Wilde says it best, ‘We are
all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.’

Can dharma be taught?

In goading Yudhishthira to fight for his kingdom, Draupadi

showed an admirable bias for action that would make any CEO
proud. She elaborated her managerial principle thus: ‘One first
decides [keeping] one’s mind on one’s goal, then achieves it with
acts . . . an act capably done, well planned by the doer, is clearly

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 83

distinguished from an incompetent one.’53 In saying this, Draupadi

is gently rebuking her husband. While his sva-dharma is clearly
that of a kshatriya, a man of action, he behaves too often like a
brahmin, a man of contemplation. Draupadi is using the word
‘dharma’ here in the sense of a ‘calling’, which is also the
connotation that my father had in mind when he would proclaim
that ‘engineering’ was his dharma.
In the same dialogue, Draupadi suggests that those who have
a sense of ‘dharma as a calling’ are fortunate. She says, ‘For who
knows what his task is, [he] is one in a thousand!’54 I expect she
feels this way because such fortunate persons have an intrinsic
motivation for their work. She would have been proud of the
primary schoolteacher in Dharmapuri district in Tamil Nadu
who I read about in the Times of India in May 2005—a man who
has bicycled 32 kilometres each day for the past twenty years
without missing a single day of school. Because of his
commitment, as well his ability to inspire students, a surprising
+ number of his former students went on to become hugely famous.
+
When asked about the roots of his motivation, he answered,
‘Teaching is my dharma,’ the sort of answer that a professional
like Drona, the teacher of the Kauravas and Pandavas, would
also have given.
Contrast this with the findings of a study on government
primary school teachers in India by Michael Kremer of Harvard
University and others (including members of the World Bank)
that shocked the Indian nation in 2003. From it we learned that
one in four teachers in our government primary schools is absent
and one in four, although present, is not teaching. Thus, one in
two teachers out of roughly 1.5 million primary school teachers
is not doing his/her job. Aside from the institutional aspects of
the failure, a teacher who is chronically absent wounds dharma
and demeans the teaching profession.
Dharma is not only a matter of personal well being. It is also
a matter of social and political health, and the epic is deeply

+
 +

84 / The Difficulty of Being Good

concerned with ‘the dharma of the king’ and his officials and it
will elaborate this further in Book Twelve. Among the officials of
the state are schoolteachers in government primary schools in
India, who fail dharma when they are absent. The Mahabharata
has offered a number of reasons to these schoolteachers to be
good. First, because it is one’s duty; second, good acts produce
good consequences; third, the social order would collapse if
people did not keep to their commitments; finally, virtue or
dharma is necessary for leading a good and flourishing life. The
absentee schoolteacher wounds dharma on all counts—he/she
fails her duty; he/she fails the consequentialist test, destroying
the futures of her students; and he/she neglects his/her own
capabilities, failing to achieve life’s purpose.
Plato wrote more than two thousand years ago that the reform
of schools is everyone’s work—the work of every man, woman
and child. While school reform—say punishing a teacher for
absence—would certainly bring errant teachers back to school,
+ how does one address the moral failure? How does one get a
+
teacher not only to be present but also teach with a sense of
calling? Can dharma be taught so that there are more inspiring
teachers like the one in Dharmapuri? Both Plato and Aristotle
believed that virtue could be taught. A person’s character is not
something that one is born with. It is constantly evolving through
repeated actions, and one can be educated to become more
moral. Aristotle gives the example of a musician in the
Nicomachean Ethics. To become a musician, Aristotle says, requires
skill and repetitive practice. In the same way, to become virtuous
requires repeating virtuous actions.55
I tend to view the old concept of karma in this light. When I
repeat certain actions, I accumulate karma of a certain kind,
which builds a certain kind of character and predisposes me to
act in a certain way. Karma for me is not something supernatural
but svabhava, ‘an inclination to act in a certain way’ as a result of
my habits, which have been formed as a result of my past

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 85

actions. So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually

human acts do bear fruit, even though the fruit is invisible,56 one
might interpret ‘fruit’ to mean the building of character through
repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly aware that repeated
actions had a way of changing one’s inclinations to act in a
certain way. That inclination is character.
Ancient Indians shared Aristotle’s belief that character could
be built. They regarded the Mahabharata as a ‘dharma text’ which
could teach dharma. It is plausible to expect that when one hears
repeatedly of the unfair suffering of Draupadi or Yudhishthira
one becomes gradually more empathetic. Moral experiments
show that ‘subjects who were urged to relax and use their
imaginations when hearing a story of distress reported both
greater emotion and a greater willingness to help the victim than
did subjects who were urged to remain detached and “objective”.
It would seem, then, that people who attend to the distress of
another in a manner sufficient for compassion have motives to
+ help that person.’57
+
The epic forces us to reflect on our beliefs and our behaviour.
It makes us aware about how we deceive ourselves. Even
Yudhishthira confesses to Draupadi and Bhima at the end of this
scene, saying that he is not the good man that they think him to
be. He had accepted the dice game because of a secret hope that
he would win and thereby expand his kingdom. Even when he
was losing, he knew that the game was crooked, but he could not
stop because he was caught in the gambler’s frenetic whirl. Thus,
Yudhishthira’s mask falls off, and with this devastating discovery
Draupadi becomes silent. Secretly, perhaps, she may have been
pleased to see that her husband is human and vulnerable, like
any other person. It could not have been easy to live with such
a principled man. Yudhishthira’s confession shakes the listeners
of the epic as well, making us aware how difficult it is to be good
in a world where right and wrong are intricately mixed in a
bewildering manner.

+
 +

86 / The Difficulty of Being Good

The Mahabharata could never be a ‘how to’ book given its

ambivalence towards moral truth. Yudhishthira is unable to
convince Draupadi about ‘why we should be good’. It does
suggest, however, that ‘being good’ is not a one-off event but a
continuing attitude to life and other human beings. Although
dharma can be learned, it is an inner ‘journey of self-discovery,
overcoming self-deception’.58 Mahatma Gandhi tried to cultivate
the moral instinct in an unusual way through his famous
‘experiments with truth’. He employed fasts as an instrument of
moral growth and was courageous in making a 180-degree turn
when it was warranted. He said, ‘It may entail continuous
suffering and the cultivating of endless patience, [but] step by
step one makes friends with the entire world.’59 The pitfall on
this journey, he reminds us, is the human tendency for self-
deception. No one ‘ever understands quite his own artful dodges
to escape from the shadow of self-knowledge’.60
Being good may come naturally to Yudhishthira and to the
+ CEO who refused to bribe in order to get government business,
+
but to Draupadi and to most of us, it needs effort. Even when
one is able to recognize moral behaviour, one is not able to
practise it. One tries to project one’s good side and hide one’s
weaknesses. One admires individuals who are ethical, believing
that their lives are somehow more integrated. Why is it then so
difficult to behave morally? Is it because goodness is not rewarded
more tangibly and generously in the world? The virtuous
Pandavas endure banishment, deprivation and hardship, while
the wicked Kauravas flourish in their palaces. This is why
Draupadi is tempted to accept Duryodhana’s view that dharma
is merely a disguised form of the interest of the stronger—that
people are basically selfish and they invoke dharma in order to
further their own interests. Hence, she concludes that it is better
to be powerful than virtuous.
One has come across people who are less than virtuous but
who are successful, wealthy and powerful. They are even admired

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Duty / 87

and sometimes loved. At the same time one also knows ‘good’
people who end up poor, helpless, and even pitiable. One
sympathizes with them for it seems reasonable to want and
achieve some degree of success. Is a ‘good’ person likely to have
as much chance of succeeding as a ‘bad’ person? Draupadi
seems inclined to believe that the world is so structured that only
the selfish, the powerful and the dishonest will have an edge in
life. Yudhishthira, however, shows by his own example that
there is another way to live. One need not assume that a
competitive, self-centred life dedicated solely to self-advancement
is the only way.
The Mahabharata reminds us that it is natural and desirable for
human beings to want happiness and pleasure as they seek to be
good. Kama is one of the legitimate goals of human life. The
Christian denial of physical pleasure, especially sexual pleasure,
is happily absent from the epic and most ancient Indian texts. So
is the ‘thou shalt not’ approach, which makes one feel guilty, and
+ turns one off the moral project. The notion of dharma as it
+
emerges from the Mahabharata is a plural one. Being plural
makes greater demands on one’s reason, for human objectives
sometimes conflict with each other, and this forces one to choose.
The attraction of a clean ethical theory like Utilitarianism is that
it attempts to resolve moral issues on the basis of a single
criterion. Pluralism is more complex but no less rational. One
needs to order different virtues in a hierarchy in order to help
one to choose in the case of a conflict.
Dharma is supposed to uphold a certain cosmic balance and it
is expected to help us to balance the plural ends of life—desire,
material well being, and righteousness—when they come into
conflict. Dharma sets limits on the pursuit of pleasure and
wealth. In practice this implies, for example, that one maximizes
one’s pleasure as long as it does not diminish another’s. What we
have learnt so far, however, is that dharma does not do a very
good job of it.

+
 +

ARJUNA’S DESPAIR
‘There are no victors in war’

‘I shall not fight,’ [and] he fell silent.

—Arjuna to Krishna, Bhagavad Gita II.9

+ ‘The magic bow slips from my hand’ +

Krishna personally leads the final embassy to the court of

Hastinapura in a last-ditch effort to persuade the Kauravas to
make peace. He hopes that his godly stature and his neutrality
(somewhat compromised though it is) will help to reach a
settlement between the warring cousins. Although this is the
fourth diplomatic attempt to avert war, the intractable
Duryodhana remains unmoved. Eventually, Yudhishthira makes
an exceptionally generous offer to Duryodhana. He will forgo
his share of the kingdom and accept only five villages—a deal
which the hawks in the Pandava camp find appalling.1 But
Duryodhana stubbornly refuses, saying:

I shall not cede Yudhishthira even a pinprick of land.2

On his return, Krishna tells the Pandavas, ‘War is the only course
left.’ The mood of the epic changes to dread and foreboding at
the approaching horror of the war.3 Both sides begin to make

88

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 89

furious preparations. Yudhishthira assembles seven armies,

against eleven of the Kauravas. All the great kingdoms of the
time are now allied to one or the other side. As expected,
Bhishma is named commander-in-chief of the Kauravas. On the
first day of battle:

under a clear sky, the kings, at Duryodhana Dhritarashtra’s

orders, marched against the Pandavas. They had all bathed and
purified themselves, wore garlands and white robes, held swords
and banners, and had offered into the fire and had the svasti
pronounced.4

While describing the battle formations of the troops at the end of

Udyogaparvan, Book Five, the epic portrays with a touch of irony
the mood of the warriors:

There were berserk men there, clutching their weapons—twenty

thousand standards commanded by champions. There were five
+ thousand elephants . . . Behind followed hundreds of thousands +
and myriads of men, marching and shouting in thousands of
formations. And in their thousands and tens of thousands the
happy warriors sounded their thousands of drums and tens of
thousands of conches.5

‘Happy’ warriors, indeed—soon, there will be ‘no more happy

warriors, only resigned ones’.6
The world-famous philosophical poem, Bhagavad Gita, now
commences in a profound ‘moment of stillness before the tempest’
in Book Six of the Mahabharata.7 In its opening lines, the Gita
announces that this is no ordinary battlefield—it is also a moral
field (dharma-kshetra). Dhritarashtra, the blind king, turns to
Sanjaya, his bard and charioteer:

Sanjaya, tell me what my sons

and the sons of Pandu did when they met,
wanting to do battle on the field of Kuru,
on the field of sacred duty?8

+
 +

90 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Sanjaya, who has received a special boon of distant vision,

becomes one of the world’s first war correspondents. He describes
how the heroes and the troops on both sides are arrayed on the
battlefield at Kurukshetra. His focus is on Arjuna, the greatest
warrior of his age, who stands at the head of his troops, alongside
Krishna, his charioteer:

Standing on their great chariot

Yoked with white stallions,
Krishna and Arjuna, Pandu’s son
sounded their divine conches.9

As Arjuna sees the enemy troops in formation, with weapons

ready to begin, he raises his bow, but stops. He says:

Krishna,
halt my chariot
between the armies!
+ +
Far enough for me to see
these men who lust for war
ready to fight with me
in the strain of battle.10

Krishna halts their splendid chariot between the two armies.

Arjuna saw them standing there:

fathers, grandfathers, teachers,
uncles, brothers, sons,
grandsons and friends.11

As he surveys the field full of his kinsmen who want war, Arjuna
is filled with a strange pity and he says:

My limbs sink,
my mouth is parched,
my body trembles,
the hair bristles on my flesh.

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 91

The magic bow slips

from my hand, my skin burns,
I cannot stand still,
my mind reels.

I see omens of chaos,

Krishna; I see no good
in killing my kinsmen
in battle.12

He sees so many on the enemy side who are blameless, for

whom he has great affection, with whom he played when he was
young. In the ensuing war he will have to kill them. How can it
be right to kill the ones you love?

Saying this in the time of war

Arjuna slumped into the chariot
and laid down his bows and arrows,
+ His mind tormented by grief.13 +
This well-known episode, known as Arjunavishada, has become a
celebrated protest against war.

‘I shall not fight’

Sanjaya continues:

Arjuna sat dejected,

filled with pity,
his sad eyes blurred by tears.

Seeing him thus, with his famous Gandiva bow on the ground,
Krishna asks,

Why this cowardice

in time of crisis, Arjuna?
The coward is ignoble, shameful,
Foreign to the ways of heaven.14

+
 +

92 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Arjuna replies,

It is better in this world

to beg for scraps of food
than to eat meals smeared with the blood of elders.

‘I shall not fight,’

[and] he fell silent.15

It is an extraordinary sight: the greatest hero of his time is

suddenly full of uncertainty and indecision just before his supreme
test. Arjuna had hitherto been of the ‘war party’ along with
Draupadi, and Krishna is dumbfounded at this sudden
development (as indeed, say, General Patton’s driver might have
been had his boss dithered on the eve of the invasion of Sicily in
World War II). Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, Arjuna does not
refuse to fight because of pride, but because he has grasped the
inner meaning of war. And as if to prove it, his courageous
sixteen-year-old son, Abhimanyu, will be among the first heroes
+ to fall, and in a most unjust way. +
Karl von Clausewitz, the German strategist, set out to explain
the ‘inner meaning’ of war. He wrote, ‘War has no limits to
violence . . . [The reason is that] each of the adversaries forces the
hand of the other, and this results in continuous escalation, in
which neither side is guilty even if it acts first, since every act can
be called pre-emptive.’16 Once war begins, it inevitably escalates,
without limit. (When Winston Churchill made the decision to
fight Adolf Hitler, he did not know that the war would escalate
into the fire-bombing of German cities in which thousands of
civilians would die.) Great tragedy is inescapable in war.
Arjuna’s older brother, Yudhishthira, also understands this. In
trying to prevent the war, he had earlier expressed the idea that
total annihilation was certain even though the war might be
won.

The aftermath [of war] is evil, for survivors do survive. The

survivors regain their strength and themselves leave no survivors
but aim at total annihilation to put an end to the feud.17

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 93

Later, as if to prove this prescient truth, Ashwatthama, the son

of their archery teacher, Drona, will avenge the unjust killing of
his father. He will set on fire the entire victorious and sleeping
armies of the Pandavas and their allies—a deed as heinous as the
dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in World War II or
the burning of Atlanta in the American Civil War. Of the hundreds
and thousands of warriors who begin to fight in the war, only
eleven are left after eighteen days. Seeing this, Yudhishthira says,
‘there are no victors in war’, and from here onwards, the mood
of the Mahabharata also changes.

What should Arjuna do?

Arjuna has no doubt that his cause is just. He is also confident

that his side will prevail, in part because of his own considerable
skills as an archer, but also because he has Krishna, the God,
who is his charioteer as well as the master strategist of the
Pandavas. The Kauravas and the Pandavas had both wanted
+ Krishna on their side. Krishna had given them a choice—they +
could either have him or his armies. Arjuna chose him while
Duryodhana took the God’s awesome armies. And now, despite
having God on his side, Arjuna is dejected. The prospect of
killing his loved ones fills him with anguish. He suggests to
Krishna that, perhaps, the Pandavas ought to give up their
claims to the kingdom as the lesser of the two evils.
Krishna devotes the next ‘700 fratricidal verses’ to persuade
Arjuna to fight, and this becomes the Gita.18 He offers many
reasons, some more persuasive than others. One of them is that
Arjuna must fight because it is his duty as a warrior.

Look to your own duty;

do not tremble before it;
nothing is better for a warrior
than a battle of sacred duty.19

This appears to be similar to Yudhishthira’s first and instinctive

response to Draupadi’s question, ‘Why be good?’ when they

+
 +

94 / The Difficulty of Being Good

were in exile. It is a superficial resemblance, however, for the

meaning of duty is different in the two cases. For Krishna,
Arjuna’s duty is to fight because he is obliged to do so as a
warrior of the kshatriya caste. Yudhishthira’s duty was to keep
his promise based on the dictates of his conscience. As noted
before, the epic distinguishes between the two meanings of
dharma—caste duty as sva-dharma, which varies from caste to
caste; the duty of conscience is sadharana-dharma, which is the
same for everyone. In this dialogue there exists the same tension
because of the two differing senses of dharma. Krishna has in
mind dharma as ‘caste duty’; Arjuna is dejected because the
dharma of his conscience tells him that it is wrong to kill.
In any case, the ‘duty’ argument of Krishna seems to have little
effect; so Krishna sweetens it with an offer of heaven, not unlike
Yudhishthira’s second response to Draupadi. Krishna adds to it
a ‘no-lose’ temptation:

If you are killed, you win heaven;

+ +
if you triumph, you enjoy the earth;
therefore, Arjuna, stand up and
resolve to fight the battle.20

Since this does not move Arjuna, Krishna tries a metaphysical

approach, arguing that only the body dies, not the soul. In killing
his enemies, Arjuna would be destroying only the transient
body, not the atman, the ‘real self’, which would continue to
exist.

He who thinks this self a killer

and he who thinks it killed,
both fail to understand;
it does not kill, nor is it killed.21

Arjuna, when a man knows the self

to be indestructible, enduring, unborn,
unchanging, how does he kill
or cause anyone to kill?22

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 95

Arjuna, however, is a man of action and appears to be impervious

to metaphysics. So, the divine charioteer Krishna resorts next to
a truly novel moral argument based on action. When an individual
acts for the sake of his work rather than for the personal reward
from it, Krishna says, the individual is likely to do the right
thing. This moral insight is famously called nishkama karma or
nishphala karma. ‘Nish’ means ‘without’ in Sanskrit; ‘kama’ means
desire; ‘phala’ is fruit; ‘karma’ is action—literally, ‘disinterested
action’ or an action performed without thinking of its fruit.
Krishna expresses it famously in the Bhagavad Gita’s 47th verse
of Book II:

Be intent on the action,

not on the fruits of action.23

Krishna does not define what the right action is. Any action
performed in a selfless spirit is superior. The action in this case
is to fight a ‘just war’ in order to, as Krishna puts it, ‘preserve the
+ world’.24 If he fights disinterestedly without thinking, for example,
+
of ‘winning the kingdom’ or achieving personal fame, then his
action will be ‘virtuous’ and will not accumulate karma.
‘Preserving the world’ is, of course, a king’s duty—i.e. to act on
behalf of his people. But it also entails preserving the natural
order of society and its classes. Therefore, Arjuna cannot abandon
his social duty as well, his kshatriya-dharma.25 He is a warrior and
a warrior’s duty is to fight, especially if his cause is just.
Arjuna’s moral dilemma is about which duty he should follow.
Should he observe Krishna’s advice—follow his kshatriya ethic
and fight a just war in order to uphold a higher good and
preserve a just order? Or should he follow the call of his
conscience, which is to be a non-violent human being and not to
kill his own family members, elders and teachers?
What should Arjuna do? In a practical sense, putting down his
arms will achieve nothing. The war will still go on; there might,
in fact, be more killing on his side if he does not fight. Moreover,

+
 +

96 / The Difficulty of Being Good

his just cause would be lost. So he should fight. But this practical
sort of reasoning, which rationally weighs the consequences of
actions, as well as their costs and benefits, does not really solve
his moral dilemma.26 Arjuna must choose either to be a dutiful
kshatriya warrior, fight this dharma-yuddha, ‘righteous war’, and
rid the world of truly wicked people; in the process he will, of
course, kill his family members, teachers and friends, or he can
be a non-violent human being and save the lives of his family
and kin; in this case, he will lose the kingdom that rightfully
belongs to him and his brothers, and worse, he will allow the
forces of evil to prevail. Should he fight when he knows that the
war will lead to disaster, like most wars in history, and not
benefit anyone? It is a dharma-sankat, a ‘tragic dilemma’. Both
choices involve serious wrongdoing and there seems to be no
right answer, as is so often the case in the Mahabharata.
Krishna points to Arjuna’s duty to fight irrespective of the
consequences. It is a just cause, and as a warrior and commander
+ of the Pandava forces, he must obey his kshatriya duty and take
+
up arms. Krishna’s advice assumes that moral worth lies in a
person’s motives rather than in the consequences of the action.
Hence, he advocates the single-minded pursuit of duty without
any thought to the consequences. Arjuna, on the other hand,
thinks of the consequences of war. He has laid down his arms
not because he is a pacifist and is upholding a principle of non-
violence. He is thinking about the killing of his kin, his friends,
his teachers, and of others. There are echoes here of the conflict
between Yudhishthira and Draupadi that we have already
encountered in the forest.27
The difference in their positions comes down to the problem of
means and ends. Krishna believes that the end of ‘preserving the
world’ justifies fighting. Arjuna believes that there are limits to
what may be done even if the end is worth pursuing, and even
when not pursuing that great end may be very costly. He
understands that the gains from fighting clearly outweigh the

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 97

costs, yet he believes that there is something terribly wrong in

fighting and killing, especially his kin. The clash between Krishna’s
and Arjuna’s positions is no longer a question about which
outcome would be worse. Nor is it about choosing between two
different outcomes. It is about choices between alternative paths.
One of those paths entails inflicting terrible suffering in a war.

‘I am time grown old’

When I asked the question, ‘Who is right, Arjuna or Krishna?’ to

military leaders in both India and the United States, their response
was uniformly that Arjuna has a duty to fight and he ought to
get on with it without this fuss. ‘We don’t want officers to
agonize self-indulgently; it’s harmful and it weakens the resolve
of the troops.’ The English poet Robert Graves expresses the
same thought as follows: ‘The way I see it, when you put the
uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don’t back out
+ of a contract merely because you’ve changed your mind. You +
can speak up for your principles, you can argue against the ones
you’re being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.’28
This might be the right position for a soldier or an officer, but it
is not the right stance for a ruler. It is political leaders who
decide to take nations to war. Arjuna is, of course, not merely a
commander, he is also a political leader of the Pandavas.
In the Gita, Krishna wins the debate. Not having succeeded in
persuading him through argument, Krishna finally reveals his
awe-inspiring aspect as God. Sanjaya, the correspondent, describes
what Arjuna sees:

If the light of a thousand suns

were to rise in the sky at once,
it would be like the light
of that great spirit.

Arjuna saw all the universe

in its many ways and parts

+
 +

98 / The Difficulty of Being Good

standing as one in the body

of the god of gods.29

Arjuna is filled with amazement at this sight and he speaks, his

voice stammering with terror:

Seeing the many mouths

and eyes
of your great form,
its many arms,
thighs, feet,
bellies, and fangs
the worlds tremble
and so do I.

Seeing the fangs

protruding
from your mouths
+ like the fires of time, +
I lose my bearings
and I find no refuge . . .30

Arjuna begs him, ‘Tell me—who are you in this terrible form?’
Krishna replies:

I am time grown old,

creating world destruction
set in motion
to annihilate the worlds;
even without you,
all these warriors
arrayed in hostile ranks
will cease to exist.

Therefore, arise
And win glory!
Conquer your foes

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 99

And fulfill your kingship!

They are already slain by me.
Be just my instrument,
the archer at my side.31

Thus, the divine charioteer reveals his terrifying form as creator

and destroyer of the universe. Arjuna sees that he has already
destroyed both the armies. Krishna reveals himself as the
incarnation of cosmic power that periodically descends to the
earth in order to restore order in times of chaos. The sight of
Krishna’s terrible power is too much for Arjuna, and he begs him
to stop and return to his more tranquil human aspect.
The experience makes Arjuna realize that his duty to fight is
linked to Krishna’s divinity. He begins to feel that his emotions
of pity for his kin are, perhaps, really a weakness. His not
wanting to kill his relatives is based on worldly, human desire.
His true duty lies in making his own actions and his dharma
+ conform to a cosmic dharma. It does not mean that he has to +
renounce the world—he can do so by acting with ‘discipline’,
without attachment to the fruit of action.
Towards the end of the Gita, Krishna makes an extraordinary
proposition to him. He says that now that Arjuna has learned
about the truth, he should think about it and do what he thinks
fit.

This knowledge I have taught

is more arcane than any mystery—
consider it completely
then act as you choose.32

‘Act as you choose’—these are remarkable words from the mouth

of God! Arjuna agrees to fight. Although he has been persuaded
here, his ambivalence to killing those who ‘ought not to be
killed’ will reappear from time to time. At a crucial moment
when he has to kill his grandfather, Bhishma, Arjuna is again
filled with self-doubt and he wavers.

+
 +

100 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Sovereignty, with hell later, having killed those who ought not to
be killed, or the tribulations of forest dwelling—which should I
choose?33

Soon, however, he recovers his resolution and tells his frustrated

charioteer:

Drive the horses to where Bhishma is! I will do your bidding. I

will fell that invincible elder, the Grandfather of the Kurus.34

That the greatest fighter of his age should have dithered at his
finest hour, and should have considered following the dharma of
non-violence, does say something about the Indian epic hero. At
that moment of indecision, the invincible, self-assured hero
becomes a doubting anti-hero, like his elder brother. That God
should have given him a choice—to make a reasoned decision
based on what he has learned—says something about the
relationship between man and God in classical India.
+ The Gita has become one of the most influential texts in the +
history of philosophy. Through the ages, people in India have
tended to identify with Krishna’s position (not least because he
is God). Even Mahatma Gandhi, the great apostle of non-violence
in the twentieth century, felt inspired by Krishna’s words in the
Gita, even though it meant having to acquiesce in the horrendous
killings of war. For Gandhi, the Gita was an allegory of the
struggle between good and evil within each one of us. The poet
T.S. Eliot also seemed to endorse Krishna’s high-duty-based
position in the Four Quartets, when he wrote:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward . . .
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.35

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 101

I do not think that Arjuna was ever fully convinced that the
great end of preserving the world from evil justified the violent
means that he would have had to employ in the war. I can
empathize with both Arjuna’s and Krishna’s positions because as
human beings we are susceptible to both types of moral intuition.
On some occasions we let ‘ends’ dictate our behaviour; on other
occasions, ‘means’ seem to matter more. Our make-up also
inclines us to one or the other type of intuition. The Gita calls
such an inclination svabhava, a concept that we have already
encountered. It seems to me perfectly possible for an individual
to feel strongly the force of both ‘means’ and ‘ends’. When this
happens the moral dilemma is acutely painful as both courses of
action are repugnant. This is at the heart of Arjuna’s tragic
dilemma.36
Some leaders may have claimed that they were not as bothered
by this dilemma. Most famously, President Truman did not
think that he had reached those limits of moral pain when he
+ ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World +
War II. He justified his act, much as Vidura would have done in
the Mahabharata, that bombing Hiroshima would save more lives
in the end (certainly more American lives) because the war would
have ended earlier.
Some have argued that Arjuna is, in many ways, a better
model of ethical deliberation than Krishna, for he takes
responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Amartya Sen,
the Nobel Prize winner, says that ‘Arjuna is bothered not merely
by the fact that many will die if war were to take place, but also
by the fact that he himself will be killing lots of people and by
the further fact that many of the people to be killed are persons
for whom he himself has affection . . . Another observer who is
uninvolved in these events need not attach any special importance
to the fact that Arjuna (not he, but Arjuna) will be killing people,
and that among the dead will be people for whom Arjuna (not
he, but Arjuna) feels closeness and affection. Arjuna cannot
reasonably take a similarly detached view of the consequences of

+
 +

102 / The Difficulty of Being Good

his choice.’37 Sen’s position of agent-sensitive evaluation is in

contrast to the usual Utilitarian formula that the evaluation must
be independent of the evaluator; he believes that moral
responsibility demands situated valuation by agents.
I too applaud Arjuna for being aware that going to war entails
moral culpability. A political leader has to be aware that he will
have ‘dirty hands’. ‘The recognition that one may have “dirty
hands” is not just self-indulgence: it has significance for future
actions . . . It informs the chooser that he may owe reparations to
the vanquished . . . When the recognition is public, it constitutes
an acknowledgement of moral culpability.’38 Arjuna’s tragic
dilemma teaches us that moral choices are not merely private.
When it comes to matters of war and public policy, they should
be deliberated in public. A political leader should include the
moral dimension in making a decision, alongside the economic,
strategic and other dimensions. It is not enough to weigh the
pros and cons of victory and defeat as King Dhritarashtra does
+ before the war begins:
+

By subtle and clear sighted calculation of the pros and cons with
proper judgment, the sagacious and intelligent man, who desired
victory for his sons, precisely weighed up the strengths and
weaknesses, and then the lord of men began to work out the
capabilities of each side.39

The world has too many politicians like Dhritarashtra, who

think that ‘if they wring their hands enough they can do anything
that they like . . . [By raising this question] Arjuna has learned
something about the difference between self-interest and moral
commitment.’40 Arjuna’s doubts at the beginning of the war, far
from betraying cowardice, ought to remind our own leaders that
they should think about the violence, cruelty and injustice of
wars before they embark on them. They ought to worry far more
about the moral consequences of war, and take steps to avoid it
as far as possible.

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 103

‘A hero bound for heaven’

The first ten days of the war have been indecisive. The ancient
patriarch of the Bharatas, Bhishma, has successfully led
Duryodhana’s armies, repelling the Pandavas’ attacks. After
Bhishma’s death Drona becomes leader of the Kauravas. Though
a brahmin by birth, Drona has been instructor to both the
Pandavas and the Kauravas. Like Bhishma he accepts his post
reluctantly because of his affection and respect for the Pandavas,
especially for Arjuna. As the fighting gathers pace, Duryodhana
is desperate to win and he accuses Drona of partiality towards
the Pandavas. Drona replies that only if the great Pandava
warrior, Arjuna, is removed from the battlefield will the Kauravas
have any chance of success.
Duryodhana also develops a curious idea: if he can capture
Yudhishthira alive, he will trap him in another bout of gambling
and exile him once again for a dozen years. So, on the twelfth
+ day of the war, he gets his allies, the Samshaptakas, to divert +
Arjuna to the southern end of the battlefield, leaving Yudhishthira
exposed. Drona sets about destroying the army that Arjuna has
left behind. He creates an impenetrable military formation, chakra
vyuha, in the form of a lotus-like circular array. In it, he places
the greatest Kaurava warriors, and they begin to advance
menacingly towards Yudhishthira.
With Arjuna pinned down in the southern theatre, the only
one in the Pandava army who knows how to penetrate the chakra
vyuha is Abhimanyu, who had learned it in his mother’s womb,
when Arjuna, his father, was describing it to her. Yudhishthira
turns to him, and the young warrior is more than happy to
oblige. But before he enters the formation, he warns his uncle,
‘My father taught me how to break in not how to come out.’41 His
mother had fallen asleep, it seems, before Arjuna could tell her
how to exit the treacherous circular formation. Still, the Pandavas
have no choice, and a great and unbearable responsibility falls
upon the sixteen-year-old Abhimanyu.

+
 +

104 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Abhimanyu’s arrowhead pierces the chakra vyuha, and he

smashes his way in ‘like a lion’s cub assailing a herd of elephants’.
Once Abhimanyu is inside, the powerful Jayadratha, ruler of
Sindhu, quickly moves his troops and seals the breach. Thus,
Bhima and the other Pandavas cannot enter, and Abhimanyu is
trapped behind enemy lines. The boy fights valiantly, single-
handedly causing so much destruction to the enemy forces that
Duryodhana is frightened. It takes the top six Kaurava generals
(including Karna, Drona, Kripa and Ashwatthama) to subdue
the ‘lion’s cub’, who goes down fighting.
Sanjaya, the ubiquitous war correspondent, announces
Abhimanyu’s death to King Dhritarashtra, squarely blaming his
own side:

O my king. So, it was that one died at the hands of many. One
warrior who had trampled our whole army as if it were just a lotus
beneath his feet but now lay in the splendour of death, a wild
+ elephant killed by his hunters. Your soldiers stood in a circle +
around him where he fell . . . Six of the fighters from Dhritarashtra’s
horde, Drona and Karna chief among them, had cut this lone body
to the ground in what I would name a sin. Yet how beautiful the
rich earth was as it cradled that dead hero.42

Sanjaya then reports the reaction of the Pandavas to this ‘sin’ of

the Kauravas:

The Pandus looked upon the broken figure of Abhimanyu who had
once been bright as the sun and the moon, and they were struck
down with sorrow. Still only a boy and dead before his prime . . .
The whole army of the Pandavas rushed to the feet of the righteous
king. The matchless Yudhishthira looked upon them and saw how
his men suffered at the youth’s death and said to them: ‘Here is the
hero bound for heaven. He was one that would die rather than run.
Take heart, do not be downcast. We will win this war and
overcome our traitors.’43

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 105

As the sun is setting on this unhappy scene, and the enemy

warriors, tired and battered, are leaving the battlefield, Sanjaya
tells his blind king:

We had killed their champion but still we felt the wounds where
his arrows had struck us and we returned to the camp at the end
of the day soaked in blood. My king, as we made our way back
weak with exhaustion, we all gazed out across the battlefield
insensate and wordless into a dusk alive with strangeness, an
uneasy time disjointed from night and day, all full of the cries of
jackals. The sun sank down slowly behind the mountains . . . and
heaven melted into earth where the delicate flame in the sky blazed
at the horizon.44

When Arjuna hears of his brave son’s death, he weeps bitterly.

He blames himself: ‘I had taught the poor boy how to get in, but
I had yet to teach him how to get out.’ Seeing Arjuna lamenting
his death, the epic mourns the brief careers of young warriors. It
+ will maintain a list of all the children who will die in battle—it +
is its way, I suppose, of making an anti-war statement.45 Krishna
tries to console him, but Arjuna tells him to go and comfort his
wife (and Krishna’s sister), Subhadra.
Gradually, Arjuna’s sorrow turns into anger. He vows, ‘Truly,
I swear I shall kill Jayadratha before sunset tomorrow.’46 If he
does not avenge his son’s killer, Arjuna declares, he will immolate
himself. Krishna censures him for making this rash oath: the
Kauravas, he says, will now protect Jayadratha with all their
might, and they will eagerly await your ‘entry into the fire’.
Fearing just such an outcome, many in the Pandava camp do not
get any sleep that night.47

‘Like a fire urged by the wind’

On the following day, it is a different Arjuna. He is ready for

revenge. ‘Like a fire urged by the wind that consumes a dense
forest of trees’, he rages over the battlefield inflicting terrible

+
 +

106 / The Difficulty of Being Good

losses on the enemy. The Kauravas have only one objective on

that day—to protect Jayadratha—and they keep him behind a
fortress of chariots, elephants, horsemen and soldiers. All
afternoon Arjuna rushes against time to fulfil his oath.48 The sun
keeps moving relentlessly westward. Just as the sun is going
down behind the Asta mountain, Arjuna battles his way through
and reaches Jayadratha.
‘As the sun is setting’, Arjuna shoots down both Jayadratha’s
standard and his charioteer.49 But his final assault is too late.
Krishna reminds him that he still has to kill six warriors who are
protecting Jayadratha, an impossible feat in the seconds
remaining. At this moment Krishna has an idea:

I shall employ yoga and cover the sun. Only the king of Sindhu
will see it. He will think, ‘The sun has set’ and he will relax his
guard . . . This is when you should strike when he is not paying
attention.50

+ Krishna’s trick works. Jayadratha thinks that the sun has set and +
he lets down his guard. In that instant Arjuna pierces him with
a fierce arrow.51 Moreover, he shoots it with such amazing skill
that Jayadratha’s head does not fall on the ground. Thus, he
escapes Jayadratha’s father’s curse: that the head of anyone who
caused his son’s head to fall in battle would burst into a thousand
pieces. Jayadratha’s head lands on the lap of his father, who has
been meditating. The father unwittingly drops his son’s head
and becomes the victim of his own curse as his own head
bursts.52
In the Greek epics, aristeia refers to a warrior’s finest moment,
usually during an extended battle scene in which the hero
exhibits great valour in pursuit of glory. This is Arjuna’s aristeia
as he performs extraordinary feats on the fourteenth day at
Kurukshetra, much like Achilles in the Iliad.53 Both heroes are
driven to action and revenge after the death of a loved one.
Arjuna is roused after Abhimanyu’s death; Achilles is awakened
from his sulking slumber by Patroklos’s killing by Hector.

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 107

Just as Achilles is ‘the best of the Achaeans’, so is Arjuna called

the ‘best warrior on the earth’ by Duryodhana.54 Both heroes
have a single, divine parent from whom they have inherited
extraordinary qualities. Arjuna’s father Indra, the Vedic god of
war and thunder, has given his son powerful weapons. Achilles’s
mother, Thetis, had dipped her son by the heel into the sacred
river Styx in order to make him invulnerable (but his heel, alas,
had remained dry and unprotected). Both depend on divine aid
to win. Arjuna needed Krishna’s help to defeat Jayadratha as
Achilles turns to Hephaestus to overcome the wide flowing
Skamandros river of Troy. In both epics, the aristeia of the hero
follows the death of someone very close. Arjuna’s rage after
Abhimanyu’s death sends him on an aristeia, driving him to fight
with superhuman energy. Achilles avenges himself on Hector,
thus turning the tide in the war against the Trojans.
Both heroes face a crisis of conscience but their differing
responses teach us something about the two epics. Achilles is full
+ of rage. Not only does he kill Hector but he desecrates his body.
+
He drags it behind his chariot before the walls of Troy, steadfastly
refusing to allow him funeral rites. Arjuna also responds with
great power on the battlefield to avenge Abhimanyu, but he
never quite forgets that he could only vanquish Jayadratha
because of Krishna’s trickery. He had felt the same sense of guilt
when he killed his grandfather through subterfuge. A cloud of
moral ambiguity, thus, hangs over him till the end of the war,
reminding him of his Pyrrhic victories. He is, after all, the same
Arjuna who had put down his arms and refused to fight at the
beginning of the war.
The Iliad is bloodthirsty, driven by anger and violence. The
Mahabharata is just as gory, but it questions the violence. The first
word in the Iliad is menin, rage, as Homer asks the Muse to sing
about the ’wrath of Achilles’. The Gita’s first word is dharma-
kshetre, ‘field of righteousness’, signalling that this is no ordinary
war enacted on a battlefield; it is also a war of dharma in the

+
 +

108 / The Difficulty of Being Good

conscience of each human being.55 Achilles, like Arjuna, faces a

conflict between the demands of divinity and humanity. After
doing wrong, Achilles is able to get on with it. Arjuna, however,
never quite forgets that the Pandavas are employing deceit in
order to win.
Gradually, Achilles rises above his rage. When Hector’s father,
the distraught King Priam of Troy, comes secretly to the Greek
camp to plead for his son’s body, Achilles receives him graciously,
and in one of the Iliad’s most moving scenes, he relents and
allows him to take the body away. In this act of kindness,
Achilles has identified with Priam’s grief and the pain of being
a victim. In recognizing his kinship with the dead and the
defeated, he has realized that he too might die in battle. When he
kills Lykaon in Book XXII, Achilles says, ‘Come friend, you too
must die.’ In that statement is his recognition of the inevitability
of death, and his common bond with humanity. During the last
few books of the Iliad, Achilles becomes more and more like the
+ Pandava hero. Even as he rages against Hector’s corpse, he +
foresees his own death.
The ethical impulses of Achilles and Arjuna are confused,
ambiguous, and even pessimistic. The Indian and the Greek epic
heroes face the same question: Does the good life consist in
dying young in battle, like Abhimanyu, and going to heaven? Or
should one pursue another, more humane way of living based
on less violent values? Where does true honour lie? The battlefield
is indeed a field of dharma in which there are no easy answers.

‘Is ours a “just war”?’

The Mahabharata calls its war a dharma-yuddha, a ‘just war’. The

epic’s language is full of words of moral judgment—aggression,
self-defence, appeasement, cruelty, atrocity, massacre. It is
profoundly aware that a just war can be fought unjustly, just as
an unjust war can be fought in strict accordance with the rules.
It examines three aspects of the Kurukshetra War: its causes, its

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 109

conduct, and its consequences. Medieval scholastics in the Catholic

‘just war’ tradition called these three jus ad bellum (cause), jus in
bello (conduct) and jus post bellum (consequences). Whereas this
chapter focuses on the first; Chapter 7 will examine the second;
and Chapter 9 will look in on the third.
To determine if the Kurukshetra War is a ‘just war’, the epic
offers a number of perspectives. The first is Duryodhana’s, who
derides all talk about the ‘morality of war’. He believes that
might is right and there are no moral rules between states. You
cannot trust anyone, least of all your neighbour. You better
conquer him before he invades your territory. The only thing
that matters is to win, and this means that anything goes.
Duryodhana acts on the premise of the ancient text, Arthashastra,
in which a wise ruler guards against his neighbour. Since a
neighbour’s neighbour is inevitably a friend, it develops a theory
of concentric circles, a sort of ‘ready-reckoner’ for the ruler to
quickly determine his ‘natural’ friends and enemies and help
+ him make appropriate alliances.
+
The ancient Athenians shared this ethic. When the Athenian
embassy told the people of Melos in 416 BC that it was a natural
law for the strong to rule the weak, they were warning them that
Melos could not remain neutral in the conflict between Athens
and Sparta. Contemporary political leaders of modern states will
have no trouble in identifying with Duryodhana’s position, as
they have been brought up in the ‘realpolitik’ school of international
diplomacy. Made famous by Prince Metternich, the Austrian
statesman at the Congress of Vienna, it set the tone for nineteenth
and twentieth century’s ‘balance of power’ diplomacy. Henry
Kissinger, the American secretary of state (who taught me a
course in college) has been its most articulate proponent in
recent times.56
This ‘realistic’ way of thinking insists that war lies beyond
moral judgment, expressed in the Latin saying, Inter arma silent
leges, ‘in the time of war the law is silent’. Someone like Kissinger,

+
 +

110 / The Difficulty of Being Good

however, would also argue that there is a deeper morality to this

stance—that effective and ruthless balance-of-power management
reduces warfare and suffering in the long term. He felt that
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, injected a
dangerous note of morality in the Cold War between America
and the USSR.
At the other extreme is the idealistic position of the earlier
Yudhishthira, who refused to take up arms when he was in exile.
Even though his cause is just he will not fight because of his deep
commitment to ahimsa, non-violence and peace. He is sceptical
about the possibility of a ‘just war’, which is what Draupadi and
Bhima had advocated in the Dvaita forest. Yudhishthira’s position
resonates in our perilous world of nuclear weapons. During the
Cold War, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, many young people
feared that a conflict between the United States and the Soviet
Union might lead to all-out nuclear war. They concluded that
contemporary warfare is so destructive that it could never justify
+ going to war. Hence, they turned pacifist and joined the movement
+
for unilateral disarmament.
In India, Yudhishthira’s position gained legitimacy and
popularity because of Mahatma Gandhi’s extraordinary success
in winning India’s independence by non-violent means. The
British rulers did not quite know how to respond to Gandhi,
who following Jesus told his followers: ‘Do not resist one who is
evil. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other one.’
Although it is not the epic’s preferred position, the Mahabharata
does have sympathy for the pacifist idealism of the earlier
Yudhishthira. It also underlines it when Arjuna springs a surprise
at the beginning of the war, as we have just seen, refusing to
fight. At the end of the war, when everyone is dead, it seems as
though this pacifist position has been vindicated. Yudhishthira
asks, what was the point of it all?
The Mahabharata offers a middle ground between the realism
of Duryodhana and the idealism of the younger Yudhishthira.

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 111

Bhishma, a statesman used to running public affairs, articulates

this position after the war in Book Twelve, and succeeds in
reconciling the remorseful Yudhishthira to the throne. Unlike the
Realists, he believes that moral principles make a claim on a
political leader, but there is a sharp limit to these claims. A wise
ruler cannot trust other nations. He must be on guard, and
sometimes be willing to take up danda, ‘arms’. He cannot afford
to be pacifist like the inflexible younger Yudhishthira, a position
that is sometimes embraced by contemporary liberals of the far
left, who fail to realize that the application of morality to wars
and foreign policy is complex and difficult. Jawaharlal Nehru,
who tended to bring moral discourse in post-war diplomacy,
espoused the cause of communist China in the 1950s. Later, to
his embarrassment, he had to deal with the Chinese invasion of
India. He would have done well to follow Bhishma’s advice. In
saying that ‘dharma is subtle’, Bhishma is, in effect, telling
Yudhishthira (and Nehru) that no matter how attractive the
+ earlier Yudhishthira’s high moral position, it is difficult to be +
non-violent in a violent world.
As the Mahabharata weaves a moral regime in the midst of the
war’s violence, its sympathies are with the Pandavas. Dharma-
yuddha can have the following meanings. It can mean a war
fought as a duty by a kshatriya; or a war fought according to the
rules of war; or a war fought for the right or just reasons. The
first meaning is trivial—if it were true, every war fought by a
kshatriya would qualify as a ‘just war’ since it is the kshatriya’s
duty to fight. As to the second meaning, the Kurukshetra War
was fought unfairly—both sides broke the rules governing warfare
(as we shall see in Chapter 7).57 As to the third criterion, Krishna
explains why the war is just from the Pandavas’ viewpoint, as he
catalogues Duryodhana’s crimes when the latter is dying:

I beseeched you, O unwise one, to give the Pandavas their paternal

share of half the kingdom. But you were greedy! Under Shakuni’s
evil influence, you almost poisoned Bhimasena; you tried to burn

+
 +

112 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the Pandavas with their mother in the house made of lacquer; you
had Yajnaseni [Draupadi] pushed into the assembly when she had
her period. O evil one, you employed the son of Subala [Shakuni]
in a crooked game of dice to defeat someone deceitfully who did not
know dice but knew dharma . . . [and finally] you had Abhimanyu,
a child who fought against so many, struck down in battle. For all
these crimes, you have been killed, O wicked one!58

Dharma-yuddha has its equivalent in the ‘just war’ theory of the

Roman Catholic Church, which stretches from Augustine in the
fifth century through Aquinas in the thirteenth century to the
present day. Like Bhishma’s doctrine, it is based on the recognition
that war is inevitable in human affairs; rather than hope for its
abolition the best one can do is to mitigate its effects. Saint
Thomas Aquinas gave justum bellum its systematic exposition in
his Summa Theologica. He discussed not only the justification for
war, but also the kinds of activity that are permissible in war. He
+ enunciated three simple criteria: a war is just when it is a defence +
against aggression or an attempt to stop atrocities. Second, the
values at stake override the presumption against killing—the
expected good must outweigh the cost of killing and destruction.
Finally, war must be a last resort when all other alternatives are
exhausted.59 Our modern war conventions, such as the Geneva
Convention, grew out of the ‘just war’ tradition of the Catholic
Church.60
Obviously, the Kurukshetra War was not a war of self-defence;
nor was it against aggression or threatened aggression. It was a
civil war to reclaim legitimate power. The Pandavas’ half of the
kingdom was usurped, and they waged the war after the failure
of extensive peace negotiations. It would thus seem to meet
Aquinas’s third criterion of ‘just war’—it was waged as a last
resort, when all other alternatives had been exhausted. Having
said that, bear in mind that the Pandavas’ claim to the throne
was a dubious one, based on a highly confused genealogy.
Moreover, the Pandavas did employ deceit to gain a victory, and

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 113

for this they were rightly censured. There is, thus, no easy
answer to the question if theirs was a ‘just war’.
Having considered the pros and cons, I tend to feel that our
moral sense would have been offended had the Kauravas won at
Kurukshetra. It would have been equivalent to Adolf Hitler
winning the Second World War. A Nazi triumph would have
been a disaster not only for the conquered nations but also for all
of humanity. Most of us would agree that the Allies’ cause in
World War II was ‘just’ (which cannot be said of the First World
War). Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister in the
1930s, was just as naïve as the younger Yudhishthira. He adopted
a policy of appeasement in order to keep the peace. Just as
Yudhishthira failed to read Duryodhana, so did Chamberlain fail
to recognize the threat posed by Hitler, believing that the Nazis
were merely continuing the policy of the earlier Weimar regime.
One of the important questions of our times is the justice of the
wars of humanitarian intervention in order ‘to protect the human
+ rights of citizens who are being massacred or enslaved by their
+
government’.61 This is a painful and complex issue, for no one
wants to start a war to end another one. But there is a growing
consensus that these are ‘just wars’ if they are prosecuted under
some sort of collective sanction such as that of the United
Nations. Despite the consensus, a Rwandan genocide does take
place, and so does a slaughter in Darfur. The new consensus has
not deterred genocidal groups who hate each other, nor has it
stopped bands of guerrillas from committing atrocious and
humiliating acts around the world.
The moral reasoning contained in the Mahabharata and in the
Catholic ‘just war’ theory would have judged the American
intervention in Iraq in 2003 rather badly. Saddam Hussein was
as evil as Duryodhana and his record of aggression abroad and
brutal repression at home was atrocious. Removing him from
Iraq was a benevolent act, but it ought to have been achieved
without a full-scale war. It seems to me that some force in Iraq

+
 +

114 / The Difficulty of Being Good

was probably necessary in order to capture Saddam and contain

his regime. Enforcing an embargo might have needed force. But
it ought to have been far less than was employed. A full-scale
assault was certainly not called for, and whatever action had to
be taken ought to have had UN support. The best moral position
on Iraq, I believe, lay somewhere between the disastrous
diplomacy of the Bush administration and the equally obstructive
position of the French (who rejected every opportunity to provide
an alternative to war).

‘To one who is killed, victory and defeat are the same’

Like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the Mahabharata can see both sides
of war. It glories in immortal feats of courage, daring and self-
sacrifice like those of Abhimanyu. It looks on with admiration at
Arjuna’s aristeia. The relentless battle scenes of the epic yield ‘the
finest poetry of the epic’.62 Yet, the epic is also aware that these
+ valiant acts that it honours are also feats of lunacy. The same +
Mahabharata condemns the approaching war in Book Five in the
most savage terms. While lamenting the failure of the peace
negotiations, Yudhishthira leaves no doubt about what he thinks
will be the consequences. He expresses his feelings so forcefully
that one wonders if Krishna might have given his message to the
wrong Pandava in the Gita.

War is evil in any form . . . To one who is killed, victory and defeat
are the same . . . the victor too is surely diminished . . . and behold,
when he has lost his strength and no longer sees his sons or
brothers a loathing for life will engulf him completely, Krishna. It
is the modest warriors, noble and with a sense of compassion, who
are killed in war, and the lesser men escape.63

Chastened by thirteen harsh years in exile, Yudhishthira has

begun to adopt a more pragmatic view of the world. As we have
noted, he has become a prudent ruler of the middle path. His
pragmatism should not be confused with an aggressive world

+
 +

Arjuna’s Despair / 115

view; its default position (in accordance with ideas about

reciprocal altruism) is to be friendly and collaborative. Unlike
Dhritarashtra, he does not merely weigh amorally the pros and
cons of victory and defeat. The considerations of dharma are a
part of the deliberations of the prudent ruler of the middle path.
He is weighed down with moral concerns during the peace
negotiations even as he is more and more resigned to the
inevitability of war. He asks Sanjaya:

Why should a man knowingly go to war?

Who cursed by his fate would choose war?
The Parthas who hunger for happiness act
For the fullness of dharma and the common weal.64

One wishes there were more statesmen in the world like Arjuna
and Yudhishthira, who place the demands of dharma in the
same equation as the material pros and cons of going to war. The
modern liberal answer to Yudhishthira’s and Arjuna’s dilemma
+ is to limit the power of democratic leaders in prosecuting war.
+
John Locke and the American founding fathers sought to separate
power in different branches of the government by means of the
constitution. They accepted the inevitability of war but recognized
that the problem lay in the ‘undue and unbalanced concentration
of it in one person’. Liberal Americans who have lived through
the Vietnam and Iraq wars in recent times have felt let down by
this ‘constitutional system’, however. It has been unable to stop
the American executive from waging unjust wars. As these wars
turned increasingly unpopular, the president tried to exaggerate
their importance to the national interest and to hide their full
implications. Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Bush in their different
ways forgot that one should not wage a war that can only be
won at an unacceptable moral and political price.
In his celebrated Histories, Herodotus, the great Greek historian,
tells us about Xerxes, the great king of Persia, who invaded
Greece in 480 BC with an army of two million men. He stopped

+
 +

116 / The Difficulty of Being Good

on the way at Hellespont and he saw, as Arjuna did, his regiments

arrayed across the plains. At first this grand sight cheered him.
But then he grew dejected like Arjuna, and he began to weep.
Although Xerxes’s mood and concerns were different, both men
were questioning the value of human action. Both were resigned
to human imperfectibility and condemned the unbridled pursuit
of military power. Had the Buddha been Arjuna’s charioteer
rather than Krishna, the Mahabharata would have gone in a
different direction.65

+ +

+
 +

BHISHMA’S SELFLESSNESS
‘Be intent on the act, not on its fruits’

Be intent on the action,

not on the fruits of action

—Krishna to Arjuna,
+ Bhagavad Gita II.47
+

What to do with the ‘self’?

My most unusual class during our ‘academic holiday’ was with

the humanist Paul Friedrich, with whom my wife and I read the
Gita as a work of literature. Friedrich was the author of some
unusual-sounding books: The Meaning of Aphrodite, Music in
Russian Poetry, Bastard Moon and Princes of Naranja. I wondered
what he was doing teaching a course on the Gita. He had come
to the text, it seems, via two famous American literary figures,
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They had
discovered the Gita in the 1840s, and were filled with excitement.
Emerson wrote in his journal, ‘I owed—my friend and I owed—
a magnificent day to the Bhagawat Geeta. It was the first of
books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or
unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old
intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and

117

+
 +

118 / The Difficulty of Being Good

thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.’ Thoreau

said, ‘I remember the book as an hour before sunrise’ and as a
result, ‘Farthest India is nearer to me than Concord or Lexington.’1
Friedrich knew a little Sanskrit but he was not an Indologist.
Like me, he had studied it briefly with Daniel Ingalls, but he
made up for his lack of expertise with an abundance of wisdom
and self-effacing charm. He was the son of the political scientist
Carl Friedrich, who had been professor at Harvard when I was
there. His family had fled Nazi Germany. On arrival in America,
the immigration officer had demanded to know their religion.
Without batting an eyelid, Friedrich senior had replied, ‘Homeric.’
There were seven of us in Paul Friedrich’s class, and we came
from various disciplines—philosophy, religion, anthropology and
literature. On Friday mornings between nine and noon, we could
be found in Harper Hall reading the ancient text line by line.
When we had read a verse or two, we would pause and discuss.
There was a timeless quality about our Socratic dialogues, in
+ which ‘truth, goodness and beauty’ seemed alone to matter.
+
Sometimes we might spend an hour over a single verse. Our
ponderings inevitably turned to why Arjuna must fight. Of all
the reasons, I was most attracted to Krishna’s notion of performing
one’s duty for its own sake without thinking about ‘what’s in it
for me’. I felt that an action performed with this attitude must
take on a new meaning. This moral insight, as we have seen, is
called nishkama karma. In perhaps the most quoted and the least
observed verse in contemporary India, Krishna says:

Be intent on the action,

not on the fruits of action.2

Knowing the Indian tendency to renounce the world, Krishna

makes it clear that acting in this selfless spirit of detachment
should not result in non-action. Both Krishna and Draupadi
reflect a healthy bias for action in the Mahabharata.

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 119

Perform necessary action;

it is more powerful than inaction;
without action you even fail
to sustain your own body.3

In other words, do not renounce the world and become a hermit.

Instead, learn to change your attitude while living and working
in the world. Do something ‘because it must be done’. If you
succeed in changing your attitude, then it will not feel like work.
It is as though you are doing ‘nothing at all’. Nor will you ‘incur
guilt’. You will be

Content with whatever comes by chance

beyond dualities, free from envy.4

You will feel ‘unattached and free’. To learn how to change your
attitude and act in a selfless way you must learn to cultivate
discipline:
+ Perform actions, firm in discipline, +
relinquishing attachment;
be impartial to failure and success—
this equanimity is called yoga.5

This disciplined attitude of karma yoga will make you less selfish,
more tranquil. Self-control will also lead to greater skill in
performing the action.

. . . so arm yourself for discipline—

yoga is skill in actions.6

In the spirit of Indian pluralism, Krishna offers Arjuna three

paths to liberation from human bondage. These are the paths of
knowledge, action and love. My father’s chief interest in the Gita
lay in the third way of love. He was quite mesmerized by bhakti
yoga, which seeks freedom from the law of karma through a
deep and passionate love of God.7 On the other hand, I am
mainly interested in the possibilities of the second path of karma

+
 +

120 / The Difficulty of Being Good

yoga, the way of action. So was Emerson, and he wrote that he

was ‘chiefly interested in Krishna’s teaching that works must be
done without thought of reward and a person may have a
tranquil mind even in activity’.8
Nevertheless, I was sceptical. As I thought about my own
dharma journey, I asked myself if it was possible to actually live
in this way. I wondered if I could shrink my ego that far in order
to live and work in the way that Krishna had suggested. It
seemed to me a nice ideal that human beings ought to strive for,
but I felt that karma yoga may well be as hopelessly idealistic as
Rousseau’s or Marx’s goal of equality.

A pillow for a hero

On the tenth day of the war, Sanjaya, the bard, bluntly announces
to the blind Dhritarashtra that their commander-in-chief, Bhishma,
has fallen in battle. At this moment, the Mahabharata presses the
reverse button. We are suddenly back in time and the war at
+ +
Kurukshetra is about to begin. The slaying of Bhishma is still on
our minds when Arjuna suddenly feels confused and dejected,
and as we have seen in the Gita, he puts down his weapons, and
shrinks from killing his kinsmen.9 Krishna consoles him, and
tries to assuage his guilt over the imminent killings of war.
I asked myself what the Mahabharata is telling us in placing
Krishna’s message of self-forgetting immediately after Bhishma’s
death. Is it holding Bhishma up as an exemplary human being?
Is the patriarch of the Bharatas an example of someone who is
‘intent on the act and not its fruits’? Is he revered in the epic
because he is Krishna’s model of a selfless person who acts with
detachment from a sense of duty?
When Yudhishthira returns after thirteen years in exile, the
first person he enquires after is Bhishma. He asks Sanjaya:

How is our venerable, wise grandfather, who is so intelligent and

endowed with every virtue? Is Kauravya Bhishma in good health,
young man? Is his character still the same?10

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 121

The ‘character’ that Yudhishthira is referring to is Bhishma’s

uncommon selflessness. Aside from Krishna, the Mahabharata
does not say if any of the other characters possesses the virtue of
nishkama karma; nor does it call anyone a karma yogi; but if
anyone in the epic does deserve this designation, it is Bhishma.
Devavrata Bhishma was the eldest son of Shantanu, the Bharata
king and the ancestor of the Pandavas and Kauravas. Bhishma
would have become king had his father not fallen in love with
Satyavati, the daughter of the chief of a tribe of fishermen. As a
condition of their marriage, the bride’s father was adamant that
the kingship should descend on Satyavati’s children. To make
his father happy, Bhishma renounced his right to the kingdom
and vowed to remain celibate in order to avoid potential disputes
in succeeding generations. It was such a terrifying and awesome
act of self-sacrifice that flowers rained from the sky when
Devavrata took this oath. Voices were heard, ‘Bhishma! Bhishma!’
This is how he got his name Bhishma, ‘the awesome one’.11
+ Bhishma keeps his promise and remains celibate all his life.
+
His stepmother, Satyavati, has two children from his father and
he brings them up lovingly like his own brothers. When they are
young, he rules the kingdom dutifully in their name as a guardian
and regent. When they grow up, he arranges their marriages.
They die early, however, without producing any heirs, and
Satyavati beseeches Bhishma to sire children on her widowed
daughters-in-law. But he refuses, saying that he cannot possibly
go back on his word.
With the royal succession at risk, Queen Satyavati, as we
know, summons her illegitimate son, Vyasa, to impregnate the
widows. Vyasa thus fathers Dhritarashtra by the elder widow,
Pandu by the younger one, and Vidura by a maid. Since
Dhritarashtra is disqualified from the succession because of
blindness, Pandu becomes king. He has five sons through divine
intervention. The eldest, Yudhishthira, is born just before
Dhritarashtra’s own son, Duryodhana. Soon, Pandu renounces

+
 +

122 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the throne and retires to the forest, where his children, the
Pandavas, grow up. Blind Dhritarashtra, whose name means ‘he
who holds the kingdom’, assumes the regency. While he believes
that Yudhishthira has first claim to the realm, he has a weakness
for his eldest son, Duryodhana, whom he promotes secretly, and
who becomes the de facto ruler of Hastinapura.
All this time Bhishma continues to administer the realm. He is
guardian for another generation until Dhritarashtra and Pandu
come of age. He performs his role with detachment, serving the
kingdom selflessly and acting from a sense of duty rather than
personal interest. When Duryodhana begins to rule Hastinapura,
Bhishma is in semi-retirement—he is a grandfatherly presence
whose advice is sometimes sought and often ignored.12
With the coming of the war, Bhishma is torn. His sympathies
are with the Pandavas but his duty is to the throne. Duryodhana
elevates him to supreme commander of the Kaurava troops, a
role that he fulfils valiantly and wisely. He successfully leads the
+ Kaurava army in repelling the Pandavas. Like a ‘fire blazing in
+
the forest’, the patriarch of the Bharatas slaughters thousands of
warriors during the first ten days of the war. Yudhishthira,
seeing his troops decimated, realizes that their ‘grandfather’ has
to be eliminated if they are going to win.
On the evening of the ninth day, Yudhishthira tells his brothers
about an eerie pledge that Bhishma had made to him. Although
he had agreed to fight on behalf of the Kauravas, Bhishma had
said openly that he would give the Pandavas counsel since he
was their ‘grandfather’. Late that night the Pandavas and Krishna
visit Bhishma’s camp, and Yudhishthira asks, ‘Tell us, O lord, the
means of your own death.’
Bhishma tells the Pandavas that he is invincible in battle; he
can only be defeated when he lays down his bow and weapons.
He tells them about a vow he made long ago that he would
never hurt a woman—or someone who had once been a woman.
The Pandavas realize that they have such a person in their midst,

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 123

who is an ally. The mighty Panchala prince, Shikhandi, was born

a woman, but later changed her sex. If Shikhandi were to appear
before him, Bhishma tells them, he would have to lay down his
bow and weapons. At that moment, Arjuna could kill him. ‘I do
not see anyone in the three worlds who can kill me [otherwise].’
The following day the war is especially bloody and Bhishma
slays ten thousand warriors. The Pandavas despair. Finally, on
Krishna’s goading, Arjuna places Shikhandi in front of him and
moves resolutely towards Bhishma. Seeing the feminine in
Shikhandi, Bhishma holds himself back because of his vow, and
Arjuna, seeing this, draws his Gandiva bow and pierces him
with twenty-five arrows. Bhishma falls from his chariot, not on
the ground but on a bed of arrows. Seeing this sight, the warriors
are awestruck. As the patriarch lies dying at sunset, the warriors
on both sides lay down their weapons, forgetting briefly that
they are enemies, and pay homage to this selfless ‘renouncer’,
who has become the first major victim of the war.
+ Arjuna notices that Bhishma’s head is hanging down, and he
+
shoots three arrows into the ground and lifts his grandfather’s
head tenderly and places it onto a ‘hero’s pillow’. Realizing that
Bhishma is thirsty, Arjuna gets up on his chariot, circumambulates
the fallen commander, and fires an effulgent Parjanya arrow into
the earth. Out gushes a pure jet of cool water, which quenches
his grandfather’s thirst. Because of his remarkable vow of celibacy,
Bhishma had received a gift—of being able to choose his time of
death. So, although he has fallen, he does not die. He lies upon
the battlefield through the end of the war and far past it, having
chosen the moment of the winter solstice to pass away.
What does one make of this extraordinary figure who lived his
life for the sake of others? He certainly managed to create a huge
problem of succession. His vow of celibacy turned out to be a
curse on the Bharata dynasty that led eventually to a horrendous
war of succession. Is the Mahabharata telling us that even
selflessness has its limitations? Bhishma sacrificed his own

+
 +

124 / The Difficulty of Being Good

happiness for the father’s sake. He did not marry; he did not
become king; he administered the realm disinterestedly for two
generations. Yet, if he had acceded to Satyavati’s request, he
might have continued the royal line of the Bharatas, lived a
peaceful, domestic, grihastha life of the second stage, and spared
the world mass destruction. (In that case, we might not have had
the Mahabharata either, whose legendary author, the sage Vyasa,
was Satyavati’s illegitimate son and father of the flawed
Dhritarashtra and Pandu.)
It is difficult to understand why this selfless hero did not get
up in the assembly on that fateful day of the dice game to stop
the public humiliation of Draupadi. Vidura tried, at least. Bhishma
must have known that more than anyone else in the assembly, he
could have saved Draupadi. ‘He had the authority to stop the
shameful spectacle. Instead, he sat there futilely discussing what
was dharma and what was not dharma.’13 One expected him to
strike Duhshasana to the ground when he tried to pull off
+ Draupadi’s garment. It has been suggested that Bhishma ‘had
+
eaten Duryodhana’s salt’ and was thus forced to support him.
This is obviously not a morally sound argument. Patronage does
make a claim on one’s loyalty, but the claim stops before one’s
conscience. I find it difficult to believe that courageous Bhishma
would have turned coward or become afraid of Duryodhana at
the end of his life, especially when he had lived the rest of his life
selflessly on behalf of others. The fact remains that when it came
to Draupadi’s question in the assembly, he failed.
When Bhishma says to Draupadi that ‘dharma is subtle’, his
mind appears to be in genuine conflict about what is right in
these circumstances. Naturally, he views dharma from the
viewpoint of state policy (raison d’êtat), and, as the elder statesman
of the Kuru clan, his main concern is to ensure that policies are
adopted to strengthen the interests of the Hastinapura state and
to preserve the Bharata line to which both the Pandavas and
Kauravas belong. He is a public figure and hence his arguments

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 125

are cautious and legalistic. They betray an individual so caught

up in the affairs of the state that moral courage has deserted him.
Or is it perhaps that he worries about Hastinapura’s alliance
with the Gandhara and the political implications of alienating
Duryodhana’s uncle Shakuni’s powerful military state in the
north-west?14
Does this mean that the ethic of selfless detachment failed on
that day? Has Bhishma’s whole life been a fruitless sacrifice as
Iravati Karve suggests? I do not think so. The Mahabharata has
presented us with another moral dilemma to which there are no
easy answers—reminding us once again about the difficulty of
being good. Even an exalted virtue like selflessness and a
commitment to disinterested performance of duty can get one
into trouble. The epic seems to be saying that one ought to be
wary of all absolutes, and there may even be limitations to
Krishna’s idea of nishkama karma. Perhaps Draupadi’s question
did not have an answer. Hence, I disagree with Iravati Karve’s
+ pessimistic conclusion about the Mahabharata that ‘All human +
effort is fruitless, all human life ends in frustration.’15

The difficult art of self-forgetting

Bhishma’s story made me think about what it means to act

selflessly, without vanity. Quite apart from Bhishma’s failures, it
made me question what Krishna has in mind when he advises
Arjuna to be ‘intent on the act and not its fruits’. Is a person
capable of acting in this disinterested way? Krishna is exhorting
me, perhaps, to transfer my attention away from myself to
something outside, for example, to my work or to others. He is
asking me not to act from personal ambition but, perhaps, for
ambition for the work or for performing the work well. I
wondered what sort of action it would be where I could forget
my ego or myself.
Human beings appear to be essentially self-interested. I have
been brought up on a steady diet of modernism, which claims

+
 +

126 / The Difficulty of Being Good

that to be self-interested is to be ‘rational’ and ‘prudent’. Adam

Smith taught me: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher,
the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from
their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to
their humanity but their self love.’16 It is not only economists
who believe this but all social scientists accept it as dogma.17
Hence, I found it difficult to accept Krishna’s premise and I just
did not believe that one could act selflessly, not for any length of
time at least.
Nevertheless, I did not dismiss the Gita’s insistent idea even
though at times it seemed to me hopelessly idealistic. I continued
to wrestle with it. I observed that we do, in fact, act disinterestedly
sometimes. We do show a concern for others; we do cooperate
even when it does not serve our narrow interest; we express a
sense of solidarity; and we are public-spirited for reasons that go
beyond ‘prudence’. Hence, ‘self-interest’ does not fully explain
our behaviour.18 Even Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral
+ Sentiments admits that people commonly feel other emotions
+
which are contrary to their narrow self-interest. They feel, for
example, the disinterested emotion of sympathy for the misery
of others.19 Jean Jacques Rousseau says that a person feels pity
when he sees a child in danger of being clawed by a wild beast.20
If sentiments like ‘sympathy’ and ‘pity’ exist, social scientists
may have gone too far in claiming that self-interest is the only
motive of human actions. I also recalled that there are times
when my ‘self’ seems to disappear. When I am deeply absorbed
in a book, for example, I tend to forget myself. I can lose myself
for hours, and when I become aware, I find myself saying, ‘Is it
already six o’clock?’ I had forgotten my ‘self’ during this period.
During this ‘lost time’, perhaps I had been acting for its own
sake. I was not aware of my personal ambition during this time.
Was Krishna, then, urging me to learn this attitude of ‘self-
forgetting’ in his concept of nishkama karma? Is this what athletes
call ‘being in the zone’?21

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 127

Yet, I could not fully shake off my modernist bias, believing

that self-interest is the primary motive driving human beings,
especially in economic and political life. I asked myself, could I
act without desire? I did not think I would wake up in the
morning if I had no desire. So, I did not think nishkama karma
meant desirelessness in that sense. Could being ‘intent on the act’
mean that I ought to perform an activity for the sake of the
‘excellence’ of the activity? Stated thus, it sounded almost
Aristotelian. One afternoon, I stumbled on to what Harry Truman,
the former American president, had said: ‘Your work will succeed
as long as you don’t care who gets the credit.’ In his folksy
American way he seemed to be saying something that seemed
suspiciously similar to nishkama karma. Was it then a universal
idea? Some Western psychologists had also observed this quality
in human behaviour, I noted.22

‘I see the bird, but I don’t see the tree or you’

+ +
The Upanishads are amongst the earliest philosophical
speculations of human beings and they had foreseen the downside
of human vanity. Composed in a period of intellectual ferment—
roughly 800–400 BC, a time which also produced the Buddha and
Mahavira in India, Socrates in Greece and Confucius in China—
the Upanishads realized that the ‘self’ is the source of many of
our day-to-day troubles. It produces harmful thoughts of ‘me
and mine’, selfish desires, cravings, attachments, hatred, ill-will,
conceit, pride and egotism, and even wars between nations. The
Upanishads trace these problems of the self to our sense of ‘I-
ness’ or ahamkara (literally ‘I-maker’) which is our subjective
sense of identity and which has its origin in our consciousness
(aham). In classical Sankhya philosophy, the empirical world of
the senses and the mind emerges from the evolution of the aham,
and liberation from this empirical existence requires the negation
of ahamkara.
The Mahabharata is aware of the ‘I-maker’ and how the ‘self’

+
 +

128 / The Difficulty of Being Good

comes in the way of performance. Arjuna, the greatest archer in

the Mahabharata, demonstrates to his admiring teacher, Drona,
that he stops thinking and forgets himself and everything else at
the moment of shooting an arrow. He only sees the target.

The left-handed archer stretched the bow until it stood in a circle

and kept aiming at the target as his guru had ordered. After a
while Drona said to him . . . ‘Do you see this bird sitting there?
And the tree? And me?’ ‘I see the bird,’ Arjuna replied, ‘but I
don’t see the tree or you’ . . . ‘If you see the bird describe it to me?’
‘I see its head, not its body.’23

Buddhists have always had an interest in ‘self-forgetting’,

especially in Dhyana Buddhism or what the Japanese call Zen.
An aspiring student makes the same point as Arjuna: ‘Man may
be a “thinking person” but his great works are done when he is
not calculating and thinking . . . In the case of archery, the hitter
and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one
+ reality. The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one +
who is engaged in hitting the bull’s eye which confronts him.
This state of unconsciousness is realized only when [one is] rid
of the self.’24 Baso (or Ma-tsu), who died in 788, claims that one
needs to restore the ‘everyday mind’, which means ‘sleeping
when tired, eating when hungry’. When a person reflects,
deliberates and conceptualizes, the original unconsciousness is
lost and thought interferes.
The Mahabharata teaches one to grin at human vanity, and I
have found plenty to smile at in my own life. As I reflected on
‘self-forgetting’, I found that distractions of the ego often came in
the way of performance in my working day. Instead of focusing
on the job, I brooded, and mostly about myself. ‘Why did I get
a smaller raise than he?’ Not only did this sort of thing generate
negative energy, it also led to boredom at work. It was my ‘big
fat ego’, as Iris Murdoch calls it, that was making me want to be
more important than others. What was often an exciting job
became ‘work’ and an unsatisfactory life.

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 129

Although my father was not without vanity, he was not driven

by it. Shy and self-effacing, he preferred to listen rather than to
hold forth. If someone asked him a personal question, he would
gently change the subject and preferred to talk about the other.
He was an engineer, and he said that his job was his dharma,
and he ‘had to do it because it was there’. He also seemed less
affected by the behaviour of others around him and less bothered
by what others thought of him. As a result, he was free from the
worry of measuring up to their expectations. He had a rare inner
confidence which is absent in many of us who care about the
attentions of the world. People liked him because he was not
thinking about himself all the time.
John Stuart Mill would have preferred my father to me. Mill
says, ‘selfishness [is] the principal cause which makes life
unsatisfactory’.25 He had learned from Auguste Comte that the
opposite of selfishness is altruism, which he felt was at the heart
of moral virtue. Comte and his followers were so taken up by
+ this idea that they overreacted by suggesting that all our actions +
should benefit others. They made altruism an obligation. But I
think that is going too far. (I shall return to this idea in Chapter
10 in connection with Yudhishthira’s compassion.) I do not
believe that Krishna’s notion of ‘being intent on the action and
not on its fruits’ leads one only to altruism. Self-forgetting ought
to make one less selfish, which is not the same thing as saying
‘all our actions should be designed to benefit others’.
Writers always seem to have more than the usual problems
with vanity, and it is perhaps because of it that T.S. Eliot, E.M.
Forster and others have been attracted to the Gita. Forster,
writing in the aftermath of World War I, was hugely enthusiastic
about nishkama karma. He saw in it the possibility of conquering
not only human vanity but fear as well. It could lead one to the
divine, which, of course, is one of Krishna’s central purposes in
conceiving of the idea:

The man of discipline has joy,

delight, and light within;

+
 +

130 / The Difficulty of Being Good

becoming the infinite spirit

he finds the pure calm of infinity.26

After summarizing Krishna’s three reasons for fighting, E.M.

Forster goes on to say: ‘The saint may renounce action, but the
soldier, the citizen, the practical man generally—they should
renounce, not action, but its fruits. It is wrong for them to be idle;
it is equally wrong to desire a reward for industry. It is wrong
to shirk destroying civilization and one’s kindred and friends,
equally wrong to hope for dominion afterwards. When all such
hopes and desires are dead fear dies also, and freed from all
attachments the “dweller in the body” will remain calm while
the body performs its daily duty.’27 Fear dies, Forster says, when
one is freed from the attachments of one’s ego. I think my
father’s attitude illustrates this point. Being happy to get on with
his work, and not being too concerned with the opinion of
others, he did not fear people in the upper hierarchy at his office.
+ He seemed to be ‘inner-directed’ rather than ‘outer-directed’ and +
this allowed him to stand up to his boss on several occasions.28
I was nine when my mother came home one day looking very
agitated. We were living at the time on the site of the Bhakra
Dam in the Punjab in north-west India. My father was working
with hundreds of engineers in building the dam. That morning
he had committed the great sin of hierarchy—he had disagreed
with his boss in public about the width of one of the load-
bearing walls. It ought to be much wider, he had said, or it
would collapse. He had expressed these views in a meeting
where his boss’s boss was also present, and his boss had lost
face.
The news of my father’s ‘defiance’ spread quickly in the
engineers’ colony. My mother heard about it in the market from
one of the other wives. My mother was worried because my
father’s boss had the reputation for being vindictive. He was full
of himself, and wanted his ego massaged by his juniors, and my
father had not joined his coterie of sycophants. She must have

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 131

transmitted her fears to me for I have never been able to forget

this incident. It was my first schooling in the morality of hierarchy.
I was formally introduced to the principles of this corporate
morality in my first job in Bombay. At twenty-one I was a trainee
at Richardson Hindustan Ltd, a company that was later acquired
by Procter & Gamble. Every company in those days seemed to
have a south Indian accountant, and ours was no different. One
day the accountant took me to a south Indian café near Flora
Fountain. Over a lunch of idli and dosa he gave me advice on
how to gain influence within the company. ‘What is right is what
the boss wants,’ he said. ‘Senior managers need to feel
comfortable, and the job of a junior manager is to put him at
ease. Otherwise, a junior will not be trusted and will end up
leading a troubled and anxious life.’ He taught me that a
subordinate owes fealty principally to his immediate boss: ‘Keep
your boss from making mistakes. If he is error prone, there is
temptation to let him make a fool of himself, but others will be
+ suspicious of you if you don’t protect him. Never, I repeat, never
+
contradict your boss in public. To violate this rule is a death
wish. Don’t speak out of turn at meetings and make an effort to
laugh at your boss’s jokes.’
My father had broken these rules on that morning, and our
family had many anxious months over the ‘load-bearing wall’.
He was removed from his job, designing the powerhouse, and
reassigned. He was told that he ‘could not be trusted’, and his
life became unpleasant. His colleagues were afraid to talk to him.
My mother found all this very distressing but my father bore it
well. He plunged enthusiastically into his new, inconsequential
job, and improved performance there so dramatically that his
boss was even more infuriated. Gradually, he realized that my
father did not respond to the usual incentives, and since he
needed him, he quietly brought my father back to his original
position. One of his colleagues’ wives said to my mother, ‘Sister,
your husband is a karma yogi!’ It was my first encounter with the

+
 +

132 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Gita’s concept of nishkama karma. Indeed, my father did seem ‘to

be intent on the act, not its fruit’.
This is the point that E.M. Forster was also trying to make in
his essay. He said that a person who is freed from attachment to
rewards and who remains calm doing his daily duty ‘will be
unstained by sin, as is the lotus leaf by the water of the tank. It
will attain to the eternal peace that is offered to the practical man
as well as to the devotee. It will have abjured the wages of
action, which are spiritual death, and gained in their place a
vision of the Divine.’29 I do not know if my father attained the
divine vision, however.

The hero as renouncer

Indians have always been fascinated by the sanyasi, ‘renouncer’.

He stands tall and splendid, ‘a theatrical figure in ochre robes’.30
In a famous essay Louis Dumont wrote, ‘the secret of Hinduism
+ +
may be found in the dialogue between the renouncer and the
grihastha, “man-in-the-world”.’ The renunciatory ideal took a
mesmerizing hold on the ordinary householder even before the
advent of ascetic religions like Buddhism and Jainism. Hinduism’s
flexible nature allowed dissent in post-Vedic society, as dissenting
renouncers chose direct knowledge of liberation through
perception and meditation over the rituals of the brahmins, thus
challenging brahmin monopoly over salvation.31
The departure of great men (and women) into the jungles
created its own problems for society. Asceticism became a major
issue, and the classic text of laws, the Manusmriti, had to forbid
men from becoming renouncers until they had successfully
fulfilled the previous three stages of life and discharged their
debt to secular society. To those who were torn between the two
ways of life, Krishna’s advice of nishkama karma offered a way
out: they could now live in the world but with the attitude of the
renouncer; they could live authentically if they remained detached

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 133

and self-possessed in the midst of worldly activity, avoiding the

extremes of indulgence and asceticism through self-discipline.32
Nishkama karma thus gave new meaning to the day-to-day life
of the ordinary householder, who had to make a living, look
after his family, live as a citizen in society, be a good friend and
neighbour, discharge his responsibilities and prepare for the next
stage of his life. To him the Gita offered the solution of living life
based on self-control. By making the householder take charge of
his life, the Gita devalued both the attractions of the rituals of the
brahmins and of the ascetic life of renunciation. It offered the
ideal of a ‘secular ascetic’.
In the Mahabharata Bhishma comes closest to the ideal of a
‘secular ascetic’. His life was motivated by duty to the state and
characterized by detachment from personal reward. His vow of
celibacy did not make him a ‘secular ascetic’. Indeed, the
Mahabharata is ambivalent about his celibacy, which turned into
a curse for the Bharata dynasty. The Gita does not expect
+ householders to be celibate either. (Celibacy is a virtue at the
+
previous brahmacharya stage of studentship but not of the grihastha,
the householder.) The Gita focuses on the positive results that
come from becoming less self-centred and among these is an
escape from karma.

. . . be without personal aspirations or concern for possessions, and

fight unconcernedly. They who follow this view of mine, believing
it without disputing it, are freed from their karman.33

The Mahabharata, and Indian tradition in general, regards karma

as bondage. Actions, both good and bad, bind one to an unhappy
cycle of birth and rebirth due to the relentless moral accounting
enforced by the law of karma. The purpose of life is liberation
from the phenomenal world, which is a ‘prison of karma’.
Detaching one’s actions from personal reward changes the quality
of one’s actions, according to the Gita. As one becomes less self-
centred, karma does not stick to one’s actions. By acting in a

+
 +

134 / The Difficulty of Being Good

selfless way one also achieves liberation from the consequences

of one’s actions.
The generation that struggled for India’s freedom from Britain
recognized the power of nishkama karma. The novelist
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay introduced this concept in
nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth century in Bengal.34
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the firebrand from Maharashtra, examined
it in depth in his commentary on the Gita, giving it a socially
activist interpretation in the early twentieth century. Mahatma
Gandhi then followed in the 1920s with even greater success,
rallying people on the path of non-violent resistance to colonial
rule. For Gandhi, the hand spinning of cloth became a symbolic
assertion of the ideal of karma yoga—action performed without
regard for its ‘fruits’—as millions of men and women began to
spin khadi cloth. Indian philosophers have been trying to interpret
nishkama karma as a spiritual ideal for centuries.35

+ But what is my duty? +

G.W.F. Hegel, the great German philosopher, had much difficulty

with Krishna’s notion of acting selflessly from a sense of duty,
and some of these difficulties were similar to the objections he
had to Kant’s notion of duty. Hegel wrote a long review in 1827
of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s lectures on the Gita in Berlin, and
he specifically focused on nishkama karma. Humboldt regarded
this as a personal attack on himself and he never spoke to Hegel
for years.36
While Hegel recognized the moral attractiveness of ‘doing
one’s duty only for duty’s sake’, and agreed that this was a great
moral intention, the practical problem lay in knowing what one’s
duty is. Krishna does specify moral duties in the Gita, but the
moral law of acting disinterestedly does not necessarily lead one
to virtuous acts. It might lead one to kill kinsmen in a bloody
war, which is Arjuna’s dilemma. Hegel concluded that nishkama
karma does not ‘lead to anything, and from itself there cannot

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 135

result any moral duties’.37 Hegel’s words were prophetic, for 125
years later, many Nazis did, in fact, justify their evil acts against
the Jews at the Nuremberg trials on the grounds that they were
not acting for selfish ends: they were doing their duty to their
country.38
In her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt
raises the same question. Eichmann was a senior Nazi SS officer
and considered by many to be the ‘architect of the Holocaust’.
Thanks to his considerable organizational talents and ideological
reliability, he was charged with the task of deporting Jews to
ghettos and exterminating them in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
After the war, Eichmann travelled to Argentina using a
fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International
Red Cross and lived there under a false identity working for
Mercedes-Benz until the 1960s. He was captured by Israeli Mossad
agents in Argentina and tried in an Israeli court on fifteen
criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war
+ crimes. He was convicted and hanged in 1962.
+
During the trial, Eichmann confessed that of the millions of
cases that passed through his hands, he allowed sympathy for
the Jews to sway him from the path of duty on only two
occasions. He implied that he generally felt sympathy for the
Jews he was sending to the gas chambers. However, he steadfastly
stuck to his job because he believed one should do one’s duty
unaffected by sympathy.39 Other Nazis spoke the same language.
As Arendt recounted: ‘In a speech to the SS Einsatzgruppen,
special squads appointed to carry out the killing of groups of
Jews, Heinrich Himmler told his troops that they were called
upon to fulfil a “repulsive duty” and that he would not like it if
they did such a thing gladly. He had recently witnessed the
machine-gunning of about a hundred Jews and he had, he said,
“been aroused to the depths of my soul” by what he had seen;
but he was obeying the highest law by doing his duty.’40
In recounting these cases of Nazi officers, I am not suggesting

+
 +

136 / The Difficulty of Being Good

that nishkama karma sanctions or justifies mass murder. Rather,

the idea that we should act selflessly for the sake of acting or do
our duty for duty’s sake without asking for further justification
can be dangerous. This is Hegel’s point as well. Both Krishna
and Immanuel Kant were understandably reacting against a
traditional view of reward and punishment, but their alternative
approach—following duty with little thought to the
consequences—brings problems of its own.
The basic problem, then, with basing one’s actions on ‘duty’ is
the question, ‘What is my duty?’ What I think is my duty might
be very different from another person’s notion of his duty.
Krishna thinks Arjuna’s duty is to fight because he is a warrior.
Arjuna thinks his duty is not to kill others. Both make an appeal,
in a sense, to their ‘conscience’. What if what is inside my
conscience or my ‘nature’ turns out to be wrong, however? One
person’s conscience might tell him/her to do something quite
unsavoury. It is not easy to be good.
+ +
‘Karma yogi was my father, Dhirubhai Ambani’

In December 2004, Anil Ambani—whom we met in Chapter 1—

employed Krishna’s idea of nishkama karma as a strategic weapon
in his war against his elder brother Mukesh. In the thick of the
struggle, Anil Ambani wrote a curious article on nishkama karma
in the Times of India on 4 December 2004 in a space called ‘The
Speaking Tree’.
In it, Ambani wrote, ‘Karma yogi was my father Dhirubhai
Ambani’s other name. He was a man of action. But as a true
follower of the Bhagavad Gita, he acted not for himself, but for
humanity. In the true spirit of nishkam-karma, he remained free
from attachment to the fruits of his action . . . Ego is the source
of all our troubles. It is as the divine text puts it, the feeling of
separateness, the sense of duality, the idea of being distinct and
different from others. It is an arrogant and obsessive sense of
ownership . . . that has lost touch with dharma. Humility then is

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 137

neither a sign of human weakness nor just another polite virtue.

It is the essential foundation for building everything that is just,
lasting and permanent. This was the abiding truth which guided
the life of Dhirubhai. He never saw himself as an owner . . . I
have often asked myself if humility and trust are matters of
individual temperament—an aspect of our samskar and karma—
or, in today’s parlance, genetic coding. And, every time, I have
come to the contrary conclusion. It’s not easy, I admit, but we
can all learn to be humble and trustful, as long as we have the
ability to love all beings as one’s own self. That is the quintessential
first step in a long journey of individual, social and spiritual
evolution.’
This article was clearly the work of a highly intelligent man
who had wrestled with the moral issues raised by the Gita’s
message. Nevertheless, it was also self-serving, which is ironical
since it extolled the virtues of selflessness and humility. It did
not fool anyone. Most people said at the time that Anil Ambani
+ had written it to win public sympathy in his epic battle against
+
his brother. One reader’s shocked reaction was: ‘I thought only
Gurus write such things. Never knew billionaires do it . . . If he
is so motivated by the Gita (and not money)—I have a simple
solution. Give up everything and go to the Himalayas.’41 The
reader had, in fact, got Krishna’s message completely wrong—
nishkama karma, as we have seen, is not about going to the
Himalayas but about living self-effacingly in the world like
Bhishma.
If Anil Ambani is to be believed, his and his father’s ambition
was for the success of their enterprises and not personal reward.
Even if one accepts this self-serving characterization on Anil’s
part, it does point to the same weakness in the concept of
nishkama karma that Hegel had pointed out. One can ‘be intent on
the act, not its fruit’ and still destroy competitors, break laws,
bribe people as the Ambanis had done. Selflessness does not
necessarily make one a moral person.

+
 +

138 / The Difficulty of Being Good

‘Sonia Gandhi, a karma yogi’

Human beings admire selflessness. We are taught to respect

those who are selfless in their actions, and as we grow up we
equate selflessness with being moral. In India, selflessness has an
exceptional status partly because of Krishna’s counsel in the
Gita. Mahatma Gandhi was commonly referred to as a karma
yogi during India’s struggle for independence in the first half of
the twentieth century. Mother Teresa is revered for the same
reason. When Sonia Gandhi refused to become prime minister
after the Congress party triumphed in the elections in May 2004,
her supporters also likened her to a ‘karma yogi’.
Is ‘selflessness’ a practical ideal in public life? Like most young
persons in the mid-twentieth century, I was a socialist in my
youth and I admired the selfless ways of many socialists. I was
in particular awe of my Marxist uncle, Sat Pal Dang, and his
Kashmiri wife, Vimla, who had sacrificed material comfort and
+ dedicated their lives to bringing justice to exploited workers in +
industrial Amritsar in north-west India. Some of my professors
were Marxists and they inspired their students to selflessly go
and change the world. A few of my friends did become socialist
activists.
My own love affair with socialism ended when I discovered
that a poor nation like India could not become prosperous via
the selfless ideals of Marxism. I concluded that its ideal of
equality was unattainable because of ahamkara, ‘the I-maker’. The
ego will not diminish to the extent that Marxism demands. My
readings in economic history had taught me that in 1750 the per
capita income of all nations was by and large the same—everyone
was poor. Then the industrial revolution came in the West and
brought unprecedented prosperity. The same thing happened in
the Far East between 1960 and 1990. And this transformation is
now going on in China and India at the beginning of the twenty-
first century. Nations have gradually conquered poverty and
turned middle class, not through selflessness but through the

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 139

‘self-interest’ of individuals in the marketplace. Nations have

grown prosperous because they depended on institutions that
allowed them to unleash the power of modern technology.
Among these institutions were law and order, stable governance
and property rights—all of which encouraged the growth of
trade, markets and entrepreneurs. These liberal institutions
presume that the citizen will act on the basis of self-interest
rather than through selfless acts of heroism.
In the twentieth century, the world has had to learn this lesson
painfully after Stalin and Mao inflicted monumental grief on
their people. Aristotle had warned us of this danger more than
two thousand years ago. He had objected to Plato’s ideal of
common ownership of property because some people would
resent those who ‘labour little and receive or consume much’. He
had thought private property was natural and legitimate, for ‘the
love of the self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in
vain, although selfishness is rightly censured; this, however, is
+ not the mere love of self, the love of self in excess, like the +
miser’s love of money . . .’42 Aristotle makes the same sensible
distinction (as Adam Smith and others) between rational self-
interest and selfishness. One should not make the common
mistake in believing that the opposite of selflessness is selfishness.
There is a liberal middle ground of ‘self-interest’, which drives
ordinary human beings. This is what successful liberal institutions
depend upon.
We must also admire the benevolent acts of many
philanthropists, social activists and environmentalists to even
out the excesses of capitalism. Kindness and compassion are
virtues and one cannot imagine a decent civilized life without
them. These are, however, moral ideals rather than moral rules for
society. Enlightened philanthropy can make a difference, but in
the end, liberal institutions will do far more in lifting people out
of poverty and oppression. Liberal, lightly regulated institutions
depend on the natural ‘self-interest’ of ordinary persons rather
than on selfless acts of heroic leaders.

+
 +

140 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Although I admire Krishna’s message of nishkama karma, I

believe it is unattainable for the ordinary human being. Even
Bhishma’s selfless vow got him into trouble when it came to
doing the right thing over the succession to the Hastinapura
throne. Nor did it save Draupadi in the assembly. Unattainable
ideals often seem to give someone a stick to beat others into
submission. They give the likes of Stalin and Mao a pretext for
resorting to strong-arm tactics to make up for the deficit in
human selflessness.43 Hence, ‘rational self-interest’ is the correct
basis on which to design public institutions, especially when
they involve large numbers of people who do not have day-to-
day contact with each other. These are the institutions of
democratic capitalism.
Nevertheless, I believe the ideal of nishkama karma does have a
place in our lives. Modern social science has gone too far in
relying exclusively on self-interest to explain human behaviour.
Reading the Gita turned out to be a nice corrective in my dharma
+ education for it reminded me of the ideal of selfless action. Game +
theorists, as we saw in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, have observed
that if individuals only pursue self-interest, defined narrowly,
they actually undermine the collective good and harm themselves.
So, one must take into account both selfish and unselfish
motivations of human beings. If one adopts the ‘cautious strategy’
and designs institutions based only on selfish motives, one might
erode whatever public spirit that might otherwise exist. If one
assumes too high a level of public spirit, one runs the opposite
risk.44

‘Let no man do to another that which is

repugnant to himself’

I have been fascinated with nishkama karma ever since I

encountered it and wondered how it might influence my day-to-
day life. I have a humbling awareness that I am interrogating the
Gita from ‘the outside’. If I believed in Krishna as God, I would

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 141

instinctively accept that my duty lies in following Krishna’s

command. I would then become ‘an insider’. I would try to
renounce the fruits of my actions in God’s favour and move
along a more traditional, religious path. But in interrogating the
text from ‘the outside’, I have to be extra careful and not try to
impose a modern, secular sensibility on to an ancient religious
text. The Gita is still the most popular religious authority in
India, partly because it addresses the universal problem of how
to live one’s life. It offers the devotee a seductive way to be in the
world and yet not be of the world by renouncing the ego. I did
not wish to ‘wound’ this world view of the believer.
Krishna obviously hopes that ordinary human beings will be
able to diminish their ‘big fat egos’. On the face of it, this is not
an outrageous expectation, since we do observe ego-less acts in
our daily life. We also experience ‘self-forgetting’ from time to
time, especially when we are engaged in doing something that
we like. Arjuna ‘lets himself go’ as soon as he picks up his
+ Gandiva bow. The challenge is to be able to do it all the time.
+
What intrigues me is the relationship between nishkama karma
and being a ‘good’ human being. Does being ‘intent on the act,
not its fruits’ lead to being more moral? It would certainly make
for an attractive world if there were fewer selfish Duryodhanas,
crusted over with pride and self-importance like the Ambani
brothers, whose sibling rivalries threaten the well-being of
millions. We could do with more self-effacing Bhishmas who
lead their lives without expecting applause.
I am not sure if there is a direct connection between selflessness
and ‘general benevolence’. While it is reasonable to expect a
person who acts disinterestedly to also adopt the ‘impartial
perspective’ and empathize with strangers, it does not necessarily
follow.45 Certainly, it did not happen in the case of Rudolf Hoess,
the commandant at Auschwitz, who systematically murdered
2.9 million Jews. He wrote in his autobiography that he suffered
great emotional pain, but he did his job disinterestedly as a duty

+
 +

142 / The Difficulty of Being Good

to national socialism.46 The moral perspective is arrived at when

one is able to think beyond oneself, beyond one’s family and
friends, and put oneself in the shoes of another. The Mahabharata
endorses this idea. It says famously:

Let no man do to another that which is repugnant to himself.

How does one learn to do that? How does one awaken the
‘impartial spectator’ within oneself? A good way to begin might
be to read a text like the Mahabharata. Children in Java who had
been exposed to the Mahabharata seemed to be more tolerant,
according to the British historian Benedict Anderson.47 Claude
Helvetius, the Enlightenment thinker, recommended that to make
a child ‘humane and compassionate’,48 one had to ‘habituate him
from a tender age to put himself in the place of the miserable’.
Psychologists’ studies show how our moral attitudes and
dispositions are formed in infancy. Psychologists tell us that an
infant is ‘omnipotent’ or ‘pure ego’ as it emerges from the womb,
+ and slowly begins to distinguish the difference between itself +
and external objects. It is curious about the world. It explores
faces and begins to delight with the world. Thus, it forms
attachments to others beyond itself. And as the child extends its
‘circle of concern’ beyond itself to others, it learns to become
more compassionate and ethical. Indeed, this is how Jean Jacques
Rousseau expected Emile to learn compassion. Emile’s teacher
taught him to focus on the common vulnerability of human
beings. As Rousseau puts it, our fragile happiness is born from
our weakness.49
Nishkama karma is valuable if only to remind one that a person
without vanity is an appealing human being, who is lucky to be
freed from the unhappy bondage of the human ego. It may be
one of the reasons that so many literary figures have been
attracted to the Gita. T.S. Eliot compared the Gita to Dante’s
Divine Comedy in its greatness as a philosophical poem. He spoke
about love beyond desire, and felt that nishkama karma could
liberate one from the future and from the past:

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 143

This is the use of memory:

For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.50

Eliot seemed to find here the answer to the riddle of life and of
death and time. He agrees with Krishna that striving after the
‘fruits’ of an illusory future is futile and even destructive. One
must learn to live in the present moment like a karma yogi, an
attitude that is consistent with the existential ethic popular in
Eliot’s time after the collapse of the Enlightenment project and
the despair brought on by the futile World War I. Hence, he
advises one to act with the mind fixed, not on the fruits (future)
but on the pleasure one gets in performing the activity, in being
alive and vital in the present. He imagines Krishna telling Arjuna:

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being
+ The mind of a man may be intent
+
At the time of death’—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.51

P.S.: ‘One bird eats the fruit while the other watches’

If I was going to learn to diminish my ‘self’ as a part of my

nishkama karma project, I felt I needed to learn something about
my ‘self’. Since this search is not central to my quest for dharma,
I have added it here as an optional postscript for the reader who
might be interested in the nature of human consciousness.
My father held the traditional Hindu view that the real ‘self’ is
an immortal soul or spirit, atman, and is not to be confused with

+
 +

144 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the phenomenal self of my subjective feeling of ‘I-ness’, which he

believed to be illusory. My own starting point, however, was this
illusory sense of ‘I-ness’. Indians have long been fascinated by
the nature of the ‘self’. They observed in the Upanishads that the
sense-of-‘I’ was present in every human activity. It persisted
whether a person was awake, dreaming, or asleep. Even after
waking from the deepest slumber, one recognized that it was the
same ‘I’ that had been dreaming. However, one could not identify
the ‘I’ with the human body or any of the individual’s senses.
Nor could one say that the human mind was the real ‘self’, for
all mental states had something constant other than the mind as
their referent. Through a process of elimination, the Upanishads
concluded that the real self must transcend the material world.
Through a further process of inference, they arrived at an even
bolder and more startling conclusion—this atman, which is present
in all living beings, is identical with the ultimate principle of the
universe, brahman. They famously stated this identity as aham
+ brahma asmi. +
Because humans have an impressive capacity for thinking,
imagining and acting to shape our world, the Upanishads felt
there must be a link between the energy of human beings and
that of the universe; behind our world of distinct and separate
objects, there must be a fundamental unity. My father believed
that the purpose of life is to achieve and experience this identity
and liberate oneself from our fragmented, finite and suffering
existence. The Gita offers multiple paths by which one can fulfil
this purpose of life—through meditation or knowledge, or selfless
action (about which we have just been speaking), or devotion
and love.
In pursuit of this aim, Indians began to elaborate early on
mental exercises or meditative disciplines, which became known
by the generic term ‘yoga’. The earliest references to yoga are
found in the Upanishads, but over time many different kinds of
yoga developed. The word ‘yoga’ comes from the Sanskrit root
yuj, ‘to yoke’—in the sense of yoking one thing to another—the

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 145

point being to merge or unite the atman, the ‘soul’, with the
brahman, ‘universal essence’. Although the ontology varies from
system to system, the common starting point is that ordinary
daily life is characterized by ‘being led astray’ by our phenomenal
‘self’ (our sense of I-ness, ahamkara) and the distracting busy-ness
of one’s mind and everyday activity. Patanjali stated the purpose
of yoga concisely in the first sentence of his classic Yoga Sutras:
chitta-vritti-nirodha, ‘calm the ceaseless activity of the mind’.
Through mental steadiness, right breathing and benevolence
towards others, one’s mind becomes ‘one-pointed’ and prepares
to distance itself from the deluded sense of I-ness, recognizing
the true ‘self’.52
The Buddha, in the sixth century BC, challenged the very
existence of the immutable ‘self’ (atman). One is conscious, he
said, of countless and changing sensations and thoughts, and one
mistakenly assumes there is a permanent entity that is ‘the
thinker of thoughts, feeler of sensations’. But this ‘idea of the self
+ is an imaginary, a false belief’ which has no corresponding +
reality.53 The Buddhist doctrine that denies a permanent ‘self’ or
soul is called ‘not-self’ (anatman in Sanskrit, anatta in Pali). If the
‘self’ does not exist, then one is not distracted by the need to
‘save’ or liberate it. One can focus on being good in the world,
an idea that fits in nicely with the overall Buddhist goal of
compassion. (Buddhist scholars have long wrestled with the
dilemma that if there is no ‘self’, then the standard arguments for
moral responsibility fall apart as well.)54
In the West, David Hume embarked on a similar search in
1739. He wrote: ‘When I enter most intimately into what I call
myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other,
of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.
I never can catch myself.’55 Hume did not find his ‘self’, but
Descartes, the seventeenth century French philosopher, did. He
concluded his ‘self’ was not his brain, but it did exist, nevertheless,
because ‘I think, therefore I am’. He convinced me that the mind
and body are two distinct entities, and ever since, I have pictured

+
 +

146 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the ‘self’ as a sort of ghost sitting behind my eyes which owns

and controls my body just as I control my car.56
Contemporary thinkers in the West have mostly rejected
Descartes’s ‘dualism’ of mind and body in favour of ‘materialism’
of the body alone. Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of the Mind deeply
influenced their thinking when it first came out in 1949,
persuading them that the mind is also purely physical—it is just
the brain. It is like the computer’s central operating system,
organizing and directing the rest of the body’s functions. There
is no ghost, no soul, no spirit; dualism is a fallacy. Neo-Darwinian
evolutionary theory, and the writings of Richard Dawkins and
others in the 1970s and 1980s, further reinforced scientific
materialism. However, the question remains: no matter how the
mind and body interact, how did this operating system develop
the sense of the ‘self’?
Contemporary consciousness theorists in the West follow a
similar line of thinking. Daniel Dennet, the American philosopher
+ turned cognitive scientist, believes that the ‘self’ is not a real +
entity in the universe, something which particle physics or
neuroscientists can identify. It is a mistake to start looking for it
in the brain: there is no thinker behind our thoughts. All that one
is aware of is a stream of thoughts and feelings. Virginia Woolf,
the writer, made a similar observation:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary

day. The mind receives myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From
all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable
atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life
of Monday or Tuesday the accent falls differently from of
old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so
that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his
work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there
would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 147

or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a

single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have
it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged;
but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end.57

Dennet goes on to explain that the self is somewhat like the

narrator in fiction.58 He argues that man acquired consciousness
because he happened to have a brain that was larger than what
he needed purely for evolutionary purposes. He speculates that
before human beings learned to speak, our primitive ancestors
‘just blurted things out’ unconsciously. ‘Then one day one of our
ancestors asked a question in what was apparently an
inappropriate circumstance: there was nobody around to be the
audience. Strangely enough, he heard his own question, and this
stimulated him cooperatively to think of an answer, and sure
+ enough the answer came to him. One component of the mind +
had confronted a problem that another component could solve.
Sometimes talking and listening to oneself can have wonderful
effects.’
The Mahabharata is aware of this primordial dialogue between
our two selves. The Mundaka Upanishad gives the example of
two plumed birds in a peepul tree. One eats the fruit, while the
other, eating nothing, looks on intently:

Two birds, twin images

in plumage,
friends, ever inseparable,
cling to a tree.

One eats the fruit,

eats of the sweet and eats
of the bitter,
while the other watches,
watches without eating.

+
 +

148 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Buried in the bole

of the self-same tree
one suffers, engulfed
in his impotence.

Yet as he watches the watching

bird, the adorable one, and sees
the sweet bitter glory
as His alone,
he rises, free
from grief.59

We are two selves inside, one that is doing and acting and
another that is watching the one who is doing. The Upanishad
goes further and suggests that in this duality is an intimation of
the idea of the human and the divine: the bird who eats the fruit
is the human self, while the witness is the spirit or the principle
of the divine.
+ Contemporary thinkers increasingly liken consciousness to
+
literature. The self’s interaction with an object, says Antonio
Tomasio, is a ‘simple narrative without words. It [has] characters.
It unfolds in time. And it has a beginning, middle and an end.’60
However, not all of these theorists dismiss the ‘autobiographical
self’ as an illusion. They are content to leave it as ‘an inner
sense’.61 The ‘I-maker’ seems like a literary narrator because
literature is so good at capturing what cognitive theorists call
qualia or the sensory content of subjective experience, the ‘raw
feeling’.62 It is the ‘painfulness of pain, the scent of sandalwood,
the taste of Bourbon-Vanilla or the extraordinary sound quality
in the tone of a cello.’63
The problem of consciousness comes down to the problem of
how to give an objective, third person account of what is
essentially a subjective, first person phenomenon. In a famous
essay called ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel
concludes that the only way to experience what a bat experiences

+
 +

Bhishma’s Selflessness / 149

is to be a bat. 64 Indeed, according to the distinguished

neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran, the ‘need to reconcile the
first person and third person accounts of the universe . . . is the
single most important problem in science.’65 This goes back to
the question that Descartes puzzled over: how can consciousness
arise in a purely physical universe? Today, the problem of
consciousness—perhaps together with the question of the origin
of the universe—marks the very limit of human striving for
understanding. It is the ‘the last great puzzle’, says Thomas
Metzinger.66
Religions have always been suspicious of the ‘self’. Hindus
think of the ‘I-maker’ (ahamkara) as the source of all human
problems. Christianity exhorts people to suppress the sinful
‘self’, and be selfless and humble. In the Middle Ages, the
Catholic Church tried to restrain human desire on the premise
that the individual was wayward and dangerously unstable;
thus, he had to submit to authority. The Renaissance, however,
+ challenged this premise, and a new awareness of the self began
+
to emerge, which represented a major break in Western thought.
Jacob Burckhardt provides the classic account of how a radical
new consciousness was born. He writes, ‘In the Middle Ages . . .
man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race,
people, party, family, or corporation—only some general category
. . . [In Renaissance Italy] man became an individual, and
recognized himself as such. This thought led to the humanist
movement, which encouraged people to be more self-confident,
and, in fact, take a delight in being human.’67
Although Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not inclined to feel this
delight, he is a good example of the birth of the subject and an
autonomous self in Renaissance literature. When he says, ‘To be,
or not to be’,68 he is not merely expressing self-doubt or weariness
with the world. When he adds a little later, ‘conscience does
make cowards of us all’,69 he is not just displaying anger or
uncertainty or moral upheaval. He is making us aware of a rich

+
 +

150 / The Difficulty of Being Good

interior self, confident in its desire to fashion itself—an impulse

that came into being in the Renaissance.70
By the early seventeenth century a new subjectivity had
emerged in the West, what we today call ‘liberal’, ‘humanist’ or
‘bourgeois’. Hegel captured this positive new individuality. The
growth of rationalism in the eighteenth century culminated in
Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’. The Cartesian cogito fostered
a conscious, self-determining individual as the one certainty in
the universe. By the mid-nineteenth century this humanist
affirmation of the individual had become ‘self-reliance’ in the
America of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A positive sense of self also
infected educated persons in India during the British Raj, and
this led to the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ in the nineteenth century and
the movement for independence in the twentieth century. In the
same way it has influenced almost all cultures around the globe
in the making of the modern world.
Nishkama karma forced me to think about the nature of the self.
+ I have concluded that I am comfortably ensconced in the broad
+
humanistic tradition of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and William
James, although I do not agree with everything they say. I am
attracted to the concept of the self as a unique, autonomous,
morally responsible human being whose inner life can be known
through introspection. For this, I do not have to believe in the
existence of an immortal soul (atman), nor worry if the mind and
the body are separate. Unlike Dennet or Buddhist monks, I do
not feel the need to call the ‘self’ an illusion. I do not mind using
the words ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ to signify some uniquely valuable
quality in human awareness. I am content to admit modestly
that ‘something like the sense of self does exist in the human
mind as we go about knowing things’. And if the ‘self’ turns out
to be a fiction, then ‘it may perhaps be the supreme fiction, the
greatest achievement of human consciousness, the one that makes
us human’.71

+
 +

KARNA’S STATUS ANXIETY

How could a doe give birth to a tiger?

How could a doe give birth to a tiger who resembles the sun, with his
earrings and armour and celestial birthmarks? This lordly man deserves
to rule the world!
+ —Duryodhana, leaping up like ‘a rutting elephant
+
from a lotus pond’, Mahabharata, I.127.151

‘No more fiendish punishment could be devised than that one

should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed
. . . If no one turned around when we entered, answered when
we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met
“cut us dead” and acted as if we were non-existent things, a kind
of rage and impotent despair would well up in us.’2 So wrote the
American philosopher William James about the common human
anxiety over status. His observation is an apt description of
Karna’s worry over his social position in the Mahabharata. Karna
is the most exciting figure in the epic, and his tragic struggle over
his identity made me think beyond questions of status to our
common notions of inequality, caste, fidelity, and even generosity.
My own moral journey in search of dharma was considerably
enriched by Karna’s tragic story.

151

+
 +

152 / The Difficulty of Being Good

‘Whatever you have done, I shall do better’

When the sons of Pandu and Dhritarashtra were young, they

were trained in the martial arts by the brahmin Drona. One day
the king, on the advice of their teacher, decides to hold a
tournament to display their skills in a public assembly.3 Invitations
are sent far and wide. On the chosen day, princes, nobles and
common people gather. The crowds ‘like an ocean, rippling in
waves’ fill the stands to observe the great spectacle. In the royal
stand, ‘decked with gold leaf and screened off by pearl-studded
lattice’, sit King Dhritarashtra, Queen Gandhari and Kunti, the
mother of the Pandavas. Watching ‘the powerful bulls of the
Bharatas descend with their bows, armour, and belts tightened,’
the spectators are ‘wonderstruck’. Arjuna, in particular, appears
‘like a rain cloud . . . aglow with lightning’ and he wins the
crowd’s heart.

When the rising theatre had somehow calmed, the Terrifier [Arjuna]
+ +
began to exhibit his different weapons. With the agneya he created
fire, with the varuna water, with the vayavya wind, with the
paranjaya rain; with the bhauma he entered the earth; with the
parvata he brought forth mountains. With a disappearing weapon,
he made it all vanish. One instant he stood tall, the next squat; he
was up in front of the chariot, the next instant he jumped to the
ground.4

The people cry, ‘he is the greatest in arms, the upholder of

dharma’.
When the tournament is almost over, the crowd has thinned,
and the music stopped, there comes from the area of the gate the
sound of arms being slapped, like the crash of a thunderbolt.

All the spectators looked towards the gate . . . and Karna . . .

entered the arena, wearing his inborn armour, his face lit by
earrings. Carrying his bow and sword . . . was this magnificent
son of the Sun.5

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 153

By birth, Karna is the son of Surya, the sun god, and Kunti, the
Pandava queen. When she was a young girl, Kunti had looked
after the ill-tempered sage Durvasa with extraordinary hospitality.
Durvasa rewarded her with a boon—a mantra by which she
could invoke any god and have a child by him. After she married
Pandu and discovered he could not have children, Kunti used
this boon to obtain three sons—Yudhishthira, Bhima and Arjuna—
from the gods Dharma, Vayu and Indra respectively. Long
before her marriage, however, she had accidentally invoked
Surya, and discovered too late that the boon worked. She found
herself with an unwanted child, Karna, who was born wearing a
protective armour and earrings of immortality, which made his
ears shine with splendour.6
Ashamed of the baby and desperate to hide her affair with the
sun god, Kunti sets the infant afloat on the river and prays for
his safety. The baby is picked up by Adhiratha, a charioteer, who
takes it home to his childless wife, Radha. They bring up the
+ child with warmth and affection. Even as he grows up as a
+
charioteer’s son, this prince by birth manages to acquire
extraordinary martial skills and yearns to be a champion warrior.

The strong-armed champion glanced about the circle of stands,

[and] with none too great courtesy, bowed to Drona and Kripa.
The entire crowd was hushed and stared at him, and a shudder
went through the people as they wondered who this stranger was.
With a voice rumbling like a thunderhead, the son of the Sun,
spoke to his unrecognized brother: ‘Partha [Arjuna]! Whatever
you have done, I shall do better!’7

To everyone’s amazement the stranger fulfils his promise.8 Next,

Karna challenges Arjuna to a duel. As the two heroes get ready
and the spectators begin to take sides, Kunti, who knows the
stranger’s identity, faints. Vidura, ever solicitous, splashes her
‘with water in which sandalwood had been sprinkled’, and she
revives. She stares in grief at her two sons.

+
 +

154 / The Difficulty of Being Good

As the two fighters raise their bows, the match referee, Kripa,
announces that the rules require Karna to make his identity
known. ‘This is the youngest son of Pandu, born from Pritha, a
scion of Kuru, who will engage you in a duel, sir. You too must
identify yourself. Tell us the name of your mother, your father,
and your kshatriya lineage. Only then may Partha [Arjuna] fight
with you.’ When he hears this, Karna’s face fades ‘like a lotus
that has been showered by the rain’.9
Duryodhana seizes the moment. Realizing that this warrior
might come in handy one day in his fight against the Pandavas,
he comes to Karna’s rescue.10 ‘According to the rules,’ he
announces, ‘there are three ways to become a king: to be born
one, to become a hero, or to lead an army.11 If Arjuna is not
permitted to duel with one who is not a king, I shall anoint him
king of Anga.’
Thus Karna is consecrated on the field by the Vedic rites, and
when the cheers subside an old man enters the scene ‘sweating
+ and trembling . . . swaying on his feet, held up by a stick’.
+

When Karna saw [Adhiratha] he let go of his bow and moved by

reverence for his father, he greeted him with his head, which was
still wet with water from his consecration. Nervously, the chariot
driver covered his feet with the end of his dhoti, and said to the
crowned Karna, ‘Ah, my son!’12

Overhearing this exchange, Bhima realizes that Karna is a mere

charioteer’s son, and he bursts out laughing. ‘Son of a charioteer,
you don’t have the right to die in a fight with Arjuna! Better stick
to the whip which suits your family,’ he jeers.13 At these words,
there is a slight tremor on Karna’s lower lip. But Duryodhana
again comes to his rescue. He declares that the greatest warriors
do not think of origins. Besides, Karna, he adds, appears to be a
hero:

How could a doe give birth to a tiger that shines like the sun?14

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 155

At this moment the sun goes down and the tournament comes to
a close. Kunti is filled with pleasure, having found her lost son.15
Duryodhana is happy to have discovered a great warrior, someone
who can match Arjuna. Yudhishthira’s fear, however, begins to
grow. So, the scene ends.

‘I do not choose a charioteer!’

Human beings tend to view each other in accordance with their

place in the world. Unlike Bhima, however, most of us do a
better job of hiding our feelings. Some societies are more
hierarchical than others, and it is difficult to escape one’s origins.
The Mahabharata is set in such a social order. Karna is slighted
constantly and the epithet sutaputra, ‘charioteer’s son’, dogs him
all his life.
What hurts most is the power of the snub, especially when a
beautiful woman delivers it. Karna discovers this to his
+ humiliation when he goes to the court of Drupada, the Panchala +
king, to vie for his daughter’s hand. It is the occasion of her
swayamvara, ‘bride choice’, when the princess Draupadi will
choose a husband. Young, ambitious noblemen are gathered
from near and far. To help her select the best man she poses a
test—the winner must string an extremely stiff bow and with it
hit a golden target suspended in the sky. All the princes fail,
except Karna, in a variant reading of the text. But the beautiful,
haughty princess rejects the unwanted suitor because of his low
birth. She says:

I do not choose a charioteer!16

Arjuna, on the other hand, succeeds in winning her hand. Karna

leaves dejectedly, but the undercurrent of sexual desire for
Draupadi does not go away. We are reminded how difficult it is
to escape one’s origins in pre-modern societies.
Like most people, Karna wants to be ‘somebody’. It must have
hurt to sit in the stands at the tournament, ignored, as Arjuna

+
 +

156 / The Difficulty of Being Good

enjoyed the admiration of the world. Later, when his own skill
is discovered and he is praised by the crowd, Karna begins to
feel worthy. Anxiety about one’s place in the world tends to
distort one’s character. It makes Karna excessively proud. Like
Achilles in the Iliad, he refuses to fight at the beginning of the
war because he has been slighted by Bhishma.17
Status anxiety also makes him boastful and self-promoting,
something that does not go down well with the noblemen of the
old school. Bhishma chides him, ‘Although [Karna] always boasts,
saying “I shall slay the Pandavas”, he doesn’t possess even a
small part of the Pandavas’ great soul.’18 Kripa, the instructor of
martial arts, finds him exasperating, ‘Son of a charioteer, you
growl like an autumn cloud that is without water!’19 To which
Karna replies good-naturedly, ‘Heroes always thunder like storm
clouds in the monsoon, but like a seed dropped to the earth in
the [rainy] season they quickly bear fruit.’20
Boasting is, of course, a critical part of heroic poetry. A noble
+ +
hero is expected to show pride and disdain in order to evoke the
heroic rasa, ‘mood’.21 But Karna also boasts in order to ‘to be
observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy,
complacency and approbation’.22 The attention of other people
matters because human beings are uncertain of their own worth.
The writer Alain de Botton explains that our sense of identity
is held hostage to the opinion of others: ‘We may not admit it,
but the truth is that we all seek to be loved by the world. When
we are babies, we are loved whether we burp or scream or break
our toys. But as we grow up, we are suddenly thrown into a
world where people judge us by our achievements or our status
(rather than as our mothers did). Hence our anxiety about how
we are perceived. No human being is immune from this
weakness.’23 The ego (ahamkara, ‘the ‘I-maker’) is a ‘leaky balloon,
forever requiring helium of external love to remain inflated, and
ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect. There is
something at once sobering and absurd in the extent to which we

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 157

are lifted by the attentions of others and sunk by their disregard.’24

Even great heroes like Yudhishthira and Arjuna are guilty of this
sort of vanity.

We all want to be ‘somebody’

In feudal societies, people worried less about their social position.

Status was determined at birth and there was little hope for
moving upwards. Indeed, if Karna had not possessed outstanding
talent and a burning ambition, he might have led a reasonably
well-adjusted life as a charioteer’s son. But he was a kshatriya
warrior who, the epic tells us, had an inborn svabhava, ‘natural
inclination’, for a heroic life. He wanted to learn the use of the
Brahmastra, the highest martial art. Even when Drona told him
that only a brahmin or a kshatriya was permitted to learn it,
Karna did not give up. He was driven to realize his natural
potential.
+ Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French traveller, observed +
far greater status anxiety in nineteenth century America (the first
truly modern society) than in feudal Europe, where there was
much less social mobility. In India too, there has been a growth
in unease about one’s status with the rise of democracy over the
past sixty years. Lower caste persons can now aspire to higher
status, and this causes unease among high-caste Indians who
worry about their own position. This anxiety has intensified after
the 1991 reforms, when India embraced the market and
affirmative action for the ‘other backward castes’. The rapid
growth in the middle class has resulted in upward mobility—
and with it insecurity about one’s position.
The modern Indian middle class originated with the coming of
the new professions in the nineteenth century. The British needed
educated Indians to collect revenue, man the railways, guard the
forests, and argue in the courts—in short, to run the country. My
grandfather was one of these men. He was largely self-made. He
came from a village and found success as a lawyer in the

+
 +

158 / The Difficulty of Being Good

provincial town of Lyallpur in the old undivided Punjab. The

memory of village poverty was never far from his mind, and he
transmitted it to his children. Should his legal practice fail, the
family faced the catastrophe of returning to a life of poverty in
the village. This powerful association in his mind between low
rank and catastrophe denied his offspring the emotional security
to go out into the world with confidence about their own value.
And these fears, I think, flowed down the generations to me
through the insecurities of my mother.
My grandfather’s status rose when he married his daughters
to Class I officials of the colonial bureaucracy. The eldest married
an official in the Indian Railways, who impressed us because he
travelled in a luxurious saloon-on-wheels. The second married a
professor of English in the anglicized Government College at
Lahore. He was an accomplished tennis and bridge player and
this gave him an entry into a social world denied to the rest of
the family. When he came to visit us in Lyallpur, he did not fail
+ to casually drop important names in his conversation. The third,
+
my mother, married a civil engineer in the Punjab government’s
department of irrigation; and the fourth, an officer in the Indian
army. By marrying his daughters sensibly to high-ranking
professionals, my grandfather bought social status and security
for his family. We rose from the middle to the upper middle
class in two generations.
I remember vividly my own anxieties about our family’s
status when I was a schoolboy in Simla, soon after Independence.
My father was a shy mid-level government official, a man
content with his own company. But my mother wanted ‘to see
and to be seen’; she wanted to mix with the elite of Simla; she
wanted to be a ‘somebody’—and she lived in fear that her own
world was insignificant compared to the grand world beyond.
The natural solution was to join ‘the club’, the ADC. Although it
had begun as an Amateur Dramatics Club, a sort of extension to
the Gaiety Theatre during the British days, it was now mainly a

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 159

social club and, more importantly, the meeting place of the

fashionable in Simla. Unfortunately, with three children in private
school, my mother couldn’t afford it.
I must have been ten years old when a bachelor friend of our
family’s saw me one day outside the ADC, peering in with
yearning curiosity. He put his arm around me. ‘Come, my boy,
let’s go into the Green Room for a cup of tea,’ he said. We were
greeted by the hall porter and we walked past smoke-filled card
rooms to another room full of young people and laughter. I
looked around me with awe. Bearers in starched white uniforms
with green cummerbunds and sashes and tassels were gliding
between the tables. ‘So, this is where the smart people of Simla
meet,’ I thought. As my host hailed a group of young people to
join us, I was intoxicated by my first encounter with an
inaccessible and forbidden world—the glamour, the clothes, the
sophistication of language and manners. I imagined these people
dwelling in big houses, with tall hedges and high gates, leading
+ a life quite unlike my own.
+
Among them I recognized a girl from my school. She was
stylishly dressed and looked beautiful. I kept looking at her,
hoping she would recognize me. But she looked through me.
Even when I smiled at her she ignored me. I couldn’t sleep for
weeks thinking of her. I have known many snobs in my life, but
no one quite matched her in my memory. I got to know her
better later in life but she had not changed. Like all snobs, she
continued to see the world in hierarchical terms. Her life was
dedicated to flattering the influential and ignoring the humble.
She had only one yardstick—she judged people by their position
in the world.
This was the first of many painful episodes in my anxiety-
ridden adolescence. Although I have grown more confident with
age, status anxiety continues to plague me. I feel the need to
impress strangers—to tell them I am a ‘somebody’. Recently, at
the hospital in Delhi where I had gone for a check-up, I found

+
 +

160 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the duty nurse leafing absently through the Times of India. I

urged her to turn to page 14. She looked puzzled, but then she
found my column with my picture next to it. She smiled and I
was relieved that she knew I was not a ‘nobody’. It was pathetic!
Why should the opinion of the duty nurse, whom I might never
see again, matter to me? The truth is that one’s ego is a ‘leaky
balloon’ that needs constantly to be refilled through the praise
and attention of others.25 In my years in the corporate world, I
discovered the truth of the saying, ‘A man will not sell his life to
you, but will give it to you for a piece of ribbon.’ Good managers
are aware of this human desire for recognition, and they are able
to motivate their employees by praising them liberally, thus
getting the best out of them.

‘Brahma emitted brahmins from his mouth’

People everywhere want to feel superior to others. Hence, status

+ anxiety is a universal problem. But only in India has hierarchy +
been rigidly institutionalized and sanctioned by tradition. India’s
caste system separated the social classes and did not tolerate
marriages between them; it did not allow them to sit and eat
together; and it restricted their occupations. No wonder Karna’s
story resonates in this India.
Although there is no definitive theory about the origin of the
Indian caste system, J.H. Hutton, a respected British census
commissioner, offered a plausible account. He described the
Indian subcontinent as ‘a deep net’ into which various races and
peoples of Asia drifted over time and were caught.26 The tall
Himalayas in the north and the sea in the west, east and south
isolated this net from the rest of the world, which led to the
development of a unique, plural society, in which diverse peoples
of different colours, languages and customs have lived together
in reasonable stability. According to this theory, the caste system
made it possible for people of great diversity to live together in
a single social system over thousands of years. Caste was thus a

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 161

natural response to historic migrations and folk wanderings of

many peoples and tribes who came to India over thousands of
years and made it their home. Every time a new intruder
arrived, it was absorbed by begetting a new jati, ‘sub-caste’.
In the classic four-caste hierarchy, the brahmin, ‘priest, teacher’,
is at the top, followed by the kshatriya, variously ‘landholder,
warrior, ruler’. The vaishya, ‘businessman’, comes third, and the
shudra, ‘labourer’, is last. Below the four are casteless
‘untouchables’ or Dalits and tribal people. In the Mahabharata,
King Shalya reminds us of the origin of this four-caste hierarchy:

Brahma emitted brahmins from his mouth and kshatriyas from his
arms. He emitted vaishyas from his thighs and shudras from his
feet. This is sacred learning! And from them then came the special
social classes—those born against the grain and those with the
grain—because of the intermixture of the four social classes with
one another, Bharata. Kshatriyas are traditionally regarded as
+ protectors, gatherers of wealth and benefactors. Learned brahmins +
were deposited on earth in order to assist people by offering
sacrifices, teaching and accepting pure gifts. According to the law,
vaishyas have agriculture, animal husbandry and giving. And
shudras have been decreed as the servants of brahmins, kshatriyas
and vaishyas. Charioteers have been decreed as the servants of
brahmins and kshatriyas. In no way should a kshatriya listen to
anything from charioteers!27

The three upper castes constitute roughly 15 per cent of today’s

India but they have ruled the country for millennia. About half
of India is shudra, divided among hundreds of sub-castes. Some
are occupational—cobblers and carpenters, for example; others
are geographic. About 20 per cent of Indians are ‘untouchable’
Dalits. (The remaining 15 per cent Indians belong to other
religions—12 per cent Muslim; the rest Sikh, Christian, Parsi etc.)
The common mistake is to confuse the four classic castes (varnas)
of the Mahabharata and the Sanskrit texts with the thousands of

+
 +

162 / The Difficulty of Being Good

local sub-castes or jatis, which really matter in people’s day-to-

day lives. There are about 3,000 such jatis, and their members
broadly identify themselves with the four historical varnas. Some
are social in origin; others are occupational; some are territorial.
People of one jati often share a vocation, and will not marry or
dine outside the jati. As they become prosperous, jatis tend to
rise in the social scale from one varna to another. For example, oil
pressers in Bengal upgraded themselves from shudra to vaishya
several generations ago.
Once India became politically free in 1947, its liberal-minded
leaders lost no time in abolishing ‘untouchability’, and making
its practice a criminal offence. Wide-ranging affirmative action
programmes were launched and roughly 22 per cent of seats
were reserved in colleges, universities and jobs in the government.
In this manner, the new nation attempted to atone for centuries
of injustice. But if the original aim was to lift the most backward
people, the initiative gradually became a tool to demand a share
+ of patronage. There has been continuous clamour in India for
+
more quotas. The Congress-led coalition government that came
to power in 2004 tried to extend quotas to Other Backward
Castes in all institutions of higher learning to 49.5 per cent, thus
effectively reducing seats available on merit to half. It justified
this step on moral grounds, but it was obvious to everyone that
it was a vote-getting ploy.
One cannot legislate away thousands of years of bad behaviour.
Prejudice persists in contemporary India although the old
untouchability is gradually disappearing in the modern urban
economy. A Dalit middle class has emerged thanks to affirmative
action programmes. Although caste barriers are rapidly fading
in the cities, competitive politics have created ‘vote banks’ in the
rural areas and strengthened the consciousness of caste. I wonder,
along with many Indians, if the nation has gone too far. Something
is wrong, I feel, when half the government jobs and seats in
colleges may not go to the most talented.

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 163

There are, however, strong arguments for affirmative action,

which have been made both by the US and the Indian Supreme
Courts. While American courts have always opposed quotas or
reservations (on grounds of reverse discrimination and unequal
treatment for equals), they have enthusiastically supported
vigorous efforts to raise the status of blacks and women on
grounds of diversity and integration. Even in the two famous
judgments in the case of the University of Michigan in June 2003,
Justice O’Connor wrote glowingly about the benefits of a diverse
student body. But the morally stronger reason for preferences,
which she did not emphasize enough, is that a university’s role
is to develop leaders for a nation in all fields and from all
communities. If India’s future leaders in commerce, arts and the
professions come only from the 15 per cent upper castes, the
losers would not be the low castes alone, but also the Indian
people, who would have failed to create a healthy civil society.
In the same way, it would be a diminished United States if all its
+ leaders were white.28 The recent election of Barack Obama in the
+
US and Mayawati in India makes the point.
The poet Rabindranath Tagore made out a case based on the
restitution of historical wrongs in one of his songs: ‘O my
unfortunate country/Those whom you humiliated,/In humiliation
you will have to be/Equal to all of them.’29 But there is an
obvious problem in trying to correct historical wrongs. Those
who did the wrongs are long dead; so are the victims. Why
should a young white male in the US today have to pay for the
wrongs done to the blacks by his ancestors? Or why should the
upper caste candidate in India today lose his place in the
university for the sake of discrimination practised by upper
castes for thousands of years?
There are three objections to affirmative action: it is inefficient,
it is unfair, and it damages self-esteem.30 Those better qualified
will perform better as doctors, engineers or electricians, and
society will have to bear the cost of this inefficiency when you

+
 +

164 / The Difficulty of Being Good

have preferential admissions—this is the argument for efficiency.

The unfairness argument is that you treat equals as unequal or
you engage in reverse discrimination when you practise
affirmative action, and this subverts the ideal of equality under
the law. Finally, you damage the self-esteem of the beneficiaries
(even those who would have got in regardless) who must live
with the stigma for life. These are all strong arguments for not
having preferences, and I agree with him. But they do not
outweigh the need for ‘exceptional measures to remove the
stubborn residues of racial caste’. Hence, I go along with
affirmative action, but do not favour numerical quotas. I also
believe that affirmative action must be a temporary step and not
remain for perpetuity.
When the Indian cabinet met in May 2006 to consider the
proposal for raising caste reservations in institutions of higher
learning from 22.5 per cent to 49.5 per cent it ought to have
played the following thought game. It should have imagined
+ that it is the admissions committee of one of India’s top colleges.
+
It has to choose whether to admit the son of a backward-caste
but wealthy businessman from a posh South Delhi address who
received low marks or the son of a poor brahmin schoolteacher
from a village in Orissa who scored much higher marks. Under
the cabinet’s proposal, it would be forced to admit the privileged,
lower-scoring son of the lower caste businessman and reject the
higher-scoring son of the poor, high-caste schoolteacher.
There are a number of lessons to be learned from this thought
game. First, our innate sense of fairness seems to accept more
easily affirmative action on behalf of the poor rather than the
low caste. Second, lowering admission standards for one group
appears to be unfair because it treats equals unequally and
offends our idea of a just, merit-based society. Third, it is
especially unjust when beneficiaries of reservations are prosperous
low caste persons, whom the Indian Supreme Court calls the
‘creamy layer’.

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 165

Is there a better way to lift the low caste persons than through
quotas in higher education and in jobs? The answer, I believe, is
through scholarships paid by the state, beginning in kindergarten,
and continued through high school and up to college. The
scholarship programme ought to be based on economic criteria
rather than caste. (The poor are likely to be of low caste, but at
least this preserves the idea that one is not building a divisive,
‘casteist’ society.)
In the year-long national debate in 2006 on extending quotas
to the ‘other backward castes’, there was much talk about
compromising merit. During the debate I found that people used
the word ‘merit’ as though it were a fixed and absolute thing.
But I find that merit in one society may not be the same as in
another. It depends on the way a society defines it.31 When
Arjuna pierced the target, he performed an act of merit and was
suitably rewarded with Draupadi’s hand. In the contemporary
Indian society, Draupadi would be more likely to choose a high
+ performer in the competitive exam for admission into one of the +
Indian Institutes of Technology. A well-functioning society
rewards talented persons whose actions further their idea of a
good society.
In the private sector it is easier to spot merit and reward it. If
one’s actions consistently increase the company’s profit, one gets
promoted and one’s fellow employees think it fair. In the public
sphere, citizens of a nation would like to reward those who
promote the common good. The quota debate has forced Indians
to think about their idea of the common good. For the philosopher
John Rawls, a good action is related in some way to lifting the
worst off in society, as we have seen. For Amartya Sen, it would
lessen inequality, and hence he has consistently supported
reservations for Dalits. As a libertarian, I would not go that far.
The key point is that there is no natural order of ‘merit’ that is
independent of one’s value system.
On the face of it, rewarding those who combine intelligence
with effort and score high marks, which gets them into good

+
 +

166 / The Difficulty of Being Good

colleges, does not seem unfair. These are probably the individuals
who will go on to build competitive companies, and these in
turn will create thousands of jobs and help the nation compete in
the global economy. But Lani Guinier, law professor at Harvard,
questions if these exams are, in fact, the best selectors of talent.
If she is correct, then we ought to re-look at our selection exams
and ensure that they not only remove a bias against the low
castes but are good predictors of future performance.

‘Draupadi will, in time, approach you’

Karna struck a great blow against the Indian caste system when
he refused to switch sides. Krishna, the master strategist of the
Pandavas, realized that victory was going to be difficult with
Karna on the opposite side. After the failure of his final peace
mission at the Kaurava court, he takes Karna aside and makes a
desperate bid to win him over. He reveals to him the secret of his
+ royal birth. As Kunti’s son, Krishna tells him, Karna is the eldest +
Pandava. If he crosses over, he will be king. Yudhishthira, the
crown prince, will stand behind him holding the royal fan;
Bhima will hold his ‘great white umbrella’; all the Pandava allies,
kings and their noble sons, will pay tribute and touch his feet.32
Listing the long pageant that will follow his train, Krishna
proclaims:

Let the Pandavas sound out Karna’s triumph!

Surrounded by princes, you will be the moon with its stations.33

It is a tempting offer. Although Duryodhana had crowned Karna

king of Anga, he had in reality remained Duryodhana’s retainer;
he was never treated as a kshatriya, nor allowed to marry one.
Knowing Karna’s weakness for Draupadi, Krishna lures him also
with the prospect of enjoying Draupadi—he will share her as a
wife with his brothers.

Draupadi will, in time, approach you.34

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 167

But Karna, to his great credit, refuses to switch sides. (Some

Indians do not give him credit for his nobility of character, but
see in this act Karna’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge Krishna’s
divinity.) Karna tells Krishna that his loyalty is to Duryodhana,
who was there when he needed him. And it is not just a matter
of loyalty—it is a question of his word, which he has given
publicly. It would be a breach of dharma if he now joined the
other camp. ‘I cannot act in an untruthful way against the wise
son of Dhritarashtra’s,’ he says.35 Karna goes on to explain that
Kunti, his natural mother, abandoned him as though he were
inauspicious, while Radha, the charioteer’s wife, brought him
up. Hence, Radha is his true mother and Adhiratha his true
father: true parentage comes from affection and not from birth.36
In parting, Karna asks Krishna to keep his identity a secret from
the Pandavas. If a principled man, like Yudhishthira, were to
find out, he would immediately surrender the realm to his older
brother. And he, Karna, in turn, would be forced to pass it on to
+ Duryodhana. Therefore, ‘Let conscientious Yudhishthira be king
+
forever,’ he tells Krishna.37
Kunti now tries to get her son to cross over. She goes to look
for Karna and finds him praying on the banks of the Ganges. As
she waits in the shadow of his tall frame, he opens his eyes and
greets her with folded hands. ‘I am Karna, the son of Radha and
Adhiratha,’ he says. She tells him, no—he is her son, who came
into the world ‘as a divine child surrounded by beauty, with
earrings and armour’.38 He should return to his real family and
join his brothers.

If you and Arjuna are united nothing would be impossible in the

world.39

The Kauravas would be defeated, the realm that has been

expanded with Arjuna’s valour would be regained and Karna
would gain for himself the splendour that was Yudhishthira’s,
Kunti says. But the way she puts it, particularly in the importance

+
 +

168 / The Difficulty of Being Good

she gives to Arjuna’s role in expanding the kingdom and to

Yudhishthira’s status as its sovereign, reveals her unconscious
mind. Karna feels that she still places Yudhishthira and Arjuna
above him. Suffering from anxiety about his status and thus
sensitive to these nuances, he finds Kunti’s desire to get him
back functionally motivated and not driven by affection. Even an
appeal from his father, the sun god Surya, who instructs him to
‘obey his mother’s wishes’, does not make him waver.40
In reply, Karna addresses Kunti, not as ‘mother’, but formally
as ‘kshatriya lady’, a deliberate gesture on his part to make a
point about his low status. He tells her politely that he was
abandoned by her; so how could he be expected to have sympathy
for her as a mother? Worse, being abandoned meant that he was
denied fame and glory. Bitterly, he adds:

I was born a kshatriya, but never received what was due to a

kshatriya
+ What enemy would do anything so evil!41 +
He cannot cross over now, he says politely. It would imply that
he had joined Arjuna and Krishna out of fear. If he deserts his
friends and allies, they would not think of him as a ‘genuine
kshatriya’.42 Besides, he says, true dharma consists in respecting
the bonds with those who care and nurture you rather than mere
bonds of blood. In a parting gesture, he promises Kunti with
bitter graciousness that he will not slay any of the Pandava
brothers except Arjuna. She will thus always have her five sons.
If he falls there will be Arjuna, and if Arjuna falls he will be
there.43 Thus mother and son part, with Kunti trembling with
grief. The next time she sees her son, Karna is lying dead on the
battlefield at Kurukshetra.
When Karna told his mother that his ‘real parents’ were the
low caste family who had brought him up and not his royal
family to which he had been born, he was in effect rejecting the
claim that status arises from birth. In the feudal culture of the

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 169

Mahabharata this must have taken great courage. Moreover, to

stand up to his mother and resist her entreaties was also a daring
act in a society where one’s parents’ wishes are almost sacred.
Even more admirable, Karna showed a commitment to his word
and to Duryodhana. In the end, principle triumphed over his
hunger for status. In making this unselfish choice he holds up to
the audience an admirable sense of dharma. A grand moment,
indeed, in my journey in search of dharma!
Karna’s search for his identity reminds one of the terrible
mistake that society makes in forcing individuals to privilege
one identity over all the others. Karna has many identities: he is
a caring son, an outstanding warrior, a father, a husband, an
extremely generous person, a loyal friend of Duryodhana’s. Why
must his father’s background trump his many rich—perhaps, far
richer—identities and become the sole basis of his status in
society?

+ ‘Give me your right thumb’ +

Karna’s problems with identity have been eclipsed in

contemporary India by another young man from the Mahabharata.
Today, Ekalavya is the symbol of Dalit revolt and Dalit and
tribal rights. In Book One, the epic narrates the tale of Ekalavya,
the son of a Nishada chieftain, who comes to Drona with a
request to learn the martial arts.44 Nishadas were tribals who
hunted and were on the fringe of Hindu society. The brahmin
archery teacher refuses to accept the casteless pupil. The
disappointed Ekalavya touches his head to Drona’s feet and
leaves for the jungle. There he makes a clay image of Drona, and
before it he practices daily with great intensity and dedication,
while paying respect to his absent teacher. Soon he becomes a
great archer.
One day the Pandavas are out hunting, and their dog wanders
off and comes upon Ekalavya. The dog starts barking and to shut
him up Ekalavya shoots seven arrows around his mouth and

+
 +

170 / The Difficulty of Being Good

zips it up. The dog is not hurt and returns whimpering to the
Pandavas. They are amazed at this extraordinary feat. Ekalavya
informs them innocently that he is Drona’s pupil. Arjuna, Drona’s
star student, is shocked to hear that his teacher has a secret pupil,
who might pose a challenge to him.
Drona is just as puzzled when he hears this and goes to see the
Nishada prince, who is honoured and delighted to see his
teacher.
‘If you are my pupil, then you will have to pay me my
teacher’s fee,’ says Drona.
‘Command me, my guru,’ says Ekalavya. ‘There is nothing I
shall not give my guru.’
‘Give me your right thumb,’ commands Drona.
Ekalavya keeps his promise, cuts off his thumb and gives it to
his supposed teacher. Arjuna is relieved. This cruel and sad story
from the Mahabharata illustrates social change during the long
period of the epic’s composition. The caste system was beginning
+ to form: jatis, ‘castes’, were coalescing around clans and +
occupations. New invaders from central Asia, Shakas and
Kushanas, were being assimilated into Hindu society by forming
sub-castes within the fourfold varna system.45 But there remained
aboriginal people who lived in tribes, as they do today. They
were not accommodated within the four-fold caste system and
continued to be casteless and ‘untouchable’.
This unhappy tale has become a political rallying point for
Dalits today. A literature of protest has arisen, and a contemporary
poet has this to say about Ekalavya:

If you had kept your thumb

History would have happened
somewhat differently.
But . . . you gave your thumb
and history also
became theirs.
Ekalavya,

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 171

since that day they

have not even given you a glance.
Forgive me, Ekalavya, I won’t be fooled now
by their sweet words.
My thumb
will never be broken.46

This Ekalavya is different. His is a cry for social reform. The

epic’s Ekalavya did not revolt against the caste system. While the
Mahabharata understands why Drona could not teach a person
who was outside the society of its time, it also makes Ekalavya
a charismatic figure. We are horrified at Drona’s command,
which the epic calls daruna, ‘terrible’, and it tarnishes the ruthless
teacher forever in our eyes. The more sensitive Arjuna does not
come out well either. When the dusky hunter cuts off his thumb,
the Mahabharata reveals Ekalavya’s humanity, and in doing so it
honours the lowest of the low born, who live in tribes in the
+ jungles outside the pale. It teaches us that they too are human +
beings who are owed dignity and respect.
Ekalavya did not face the moral dilemma of Karna, who had
to choose between the life of a high-born kshatriya and a low-
born charioteer’s son. However, the Ekalavyas of today do have
to come to terms with the predicaments of affirmative action.
Indian newspapers prominently carried a report in June 2005
about an outstanding Dalit doctor who resigned his position
from a well-known hospital in Delhi because he was constantly
humiliated by his patients and the hospital staff. He said he was
‘sick and tired’ of being dubbed a ‘quota’ doctor. I could
empathize with his loss of self-esteem, and this is one of the
reasons why I do not favour quotas.

‘I fear not death as I fear a lie’

Since Ekalavya was not a ‘would-be’ kshatriya, he did not

experience some of Karna’s worries over status. The problem

+
 +

172 / The Difficulty of Being Good

with status anxiety is that it distorts one’s natural behaviour. Not

only does it make Karna boastful, but he is also generous to a
fault. His generosity, especially to brahmins, is legendary in the
epic and, possibly, compensates for his low status. Connected to
his liberality is undoubtedly a hunger for fame, a quality not
unusual among epic heroes. Like Achilles, Karna prefers death
with glory to a safer, longer life.
One night, his father, the sun god Surya, appears to him in a
dream and warns him that Indra, the king of gods and Arjuna’s
father, will come to him disguised as a brahmin in order to
deceive him.

. . . listen to my words, son . . . All the world knows [of your vow]
that you will not refuse what a brahmin asks of you . . . don’t give
[Indra] your earrings and armour when he begs you. Appease him
as far as you can . . . Try to satisfy him . . . with gems, women,
pleasures, riches of many kinds. Karna, if you give away your
+ beautiful inborn earrings you forfeit your life . . .47 +
This does put Karna in a dilemma. If he refuses, he would be
guilty of breaking his celebrated vow. ‘The divine armour is
meant to protect your life,’ Surya reminds him insistently. But
Karna finds it irresistible that a great deity should place himself
in the position of a supplicant and want something that only he
can provide. Clearly, our hero fears death far less than either the
infamy of breaking his word or the possibility of earning
incalculable fame from such a munificent, albeit suicidal, act.48
He does not pay heed to his father’s counsel, who had reminded
him before leaving that there are other things in life that matter
more than fame—such as the ‘human duties of the living’. He
had added, ‘What use is fame to a dead man? . . . [It] is like a
garland on a corpse’.49
Indra does appear, as expected. He comes at noon disguised
as a brahmin. For one who has effectively decided to die, Karna
is relaxed and speaks to the king of gods in a light-hearted,

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 173

almost bantering way. Before making his demand, Indra wants

to know if Karna is the ‘one whose vow is true’.50 Karna replies
that he knows the identity of the brahmin standing before him.
Indra ignores this remark and gets to the point—he begs Karna
for his earrings and breastplate. Karna reminds him laughingly
that if he were to do what Indra asks, then he would become
vulnerable.

If I would give you, O deity, both my ear-rings and breastplate,

I would give myself a death sentence . . .51

And that would reflect rather badly on the ‘lord of the gods’. In
fact, wouldn’t it be more appropriate for a god to give a gift to
a mortal than the other way around? But Indra is adamant.
Karna then proceeds to cut off his divine protection bloodily
with a knife. There is a roar in the sky as the other deities and
celestial creatures are appalled at this self-sacrificing, suicidal
deed.52 As he hands over the breastplate ‘wet with blood’ to
+ Indra, the epic proclaims that ‘Karna achieves glory in the +
world’.53 By giving away his celestial earrings, Karna has given
away his ‘self’, his identity (one of the meanings of ‘Karna’ is ‘the
eared’).54
When it is time for the final duel with Arjuna, Karna is
without the protection of his armour, earrings and weapons.
Although the Pandavas instigated this perfidy, Indra was quite
capable of thinking up this deceit on his own. But when they did
find out they were not ashamed. They rejoiced. Not surprisingly,
Krishna, the devious strategist, had a hand in the deceit. And
when he learned that Karna was no longer invincible, he danced
with delight and became ‘overjoyed’.
Why did Karna make this extraordinarily generous sacrifice?
Why did he let Arjuna’s father, Indra, take away his divine gifts
and invite death? Perhaps it is his leitmotif—his lack of restraint.
But I do not think this episode is merely about a hero who is
prepared to exchange death in return for extraordinary heroic
fame.55 What I learned for my own dharma education is the

+
 +

174 / The Difficulty of Being Good

importance of commitment. Karna makes this gesture because he

has to live up to a promise. Rightly or wrongly, he has made a
vow—he cannot refuse what a brahmin asks of him. Hence, he
is forced to ignore his divine father’s advice and the tragedy
follows. He tells Surya, ‘I fear not death as I fear a lie.’56 How
refreshingly tall he stands, I felt, beside a god who is ever ready
to receive a bribe, especially if the prize is a woman!

‘I tried my best to follow dharma, but dharma

did not protect me’

Karna did not fight during the first ten days of the war because
he resented Bhishma’s attitude towards him.57 After Bhishma
fell, Karna entered the fray under Drona’s leadership, and the
level of violence rose dramatically. So did the casualties on the
Pandava side. Book Seven, Dronaparvan, culminates in Drona’s
perfidious death, and this is where we pick up the story. The
+ Kaurava armies are depressed at their leader’s death. Seeing his +
forces in gloom, Duryodhana tries to rally them: ‘Victory or
death is the lot of all warriors . . . Let us resume the fight,
encouraged by the sight of lofty-minded Karna.’58 Thus, the
Kauravas install Karna on the sixteenth day of the war as their
commander-in-chief, bathing him according to the rites with
golden and earthen pitchers of holy water. Talent conquers caste;
the son of a charioteer has become the leader of kings on the
field of Kurukshetra. (The irony, however, does not escape the
audience which is aware that Karna is in reality a kshatriya
nobleman.)
On the dawn of the seventeenth day, Karna meets Duryodhana
to discuss strategy and asks for the skilful Shalya, king of the
Madras, to be made his charioteer. Duryodhana knows that
Arjuna has an advantage with the incomparable Krishna as his
charioteer. In an effort to neutralize it, he agrees to Karna’s
request. But King Shalya feels outraged at having to serve the
son of a charioteer.

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 175

I am a king! I was anointed on the head and born in a family of

royal sages. I am celebrated as a great warrior. I should be served
and praised by bards! I can’t now become the chariot-driver for a
charioteer’s son! You have insulted me.59

Duryodhana tries to win him over patiently, alternately flattering

him and praising Karna.60 Just as Karna is superior to Arjuna, he
says, so is Shalya better at handling horses than Krishna. After
listing Karna’s many achievements, Duryodhana concludes, ‘Thus,
I don’t think Karna was born into a family of drivers.’61 Shalya is
won over.
As Karna and Shalya ascend their chariot the following day,
their horses stumble in a humorous but threatening warning.
Karna begins the warrior’s ritual boast of his upcoming victory
over Arjuna.62 He compares himself to Indra in valour. Suddenly,
Shalya tells him to quit bragging. As they engage in battle,
Shalya begins to praise Arjuna while disparaging Karna. Karna
+ doesn’t know quite what to make of this, and he returns the +
abuse in kind. It turns farcical as the pseudo-charioteer and the
pseudo-charioteer’s son try to outdo each other in name-calling.
Finally, Karna angrily calls Shalya ‘an enemy with the face of a
friend’.63
Although the morning’s fighting goes well for the Kauravas,
and Karna betters Yudhishthira twice, the tide begins to turn by
mid-day. The fighting gets bloodier in the afternoon and there
are huge losses on both sides. Finally, the great moment arrives
that the epic has been waiting for. It is almost sundown and the
epic’s two greatest heroes are going to engage in battle. There is
great excitement among the gods as well. The celestials take
sides. Those who will cheer for Karna are headed by Surya, the
sun god, while those who support Arjuna are headed by the rain
god, Indra.64 As the gods debate the qualities of the two heroes,
they implore Brahma to keep the universe intact during the
period of the contest.
When the battle begins, Karna asks Shalya to drive his chariot

+
 +

176 / The Difficulty of Being Good

towards Arjuna’s and he shoots a dazzling fiery arrow called the

Serpent.65 The arrow, spitting fire, searches for Arjuna’s head,
but in the nick of time, Krishna presses down Arjuna’s chariot
and sinks it five fingers deep into the ground. The arrow misses
Arjuna, but knocks off his crown. Arjuna is red with anger, and
he in turn fixes an arrow to finish off his opponent. At this
moment, the left wheel of Karna’s chariot gets stuck in the
bloody mire of the ground.66 As he descends to lift it out of the
rut, Karna grows downhearted. He rails against dharma:

Those who know dharma say that it always protects the righteous.
Although I tried my best to follow dharma, I find that dharma
does not protect me.67

While he is on the ground, he is hit repeatedly by Arjuna’s

arrows, and the impact begins to take its toll. Karna seizes his
sunken wheel with his two arms and tries to lift it up, but the
earth rises to a breadth of four fingers. Seeing his wheel
+ swallowed, he is in tears of anger, and beholding Arjuna, he +
says,

. . . wait a moment, till I lift this sunken wheel . . . Brave heroes

observe the laws of dharma and do not strike [at the helpless].68

Krishna hears this appeal and he answers: ‘It is all very well to
remember dharma when one is in distress. Where was dharma
when Draupadi, clad in a single garment, was dragged and
disgraced before the assembly? Or when the rigged game of dice
was played in order to usurp the Pandavas’ kingdom? Or just
four days ago, when the Kaurava warriors encircled Arjuna’s
young son, Abhimanyu, and killed the defenceless boy?’
Karna hangs his head in shame and does not reply. Arjuna,
not wanting to take advantage of this moment when Karna is in
distress, hesitates. But Krishna urges, ‘Waste no more time, go
on, shoot . . .’ So Arjuna raises his Gandiva bow and sends a
razor-headed arrow at Karna’s standard. With it falls ‘glory,
dharma, and victory, and all dear things’.69

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 177

Finally, Arjuna lets loose his Anjalika weapon at the helpless

Karna and strikes ‘the beautiful head, with a face that resembled
a lotus of a thousand petals’.70

From the body of the felled Karna

Splendour blazed in the sky.71

Thus dies ‘a wronged hero, wronged by teachers, brothers and

mother, more wronged and more heroic than other wronged
heroes’.72 After the war, when Yudhishthira is told about Karna’s
identity, he realizes how deeply wronged his half-brother was:

Because of the curse of the exalted brahmin Rama, because he

granted Kunti’s wish, because of Indra’s magic, because of
Bhishma’s contempt . . . because Shalya snuffed out his inner fire,
and because of Krishna’s tricks, Karna Vaikartana, whose brilliance
was equal to that of the Sun, was killed in battle . . .73

Karna’s story is a tale of ‘double standards, conniving divinities,

+ and vengeful brahmins [who] stand out in sharp contrast to +
Karna’s displays of generosity to brahmins, his remarkable
physical ability and immense resilience and courage . . . Therefore
it is of little surprise that Karna is writ large in the central
Mahabharata trope of the great battle as the great sacrifice,’ says
the Sanskrit scholar Adam Bowles.74

‘Enemy with the face of a friend’

The last thing Karna needed on his final, fateful day was a
treacherous charioteer. The Mahabharata explains how this came
to pass. After the peace negotiations had failed and when both
sides were gathering allies, the Pandavas and the Kauravas tried
to woo the accomplished King Shalya. Since he was their uncle
through Pandu’s second wife, Madri, he naturally chose to side
with the Pandavas. When he set out to join his nephews,
Duryodhana thought up a clever scheme to arrange temporary,
luxurious guest houses along the journey. There he was honoured

+
 +

178 / The Difficulty of Being Good

and flattered by Duryodhana’s officials. Thinking that it was

Yudhishthira’s uncommon generosity, Shalya offered a boon to
his benefactor. When he discovered his mistake, it was too late.
Thus, he was forced to join the Kauravas and become
Duryodhana’s ally.
Arriving at the Pandavas’ headquarters in Upaplavya, Shalya
felt ashamed and helpless. In order to salvage something from
this disastrous reverse, Yudhishthira conspired with his uncle to
demoralize Karna and diminish his tejas, ‘fiery energy’, during
the battle.75 Ever since Karna had appeared on the scene,
Yudhishthira had built up an obsessive fear of him.76 Shalya’s
long tirade about Karna’s low status was, thus, a hypocritical
sham, a part of strategy.
The Mahabharata uses Shalya’s betrayal to reflect on the moral
character of human beings. Both Yudhishthira and Duryodhana
exploit Shalya’s vanity. Shalya feels flattered when they compare
his skills with Krishna’s. Karna too is vain—he boasts and
+ promotes himself.77 But the lesson I learned in my dharma
+
education is about human friendship and its limitations. Karna
proves time and again to be a remarkably loyal friend of
Duryodhana’s. After Duryodhana came to his rescue during the
tournament of the princes, he tells his benefactor that what he
values most is ‘your friendship!’78 But his overwhelming sense of
obligation turns to excess. He is unable to see Duryodhana’s
flaws. Always eager to impress his feudal lord, Karna is ‘more
royal than the king’. An innocent friendship turns into bhakti,
‘devotional surrender’—what one usually reserves for a deity.79
Karna comes out particularly badly in the gambling match. He
is visibly happy when Duhshasana drags Draupadi into the
assembly. He calls her bandhaki, ‘harlot’—because she has many
husbands—and dasi, ‘slave’. He is the one who commands that
she be disrobed.80 The Pandavas will never forget these insults
and Draupadi, in particular, takes them to heart. ‘My pain will
not go away—for Karna ridiculed me!’81Yudhishthira remembers

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 179

how deeply those words had wounded Arjuna.82 So, when Krishna
finds Arjuna wavering at the sight of the vulnerable Karna trying
to dig out his chariot wheel, he reminds him about this affront
and it has the desired effect.83
Despite these excesses, Karna is remembered for his friendship
and loyalty and Shalya is remembered as ‘the enemy with the
face of a friend’.84 When it is Shalya’s turn to be named
commander, there is more than a hint of irony as Duryodhana
says, ‘The time has come, O you who are devoted to friends,
when among friends wise men examine carefully for friendship
or enmity.’85 As for Shalya’s end, when Gandhari surveys the
corpses on the Kurukshetra battlefield at the end of the war,
Shalya’s tongue is being eaten by birds.86

‘How could a doe give birth to a tiger?’

Karna’s is a universal problem of all mankind. All of us like to

+ feel important. We are concerned about our value in the eyes of +
the world. We want to be cared for, flattered, and deferred to.
No one wants to be neglected. Few of us may admit it, but all of
us worry about it, and some even kill to get attention. The Indian
Express reported on its front page on 26 April 2006 that Pravin
Mahajan, brother of the powerful Bharatiya Janata Party politician
Pramod Mahajan, confessed to the investigating officer in Mumbai
that he had shot his brother ‘because he ignored me’. He added,
‘When I stepped out of the lift and entered my brother’s house
he was reading the newspaper. He looked up, saw me, and
continued to read the paper . . . When I asked why he was
ignoring me, he said that he had mistaken me for a newspaper
delivery boy. This turned out to be the last straw. He had not
taken my phone calls and had been humiliating me for days.’
All of us feel diminished at times by the success of our friends
and relatives. Most people do a reasonable job of hiding it. It
does not become a constant obsession as in Karna’s case. Nor
does it take the form of Duryodhana’s hugely destructive envy

+
 +

180 / The Difficulty of Being Good

for everything that the Pandavas possess. At the root of status

anxiety is an excessive concern about what others think of us.
Hence, we might consider following the sensible advice of the
aunt of my friend who lives in America. She used to tell him
when he was growing up: ‘You’ll waste a lot less time worrying
about what others think of you if only you realized how seldom
they do.’ To this we might add Albert Camus’ wise words: ‘To
be happy one must not be too concerned with the opinion of
others. One should pursue one’s goals single-mindedly, with a
quiet confidence, without thinking of others.’
Karna, like the other heroes in the Mahabharata, forces us to
look at ourselves and at our frailties. When Karna is not allowed
to train in weaponry because he is a suta, it makes one ask, ‘What
if my child had been denied entry into college because of her
birth?’ Karna had to pose as a brahmin to get in. When he was
discovered, his teacher cursed him—he would forget all he had
learned at the moment that he needed it most. We don’t want
+ our children growing up dogged by epithets like ‘charioteer’s
+
son’. We want them to feel secure and confident about their
position. We want them to be treated with respect as equals.
The Mahabharata is not content simply to point out the
weaknesses of human beings. It criticizes society’s flaws. It raises
the question whether a person’s social position should be defined
by birth or by some other criterion, such as accomplishment of
some sort. Karna does pose a challenge to India’s caste system,
although one cannot forget the irony: he is not what he seems. It
isn’t surprising that traditionalists find this ‘would-be kshatriya’
a subversive character. He challenges their traditional
understanding of dharma—as inherited status—and offers a new
notion of dharma as deserved status.
Karna did become king of Anga through his accomplishments.
It was not a token gesture of Duryodhana’s. Anga is a large
territory in the north-east of India corresponding to today’s
south-east Bihar. However, ‘Duryodhana’s liberal attitude to

+
 +

Karna’s Status Anxiety / 181

social classes is, in the eyes of the epic poets, a marker of his
essential corruption and one of the principal motivations given
for the necessity of his demise. His attitude is representative of
the breakdown of social order and customary behaviour that
occurs when class divisions are not properly maintained.’87 Indeed,
when Duryodhana states, ‘How could a doe give birth to a
tiger?’, he is veritably setting a cat among the pigeons (to mix the
metaphor). In traditional eyes he is raising the prospect of the
mixing of castes, a great sin according to the Code of Manu, the
authoritative textbook on caste dharma.
Despite being crowned king, Karna could not shake off his
lowly origins. He kept feeling slighted both by the Pandavas and
the Kauravas. This is not an uncommon experience among Dalits
in India and blacks in America. Despite becoming middle class,
and despite great achievement in many cases, they continue to
experience social prejudice. When they rise through affirmative
action, they are not allowed to forget ‘society’s favours’. Political
+ intervention cannot easily erase the human tendency to
+
discriminate. K.R. Narayanan, the former President of India and
a Dalit, once confessed in an unguarded moment that he was not
allowed to forget his origins even in his home, Rashtrapati
Bhavan. I don’t know if there is a satisfactory political answer to
social discrimination.
I sometimes wonder if Karna had not strived to be a hero, he
might have lived a quiet and contented life as a charioteer’s son,
amidst the warmth and affection of his adopted family. But with
his great talent bursting to get out, I don’t think he would have
been satisfied with a comfortable life. He had to challenge the
boundaries of the social order and suffer the pain in doing so. He
had to be ‘the wrong person in the wrong place’—this is what
Karna symbolizes to many minds today. Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
the recent prime minister of India, was once called ‘Karna’ for
being the ‘right man in the wrong party’.
Life may have been unfair to Karna but he rises above pity.

+
 +

182 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Despite his flaws we admire him. Despite enormous temptation,

he did not switch sides. At a stroke he could have had all that he
wanted, but he stood up courageously to Krishna and to his
mother and remained faithful to his lowly foster parents who
had raised him. Thus, he rejected society’s claim that status
arises from birth. By rejecting the royal status of his birth, he
showed true nobility. Even though it meant ending up on the
losing side, he remained loyal to Duryodhana. If Shalya is
remembered for betrayal, Karna is remembered for friendship
and loyalty.88
In contrast to Duryodhana’s life of envy and resentment,
Karna’s heroic life shines because he remained true to his word.
When he tells Krishna to keep the circumstances of his birth
secret, he is concerned that the Pandavas, particularly
Yudhishthira, should not get excessively demoralized. His life
once again reminds the audience that true dharma is not the sva-
dharma of caste, but the sadharana-dharma of truth, commitment,
+ generosity and friendship. Thus, it does not come as a surprise
+
to hear him acknowledge that fame, victory, and other heroic
goals can only be achieved through dharma. When he says
‘where there is dharma, there is victory’, he is not being
hypocritical. He is being true to himself.89 When Karna falls, we
cherish his many wonderful qualities, and how he turned out to
be greater than his cruel circumstances. Status anxiety may have
contributed to his many flaws—especially his lack of restraint—
but this only heightens his tragedy. We are moved by
Yudhishthira’s lament when he discovers too late about his
brother’s identity. This is why Karna is ‘the most lamented hero
of the war’ and his tale is still sung in villages across India.90

+
 +

KRISHNA’S GUILE
‘That is the way it is!’

Aren’t you ashamed . . . of striking me down so unfairly?

—Duryodhana, as he lies dying

at Kurukshetra, Mahabharata, IX.60.271
+ +

‘Aren’t you ashamed of striking me down so unfairly?’

After Karna’s death, the war comes to a quick close. Almost all
the great warriors on the Kaurava side are gone. In despair,
Duryodhana flees from the battlefield to a lake nearby. Using
maya, ‘magic’, he solidifies its waters and enters into it, resolving
to live there in suspended animation. The Pandavas manage to
find him, however, and so the stage is set for the war’s last
duel—between Bhima and Duryodhana. As it begins, Krishna
doubts if Bhima will be able to defeat Duryodhana in a fair
fight—he will need some sort of dodge. Arjuna gets the point,
and he slaps his left thigh, signalling to Bhima to strike a blow
below the navel. Bhima hurls his mace unfairly at Duryodhana’s
thigh, smashing it, and wins. Thus, the war ends.
As he lies dying on the battlefield late in the afternoon of the
eighteenth day, Duryodhana enumerates Krishna’s many

183

+
 +

184 / The Difficulty of Being Good

misdeeds during the war. He accuses him of perfidy in the way

he had all the top Kaurava commanders killed:

Aren’t you ashamed, O heir of Kamsa’s servant, for having me

struck down so unfairly! When Bhima and I were fighting with
clubs, you told Arjuna to remind Bhima to break my thighs.
Aren’t you ashamed that you have had so many kings who were
fighting fairly and valiantly in battle killed by crooked means?
You killed our grandfather by placing Shikhandi before [Arjuna].
You behaved viciously in having the elephant of the same name as
Ashwatthama killed; when our teacher cast down his armour, you
did not stop the hateful Dhrishtadyumna from killing him . . .
And you had Karna, the best of men, struck when he was in
difficulty, trying to pull out the sunken wheel of his chariot. Had
you fought fairly with Karna, Bhishma, Drona and me, you would
certainly not have won.2

It is not unusual for an epic hero to win through cunning. The

+ Greeks did it all the time. The Odyssey glorifies that master
+
trickster, Odysseus. It recounts the great deception of the Trojan
horse. The Iliad reveals the duplicity of Athena, who posed as
Hector’s brother, Deiphobos, to put him off his guard in his final
battle. The difference between the Greek and the Indian epic is
that the action stops in the Mahabharata when the hero does
something wrong. Dubious acts are placed under the lens of
dharma, and are examined from different angles before being
finally condemned. ‘The Iliad, on the other hand, mentions them
and gets on with it without remorse.’3
Duryodhana’s condemnation of Krishna’s deceits belongs to
this tradition. Kunti, the Pandavas’ mother, had earlier warned
Krishna:

Do whatever is good for them in whatever way you see fit, without
hurting dharma, and without deception, enemy-tamer.

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 185

Krishna, however, instead of safeguarding dharma, instructs the

Pandavas to do precisely the opposite in the name of ‘strategy’.

Casting aside virtue, ye sons of Pandu, adopt now some contrivance

for gaining the victory.4

Some acts in war are always more dishonourable than others. It

is these considerations of honour which led these ancient warriors
to define a set of mutually agreed rules of combat. The rules
became part of the kshatriya dharma, a ‘warrior’s code of conduct’,
defining meticulously what is right and wrong conduct in the
course of war. In the language of Western medieval scholastics,
this is called jus in bello, ‘justice in the conduct of war’. Chapter
4 on Arjuna addressed jus ad bellum, ‘the just reasons for going
to war’. Chapter 9, ‘Yudhishthira’s Remorse’, will deal with jus
post bellum, ‘justice of the consequences of war’. The epic seems
resigned to the inevitability of war and seeks ways to mitigate its
destructiveness. It elaborates the rules of fighting, and reminds
+ +
the combatants what these rules are and then condemns those
who break them.
Duryodhana may have had good reasons to denounce Krishna,
but Krishna believes that Duryodhana is really the guilty one. He
blames him for the failure of the peace talks. Rolling his eyes in
anger, Krishna replies to Duryodhana:

When you burned with envy for the wealth of the Pandavas . . .
you plotted that evil, heinous dice game. What sort of a man are
you who would molest the wife of a kinsman? You had Draupadi
brought into the hall and spoke to her as you did! You manhandled
the queen . . .5

Krishna firmly believes that once you make the fateful decision
to go to war then you must win at any cost. As he sees it, the
Pandavas’ cause is just, and once the war begins the only thing
that matters is victory. The Mahabharata is not so sure that
‘anything goes’ in war.

+
 +

186 / The Difficulty of Being Good

‘War is hell’

General Sherman made a similar point in the American Civil

War. He believed that once leaders start a war, soldiers have to
win it at any cost. He expressed this doctrine in the phrase ‘war
is hell’. It is a common mistake, perpetrated by Hollywood
movies, to think that this is a description of war. It is a doctrine.
‘It is a moral argument, an attempt at self-justification. Sherman
was claiming to be innocent of his many questionable acts: the
bombardment of Atlanta, the forced evacuation of its inhabitants,
the burning of the city, and the march through Georgia.’6
Sherman’s doctrine is that war has its own logic and momentum
once it begins. It inevitably escalates, and you cannot blame
soldiers or generals for the killing. You can only blame those
who start the war.
When he heard about Sherman’s plan to burn Atlanta, General
Hood, the shocked Confederate commander, wrote to stop him.
+ Sherman replied that war was indeed dark. ‘War is cruelty and +
you cannot refine it.’ Therefore, ‘those who brought war into our
country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can
pour out.’7 He himself was, he said, only an innocent soldier who
was doing his job. ‘War is hell’ is the moral position of those who
have to fight and win wars which they did not start. The
Pandavas, of course, do not have the luxury of falling back on
General Sherman’s defence for they were the leaders. And indeed,
as victors, they feel enormous guilt and remorse for their wrong
acts during and after Kurukshetra.
The Allies behaved no better than Krishna in the terror bombing
of Dresden, Hamburg and other German cities in World War II.
They had a clear intention of killing German civilians in order to
destroy Nazi morale, hoping that this would lead Nazi Germany
to surrender. In doing so, they clearly violated the ‘just war’
doctrine. Yet they were not hauled up before any Nuremburg
court, which only judged Nazi war criminals after the war. This

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 187

is because the Allies were victors and only losers are tried for
war crimes.
The Mahabharata faces this dilemma squarely. What if good
persons, who have excellent reasons to wage a war, can only win
it by unfair means? In that case, how can one think of them as
‘good persons’?

‘Untruth may be better than truth’

Once the peace negotiations fail and preparations for the war
begin, the epic lays down elaborate rules of warfare in
Bhishmaparvan. Lest anyone forget, it repeats them several times.

A person who fights with speech should only be opposed with

speech during battle. One doesn’t kill a person who has left the
battlefield. A charioteer should only fight a charioteer; an elephant
rider by [one who rides an] elephant; a horseman against a
cavalryman; and an infantryman by [one in the] infantry . . . One
+ is allowed to strike another according to usage, heroism, power
+
and age, by [first] calling out, [but] not at one who is unwary, or
in trouble, or fighting another, or is looking the other way, or
without armour or whose weapons are exhausted. One does not hit
[those who provide services, such as] charioteers, weapon-helpers,
those who blow conches and beat drums . . .8

Sanjaya, who is narrating the action of the war to the blind

Dhritarashtra, begins to rebuke those who break the rules. In this
way the war correspondent becomes the epic’s conscience. He
censures Arjuna for killing the otherwise invincible Bhishma
unfairly by breaking the cardinal rule that one ‘doesn’t strike an
enemy who is already engaged in fighting another’. As we know,
Arjuna struck Bhishma when the old man was engaged by
Shikhandi. The patriarch was particularly vulnerable because he
was meticulously observing another rule of war—not to strike a
woman or someone who was once a woman as in Shikhandi’s
case.9

+
 +

188 / The Difficulty of Being Good

After Bhishma’s death, Krishna incites the killing of Drona, the

next Kaurava commander-in-chief, in a most deceitful manner.
Like Bhishma, Drona had also told Yudhishthira how he might
be killed:

I really don’t see [anyone in] the enemy who is capable of killing
me in battle. The one exception is, O king, [when I have] . . . cast
down my weapons after hearing bad news from a man of integrity.10

Learning of this, Krishna confers with Arjuna and suggests that

the only option is to employ ‘strategy’. He says: ‘Cast aside
virtue . . . let a device be adopted for victory.’11 Arjuna does not
approve of this but everyone else does. Yudhishthira accepts the
advice ‘with difficulty’.12 So, Bhima kills an elephant named
Ashwatthama, which is the name also of Drona’s beloved son,
and spreads the news. Since Drona knows that Ashwatthama is
invincible, he ignores the rumour and continues to inflict great
damage upon the Pandava armies. Later in the day when he sees
+ Yudhishthira on the battlefield, he asks gloomily if Ashwatthama +
is dead.
According to Sanjaya, ‘Drona firmly believed that Yudhishthira
would not speak an untruth, even for the sake of the sovereignty
of the three worlds.’13 Yudhishthira confirms that Ashwatthama
is indeed dead, muttering ‘iti gaja’ (it’s an elephant) under his
breath. The grief-stricken father lays down his arms.
Dhrishtadyumna, Draupadi’s brother, seizes the defenceless
general by his hair and severs his head. The epic punishes
Yudhishthira instantly. Sanjaya tells us that Yudhishthira’s chariot,
which had always travelled slightly above the ground, now sinks
to the earth.14 Arjuna, who had earlier been horrified at Krishna’s
scheme, is now filled with remorse. When Kripa, the other
teacher of the Kuru princes, recounts the scene to Ashwatthama,
he says that Arjuna had wanted his teacher to be taken alive, and
he regrets that he did not intervene.15 Drona, of course, had
trusted Yudhishthira implicitly thinking that ‘this Pandava is
endowed so completely with dharma, and he is my pupil’.16

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 189

The Mahabharata has a problem on its hands when the greatest

upholder of dharma achieves success by telling a lie. Krishna
tells Yudhishthira that a lie is permissible when it is for a greater
good.

Untruth may be better than truth. By telling an untruth for the

saving of life, untruth does not touch one.17

Yudhishthira must have found this Utilitarian advice very

disturbing, especially as it came from God. The epic describes
Yudhishthira as being torn. He is ‘sunk in the fear of untruth but
[yet] clinging to victory’.18 Arjuna, whose dharmic antenna is
always acute, is even more upset, and he accuses his brother of
deceit:

Our guru depended on you . . . For someone who is conversant

with dharma, you performed a very great adharma . . . [Moreover]
you spoke untruth in the garb of truth . . . We harmed our old
+ guru, our benefactor, dishonourably for the sake of sovereignty.19 +
Arjuna’s verdict is clear—a crime has been committed, the murder
of an innocent and unarmed man. The motive was base self-
interest, the method was underhand, and the opportunity came
when Drona was disarmed.
Karna becomes the next commander of the Kauravas after
Drona, and the next victim of Krishna’s deceit. When asking
Arjuna to wait until he has finished lifting the sunken wheel of
his chariot, Karna reminds Arjuna of the rules:

Arjuna, the brave don’t hit those who turn away their face, whose
hair is undone, who are brahmins, who seek protection, who put
down their weapons, who are in difficulty, who are without arrows
or armour, or whose weapon is broken . . . Since you are brave, O
son of Kunti, have patience.20

Arjuna, as we know, wavers when he hears this but Krishna tells

the dithering warrior, ‘Strike now . . . Here is your chance!’

+
 +

190 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Given all this treachery, Duryodhana is, perhaps, right to

accuse Krishna—the war could not have been won without his
manipulations. All the great commanders of the Kaurava armies—
Bhishma, Drona, Karna and Duryodhana—were killed unfairly,
under instructions from the master trickster. Although he did
not shoot a single arrow, Krishna won the war for the Pandavas
through cheating. He, of course, calls it ‘superior strategy’, but
the text is clear that he violated the dharma of war in doing so.
Indeed, Krishna had acquired a reputation for deception very
early in the war so that when Arjuna unlawfully cuts off
Bhurishrava’s arm, the latter exclaims:

Who, indeed, could commit such a crime who was not a friend of
Krishna’s?21

V.S. Sukthankar, editor of the Pune Critical Edition of the

Mahabharata, called Krishna a ‘cynic, who preaches the highest
morality and stoops to practice the lowest tricks . . . An
+ opportunist who teaches a god fearing man to tell a lie, the only
+
lie he told in all his life! [He is a] charlatan who . . . advises a
hesitating archer to strike down a foe who is defenceless and
crying for mercy.’22
Nevertheless, the epic’s sympathies are clearly with the
Pandavas. Sanjaya frequently reminds the audience that the
Pandavas follow dharma while the Kauravas are evil.23 On a
number of occasions he catalogues their wicked deeds. They
tried to burn the Pandavas in the house made of lacquer, usurp
the Pandavas’ kingdom through a crooked game of dice, and
tried shamefully to disrobe Draupadi. Krishna’s defence is that
the only way to defeat evil is with evil. The Kauravas are the
stronger side—they have more divisions and greater warriors.
The threat of their victory looms over the epic and there is a
danger that evil might triumph. Hence, the Pandavas must
match their might with ‘strategy’. But the Mahabharata does not
buy his logic. It makes sure that everyone is aware, including the

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 191

Pandavas, of the immorality of these acts. After Drona is killed,

Arjuna is disconsolate and Bhima has to remind the unhappy
warrior to stop harping on dharma:

You are right in what you say, O son of Prtha! You have spoken
of dharma as though you were a sage who had retired to a forest.
But you are a warrior, whose duty is to protect living creatures
from harm . . . It doesn’t do you honour or your family to speak
thus like a fool.24

‘Moreover,’ Bhima reminds his brother, ‘wasn’t the kingdom of

one devoted to dharma [Yudhishthira] carried off immorally?’25
As the war progresses, and as their brilliant commanders fall
one by one, we begin to sympathize with the Kauravas. As
victims of Krishna’s deceitful tricks, they even begin to appear as
underdogs. Some of the Kauravas did behave in an exemplary
manner. Duryodhana’s unusual brother, Vikarna, as we know,
did get up to defend Draupadi after the game of dice—the only
+ +
member in the august assembly to do so.26 Even the villainous
Duryodhana demonstrates some virtues,27 and the text refers to
him in Book Fifteen as a good king,28 who invited great loyalty
from Karna and Ashwatthama. Yudhishthira also admits that
Duryodhana has always been called a hero.29 In humanizing the
Kauravas, the Mahabharata reminded me again of an important
lesson on my dharma journey: when one begins to see the ‘other’
as a human being with empathy, as someone like oneself, that is
the moment when the moral sentiment is born in the human
heart.30
The Mahabharata is sometimes called a tale of deceit and
illusion, and Yudhishthira’s lie is a prime example of this. This
illusory nature of the epic led an early German scholar of the
Mahabharata to propose the thesis that in the ‘original’ epic the
Kauravas were the heroes, which also explains why Duryodhana
is often referred to in the epic as Suyodhana.31 False words mask
or they manipulate. In lying, one conceals oneself and enmeshes

+
 +

192 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the other person in an illusion of one’s making.32 By deceiving

Drona, Yudhishthira corrupts his teacher’s relationship with the
world. So do we every time we lie—we corrupt the ‘other’ in the
same way. The epic is aware of this and of Yudhishthira’s
terrible deed as it reminds us:

There is no higher morality than truth, nor a greater sin than

falsehood. Truth is the foundation of morality; therefore, one
should not suppress truth.33

When Drona’s son Ashwatthama hears of the ignoble deed, he

denounces Yudhishthira, accusing the dharmaputra, ‘son of virtue’,
of becoming an ‘impersonator of virtue’. But Vyasa, the legendary
author of the epic, explains to Ashwatthama that the whole
battle and everything in it might have been an illusion. Krishna
was merely fighting one illusion with another illusion. It was not
a simple battle of good versus evil, with God on one side and the
evil Kauravas on the other. The two sides may not have been
+ fighting each other. They were battling the common enemy of
+
illusion, whose most insidious form is lying—concealing the self
and ensnaring the other in an illusion of one’s own making. This
is perhaps why in real life dharma is ‘subtle’ and the Mahabharata
is an allegory of the elusiveness of dharma.

Who is Krishna, man or God?

The problem, of course, is that Krishna is not merely the master-

strategist of the Pandavas, he is also a god. He is not simply a
god, but he is ‘the God’ (with a capital G). The epic thus has a
difficult task in defending his dirty tricks. It tells us early in Book
One that the war of the Mahabharata was needed because demons
had begun to oppress the world. The earth had appealed to
Brahma, who had asked the other gods for help. Thus, some
gods assumed human form. One of them was Krishna—an
incarnation of the great god Vishnu.

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 193

We first meet Krishna at Draupadi’s swayamvara, where she is

to choose her husband from among competing princes. Krishna
appears to be dark and handsome, a nice enough young man of
the Yadava clan. He is not a suitor but he recognizes the
disguised Pandavas in the assembly and prevents a fight breaking
out between them and other royal suitors. Later, as he is leaving
for Dwarka with his brother Balaram, he salutes his aunt Kunti,
but like a good diplomat he avoids the subject that is on
everyone’s mind—the extraordinary situation that Draupadi has
got into by accidentally marrying all the five Pandava brothers.
Next, we run into Krishna at Pravas, a pilgrimage spot, where he
has become, as the epic says, ‘Arjuna’s dearest friend’.34 Soon
they become related as Krishna contrives to have his sister
abducted by and married to Arjuna. The abduction is typical of
the daring adventures of the two young men.
Early on, Krishna shows a penchant for cunning and mischief.
He devises a deceitful strategy to overcome the menacing ogre
+ King Jarasandha, who has terrified and repeatedly attacked the
+
innocent Yadavas. As a result, Krishna’s kinsmen have had to
flee for safety from Mathura to Dwarka, on the western coast of
India. Krishna gets Arjuna and Bhima to join him, and the three
disguise themselves as brahmin novitiates. They provoke
Jarasandha, spurn his offerings, break his kettledrums, and snatch
garlands from his shops, before finally killing the wicked king.
Jarasandha’s end could have been achieved more easily without
all the drama, but that would have been too easy for a mischievous
god who loves tricks, not unlike the Greek hero Odysseus.
In the Udyogaparvan, as we know, Krishna works hard to bring
about a truce and prevent war.35 This Krishna is bright, keen-
witted, enterprising and eloquent. He is also a crafty negotiator.
That he does not succeed is not his fault, but that of Duryodhana,
who is ‘a large tree full of anger’, and who refuses to part even
with five villages for the Pandavas.36 But his finest hour comes in
the Gita as the godly charioteer of Arjuna. He stands confident

+
 +

194 / The Difficulty of Being Good

and debonair, ready to do battle, amidst the arrayed forces and

the tumult of the conches. Just as war is about to begin, his
commander swoons. He does not have much success in
persuading Arjuna until he resorts to his authority as God. As
we have seen, Arjuna sees the most amazing sights—all created
animals on the earth enter Krishna’s mouth, ‘driven powerfully
and inevitably, like all rivers merging into the ocean and
disappearing like insects plunging into the fire only to die’.
Krishna says, ‘I am Time, and as Time, I destroy the world.’ The
awestruck Pandava can only say, ‘I salute you. I salute you in
front and from behind and on all sides.’37
Once the battle begins, Arjuna and the Pandavas forget
Krishna’s divinity. The epic vacillates—sometimes Krishna is
human, at other times he is God. He plays innocent pranks, he
frets over the outcome of battles. As a war counsellor, he advises
the Pandavas to perform dirty tricks. Until the end they are
never quite sure of winning—even with God on their side—and
+ there is real suspense over the outcome of the war. After
+
Duryodhana’s fall, Krishna tells Yudhishthira, ‘It is lucky that
you won!’
These are not the sentiments of an omnipotent God. So, who
is Krishna, man or God? There are many opinions. Some scholars
believe he was a kuladevata, an ethnic and family god of a
confederation of Rajput clans. He was also probably a ‘patron
god of the Pandavas’.38 Others believe that Krishna was not a
god in the ‘original’ Mahabharata or in the parts generally thought
to be its earliest versions: his godly aspects are later interpolations
with the rise of the devotional worship of Krishna. Sukthankar
thought that ‘there is no cogent reason to separate Sri Krishna
from the other chief actors in this drama . . . just as the latter are
uniformly treated as incarnations of the minor gods and the anti-
gods of the Indian pantheon, so Sri Krishna is also consistently
treated as the incarnation of the Supreme Being.’39
The nineteenth-century Bengali writer Bankimchandra felt that

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 195

Krishna was not God but an ideal human being. Given Krishna’s
ambiguous deeds, this seems to be an extraordinary conclusion,
especially since the epic makes Krishna’s divinity quite clear.40
Peter Brook, the director of the well-known production of the
Mahabharata, sensibly ducked the issue of whether Krishna was
man or God. He said, ‘It is obviously not up to us to decide. Any
historical or theological truth, controversial by its very nature, is
closed to us—our aim is a certain dramatic truth. This is why we
have chosen to keep the two faces of Krishna that are in the
original poem, and to emphasize their opposite and paradoxical
nature.’41
It seems to me the question—man or God—is posed incorrectly.
One must accept Krishna as he appears in the epic. The epic is
clear that Krishna is God, Vishnu’s incarnation. The historical or
theological truth matters less than the dramatic truth within the
epic. One must accept both sides of Krishna, no matter how
paradoxical or contrary. Despite his faults, the characters in the
+ epic admire him. For two thousand years Indians have known of
+
these contradictions and have continued to worship him. If
anything, his popularity has grown. I must confess I am drawn
to the Krishna who gets thirsty and hungry; who gets tired and
old with time; who is surprised and upset when Arjuna will not
shoot at Bhishma; and who is not sure quite how the war will
end. This is the same Krishna who is accidentally killed by a
hunter in the forest at the end of the epic. It seems to me that it
is impossible to separate this human and ‘original’ Krishna from
the impressive legends that were later built around him. The
other Krishna is, of course, the superhero, who makes Draupadi’s
sari go on and on indefinitely; who creates an illusion that made
his enemy think that the sun had set; and who shows Arjuna his
divine form at the beginning of the war.
My father used to believe that the Mahabharata’s purpose was
to advocate bhakti, ‘devotion’, to Krishna. According to him,
Krishna teaches that an action which is free from selfish desires,

+
 +

196 / The Difficulty of Being Good

and is performed in the name of God, is true moral action.

Hence, the epic’s morality is subordinate to Krishna the God.
Krishna’s ambiguous nature says something about the
Mahabharata’s and the ‘Hindu’ conception of the divine, which is
so different from the one in Christianity and Islam. Although this
Krishna is able to pull a few strings, he is obviously not able to
bring easy victory to the Pandavas.
Another way to think about Krishna’s mystery is to imagine
that it illustrates the elusive nature of the divine presence in
human life. Human beings seem to require a divine actor to
resolve the dilemmas of day-to-day life and to give their lives
coherence. Krishna, in this sense, is not a mystery to be solved.
One of the Mahabharata’s objectives is to represent the divine
mystery in narrative form. The epic’s search for dharma is
grounded in Krishna’s divine presence and Krishna’s complexity
lies in the human struggle to ask many different things of God.
His mystery is thus a commentary on the human condition.42
+ +
Krishna tries to negotiate a peace

During the wedding celebrations of Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son—

soon after the Pandavas had completed their thirteen-year exile—
Krishna proposes to the gathered Pandavas that they send an
ambassador to the Kaurava court in order to settle the feud
between the cousins. Thus, a respected priest from Draupadi’s
father’s court is dispatched to Hastinapura to ask for the return
of the Pandavas’ share of the kingdom. But he achieves nothing
except to frighten Dhritarashtra about the Pandavas’ growing
strength. Dhritarashtra in turn sends Sanjaya to pacify
Yudhishthira and the Pandavas. Since Sanjaya is not authorized
to make an offer, his embassy doesn’t go anywhere either. What
it does do, however, is to sharpen the positions of some of the
key actors with regard to war and peace, depending on their
different conceptions of dharma.
Yudhishthira’s position, as we have seen, changed during

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 197

these negotiations, and Krishna was primarily responsible for

the conversion. During his long exile in the forest, Yudhishthira
believed unconditionally in ahimsa, ‘non-violence’. To him war
was an unmitigated evil, leading to the slaughter of human life,
a sin under any circumstance.43 There could not be peace unless
one side was totally annihilated. So, he wanted to give up the
kshatriya world of violence and live a peaceful life in the forest.
Krishna disagrees. He reminds Yudhishthira that a king has a
duty to his family, his kingship and his subjects, as well as a duty
to the society that has nurtured him. It is improper and cowardly
to lead the life of non-activity in order to escape the destructive
path of war. One has to act in the world; nothing in the world
would exist without action—even the gods have to engage in
work. There will always be evil individuals like Duryodhana,
who will disturb the balance of order in society and nature. The
only course is to destroy them.44
Yudhishthira is forced to concede that Krishna’s is the more
+ +
practical position, but being the sort of person he is, he desperately
tries to avoid war and makes a huge concession. As Sanjaya is
leaving, Yudhishthira says that the Pandavas will be content
with only a province or just five villages, instead of their half of
the kingdom.45 But Yudhishthira’s generous concession has no
effect on Duryodhana, who is unmoved. He is only interested to
know from Sanjaya about the Pandavas’ military strength. He
interprets Yudhishthira’s forbearance as fear.
Krishna, however, decides to make one last try at a settlement.
He goes personally to the Kaurava court, where he employs
every possible means in the ancient art of diplomatic negotiation.46
His first strategy is reconciliation, and he tries to arouse brotherly
affection in the Kauravas. When this fails, he uses the tactic of
fear—he tries to frighten them by recounting his own and the
Pandavas’ exploits. This too fails. Next, he employs the policy of
dissension. Since Karna could make the difference between success
and failure in the war, Krishna tries to make him switch sides.

+
 +

198 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Finally, when Karna refuses his offer, he attempts a policy of

generosity—he repeats Yudhishthira’s offer to renounce his
kingdom if the Pandavas can have the five villages. He is
rebuffed on each occasion. In the end, the peace negotiations
having failed, the only recourse is force. Yudhishthira, with a
heavy heart, takes the decision to go to war. Krishna’s misdeeds
have to be seen in the context of one who tried very hard to
prevent a war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas.

‘Methinks that time is out of joint’

After the disastrous game of dice, Draupadi had said:

Methinks that time is out of joint . . . This ancient eternal dharma

is lost among the Kauravas.47

The Pandava queen may also have dropped a hint about why
God plays dirty tricks during the Kurukshetra War. The bizarre
+ +
game of dice is a signal that things are not quite what they
appear. This game was meant to be a ritual, as we noted in
Chapter 1, a part of the celebrations to confirm Yudhishthira’s
supremacy.48 Instead, in this charade, Yudhishthira is doomed
from the beginning. If dharma had been functioning properly, a
younger brother or cousin would never have challenged an older
one. The queen would not have been left ‘unprotected amidst
her protectors’.49
What Draupadi means in saying that ‘time is out of joint’ is
that the Mahabharata is being enacted in our imperfect age of Kali
Yuga, ‘the age of Kali’, when it is common for brothers and
families to fight.50 During this age it is hard to know right from
wrong. This is why Bhishma answers Draupadi helplessly,
‘Dharma is subtle, my dear. I fail to resolve your dilemma in the
proper way.’51
In the classical Indian sense of time, dharma has been declining
in the universe. The Mahabharata explains that in the first yuga,

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 199

‘age’, human beings were perfect and lived in a golden age. They
have since worsened morally by a quarter in each subsequent
yuga. The epic tells us:

Dharma was four-footed [whole] and complete . . . in [an earlier

golden age] Krita Yuga . . . After that dharma declined by one foot
[in each subsequent age] and adharma increased, with theft,
untruth, and illusion.52

The game of dice, which led to the exile of the Pandavas and the
Kurukshetra War, reflects the decline of dharma. The Kurukshetra
War was, thus, inevitable. It was meant to lead to pralaya, ‘end
of the world’, after which would emerge a new golden age, the
Krita Yuga, another throw of the dice, under the rule of the good
king, Yudhishthira. Krishna, too, defends his questionable acts
on this basis. He says to Duryodhana:

Know that the Kali Yuga has arrived and the promise of the
+ Pandava [has been fulfilled]. Let the Pandava be considered to +
have made good his hostility and his promise.53

By this he is saying, in effect, that he, Krishna, had to resort to

trickery in order to even the playing field in an age where
dharma had declined. In order to preserve dharma in this
imperfect world of Kali Yuga, he had to commit ‘smaller wrongs’
for the sake of a ‘bigger right’.
Indians have always found this a perfectly acceptable
explanation. They continue to invoke Kali Yuga to explain
incomprehensible adversities or the corrupt ways of their
wayward politicians. The myth helps them to be reconciled to an
imperfect world in which it is so difficult to be good.

The world is Krishna’s lila

There is, of course, the traditional believer’s straightforward

explanation for Krishna’s moral lapses. When I asked my father
about Krishna’s dubious acts, he replied that Krishna is God and

+
 +

200 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the world is a stage on which he enacts his play. We are his maya,
‘illusion’, and our lives are a part of his lila, ‘play’, including the
war at Kurukshetra. I found echoes of this in Draupadi’s
complaint, who referred to human beings as ‘toys of God’, who
treated us as a puppeteer treats his puppets. From this perspective,
Krishna’s tricks are merely God’s moves on the stage to make
sure that the righteous win in the end. The Pandava victory is
Krishna’s prasada, ‘grace’—his way to ensure dharma’s victory in
the Kali Yuga. Vaishnav devotees of Krishna, in fact, do not say
‘where dharma is, there is victory’; they chant:

Where Krishna is, there is dharma; where dharma is there is

victory.54

Kali Yuga, my father explained, is the flawed age in which we

live. This is why we can identify so easily with the blemished,
human characters of the Mahabharata. Krishna too must have his
flaws when he becomes human, an actor on the epic’s stage like
+ other actors. But since he is also divine, he is able to step aside,
+
and become the instrument for fulfilling the divine prophecy at
Draupadi’s birth:

Superb among women, the Dark Woman [Draupadi] shall lead the
[kshatriyas] to their doom.55

It is Krishna’s will, accordingly, that the entire kshatriya class

should perish in atonement for their overweening pride and
relieve the earth of the excessive burden of an overpopulated
world. In order that this may come about, hostility must be sown
between the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra and the five sons of
Pandu. ‘Since all warriors have to die, in any case, in this murky
age,’ said my father, ‘does it matter if Krishna plays a few tricks
and enjoys himself along the way?’
The Mahabharata was composed during the long period of
transition from the Vedic gods of nature (like Indra, who
represented thunder) to the sectarian gods of Hinduism. Just as

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 201

Rama becomes the great god of the Ramayana, so does Krishna in

the Mahabharata. Also called Vasudeva, Krishna is an incarnation
of Vishnu. There is a reference to one Krishna, the son of Devaki,
during the Vedic period, where he is merely a wise, enquiring
man seeking for the highest truth.56 Panini, in the fifth century BC,
mentions a bhakta, ‘devotee’ of the god, Vasudeva. Thus, Krishna
the sage and Vasudeva the god may originally have been different
but only later became the same deity through syncretism.57 The
Bhagavata sects also began in this period with the worship of
Bhagavan, the Lord, a name for Vishnu. Gradually the Vedic
gods faded as Vishnu and Shiva became the most popular great
deities. In the Mahabharata, people specifically mention that they
worship a god of their sect.58 Gradually, the way of bhakti,
‘devotion’, caught the people’s imagination, and it spread across
India via the medieval bhakti saints, who ‘bhagavatized’ the country.
Krishna’s narration on bhakti in the Gita in the Mahabharata is a
peak moment in this process.
+ The gods thus evolved over time, and the Krishna of the later
+
period of the Puranas is even more playful than in the Mahabharata.
This Krishna steals butter as a child; he plays pranks all the time;
he grows up to be the divine lover not only of his beloved
Radha, but also of a thousand cowgirls in the Vrindavana forest.
He entices the women with his flute and his romantic melodies.59
Tricks are a part of Krishna’s character, and his ‘trickery implies
an open defiance of traditional morality, which is of major
significance for the total meaning of the work: even as it
recapitulates the human condition . . . it is also the sign of
Krishna’s transcendence.’60
It is extraordinary, I find, how the epic manages to balance the
worldly and the divine identities of Krishna. It does not gloss
over his contradictions, nor does it try to idealize him—his flaws
are there for all to see.

+
 +

202 / The Difficulty of Being Good

‘Let us go home and rest’

Cheerful throughout the epic, Krishna becomes grave after

Duryodhana’s death and he gives a sobering message to the
victors:

Listen Pandavas, the Kauravas were great warriors and you could
not have defeated them in a fair fight. So, I had to use deceit,
trickery, and magic on your behalf . . . To defeat Duryodhana
fairly was even beyond the messengers of death. So, let’s not [get
carried away] by Bhima’s heroics. We have succeeded, it is evening
now—let us go home and rest.61

Instead of celebrating his side’s triumph, Krishna becomes

subdued. After the war Queen Gandhari, the mother of the
Kauravas, reproaches him for being indifferent to the terrible
carnage of battle when he could have prevented the war in the
first place. She curses him to die like a common beast in the
+ wilderness for having caused the death of all her sons, her +
kinsmen and her friends.
The Mahabharata is clearly uncomfortable with Krishna’s
conduct during the war. This explains, in part, why the mood of
the epic now swings downward. There may have been good
reasons why Krishna had to do what he did to win—the good
had to defeat evil; the world had to be brought to an end before
a new age could be ushered in—but the epic does not believe
that the ends justify the means. It does not approve of the
breaking of the rules of warfare. It does not believe a
dharmayuddha, ‘just war’, can be fought unjustly. It is resigned to
the fact that war cannot be abolished; hence, the rules of war are
a way to make it tolerable.
The Mahabharata shares this concern with the Catholic Church,
whose ‘just war’ tradition also defines the rules of war (jus in
bello). The latter defines them under two broad principles: the
principle of discrimination specifies legitimate targets that a
soldier can hit in a war and the principle of proportionality is

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 203

concerned with how much force is morally right in a given

moment. The first principle in this Western tradition exhorts
soldiers to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants
to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. When a soldier joins the
army he is prepared to become a target and loses the immunity
due to civilians. Still, sometimes the killing of civilians is
unavoidable. Bombing a munitions factory in a residential area
does not violate the first principle even if it is clear that some
civilians will be killed. This is what American military jargon
calls ‘collateral damage’. The second principle of just conduct
holds that the force employed against the enemy should be
proportionate to the desired objective. Again, the purpose is to
temper war’s violence and minimize suffering.
Jus in bello requires that soldiers be held responsible for their
actions. Saint Augustine opposed the prevailing belief of the
soldier ‘who is but the sword in the hand of him who uses it, is
not himself responsible for the death he deals’. When soldiers
+ start killing non-combatants, or pursue their enemy beyond a
+
reasonable limit, they are no longer committing legitimate acts of
war but acts of murder. This principle also raises the question if
obeying orders that one knows to be wrong or claiming ignorance
of the effects of one’s actions is immoral. The rules that shape
our military conduct comprise the ‘war convention’. It tells
soldiers not to use poison gas, for example. Although it has been
expounded, debated and revised over many centuries, ‘it remains
one of the more imperfect of human artefacts’.62
I believe that the Second World War was an example of a ‘just
war’, and I expect most people would agree. A world dominated
by a victorious Nazi Germany would have been even more
intolerable than the one ruled by Duryodhana. In that war the
victorious Allies did some nasty things. In the last five months of
World War II in the Pacific theatre, American ‘fire bombing’
raids killed more than 900,000 Japanese civilians—and this
happened before they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima

+
 +

204 / The Difficulty of Being Good

and Nagasaki. In the European theatre, the British killed more

civilians with their bombing of German cities than were killed by
Germany’s blitz on Britain.63 The Pandavas’ acts seem like
indiscretions in comparison.
Many believe that the Allied bombing of Germany was
vindictive and broke the rules of war, and that Churchill stuck to
it perversely, even after the cost to both the bombers and the
bombed had escalated and had become increasingly awful. The
irony is that the bombing did not achieve its objective. At the
time, of course, the Allies did not know they would win. Even
after Stalin’s gigantic army began to march against Hitler, the
Nazi propaganda machine was announcing to the world that it
possessed secret weapons that would alter the war’s course. This
was a lie, of course, but how were the Allies to know it? When
they were fighting the only thing that mattered was to defeat
Hitler, and as quickly as possible.
Ever since the Nuremberg trials, interest in the moral conduct
+ of war has grown around the world. We are better informed
+
about wartime offences thanks to the media and human rights
groups. Despite frequent lapses, the world does seem to have
made some progress. The doctrine of ‘just war’ and the rules of
the Geneva Convention appear increasingly to influence the
behaviour of governments and individual leaders. It is sobering
to remember though that the Mahabharata had been expressing
these concerns more than two thousand years ago.
The epic is ambivalent about Krishna’s pragmatic defence. It
refuses to accept the idea that good consequences outweigh evil
methods. Ultimately, there seems to be an austere and unforgiving
streak of dharma which appears to run through the epic. If good
persons are not allowed to win by any means, and if they must
fight justly, then one must be prepared to face the fact that they
might lose. There is no guarantee that truth and goodness will
prevail in human history. The Pandavas must accept this and
wait, perhaps, for another day. The important thing is that they

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 205

fight fairly. Since they did not, they failed in their dharma.
Therefore, they have to be judged and punished. Accordingly,
the Pandavas are not allowed to ‘live happily ever after’.

The war convention

The detailed code of warfare elaborated in the epic places the

men of the Mahabharata closer to the chivalric knights of the
Western middle ages. They were aristocratic warriors, who had
a sense of themselves as men of a certain kind, engaged in an
activity that was of moral value. They were noble kshatriyas, not
mere mercenaries, ruffians and bandits. They were also different
from soldiers in modern national armies who fight and die in
anonymity. Yet their concerns about the just war convention are
the same as ours.
Shakespeare’s much-admired hero Henry V faced a similar
problem as the Pandavas, although he seems to have had fewer
+ moral qualms. Like Yudhishthira, Henry had to decide whether +
to go to war with France in order to enforce his claim to the
throne. In the first scene of Act IV, Henry warns the French
governor of Harfleur that if the city does not surrender, he will
not be able to restrain his soldiers, who will rape virgins and
impale infants upon their pikes. The guilt for this, he suggests,
will be on the head of the governor for not surrendering. The
audience finds this disturbing for it is clearly wrong that soldiers
should inevitably kill innocent women and children. Yet,
Shakespeare seems to think otherwise, for he regards Henry a
noble and just king in his play. He assumes (probably rightly)
that war will bring rape and murder of the innocent. It does not
occur to him that these are crimes even in war. Like most of us,
he did not have a high opinion of the efficacy of war conventions.
Henry’s argument sounds similar to those of modern leaders,
who also do not give much thought to their responsibility for the
deaths of civilians in the wars that they prosecute. When George
W. Bush launched the American attack on Iraq in 2003, he must

+
 +

206 / The Difficulty of Being Good

have known that many innocent Iraqis would be killed by

American bombs. But he does not appear to have given it much
attention. Thousands of civilians had died from American
bombardments and from the civil strife that followed. President
Bush did not intend to kill Iraqi civilians, but this does not
absolve him of responsibility for their deaths.
When Amnesty International claimed in 2005 that the United
States had been complicit in the torture and detention of the
suspects of terrorism in secret locations around the world, there
was outrage in America and abroad. Amnesty claimed that
Yemeni men had been tortured in Jordan, and then kept for
eighteen months in secret detention. The Washington Post ran a
detailed account of the violent and protracted interrogation—
ending in death—of a former Iraqi general. When the US collected
prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, it did have a choice to treat
them as criminals, which means they had a right to be represented
and to face a court, or to treat them as prisoners of war. America
+ set up military tribunals, but many Americans were suspicious
+
about this move for those courts did not provide enough
protection to prisoners. Some felt that civilian courts should have
been used for these trials.64
Critics, however, countered that some prisoners released from
Guantanamo Bay may have ended up as insurgents in Iraq. True,
but in a decent judicial system some guilty people will always be
acquitted. This does not mean that they should have been held
incommunicado and treated as people without rights. If the war
on terror ‘takes on the aspect of a real war, then you fight it
within the rules of the Geneva Convention. If it is police work,
then you do it subject to the laws of a constitutional democracy.’65
My favourite general, Erwin Rommel, illustrates how an unjust
war can be fought justly. Rommel was one of Hitler’s famous
commanders during World War II who seems to have escaped
the moral infamy of the Nazis. His biographers tell us that he
was an honourable man. ‘While many of his colleagues and

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 207

peers in the German army surrendered their honour by colluding

with the iniquities of Nazism, Rommel was never defiled.’66 He
confined himself to the soldier’s professional task and when he
fought he followed the rules of war. ‘It was Rommel who burned
the Commando Order issued by Hitler on 28 October 1942,
which laid down that all enemy soldiers encountered behind the
German line were to be killed at once.’67 He did not shoot
prisoners. Rommel was a servant, not a ruler, of the German
state; he did not choose the wars that he fought but like Prince
Andrey in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he served his ‘Tsar and
country’.
The Mahabharata understands that war is terrible. Hence, it
lays down elaborate rules of fighting. It reminds warriors that
fighting should be broken off at sunset; one does not strike the
enemy from behind; one does not engage in ambush or surprise
attacks. The epic creates limits on the intensity and duration of
the combat or the suffering of soldiers. Yet, it is also cynical
+ about these restraints. It doubts if these rules will be observed. It +
has the same mocking attitude that we have towards the defective
Geneva Convention. When the best of men, the Pandavas, break
those rules, then what about ordinary persons? It is not easy to
be good.

The problem of evil

Uttanka, the hermit, did not know that the war at Kurukshetra
had taken place. Krishna told him about it when they chanced to
meet in the desert sands of Rajasthan. Uttanka got angry with
Krishna when he heard about this and he accused him of not
having prevented the brutal killing of war. Krishna replied that
he was helpless. The hermit was, indeed, surprised to hear God
claiming helplessness. Krishna explained that the process leading
to the war had begun much earlier, and by the time he had got
involved there was already too much hate and hostility on both
sides. War had become inevitable. Moreover, he told the hermit

+
 +

208 / The Difficulty of Being Good

that when he, Krishna, assumed the avatar, the ‘form’, of a

human being, he had to act as one. He did try to negotiate a
peace but the Kauravas did not listen to him. All he could do
was to try and see that justice was done in the end, and the
kingdom restored to the Pandavas.68
Uttanka’s innocent question reminded me of the classic
‘problem of evil’ in Christian theology: how can God, who is
supposed to be perfect, allow evil to exist? Epicurus, one of the
first to raise this question, asks: ‘Either God wants to abolish evil,
and cannot; or he can, but does not want to . . . If he wants to, but
cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is
wicked . . . If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really
wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?’69
Put another way: If God is good, why is his world so bad?
Why is there so much unmerited suffering of the sort that
Draupadi spoke about in Chapter 3? Epicurus concluded that the
existence of suffering is incompatible with the existence of God.
+ When Draupadi was in exile with the Pandavas, she ‘staggers
+
with wonder’ and ‘condemns the Placer’ for the unmerited
suffering experienced by her family.70 When everything was
going so well for the Pandavas, why did the tragedy of the dice
game and their consequent exile have to strike her family?
Epicurus’s simple answer would have been that since there is
evil in the world, God does not exist.
I believe that the problem of evil exists only if one believes that
God is all-powerful and benign. This may not hold true in the
Mahabharata. Krishna seems to be suggesting that all of life is
subject to the law of karma. A person is free to act, but once the
deed is done, no one can stop its relentless consequences. Even
God cannot interfere. The law of karma is relentless and it
trumps even God. ‘The Hindu conception of God does not
include the attribute of omnipotence’, and this is in striking
contrast to Judeo–Christian theology.71 To a Hindu, it makes
sense for Krishna to tell Yudhishthira at the end of the war that

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 209

the Pandavas won partly through ‘luck’.72 The Indian medieval

philosopher Shankara explained this in his commentary on the
Brahma Sutras. He said that one merely reaps the results of one’s
moral actions sown in the past. One’s karma decides if one will
experience pleasure or pain, and this is decided by one’s previous
actions. God does not want to come in the way of this cosmic
justice. Hence, God is not unjust.73 Accordingly, the problem of
explaining unmerited suffering does not arise, and the problem
of evil is a problem of ignorance. Karma explains it all.
But this intellectual interpretation leaves the average person
dissatisfied. Clearly there is unjust suffering. Draupadi did suffer
in the jungles. The Pandavas grieved mightily over the death of
the young Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son, whose unjust killing hangs
over the ‘battle books’ of the Mahabharata. Even though one may
believe in karma, one feels the psychological need to be comforted.
One feels anxiety and guilt over one’s bad deeds and this leads
to a feeling of helplessness. This is where the benign and loving
+ God of bhakti, ‘devotion’, comes in. It was, in part, on this very
+
human need for faith in God’s grace that Ramanuja built his
bhakti philosophy in the eleventh century in south India. Hence,
many Vaishnav devotees of Krishna (as ‘God’ with a capital G)
believe that He can ‘override’ karma. And this contradictory idea
sits side by side with a belief in the ‘unyielding power’ of karma.
Karma has its optimistic side in a human being’s ability to act
with freedom, and be responsible for this act. Its pessimistic side
is a feeling that we cannot escape from our past.
An influential defence of God in the West argues that human
free will is something of value. God cannot eliminate evil and
suffering in the world without also eliminating the free will of
human beings to do evil and good things. If God allows people
to be free, they need to have the capacity to commit crimes and
to be immoral as well. You cannot blame or praise people unless
they have a certain amount of freedom to act.74
But why would God risk populating the world with free

+
 +

210 / The Difficulty of Being Good

creatures if he knew that they would mess it up with wrongdoing?

The neat answer to that is although free will makes evil possible,
it is also responsible for love and goodness and human joy.
Giving a human being free will is worth the risk.75 Some of the
evil in the world, however, is not the result of the free choices of
people but arises from natural disasters, such as an earthquake,
which takes innocent lives unexplainably. The ‘free will defence’
cannot explain why God allows such ‘natural evil’ to exist. The
usual Jewish and Christian response to this challenge is to say
that God allowed natural evil to enter the world as part of Adam
and Eve’s punishment for their sin in the Garden of Eden.

‘The meanest death in history’

When Queen Gandhari curses Krishna for not preventing the

war, he replies:

Lady, I shall destroy the Yadava clan, which I had planned [to do,
+ in any case]. You have just reminded me of what I have to do.76 +

Hearing this, the Pandavas become ‘afraid and worried’, and

they realize that the killing in the war was only a part of the
divine plan of a broader destruction, in which Krishna’s own
Yadava clan would also be finished. They are reminded with
terror of the Krishna who has shown Arjuna his form of Time,
the destroyer. Krishna remains true to his word.
Years go by, and one day when the sun is eclipsed in the sky
above Dwarka, members of Krishna’s Yadava and Vrishni clans
are drunk and noisy after much festivity. During the revelry, the
few survivors of the Kurukshetra War are reminded of those
terrible events. Satyaki accuses Kritavarma: ‘Can anyone be
more cruel than you who killed the ones who were asleep?’77
Kritavarma remembers the ghastly nocturnal slaughter by the
three Kauravas (which we shall encounter in the following
chapter). He retorts angrily by listing how the Pandavas brought
down all the great Kaurava generals through deceit. The

+
 +

Krishna’s Guile / 211

wrangling gets more and more bitter between the two survivors
of the great war. Ancient wounds are reopened, and soon Satyaki
draws his sword and kills Kritavarma. Instantly, others join the
fray, and Satyaki and Pradyumna, Krishna’s son, are killed.
During this terrible fight, Krishna remains a silent spectator.
Finally, he stirs and picks up a blade of isika grass. In his hands
the blade of grass turns into a weapon, and within minutes he
has wreaked devastation. The entire clans of the Yadava and the
Vrishni vanish as the sea crosses its shore and engulfs Dwarka.
Krishna is calm, unmoved and relentless.
A few days later as Krishna lies resting in the forest, an
ordinary hunter mistakes him for an animal, and pierces the sole
of his foot with an arrow. It kills him. He does not die the noble
death of the warriors of the Mahabharata. Flowers do not fall
from above as they did at Karna’s death. He dies like any
creature in the forest. It is ‘the meanest death in history’.78 While
recognizing his divinity, I believe it is the epic’s way of showing
+ +
disapproval of Krishna’s misdeeds.
Krishna’s role in the epic forces one to confront a moral
dilemma. How does one explain that ‘good’ persons, who had
strong and persuasive reasons to make war, could win only by
unfair means? How can one think of them as ‘good’ if they can
succeed only by fighting in unfair ways? How, then, does one
distinguish between the ‘wicked Kauravas’ and the ‘good
Pandavas’, and indeed, between good and evil? The Pandavas,
along with Krishna, were supposed to be ‘the good guys’; yet
they managed to kill every Kaurava commander—Bhishma,
Drona, Karna and Duryodhana—by foul means. On the other
hand, the Kaurava heroes—supposedly ‘the bad guys’—fought
honestly and heroically, especially Duryodhana and Karna.
These are genuine dilemmas, and the text does not offer easy
answers. If the Mahabharata’s editors had to defend themselves,
they might have said something like this: like all human beings,
the epic’s characters are an ‘ineradicable mixture of good and

+
 +

212 / The Difficulty of Being Good

evil’.79 It is a mistake to slot them into compartments labelled

‘good’ and ‘evil’. ‘Both sides engage in good and bad deeds, and
there is greatness on both sides.’80 It would have been easy to
make Krishna a perfect god, who always upholds dharma.
However, the point of the Mahabharata is that dharma is sukshma,
‘subtle’, and it is often difficult to tell right from wrong. Since
Krishna’s deceptions take place on the human stage, they are an
expression of our ambiguous human condition. To have done
otherwise would have been to miss the point.

+ +

+
 +

ASHWATTHAMA’S REVENGE
‘Now I feel the whirligig of Time’

Where is sleep for the man who is suffering?

. . . How in this world can a man express the grief
Remembrance of his father’s murder brings?
+ My heart burns day and night but never burns it out. +
1
—Ashwatthama to Kripa, Mahabharata X.4.21, 23

‘This owl has tutored me’

Sauptikaparvan, the slim Book Ten of the Mahabharata, opens on

the fateful night of the eighteenth day of battle.2 The Pandavas
are victorious after destroying the Kaurava armies. All the sons
of Dhritarashtra are dead. Duryodhana lies on the ground, his
thighs broken. Among the Kaurava warriors, only Drona’s son,
Ashwatthama, his uncle Kripa, and Kritavarma remain. Seeing
his commander felled unfairly by Bhima, Ashwatthama is filled
with pity. As the dying Duryodhana anoints him the last
commander of the Kauravas, he vows revenge.
Fleeing from the jubilant Pandavas, the three warriors take
refuge in a forest. They spot a banyan tree and descend from
their chariots. They untie their horses, bathe, and perform their

213

+
 +

214 / The Difficulty of Being Good

evening prayers under the tree. Their limbs dragged down by

sleep, Kripa and Kritavarma fall asleep.

But Drona’s son . . . overpowered

By shame and wrath, could not sleep and lay there . . .
Peering at one particular, teeming spot,
The warrior saw a banyan tree covered in crows . . .

But as those oblivious, trusting crows slept on

Ashwatthama beheld a terrible owl . . .

It stooped as swift as Garuda, screeching loud,

Unnaturally taloned, freakishly beaked.

Then uttering soft deceitful cries, like any bird

Come down to roost, it fell upon the tree—
Stooped on a branch, and slaughtered countless sleeping crows . . .
Slicing the wings of some, beheading the rest . . .

Then, Drona’s son, a witness to that guileful deed

+ Accomplished by the owl at night, resolved
+
To do a similar deed himself, reflecting:
‘This owl has tutored me in war. My thoughts
Are locked on my enemies’ death, and
Now the time has come . . .’3

Learning from the owl, Ashwatthama resolves to massacre the

enemy forces when they are asleep. He reasons that the three
Kauravas are too weak to take on the skilled and powerful
Pandava army and their Panchala allies. But they might succeed
through deceit. So, he awakens his companions and tells them of
his decision. He knows that what he intends to do is ‘corrupted’,
but he cannot help it, he says.

And now I feel the whirligig of Time:

For in reality this has fallen out
Just as it had to; whatever the effort—
However exceptional—the result would have
Been precisely the same.4

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 215

His companions recoil from the foul proposal and try to dissuade
him from this terrible, immoral enterprise. Kripa says,

Rest tonight, sleep tonight, dear lord—you have the strength

To rise to this, but you have been awake too long.5

His nephew, however, cannot forget the murder of his father by

the Pandavas.

Where is sleep for the man who is suffering?

. . . How in this world can a man express the grief
Remembrance of his father’s murder brings?
My heart burns night and day, but never burns it out.
That special way in which my sire was slain
By evil men—you saw it all. And it is that which
Rips my vitals now.6

Ashwatthama recalls that barely three days ago, his father,

Drona, the commander of the Kaurava forces, was destroying
+ everything in sight. The Pandavas had looked to Krishna, who as +
we saw in the last chapter, advised them to play a trick: kill the
elephant named Ashwatthama and shout, ‘Ashwatthama is dead’.
Drona did not believe his son was dead until Yudhishthira, as
tutored by Krishna, confirmed that Ashwatthama (and he said
‘elephant’ under his breath) was indeed dead. We know the
rest—Drona laid down his weapons, assumed a yogic posture,
and Dhrishtadyumna, the Panchala prince, cut off his head.
The blind Dhritarashtra had predicted that this would be a
turning point in the war: ‘I lost all hope for victory, O Sanjaya,
when I heard that the teacher, Drona, was slaughtered by
Dhrishtadyumna. Dharma was, thus, violated for Drona at that
time was sitting in his chariot unarmed.’7
Ashwatthama is in a rage as he remembers the dark moment.

Life is unbearable until I’ve killed

Dhrishtadyumna in battle. He murdered
My father, and so he must be killed by me,
Along with all his Panchala allies

+
 +

216 / The Difficulty of Being Good

So the question of my holding back now doesn’t

Arise. No man in this world can deflect me
From this, my duty. My mind is made up . . .8

Kripa tries to dissuade his nephew, reminding him that such a

heinous act of revenge will violate dharma, which is, after all,
one of the three ends of life. He warns him that his false sense
of duty will land him in hell.

In this world, the slaughter of the sleeping

Is not respected as conforming to dharma.
The same applies to those whose arms have been laid down,
To those whose fighting chariots have been unyoked . . .

Tonight, my lord, the Panchalas will sleep,

Their armour unbuckled, unconscious as the dead,
All unsuspecting through the dark till dawn
The wicked man who seeks to harm them in that state,
Without a doubt, would dive into a raftless,
+ +
Fathomless, shoreless hell.

. . . in you an unworthy action would inspire

Revulsion—like blood splattered on a white tunic,
So it seems to me.9

But Ashwatthama is unmoved. He is intent on revenge even

though he is aware of its terrible karmic consequences.

Truly, if killing my father’s murderers,

The Panchalas, as they sleep in the night, means
Rebirth for me as a worm or a moth, I shall
Suffer it gladly.10

With these words, Ashwatthama yokes his horses, mounts his

chariot, and sets out, followed by his uncle and Kritavarma. At
the threshold of the enemy camp,

. . . his hair rose on his scalp, for he saw

Guarding the gate, a great bodied spirit, bright as

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 217

The sun and moon combined.

It was draped in a tiger’s skin soaked in blood,
Its upper garment, black antelope skin.
Its sacred thread a snake.
. . . Its gaping jaws and their jutting tusks spoke terror—
Brilliant eyes in their thousands stared from its face.
. . . From every orifice—from its mouth, its nostrils,
Its ears, from those thousands of eyes—there licked high flames.11

Ashwatthama attacks the horrific spirit with arrows, a javelin,

his golden sword and a blazing club, but the spirit devours them
all. Disarmed and in great distress, Ashwatthama thinks that this
is his punishment for wanting ‘to kill those who should not be
killed’. Yet he cannot turn back for that would be cowardly.
Perhaps fate, in the form of this towering spirit, has overtaken
him.

Surely this terrible being that comes

+ To obstruct me is the fruit of my impure +
Intention, produced with no regard for dharma.

And he concludes:

So my turning back from battle has been

Determined by fate: fate alone can check me here.12

Ashwatthama bows his head and invokes the god Shiva’s aid to
help him destroy this ‘terrible instrument of fate’. He offers
himself as a sacrifice and enters the flames of the sacrificial altar.
Shiva is moved. The god explains that he has been protecting the
Panchalas so far, but their time has obviously run out. He gives
Ashwatthama a sword and enters his body.

‘The Night of Time’

Ashwatthama advances towards the enemy camp, while Kripa

and Kritavarma wait unseen by the gate. He spots the tent of his
father’s killer and enters stealthily.

+
 +

218 / The Difficulty of Being Good

So entering Dhrishtadyumna’s tent, Ashwatthama

Saw the prince of the Panchalas sleeping
On a bed close by—
On a great bed covered with a priceless quilt
Of spotless linen, fragrant with powder
And incense, and hung with beautiful garlands.
Then with a kick Ashwatthama awoke
High-souled Dhrishtadyumna, sleeping in his bed,
Secure and trusting.

. . . as he rose from bed, mighty

Ashwatthama seized his hair in both his hands and
Ground him into the earth.
Crushed by that force and his own fear, the Panchala
Prince was trapped half out of sleep, quite paralyzed.
So one foot on his chest, the other on his throat,
Ashwatthama prepared to kill him, groaning
+ And quivering like a sacrificial beast. +
Then Dhrishtadyumna, tearing with his nails
At Drona’s son, cried in a muffled way:

‘Son of the teacher, best of men, kill me

With a weapon. Quickly! Strike! So by your hand
I may reach the worlds of those whose deeds were good.’

Hearing those garbled words, Drona’s son spat back:

‘There are no worlds for those who kill their teachers,
Defiler of your race. And that is why,
. . . you do not merit death by arms.’

So speaking, enraged Ashwatthama drummed

Violently on that hero’s vitals with his heels,
Like a lion mauling an elephant in rut.13

Then, with his sword like a sacrificial knife, Ashwatthama crashes

through the camp, slaying the sleeping victorious armies of the
Pandavas, Panchalas, and their allies. It is an orgy of slaughter.

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 219

Like Death himself let loose by Time, his limbs

Painted with their blood, he cut down with his
Mighty sword, warriors, elephants, and steeds.
So as they struggled, and as he plunged and raised
And stabbed convulsively, Ashwatthama
Was triple-dyed in blood.

And excellent, valiant men, who had risen

From their beds and rushed to meet him, he killed
From afar, and offered them to the Night of Time.14

After avenging his father’s death on Draupadi’s brother

Dhrishtadyumna, Ashwatthama kills her unsuspecting father,
Drupada, the Panchala king, and then all the five sleeping
children of Draupadi. Meanwhile, Kripa and Kritavarma set the
camp on fire. Everyone perishes, except the five Pandava brothers
and Draupadi, who were away from the military camp that
night. They were with Krishna.
+ The devastated Pandavas asked Krishna the following day: +
How was it possible for three men to destroy the entire victorious
army of the Pandavas? Krishna explained that the great Lord
Shiva, who is not easily offended but is easily pleased, had aided
them.

‘An epic of revenge’

What explains this terrible deed of Ashwatthama’s? The night-

time massacre of the sleeping armies was a deed of such repulsive
proportions that it turned the mood of the epic from heroic
triumph to one of dark, stoic resignation.15 Yet, by all accounts,
Ashwatthama was a fine young man—confident, modest and
fair-minded. The son of the great martial arts teacher Drona, he
grew up in a privileged environment, in the company of princes.
His father taught him archery and other skills along with the
Pandavas and Kauravas, and Ashwatthama always dealt with
both sets of cousins correctly and impartially. Although a brahmin,

+
 +

220 / The Difficulty of Being Good

he acquired from birth the broad-chested ethic of the kshatriya

warrior and looked upon glory in battle as his life’s goal. He
believed unquestioningly in what Duryodhana said to Kripa in
the Shalyaparvan, ‘Fame is all that one should acquire here [on
the earth]. That fame can be obtained in battle, and by no other
means.’16
When war is declared, Ashwatthama finds himself on the
wrong side, not unlike other honourable men—Bhishma, Drona
and Vidura. Like them, he acts with integrity and fights with
honour till the end. However, his sense of justice is wounded
early by Duryodhana’s sham game of dice. Hence, he draws a
line during the cattle raid on Virata; he tells Duryodhana to ask
the cheat, Shakuni, to go and fight the Pandavas as he had done
so deceitfully well at dice.17
Ashwatthama is not afraid to speak his mind. When
Duryodhana chides him for his sympathy for the Pandavas, he
erupts. ‘You are right, my father and I are naturally fond of the
+ Pandavas. But our friendship has nothing to do with our actions
+
on the battlefield.’ He adds, ‘We are striving to do our best to
win this war for you, ready to shed our blood if needed . . . It is
you who are greedy, self-centred, and treacherous; in fact, it is
your suspicious character that is the problem.’18
Ashwatthama’s personality begins to change when his father
is slain deceitfully. He is filled with pity as he recalls how Bhima
killed his leader, Duryodhana, unfairly with a treacherous blow
to the thighs.

. . . whose heart is so pitiless

It would not burn to have heard, as I have,
Wailing of the king whose thigh’s been shattered?19

He remembers the other misdeeds of the Pandavas—how Karna,

Bhishma and Bhurishrava were killed on the battlefield. Thus,
his mind turns to revenge and the terrible massacre at night is
the result.

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 221

The Mahabharata has been called ‘an epic of revenge’ and

Ashwatthama happens to have been at the wrong place at the
wrong time. From this perspective, the Kurukshetra War was the
Pandavas’ vengeance against their humiliation at the game of
dice. When Draupadi was dragged into the assembly of men,
wearing only a single piece of clothing stained with her menstrual
blood, and when Duryodhana invited her to sit on his thigh,
Bhima vowed to break those thighs in revenge. And so he did.
‘The narrative fabric of the epic is . . . a network of tales of
vengeance, and . . . avenging Draupadi is Bhima’s speciality.’20
Ashwatthama’s revenge was the next escalating act in this cycle
of vengeance.

Crime and punishment

If a good person suffers, then the bad person should suffer even
more: this is an idea that seems embedded in the human psyche.
+ Consciously one denies it, of course, and proclaims piously, ‘I’m +
not the sort of person who holds grudges.’ Yet one unconsciously
applauds when the villain ‘gets what he deserves’. Wanting to
punish a villain or seeing him punished is ubiquitous in literature,
movies and politics. From the rage of Achilles in the Iliad, to the
bloodbaths of Renaissance tragedies, to the calculated revenge of
Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, to popular
Hollywood films, human beings want to get even. The desire for
retribution, to right the catastrophic wrongs done to American
slaves and Indian ‘untouchables’ drives the politics of Afro-
Americans in the US and of Dalits in India respectively.
‘Vengeance has the power of an instinct. The “lust of
vengeance” and the “thirst of revenge” are so powerful that they
rival all other human needs.’21 Contemporary thinking about
revenge and other emotions has been influenced by advances in
psychology. Some think that revenge is neurotic and aberrant—
‘vindictiveness damages the core of the whole being’.22 Others
argue that vindictive emotions like anger, resentment and the

+
 +

222 / The Difficulty of Being Good

desire for revenge actually deserve a more legitimate place in

our emotional, social and legal lives.23
I am inclined to believe that revenge fulfils a legitimate human
need. I think retribution is useful because it brings a ‘profound
sense of moral equilibrium impelling us to demand that people
pay for the harm they have done to others’.24 Punishment is thus
a form of revenge by society, fulfilling both a human need for a
moral equilibrium and the need to demonstrate to offenders that
some behaviours are unacceptable. The US Supreme Court
employed this logic in legitimizing the death penalty in 1976.
Some crimes are so terrible, it felt, that capital punishment is the
only adequate penalty.
Human beings have long wrestled with establishing the right
relationship between a crime and its punishment. This is also the
central issue in Ashwatthama’s story. What, if anything, ought
Ashwatthama to have done after his father’s killing? How should
he be punished after his heinous revenge? When human beings
+ lived in tribes, revenge was a matter of clan’s vendetta in the +
form of ‘blood money’. As they moved into civil society, they
developed the legal doctrine of ‘pollution’ for serious crimes.
Most ancient societies—including Greek, Hebrew and Indian—
regarded a crime such as murder an offence against society, and
only allowed the state to revenge it. Punishment under the law,
executed by officers of the state, is thus a human institution, not
a natural fact. Indeed, Bhishma instructs Yudhishthira (after he
becomes king after the war) that punishment must follow a
proper judicial process:

Listen, scion of Kuru, to what the rod of punishment is and how

it is judicially prescribed: for the rod of punishment is the one
thing in this world upon which everything depends. Great king,
judicial process is regarded to be a name of Law. The very
proceeding of judicial process is directed to this end.25

Thinkers from Plato onwards have believed in the legitimacy

of retributive justice. Even an absolute moralist like Kant felt that

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 223

imposing a just punishment showed respect for the criminal’s

human autonomy. I happen to agree with forward-looking
‘consequentialists’ who justify punishment on the grounds of
social control: it provides an incentive for a normal person to
comply with laws, helps reduce crime and thus maximizes
human welfare.26 Backward-looking ‘retributivists’, on the other
hand, believe that the guilty deserve to be punished.27 Punishment,
in their view, is supposed to correct an injustice, protect the
individual rights of the innocent, and restore moral equality
between the offender and victim. To fail to impose a penalty is
as much an injustice since it makes the offender superior to the
victim; hence, perpetrators must be punished to reaffirm human
equality. According to the political philosopher Jean Hampton,
the aim of punishment is not to avenge wrongdoing or to inflict
pain and injury on the offender but ‘to annul the offender’s claim
of superiority’.28 In both cases, private revenge is pre-empted, as
the ordinary citizen of a well-functioning modern state is confident
+ that offenders will be arrested and convicted.
+
During the past fifty years, public opinion around the world,
including in America and India, has shifted from efforts to
reform and rehabilitate offenders to retribution and incarceration.
Sociologists and criminologists became disillusioned in the 1960s
with the rehabilitation programmes in prisons in America.29 The
debate today is about ensuring that the sentence is fair, deserved
and proportional to the crime, which is also the key issue in
Ashwatthama’s revenge. This doctrine of proportionality is
consistent with human intuition, as these dramatic lines from
Exodus 21:22–25 demonstrate: ‘If men strive, and hurt a woman
with child, so that her fruit depart from her . . . and he shall pay
as the judges determine . . . thou shalt give life for life, eye for
eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for
burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’30
Proportionality in punishment is also what Bhishma counsels
Yudhishthira when he becomes king after the war.

+
 +

224 / The Difficulty of Being Good

The rod of punishment is to be applied differentially and according

to Law, not haphazardly: Punishment may be censure,
imprisonment, gold, expulsion, severing a limb from the body, or
execution. Banishment, death, and the various corporal afflictions
should not be imposed for any trivial reason.31

Yet one is painfully aware of how difficult it is to achieve

proportionality in practice. There are wide variations in prison
sentences handed out for the same crime even in the same
country, and capital punishment continues to be controversial.
Ashwatthama’s example shows that ‘inflicting punishment is an
unparalleled opportunity for the abuse of power’.32 Both Nietzsche
and Foucault believed that human beings seem to ‘get intrinsic
even if disguised satisfactions out of inflicting authorized harm
on others’. A self-appointed judge like Ashwatthama illustrates
Nietzsche’s point. Hence, contemporary liberal democracies have
arrived at a more modest solution. It is what John Rawls called
+ ‘pure procedural justice’, which means that punishment is +
authorized under a fair penalty schedule. ‘No other conception
of deserved punishment can be defended’ even though one is
aware in the end that punishment has a largely symbolic rather
than an intrinsic value.33

‘For three thousand years you will wander this earth’

In the end Ashwatthama is, indeed, punished for his heinous

deed. Was his punishment just? Did it meet the test of
proportionality? I now turn to these questions.
When Draupadi hears of Ashwatthama’s awful deed and of
the death of all her children, she cries out for revenge.

O Partha, ever since I heard that they were

Slaughtered in their sleep by Drona’s wicked son,
Grief burns me up, like fire running through a house.
If the life of this evil’s author, Drona’s son,
And the lives of his followers are not rubbed out

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 225

By you today in combat, on this very spot

I shall fast to death.
Don’t doubt it, Pandavas—if Drona’s son does not
Reap the fruit of his evil deed, I shall do this.34

Bhima and the other Pandavas set out in pursuit and encounter
Ashwatthama on the bank of the Ganges. Cornered, Ashwatthama
makes an arrow from a blade of grass, charges it with brahmashiras,
and hurls it at the Pandavas. Arjuna then releases an equally
powerful weapon in order to neutralize Ashwatthama’s. Together,
these two dreadful weapons threaten universal destruction, a
sort of nuclear nightmare. Realizing this, Arjuna withdraws his
weapon, but Ashwatthama cannot. He diverts it into the wombs
of the Pandava women, making them barren. This would have
ended the Pandava dynasty, but Krishna managed to revive the
foetus of Abhimanyu’s widow, Uttara, who bore him a son,
Parikshit, and he went on to rule the Kurus for sixty years.35
+ Krishna then turns to Ashwatthama and says: +
But as for you, the wise shall know you as a
Murderer of children and a coward,
Whose evil deeds are beyond all tally.
And so you must harvest those evil deeds;
For three thousand years you shall wander this earth,
Alone, and totally incommunicado.
You shall stray companionless in desert wastes,
For Villain, you have no place among men.
Stinking of blood and pus, driven to the
Inaccessible wilderness, you shall wander,
Subject to every plague that blows, you black-souled wretch!36

What is one to make of Krishna’s punishment of Ashwatthama?

I asked this question to a class of fourteen-year-olds in a middle
class school in South Delhi in March 2005. They were satisfied on
the whole that the punishment met the test of proportionality.
They said that Ashwatthama’s crime was of such a monstrous

+
 +

226 / The Difficulty of Being Good

nature that it deserved an equally horrific retribution. Many felt

that a death sentence would have been too kind under the
circumstances for he would not have suffered the consequences
of his terrible deed. There was no mention of rehabilitative
justice. One child argued that since Krishna is a loving god, it
would have been more appropriate if he had forgiven
Ashwatthama. She was shouted down by her classmates.

‘Forgiveness is the strength of the virtuous’

The opposite of revenge is, of course, forgiveness. Draupadi

wanted revenge against the Kauravas for stealing the Pandavas’
kingdom. But the idealistic Yudhishthira calmed her down in the
forest, saying ‘forgiveness is the strength of the virtuous’.37 In
that poignant scene he said, ‘To fight is easy, but to forgive is
difficult. To be patient is not to be weak; to seek peace is always
the wiser course.’ Forbearance, he added, is superior to anger.38
+ In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; in passing +
it over, he is superior. That which is past is gone, irrevocable,
and the wise have enough to do with present matters.
Draupadi wondered why her husband did not feel anger and
resentment, emotions that are normal in a victim. She asked how
it could be virtuous to forgive Duryodhana, who had stolen their
kingdom and humiliated her. She feared that Yudhishthira’s
‘forgiveness’ glossed over the seriousness of Duryodhana’s crime.
The overwhelming tradition of retributive justice is, of course, on
Draupadi’s side. It is grounded in the belief that victims also
deserve respect. Draupadi’s resentment is a ‘natural instinct’,
and to acknowledge that resentment is to respect Draupadi as an
individual.39 Hence, only sincere and sustained repentance by
the wrongdoer can make forgiveness acceptable. Otherwise, the
propensity to forgive is a moral defect.40
The profound grief that Yudhishthira experiences at the end of
the war is an example of such a repentance when forgiveness is
justified. It made me rethink my position on retributive justice

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 227

and look upon forgiveness more sympathetically. There are a

number of reasons why I felt that revenge and retributive justice
are wrong: it employs the suffering of another human being to
satisfy oneself; it is connected with obsession, rage, escalating
violence—all of which are morally objectionable; those against
whom we take revenge are unlikely to concur with our
perceptions of the wrong; finally, revenge goes against our
obligation to respect human beings and to limit their suffering.41
Thus, I sympathized with the earlier Yudhishthira, and I began
to believe that the capacity to overcome anger and resentment
amounts to a virtue. I realized that forgiveness allows the victim
to see the wrongdoer also in a different light. It is not merely
passive. By changing the way one perceives the other person,
forgiveness makes one want to act rather than merely feel.42
Yet, I felt that there are strict limits to forgiveness. It took
Yudhishthira thirteen harsh years in exile to realize this. The first
sign of this change came, as we have seen, on the day after
+ Abhimanyu’s wedding, when Satyaki proclaims in Virata’s court, +
‘No law can be found against killing enemies who are plotting to
kill us.’43 As he took charge of the peace negotiations, Yudhishthira
realized that he might have to go to war. His new pragmatic,
down-to-earth view of dharma recognizes the limits of goodness.
It is grounded in human self-interest, but without being amoral.
Retributive justice avoids both extremes—the amorality of
Duryodhana and the idealistic super-morality of the earlier
Yudhishthira.
Ultimately, Yudhishthira accepts that there will always be
wrongdoing in the world, and if necessary, a king must go to
war to protect the innocent. And he does. After the war, Bhishma
instructs him on the dharma of a good king and teaches him that
retributive justice protects the innocent, and indeed danda, ‘the
rod’ or retributive justice, is the source of civilized behaviour:

If the rod of force did not exist in this world, beings would be
nasty and brutish to each other. Because they fear punishment,

+
 +

228 / The Difficulty of Being Good

beings do not kill each other, Yudhishthira. As they are preserved

by the rod of force day after day, king, his subjects make the king
grow greater; therefore the rod of force is what is most important.
It puts this world into a stable order quickly, king.44

Yudhishthira in the end agrees.

O lord, the rod of punishment that reaches everywhere with its

tremendous fiery energy is the best thing for all living beings.45

It is difficult to say what Yudhishthira would have advised

Ashwatthama in order to cope with his grief. The horror of the
war will tempt him to renounce his throne and adopt the
peaceful, non-violent paths of Buddha and Mahavira. This is
when one begins to understand that the theme of the Mahabharata
is not revenge but peace and reconciliation. We get an intimation
of this change on the following day when Yudhishthira learns
about Ashwatthama’s night-time massacre of his sleeping armies.
He cries out:
+ +
We who were their conquerors have at last
been conquered by the foe . . .
How can we call it victory when we are the
Vanquished . . .46

Forgiveness and reconciliation

The only one who rejoices at Ashwatthama’s heinous deed is

Dhritarashtra. Instead of horror, the blind king expresses regret
that Ashwatthama’s revenge came too late. He asks Sanjaya, the
narrator:

Why is it this mighty warrior, Drona’s son,

Could not achieve this feat before . . .
And why is it only
When the warrior Duryodhana is dead,
Has the great archer committed
This action? Tell me that!47

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 229

Sanjaya replies baldly that it had happened because the soldiers

were asleep; moreover, Krishna and the Pandava brothers were
absent.
Later that day the Pandavas come to console the blind king
and Gandhari over the death of their children. Dhritarashtra is
still burning for revenge, especially against Bhima, who had
killed Duryodhana. He rises to embrace Bhima, but Krishna,
sensing devious thoughts in the old man, instantly substitutes an
iron image of Bhima. The powerfully built king embraces the
statue with all his desperate strength, and crushes it to pieces.
His anger is thus cooled, and the last act of revenge in the epic
is aborted.48
Despite the enmity, Yudhishthira behaves magnanimously
with Dhritarashtra after the war. At his coronation, he declares:

Our father, the great king Dhritarashtra, is our highest God, and
those who wish to please me must obey his commands and heed his
+ preferences. It is because of him that I am still alive after my vast +
slaughter of my kinsmen. I will always obey him unflaggingly. If
you would be kind to me then please comport toward Dhritarashtra
as you did before. He is the lord of the universe for you as he is
for me.49

Yudhishthira does not pursue the path of retributive justice but

of forgiveness. Even though he knows that Dhritarashtra’s
unwillingness to control his son, Duryodhana, had been the
cause of the war, he does not hold trials of war criminals.
Yudhishthira must have realized that punishing his uncle would
not have healed the Pandavas’ wounds nor helped to restore
political community. He uses the word kshama, ‘forgiveness’,
several times, just as he had used it earlier in an attempt to cool
down Draupadi’s anger in the forest. Kshama has connotations of
forbearance as well as forgiveness.
While forgiveness suggests a degree of ‘self-righteousness’,
forbearance points one in the direction of the classical virtue of

+
 +

230 / The Difficulty of Being Good

magnanimity. The magnanimous person is forward-looking and

does not suffer from the ‘victimization’ complex of the forgiving
person.50 In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle extolled this big-
hearted ‘virtue of a great man’. Seventeenth-century painters
celebrated Alexander the Great’s magnanimity after defeating
the courageous Indian king Puru (Porus) of the Punjab. The
magnanimity of the victor towards the defeated has also been
codified in the Geneva Convention. Yudhishthira demonstrates
this virtue after the war and thus makes it easier for the political
reconstruction of the fractured community of Hastinapura.
Many liberals today, however, would be sceptical of
Yudhishthira’s policy of reconciliation.51 They would argue that
reconciliation in a political community comes through political
participation, which is supposed to heal relationships and restore
communal solidarity. Excessive emphasis on social harmony and
communal solidarity might actually compromise the legitimate
rights of individuals, such as the right to reparations.52 They
+ believe that social and political harmony results from certain
+
constitutional procedures. When citizens freely and openly
confront conflicting interests and values they help to restore a
fractured, polarized society far more effectively.53 Hence, former
American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright frequently
stressed ‘first justice, then peace’ during the war in Yugoslavia.
She believed that retribution had to precede healing, and legal
accountability for the past regime’s offences was necessary for
restoring communal trust.54
The problem with the modern liberal position is that it works
well only in a stable and peaceful constitutional environment.
After a civil war, if one focuses on punishing offenders of the
past regime, one often neglects to rehabilitate the victims.
Moreover, it is difficult to pinpoint culpability even in a brutal
dictatorial government which has engaged in ethnic cleansing or
genocide. This was the case after the downfall of vicious regimes
in Cambodia, Chile, Liberia and Rwanda. Because evidence of

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 231

criminal wrongdoing was more easily available for lower officials,

senior political leaders escaped. Even in the Mahabharata’s civil
war—forgetting for a moment that almost everyone died—it
would have been difficult to prosecute offenders because the
claims to the throne were ambiguous.
The story of Argentina in the 1980s illustrates why
Yudhishthira’s reconciliatory approach may be better than the
pursuit of punishment. The democratic government that came to
power in Argentina after the atrocious 1975–79 ‘dirty war’ chose
to prosecute and punish senior state officials who were guilty of
human rights violations. Instead of restoring a sense of
community, the trials polarized society, ‘us versus them’, and
weakened institutions. They led to the illusion that only a small
group of military and police officials were guilty.55
The opposite example is South Africa’s oft-quoted success
with reconciliation. It shows that the ‘extension of forgiveness,
repentance, and reconciliation to whole nations is one of the
+ great innovations in statecraft of our time’.56 The South African
+
judge Richard Goldstone, who served as prosecutor for the
International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, observed that
truth-telling is more important than trials in healing and restoring
political community. Desmond Tutu, chairperson of South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, adds, ‘There is no future
without forgiveness.’ Pope John Paul II echoed the same
sentiment. ‘Indeed, if strict justice is viewed as a precondition for
peace, then the quest for national unity and peace may be
doomed to failure.’57
More recently in India, Professor J.S. Bandukwalla asked
Muslims to forgive the 2002 killings in Gujarat. On India’s west
coast, Gujarat is one of India’s most prosperous states, but it
allowed genocide to happen in broad daylight. In 2002, around
1,500 Muslims were killed in retaliation for the alleged murder
of Hindu pilgrims who were torched in a train near the city of
Godhra. Those who presided over the killings of the Muslims

+
 +

232 / The Difficulty of Being Good

were elected to power and their complicity was confirmed on

camera by an exposé in Tehelka magazine in 2007. But
Bandukwalla argued, ‘Forgiveness will release Muslims from the
trauma of the past. It may also touch the conscience of Hindus,
since the crimes were committed by a few fanatics in the name
of Ram. Most important, it may give Gujarat a chance to close
the tragic chapter of 2002 and move on.’
My first reaction to his proposal was: ‘No, the guilty must be
punished.’ But after the chief minister Narendra Modi was re-
elected with a thumping majority, I wondered if it was not a
great opportunity for him to make a magnanimous gesture to
heal the state’s wounds and lay to rest the ghosts of 2002. I felt
that forgiveness might actually work better than retributive
justice. I suggested, therefore, in my Sunday column in the Times
of India that it was worth trying Professor Bandukwalla’s idea.
I got a lot of hate mail from both sides after my column
appeared. Those who believed in legal accountability disagreed
+ vehemently, arguing that healing and communal trust would
+
only be restored in Gujarat once the guilty were punished and
the victims’ right to reparations fulfilled. Hindus, on the other
hand, were outraged; they felt that it was they who should be
doing the forgiving for the torching of the train in Godhra.
Nevertheless, I followed up my article with a suggestion that the
hugely popular chief minister, with a big electoral majority,
would gain a great deal of goodwill if he set up a ‘truth and
reconciliation commission’ (as Nelson Mandela and Desmond
Tutu had done in South Africa) and followed it up with a plan
to rehabilitate victims on both sides. This might bring to an end
a tragic chapter.
In the post-9/11 world, I find that revenge is increasingly
associated in the world’s eyes with Islam. My friend Murad Ali
Baig explains that revenge was an old Arab custom that
unfortunately got mixed up in Muslim tradition. A survival from
the precarious life in the desert, the certainty of vengeance acted

+
 +

Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 233

as a deterrent against oppressors; this is how small tribes of Arab

Bedouins protected themselves against bigger tribes. But revenge
also became intertwined with early Islamic politics. The early
khalifs, Umar and Uthman, and the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali
were all assassinated. The Bedouin Kharajites, unhappy that Ali
did not avenge Uthman’s assassination, caused a split between
the Sunni and Shia sects, and this brought its own bloodshed.
The Kharajite view of the world has been passed on through the
Wahhabis to today’s Taliban.
‘The word jehad,’ according to Baig, ‘is rarely found in the
Qur’an but is referred to 199 times in the Hadith, which was
written two centuries after the death of the Prophet. The Wahhabis
interpreted jehad to mean a holy war, even though it had
actually meant ‘striving’; a Mujahideen was originally not a holy
warrior but only one who strives. For Muhammad there were
two jehads and the greater one meant a struggle against one’s
own weakness while a lesser jehad was to fight against injustice.’58
+ Baig goes on to explain that the Qur’an clearly forbade killing in
+
the name of Islam. It is clear to me that unless today’s Muslim
clerics disavow revenge and the extreme views of Wahhabis and
others, Islam and Muslims will continue to be viewed with
suspicion around the world.

+
 +

YUDHISHTHIRA’S REMORSE
‘This victory feels more like defeat to me’

If someone is victorious but grieves like a poor afflicted imbecile, how can
he think of that as victory? In fact, his enemies have defeated him . . .

—Yudhishthira, after winning the war

+ at Kuruskshetra, Mahabharata X.10.131
+

‘This grief holds me in check’

As soon as the war is over, Yudhishthira’s first thought is to the

Kauravas’ mother, Gandhari. He goes to her and begs her for
forgiveness. He does not make excuses, nor does he remind her
how his demand for just five villages could have avoided the
war. He simply says:

I, Yudhishthira, am the cruel killer of your sons, great lady. Curse

me!2

It is time for the Mahabharata now to begin to pick up the pieces

of the legacy of the war—the relentless bloodshed, the revenge
and violence against all human feelings, which it has described
in great poetry in the battle books. It seeks reconciliation in
Books Eleven and Twelve to heal the wounds of a shattered
polity.3

234

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 235

There is a great build-up of shoka, ‘burning grief’.4 The morning

after the war, the women of Hastinapura gather on the
Kurukshetra battlefield to find their men.

The clamour of the afflicted women bewailing the destruction of

the Kurus became tremendous and shook the worlds. They were
like beings on fire when the end of an age has arrived . . .5

When the women reach the field of battle, they see

their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands who had been killed
there being eaten by all the flesh-eaters—jackals, jungle crows,
goblins, Pishachas, and night prowling Rakshasas . . . Some
stumbled about amidst the bodies and others dropped to the
ground. [They] were in shock and helpless and they lost their
wits.6

On the field is Queen Gandhari, the mother of Duryodhana, who

+ says: +

The earth is so muddy with flesh and blood [that] one can scarcely
move upon it.7

Seeing the women ‘sink into misery as they drop to the earth
littered with brothers, fathers and sons’, Gandhari observes the
newly-married Uttara holding in her arms the body of her
husband, the dazzling hero Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna. The
pregnant bride caresses her dead husband. Slowly she undoes
his guilded armour and passionately embraces the wounded,
blood-soaked body of one who was merely a boy.8

Cradling his head in her lap as if he were still alive, pushing aside
his blood-matted hair with her hands, she asks, ‘How could those
great warriors kill you when you stood in the middle of the battle?
. . . Did [they] have any heart . . . when they closed around you
and strove to kill you, one boy alone?’9

+
 +

236 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Imagining her husband to be asleep, Uttara keeps talking to him.

Soon she begins to picture him in heaven and torments herself,
thinking that he is being entertained by celestial beauties.
Abhimanyu’s death (as we saw in Chapter 4) is one of the
epic’s great moments. Yudhishthira blames himself now—he
shouldn’t have allowed the boy to enter the treacherous military
formation alone. His grief becomes uncontrollable when he learns
the secret of Karna’s birth. He says that his conspiracy with
Shalya was responsible for his own brother’s death. ‘With Karna
and Arjuna beside me I could have conquered even Indra’s
heaven.’10 He recalls that he had always felt a certain tenderness
each time he saw Karna’s feet. Now he understands why—they
resembled his mother’s. Ever since Duryodhana and Karna came
together at the tournament of the princes, a great fear overtook
Yudhishthira. He was filled with anxiety.11 He spent sleepless
nights thinking about how Karna stood in the way of recovering
his kingdom.12 This is what led him to hatch the unholy conspiracy
+ with Shalya to destroy Karna’s morale before his battle with
+
Arjuna. When the wheel of Karna’s chariot got stuck in the mud,
Karna had appealed, ‘You can see that the earth has swallowed
my left wheel . . . don’t kill me while you stand in your chariot
and I’m on the ground . . . Recall dharma and wait for a
moment!’13 But the Pandavas had not heeded dharma.
Thinking of Karna, Yudhishthira’s eyes fill up with tears and
he speaks sadly to his mother, ‘Ah woman, you have slain us by
keeping this secret . . . There is nothing that we could not have
won! Not even what is in heaven. This grotesque butchery that
has finished the Kauravas would not have happened.’14 In
torment, he curses all women: ‘They will not keep secrets!’15
A month thus goes by in mourning for the dead warriors on
the banks of the Ganges. It is now time for the king to enter the
city victoriously and assume the throne. Yudhishthira’s sense of
guilt and shame, however, show no signs of abating. Full of
remorse, he laments:

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 237

To get a piece of the earth we totally abandoned men who were

equal to the earth, men whom we should never have killed. And
now we live with our kinsmen dead and our wealth exhausted . . .
like dogs we greedily went after a piece of meat! Now our piece of
meat is gone, and so are those who would have eaten it.16

He tells Arjuna:

The heroes are dead. The evil is done. Our kingdom has been laid
waste. Having killed them, our rage is gone. Now this grief holds
me in check!17

Famous words, indeed—shoko mam rundhayaty ayam!—‘this grief

holds me in check’. But they provoke a crisis for the state.
Yudhishthira declares:

I am going to say good-bye to all of you and go to the forest . . .

You rule this wide earth which is now at rest; the thorn has been
+ +
removed from it.18

He tells Arjuna that he plans to live the life of a wandering

ascetic.

You will not get me back on that road the rich travel. No way! I
am going to leave behind the pleasures of society and go. The road
one travels all by oneself is peaceful . . .19

And he offers a compelling, lyrical picture of another kind of life:

. . . ridiculing no one, frowning at nothing, my face always cheery,

all my faculties thoroughly restrained, questioning no one about
the road, travelling by any way whatsoever, not seeking to go in
any particular direction, nor to any particular place, paying no
heed to my going, not looking back, straight and steady as I go,
but careful to avoid [hurting] creatures moving and still—so will
I be.20

+
 +

238 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Arjuna is stunned. Normally correct and respectful towards his

elder brother, he attacks him now with uncharacteristic fierceness:

What heights of sissy feebleness . . . how can you renounce

everything now that your enemies are slain, unless you are daft.
How can a eunuch be a king? Or one who shilly-shallies?21

His ‘beautiful, long-eyed Draupadi’ is even more incredulous.

‘Usually haughty towards Yudhishthira’, she looks him in the
eye and reminds him of all the suffering they have undergone
for the sake of this prize.

The [Pandavas] have striven hard, and success has come to them,
but now that you’ve got the entire earth, you are turning success
into disaster all by yourself . . . After being abused like that by our
enemies, I want to live now!22

She berates him for abandoning his kshatriya-dharma. To this,

+ Yudhishthira retorts with such passion against the ‘big-chested’ +
ethic of the kshatriya warriors that she is taken aback.

Damn the kshatra way! Damn the power of the mighty chest!
Damn the unforgiving stubbornness that brought us to this
disaster . . . Because of our greed and our confusion, we . . . have
been brought to this condition for the sake of a trifling kingdom.
Now that we see our kinsmen lying dead upon the ground, no one
can rejoice at being king.23

Draupadi turns conciliatory and reminds her husband

affectionately of his duty, foremost of which is to accept the
throne and give up all thoughts of renunciation:

Most excellent of kings, friendliness towards all creatures, generous

giving, study, asceticism—all this may be the dharma of the
brahmin, but it is not for a king. Restraining the wicked and
protecting the pious, and not fleeing in a war—this is the highest
dharma of kings.24

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 239

‘One who gains victory also suffers loss’

Yudhishthira’s grief is all the greater because he had foreseen the

hollowness of victory. During the peace negotiations, he had told
Krishna that he wanted to avoid war because:

Victory and defeat, O Krishna, are the same to one who is killed.
Defeat is not very much better than death, I think; but he whose
side gains victory also suffers loss.25

What he had predicted has come to pass. It was he who gave the
fateful order to begin the war, and he considers himself ‘a sinful
wrongdoer’ who has caused the deaths of ‘people who should
not be slain’.26 Painful memories keep nagging at him. He
remembers the fall of Bhishma:

I used to roll around playing on his lap . . . and when I saw him
fallen upon the earth, drenched in blood, a racking fever entered
+ into me. He who nurtured and watched over us as children, I +
brought his killing to pass [since I was] lusting to rule the
kingdom . . . I am responsible.27

He recalls how ‘wickedly I lied to [Drona] about his son when he

approached me during the battle’ by putting a ‘little jacket on the
truth’:

. . . the teacher said to me, ‘Your words, king, are true. Tell me if
my son is alive.’ . . . I acted falsely by saying ‘elephant’ under my
breath . . . I put a little jacket on the truth and told my teacher
‘Ashwatthama has been killed’ when it was only an elephant that
had been killed. What heavenly worlds will I go to now that I have
done this dreadful deed?28

He identifies with the pain of Hastinapura’s women who have

become widows. In empathizing with the undeserved misfortune
of others, Yudhishthira has embarked on a moral journey that
will lead him to the core of dharma. His brothers may feel regret,

+
 +

240 / The Difficulty of Being Good

but he feels remorse. He speaks of his victory in the war ‘as a

great sorrow that is constantly in my heart’.29


Remorse is different from regret. A remorseful person feels
‘radically singular’, and hence remorse is a kind ‘of dying to the
world’.30 Remorse ‘sticks with us in a way radically different
from other forms of suffering. Someone who is true to their
remorse will always reject, as inappropriate, consolation which is
based on their recognition of the guilt of others. Any other kind
of suffering . . . may be consoled by being seen in the light of the
suffering of others.’31 Because remorse is isolating and difficult to
console, the Pandavas feel frustrated. Draupadi finds Yudhishthira
completely unresponsive. He craves solitude in his guilt, and he
is unable to relate to others.
Another king who felt remorse was Oedipus. Sophocles’s
+ tragedy, Oedipus Rex, describes how Oedipus unknowingly killed +
his father and married his mother in fulfilment of a divine
prophecy. When he realized what he had done, he blinded
himself, saying that he was unfit to face the children of his
incestuous union. Remorse can exact a terrible price. Yudhishthira,
like Oedipus, feels guilty that a great tragedy has befallen and it
was his fault. He was responsible for the deaths of his teacher
Drona, his brother Karna, his nephew Abhimanyu, and many
others. Like Oedipus, he believes he is unworthy to rule and he
atones by renouncing his crown. Both kings are acutely aware of
the humanity of their victims, which is the hallmark of remorse.
‘In remorse we respond to what it means to wrong another . . .
Far from being intrinsically self-indulgent, lucid remorse makes
one’s victim vividly real.’32
Remorse is a more intense emotion than regret. When a
child is accidentally hit by a car, an onlooker may feel regret,
but the driver feels remorse even if it was not his fault. The
regretful person says ‘too bad, it happened’; a remorseful person

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 241

is scarred, sometimes for life.33 By recognizing the reality of the

other person, both Yudhishthira and Oedipus have gone beyond
regret. They have rendered themselves vulnerable to the other
person who is capable of causing unfathomable grief. Both have
a shocked and bewildered realization of what it means to wrong
another.
The problem with remorse is that it can easily degenerate into
self-pity. Indeed, some Indians find Yudhishthira self-indulgent.
Spinoza, the philosopher, was also suspicious of remorse—he
thought it was a ‘species of sadness’ and hence ‘injurious and
evil’. He felt that one ‘comes to the right path more through
reason and love of truth than through Remorse and Repentance.’34
Aldous Huxley dismisses remorse as well: ‘On no account brood
over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way
of getting clean.’35 Bernard Williams, the English philosopher,
objects to remorse because it turns the focus on oneself rather
than on the one who is injured. A remorseful person is more
+ concerned with preserving his ‘own integrity or purity or virtue
+
at others’ expense’.36
I disagree. I do not think it is self-absorption. The self-absorbed
person is focused on himself whereas the genuinely remorseful
person cares for the other person who has been wronged. A
moral sentiment like remorse is valuable for it offers a
psychological basis for the moral life. When we look upon the
misfortune of worthy persons like Yudhishthira and Oedipus
with sympathy, even though they are characters in a narrative, it
becomes a powerful training ground for learning about
compassion. These reverses could happen to us as well.37 Empathy
for Yudhishthira’s remorse at the end of the Kurukshetra War
was invaluable in my dharma journey. It opened up a new
understanding of dharma and taught me how to cultivate the
moral life.

+
 +

242 / The Difficulty of Being Good

From shoka to shanti

A curious sight this: a victorious king refuses to ascend the

throne because he is convinced that the demands of kingship
and dharma are inconsistent.38 Yudhishthira’s grief creates a
crisis for the state. The violent deeds of the war torment him. His
shoka, ‘burning grief’, endangers the Pandavas’ victory. His is a
tragic dilemma of a good man who had to engage in violence in
the performance of duty, and who now hesitates to ascend the
throne because of the violence inherent in the king’s role. It is an
existential crisis of a good human being who is unable to cope
with the violence inherent in the imperfect human condition.39
Yudhishthira’s shoka has to be cooled and converted to shanti,
‘peace’. The classic strategy in yoga for doing that is to still the
mind, reduce the human impulse to react, and bring about a
state of inner calm.40 The epic now recalls his grandfather in
order to ‘cool the king’ and make him fit to rule. We had left
+ Bhishma in Chapter 5, resting his head on a hero’s pillow of +
arrows. Now he is brought from his deathbed to the hugely
embarrassed Yudhishthira to teach him that violence, power and
war are integral to kingship.41 The purpose of Shantiparvan, Book
Twelve of the Mahabharata, is to calm Yudhishthira’s remorse by
instructing him about the nature of the dharma of the king.42
Bhishma teaches Yudhishthira that kingship and dharma are
not contradictory. The king has to wield the danda, ‘the rod’, but
he must do it justly under the constraints of the law. Conceding
that the ethical value of ahimsa, ‘non-violence’, is highly desirable,
Bhishma says that the king can promote it in society by ruling
justly. ‘Ruling justly’ may require the king to use violence at
times; this violence, however, must be grounded in laws and
principles:

. . . the king exists for dharma, not for doing what gives him
pleasure. The king is protector of the world . . . People depend
upon dharma and dharma depends upon the king.43

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 243

It is, then, dharma which sanctions the use of violence by the

king in order to curb unsocial behaviour. And if a king is too
idealistic in pursuit of the moral and abandons the rod, the
results may be catastrophic.
Bhishma’s point about the need for sovereign power is not
unlike the conclusion which Thomas Hobbes reached in mid-
seventeenth century England. Writing after the English Civil
War and the overthrow of the Stuart monarchs, who had claimed
to rule by divine right, Hobbes explained that peace could only
prevail in society if there was a sovereign power to punish those
who misbehave. Hobbes wrote in 1651 in Leviathan that mankind
has ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power, that ceaseth only
in death’.44 For this reason, in the natural condition of mankind
all human beings would live in a state of war ‘where every man
is Enemy to every man . . . And the life of man, [is] solitary poor
nasty brutish, and short.’45 Although Bhishma does not elaborate
on the state of nature or share Hobbes’s pessimistic view of
+ human beings, his prescription is just as blunt. Indeed, if there is +
one thing that the horrific Kurukshetra War teaches, it is that
there will always be human beings like Duryodhana who are
driven by the will to power. Society needs an executive to curb
this drive with legitimate and superior authority, maintaining
peace by punishing those who breach it.

Yudhishthira and Ashoka

How does a king protect his subjects from external or internal

attacks if he gives up arms? How does he keep peace in society
by non-violent means? This is the question raised by Yudhishthira
who bears an uncanny resemblance to Emperor Ashoka of the
great Mauryan empire, which ruled over India from 317 BC to
180 BC. Ashoka too was caught between the demands of kingship
and his conscience after a bloody war in eastern India. His
famous thirteenth rock edict says: ‘On conquering Kalinga, the
Beloved of the Gods felt remorse, for when an independent

+
 +

244 / The Difficulty of Being Good

country is conquered the slaughter, death and deportation of the

people is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and
weighs heavily on his mind.’46 Ashoka converted to Buddhism,
renounced war and devoted the rest of his reign to teaching non-
violent dharma to his subjects.47 He was a hugely charismatic
and influential personality, and it is hard to imagine that the
Mahabharata escaped his influence. Scholars have speculated that
the epic had to counter the impact of Ashoka’s ideal of ahimsa,
which was spreading across the subcontinent, as a result of his
Buddhist ‘Dharma campaign’.48
Although the earliest compositions of the Mahabharata may
date back to around 400 BC, it was not written down until around
the first century BC. Society evolved during this long period and
many of the changes are reflected in the epic. During the early
part of this period, Aryan tribes in north India settled down and
integrated with the indigenous people. They became urbanized
and gradually formed monarchical states. New ideas appeared,
+ which challenged the old Vedic ideals and the religion of the
+
Aryans. Young men began to question the old order. They were
drawn in particular to the ideal of renunciation, which challenged
the orthodox life of the ordinary householder and the pre-
eminent place of the brahmin.
New sects appeared. The Buddhists, the Jains and the Ajivikas
were the most strident in rejecting the old orthodoxy. They
criticized brahmins, dismissed the Vedas, and condemned animal
sacrifices as violent, cruel and immoral. They adopted the idea of
ahimsa, ‘non-harming’, in part as a reaction to the Vedic yajnas.
These social and philosophical changes are reflected in the
Mahabharata, which appropriated the exciting new ideas of
Sankhya, Yoga and bhakti even though it did not abandon the old
Vedic way of life. It retained contempt for those who deny the
Vedas and calls them nastikas, ‘atheists’.
Ashoka came to power around 265 BC and became the most
famous Buddhist king in history.49 He was the grandson of

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 245

Chandragupta Maurya, who founded the dynasty in 320 BC, soon

after Alexander the Great’s invasion in 326 BC. Like Yudhishthira,
Ashoka was obsessed with dharma. He had ‘dharma edicts’,
expressing ethical, religious tolerance, and social and ecological
concern, erected in stone throughout his vast empire.50 His twelfth
major rock edict states: ‘This inscription of Dhamma has been
engraved so that any sons or great grandsons that I may have
should not think of gaining new conquests, and in whatever
victories they may gain should be satisfied with patience and
light punishment. They should only consider conquest by Dhamma
to be a true conquest, and delight in Dhamma should be their
whole delight, for this is of value in both this world and the
next.’51
Ashoka’s edicts also celebrate his vision of a plural, multi-faith
society, a message that is especially relevant for our intolerant,
fundamentalist times. Those who disparage other faiths, he says,
demean and harm their own: ‘Again, whosoever honours his
+ own sect or disparages that of another man, wholly out of
+
devotion to his own, with a view to showing it in a favourable
light, harms his own sect even more seriously. Therefore, concord
is to be commended, so that men may hear one another’s
principles and obey them.’52
The Mauryan empire posed a clear challenge to the brahmins.
To their relief, however, the Mauryas were overthrown by a
brahmin general, Pushyamitra Shunga, around 185 BC.53 In this
way the Hindu orthodoxy reasserted itself. But the traditional
values had changed in the meantime, and this in turn must have
influenced the evolution of Yudhishthira’s character.54 The epic
could not remain immune to two centuries of Mauryan history.
The new values of Buddhism were clearly attractive. Thus,
Yudhishthira probably evolved into a Hindu answer to the
Buddhist Ashoka, seeking to overcome the contradiction between
Ashoka’s vigorous policy of ahimsa and having to employ state-
sanctioned violence as a ruler. 55 Thus, the character of

+
 +

246 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Yudhishthira is ambivalent—sometimes, he is attracted to the

new, gentler values of ahimsa and compassion; at other times, he
realizes their limitations, such as the moment when he makes the
decision to go to war. He is attracted to nivritti, ‘the contemplative
life’, but he is reminded of his kshatriya duty to live ‘the active
life’ of pravritti. The two sets of values coexist within his tormented
character, and this coexistence is a major source of the epic’s
narrative tension.56

‘A twig is borne along in a stream’

Eventually Yudhishthira’s shoka is calmed. He reconciles to the

demands of kingship. As he listens to Bhishma’s pacifying
instructions, he becomes resigned to the tragedy of war and the
imperfect human condition.57 He realizes that renouncing the
throne is an escape, not a solution. He must learn to live in the
world and become a principled king who will have to employ
+ violence when necessary. Occasionally he expresses disaffection, +
but his stoic sense of duty to the throne remains strong.58 Thus,
the epic affirms a middle path, a narrow spectrum of moral
possibilities that human beings have to learn to live within in
order to function in the imperfect age of Kali Yuga. One cannot
escape the world’s suffering, but the values of dharma, especially
ahimsa, can inform one’s life.
Early on, the epic had established the theme of ahimsa when it
recounted the story of Prince Ruru, who was so furious when a
snake bit and killed his bride-to-be, Pramadvara, just before their
wedding, that he vowed to kill all snakes that came across his
path. One day a non-poisonous snake-lizard crossed his path. As
he was about to strike it, the lizard said, ‘ahimsa paramo dharma’,
‘non-violence is the highest dharma’.59 More than two thousand
years later, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi made his wife,
Kasturba, copy out these three words of the lizard in an exercise
book when she was learning the alphabet. The words, ahimsa
paramo dharma became Gandhi’s rallying cry during India’s non-

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 247

violent struggle for freedom from Britain in the first half of the
twentieth century. The cry was heard around the world, and was
adopted by Martin Luther King during America’s civil rights
movement.
Since Yudhishthira had wanted to renounce kingship for the
life of a wandering hermit, Bhishma addresses this problem—he
extols the virtue of ahimsa, both as a principle of social behaviour
as well as an ascetic ideal.60 As a part of the instruction of the
future dharmic king, Yudhishthira is told a remarkable story. A
brahmin named Jajali acquires enormous powers by performing
fearsome penance in the forest. He boasts, ‘There is none like me
in this world . . . who can travel through the air.’61 Jajali is told
about a trader of spices in Varanasi, Tuladhara, who is indeed
superior to him and who can teach him something about dharma.
Hearing this, Jajali goes to Varanasi and finds Tuladhara. He
observes that the shopkeeper’s merchandise consists of spices
and juices, which he weighs and measures with equanimity.
+ Tuladhara treats all his customers alike and works diligently
+
without a concern for blame and praise, without allowing his
ego to come in the way of his work.62
Jajali is intrigued by Tuladhara and he asks the merchant
about his views on dharma. Tuladhara says that ‘everyone is
confused about dharma’. Right dharma is not just a code of
conduct; it is an attitude. He offers the analogy of a twig that
moves randomly in a stream:

As . . . a piece of wood is borne along in a stream, and may

randomly join up with some other pieces of wood, [and as] other
logs join with them from here and there, with straw, wood and
refuse, from time to time, senselessly, so it is with behaviour . . .
as it arises from one source or another.

O Jajali, in this world there is no dharma, however subtle, [which

is] unmotivated: human formulations of dharma are made with
past and future interests in mind. Because of its subtleness, the

+
 +

248 / The Difficulty of Being Good

deeply obscured [true dharma] cannot be identified; only through

grasping other [kinds of] conduct [can] it be conceived. For [this]
reason one should seek [true] dharma, not follow the ways of the
world.

If one man were to injure me and another praise me—listen, O

Jajali, in such circumstances [my reaction would be equal].63

There is an ironic twist here—a petty trader is teaching a high

caste brahmin how to live. The worldly merchant, who
presumably ought to covet wealth, is being held up as a model
of detachment for a forest-dwelling ascetic. Jajali is told to
observe Tuladhara’s attitude of disinterested equanimity.
Tuladhara is happy to go with the flow like a twig in the river
that moves randomly with the current and joins up with flotsam.
In the same manner, Yudhishthira is taught that a good king
ought to dispense justice with detachment for the good of his
people, unlike the usual ego-filled conquerors who want to
+ stamp their mark on history through violence and conquest. It is
+
similar to the message of detached action that Krishna gave to
Arjuna on the battlefield—if one acts for the sake of the action
and not for the personal reward, then one is liberated from the
bonds of karma.
What Yudhishthira learns from Tuladhara’s example is that
the search for wealth and social standing is an impermanent
pursuit. It is wiser to have the attitude of a randomly floating
twig in the river. It is not necessary to renounce kingship and
become a hermit like Jajali in order to be virtuous. One should
live in the world with Tuladhara’s attitude. A person who is
distrustful of worldly achievement is less likely to step on the
toes of others. Such a person is on the way to acquire the virtue
of ahimsa. Leo Tolstoy came to the same conclusion. Classical
liberals of the eighteenth century also viewed the trader
sympathetically, although their message was different from
Tuladhara’s. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations observed that

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 249

a typical merchant had to deal with suppliers and customers and

was thus at the mercy of an ‘invisible hand’ of the market, which
determined his prices and profits. If the market is competitive,
one can see that a trader’s position is a bit like Tuladhara’s twig
being randomly swept along the flow.64

‘Ahimsa paramo dharma’

The Mahabharata calls ahimsa the ‘heart of dharma’ and in its last
book reiterates what the snake-lizard had said: ‘ahimsa is the
highest dharma.’65 Ahimsa is a foundational concept in classical
Indian culture, and like dharma, it is not easy to translate. It is
the opposite of the Sanskrit himsa, ‘harm’ or ‘violence’; hence,
ahimsa is ‘not doing harm’. The Mahabharata uses it to mean ‘not
taking life’; ‘not causing pain’; ‘not causing injury’. In the Laws
of Manu, ahimsa connotes ‘not having an aggressive attitude’,
while in Patanjali’s text on yoga, it means ‘not having a stilled
+ spirit’—something that might interfere with meditation.66 Thus, +
ahimsa affects both the object (‘non-injury’) and the subject (‘non-
injuriousness’). 67 Hence, ‘harmlessness’ may be the most
appropriate way to translate ahimsa into English because it
suggests both ‘non-injury’ and ‘non-injuriousness’. I find, however,
that ‘harmlessness’ is a weak word with negative connotations.
I prefer to stick to the old-fashioned ‘non-violence’ of Mahatma
Gandhi.
Gandhi taught the world that ahimsa is not pacifism. Non-
violence does not come from weakness but from strength, and
only the strong and disciplined can hope to practise it. Gandhi
combined ahimsa with another virtue in the dharma lexicon,
satya, ‘truth’. He joined the latter with ‘agraha’ or a ‘holding on
to’ with force if necessary. Thus, satyagraha is ‘truth force’. When
one’s cause is truthful, Gandhi said, holding on to it non-
violently can be immensely powerful. Whereas pacifism is passive
and harmless, non-violence is active and even dangerous, as the
British discovered to their discomfort during India’s freedom

+
 +

250 / The Difficulty of Being Good

struggle. ‘Non-violence, like violence, is a means of persuasion.’68

Gandhi’s non-violent action was a technique by which ‘people
who reject passivity and submission and who see struggle as
essential, can wage it without violence. Non-violent action is not
an attempt to avoid or ignore conflict. It is one response to the
problem of how to effect change in politics, especially how to
wield power effectively.’69
But ahimsa has its limitations. Gandhi was fortunate in having
as his adversary the British liberal establishment, which was, by
and large, open to reason. I have sometimes wondered how
Gandhi might have fared against a fanatic, a terrorist, or a
dictator bent on genocide. It is very well to be non-violent to
non-poisonous lizards but one must defend oneself against
poisonous snakes. George Orwell, in his famous essay ‘Reflections
on Gandhi’, wrote that ‘it is difficult to see how Gandhi’s
methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the
regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard
+ from again’.70 Liddell Hart echoed this view: ‘It is very doubtful
+
whether non-violent resistance would have availed against a
Tartar conqueror . . . or a Stalin . . . The only impression it seems
to have made on Hitler was to trample on what, to his mind, was
contemptible weakness.’
Gandhi would have replied that it is better to resist and die
than to give your consent to violent death. ‘You will have my
body but not my will.’ Most Jews in Germany went to their
death without resisting. They were, as Lloyd Rudolph argues,
‘complicit in their death’. Had the Jews resisted the ‘storm
troopers’ of the Nazi party, who attacked their shops and homes,
they might have aroused the conscience of middle class Germans.
The attitude of assimilated, educated professional Jews was one
of denial and an avoidance of disorder. Unlike Nazi Germany,
non-violent resistance was tried with considerable success in the
countries of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, particularly in
Poland and Czechoslovakia.71

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 251

Bhishma and Krishna—men who had to rule a kingdom,

unlike Gandhi—recognize the limits of ahimsa. There are times
when even a dharmaraja, ‘good king’, must go to war. That is
why there is such a thing as dharma-yuddha, ‘a just war’. Even
Yudhishthira was forced to recognize that a policy of ahimsa
would not work against Duryodhana, and he had no choice in
the end but to fight. It seems to me that a policy of ahimsa would
not be able to usher in an era of peace in the world. Non-violent
defence would have to permit an invading army to occupy one’s
homeland, and I don’t think any government would allow it.
Nor are there any cases, as far as I know, in which ‘civilian
defence has caused an invader to withdraw’.72 Non-violent
resistance succeeded in hastening Britain’s departure from India
because the British believed in restraint and in a moral code.

Peace, not war

+ When the Kurukshetra War comes to an end, it becomes clear +

that the theme of the Mahabharata is not war but peace. We have
been so mesmerized by the heroic and valorous deeds at
Kurukshetra, recounted in the battle books of the epic, that it is
only during the sorrowful ‘bath of tears’ of the widows of
Hastinapura that we begin to confront the other side of war.73
Yudhishthira is left with a hollow sense of victory. It is for this
reason that Anandavardhana, the ninth century Kashmiri
commentator, concluded that the aesthetic mood evoked by the
Mahabharata is not ‘heroic’, as one would expect from a war epic,
but one of shanta—calm resignation, leading to nirveda, the end
of desire.74
Revolted by the violence against all human feeling, remorseful
Yudhishthira becomes a disillusioned pessimist. The same thing
happened to the proud Athenian, Thucydides. Looking back on
the Peloponnesian War which brought Athens—with all its
incomparable achievements in philosophy, architecture and
literature—to its knees, Thucydides wrote, ‘It was love of power

+
 +

252 / The Difficulty of Being Good

operating through greed and personal ambition which was the

cause of all these evils.’ The story that Thucydides tells in his
great History of the Peloponnesian War is of a war between Athens
and Sparta and their respective allies, which lasted from 431 BC
to 404 BC. Just as the continuous Greek wars left Athens defeated,
permanently weakened and in moral decay, so did the war at
Kurukshetra usher in Kali Yuga, an age of deep moral decline.
The kshatriya commanders at Kurukshetra, like their
counterparts in Greece, killed most of the men of military age.
They were tough-minded and cruel in the cold execution of their
soldierly duty. Yudhishthira concludes that there is something
terribly wrong with this kshatriya duty, and expresses deep
loathing for the warrior ethic of heroism. Once that ethic is
stripped of its romance and the embellishments of the sutas,
‘bards’, human nakedness is revealed in all its fearful and
murderous selfishness. Draupadi and his Pandava brothers may
be able to shrug their shoulders and hide behind the thought that
+ ‘after all, this is what war is like’, but Yudhishthira cannot excuse
+
the slaughter at Kurukshetra as a ‘necessity of war’.75
Thucydides did not believe that the Athenian generals were
depraved when they gave their murderous orders. In the massacre
at Melos in 416 BC, as we have noted in Chapters 1 and 4, the
generals must have felt guilty for they tried to defend their
actions. They said, like Duryodhana, that if they had not done it,
their enemies would have construed their lenient behaviour as
an ‘argument of our weakness’. Furthermore, the generals said,
‘that you likewise, and others that should have the same power
which we have, would do the same.’ Not true. The Athenians
were cruel to the people of Melos because they punished not
only the authors of the rebellion but others as well, especially the
women and children. Thucydides tells us that in a comparable
situation with the Mytilenes a few years earlier, the citizens of
Athens ‘felt a kind of repentance’. They debated the issues of
collective guilt, retributive justice and the deterrent effects of

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 253

capital punishment, and concluded that their generals had been

cruel in their treatment of the conquered people.76
Yudhishthira also expresses remorse and he too repents. The
irony is that many Indians have a low opinion of him.
‘Dharmaputra Yudhishthira’ is a derogatory epithet in Bengal.
While Arjuna is a brave and valiant warrior, remorseful
Yudhishthira is considered weak and indecisive.77 The contempt
for Yudhishthira tells us something about our contemporary
society. What we need is more remorse, not less, but it is
somehow considered unmanly in most modern societies.
Yudhishthira’s remorse and his hypnotic attraction for ahimsa
posed uncomfortable questions for my dharma education. It
made me stop and look at myself. From the earliest moment
when I began to think for myself, I realized that I had made
choices that have determined the sort of person I have become.
Like most people, I failed to choose and allowed myself to be
swept along in a direction that others decided. For the rest of my
+ life I have had to deal with the consequences of those decisions.
+
Even in later life I did not reflect on my choices and I continued
to be led. In a few unusual situations, I did indeed pause and I
asked, ‘Who am I?’, but even then I was reluctant to make
genuinely free moral choices that would have led me to become
an authentic human being like Yudhishthira.
Yudhishthira does reflect. Unlike most of us, he makes a
deliberate choice between following his own interest
unthinkingly—his kshatriya-dharma—or doing something more
difficult, which might even involve some inconvenience, but
which is the right thing to do from the larger perspective of a
universal sadharana-dharma of his conscience. He decides, whereas
most of us are content to stumble along unthinkingly, succumbing
to self-deception and compromise.
On two recent occasions I felt remorse was appropriate in our
public life but it was not expressed. When Benazir Bhutto,
Pakistan’s candidate for prime minister, was assassinated in

+
 +

254 / The Difficulty of Being Good

December 2007, what struck me most was the singular lack of

remorse in that country. There was plenty of grief, even some
regret, but no remorse. When I raised the question of Pakistan’s
lack of remorse in my Sunday column in the Times of India, Rahul
Gandhi (Rajiv’s son and Indira’s grandson) sent me an e-mail,
which I think is worth quoting, for he connects remorse with
democracy. ‘Remorse comes when you are able to feel the
suffering of fellow human beings to an extent where the suffering
becomes your own. To feel deeply human suffering you have to
internally accept that all humans are equal and see them as
humans and not as a particular group. Once you make this leap,
democracy is the only system you can believe in. [India’s] leaders
in the freedom struggle were able to look beyond divisions and
see the human being (including the British). Because of this, they
were able to feel the pain of people. The outcome was democracy
and remorse for your fellow human being. Pakistan’s founders
(probably as a result of their fears) were unable to see beyond
+ divisions, and hence, the outcome was an unstable, undemocratic,
+
remorseless system.’
Rahul Gandhi believes that remorse is more likely to be
expressed in democratic societies. But I find that even in
democracies it is usually absent. It is extraordinary that there
was no remorse among the investment bankers on Wall Street
after their moral failings had tipped the global economy into a
recession in 2008. They were not contrite that their actions had
resulted in millions of job losses around the world. They still
expected bonuses to be paid, whether their company had lost or
made money. It is as though they felt they had a God-given right
to earn more than ordinary human beings. One does not object
to paying bonuses to outstanding performers, but one does to
mediocrities or to executives of companies whose profits decline.
To be fair, a few investment banks like Goldman Sachs did show
restraint, but the majority behaved like the French aristocracy
just before the French Revolution. The Economist, a consistent

+
 +

Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 255

supporter of the free market, asked, ‘What will it take for

bankers to show a little remorse?’78
The Mahabharata believes that purushakara, ‘human initiative’,
matters. Despite the many occasions when its characters feel
frustrated before the weight of circumstances, and despite blaming
their feeling of impotence on daiva, ‘fate’, moral autonomy shines
through in the epic. Because they have some freedom to choose
they can be praised when they pursue dharma or blamed when
they follow adharma. Yudhishthira in the end chooses not to
become a ‘non-violent’ hermit like Jajali. He elects to become a
just king, who he knows will have to resort to non-violent danda,
‘punishment’, in the pursuit of justice. When the epic’s characters
make free choices, they become responsible for their decisions.
At the moment of making a decision they become conscious of
their freedom, and it is this perception of autonomy that gives
them the ability to lead authentic moral lives.79
Yudhishthira reflected and he showed the courage to choose
+ between two kinds of lives. He made this choice identifying with
+
all human beings, and this led him to the heart of dharma. He
would have agreed with Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said, ‘let
the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not
through me’.80

+
 +

10

MAHABHARATA’S DHARMA
‘Great king, you weep with all creatures’

One should never do to another what one regards as injurious to oneself.

This, in brief, is the law of dharma.

—Mahabharata XVIII.113.8
+ +
‘This dog is devoted to me’

Yudhishthira went on to rule justly for thirty-six years. But he

found no pleasure in sovereignty because he could not forget the
terrible slaughter of his kinsmen.1 The Pandavas felt a lingering
sadness in having to live on without their loved ones. Kunti,
Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, who had gone to spend their last
days in the forest, died in a forest fire. When Yudhishthira heard
of their death, he lamented: ‘We who are still alive are in fact
dead.’2
The last three books of the epic, Books Sixteen to Eighteen,
depict a time of twilight for our heroes. As the years go by there
is a growing sense of weariness with life. Krishna, as we know,
dies a banal and unremarkable death. As he lies resting on the
banks of a river, a hunter mistakes his foot for a bird, shoots an
arrow and kills him. After Krishna’s death, the Pandavas find
even less meaning in life. Arjuna, in particular, is sad and

256

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 257

exhausted. His powers begin to wane. His bodily strength leaves

him and his magical weapons no longer obey him.3
Eventually the disillusioned Pandavas decide it is time to
leave the world.4 Yudhishthira reminds Arjuna: ‘Time cooks
every creature in its cauldron.’ They crown Abhimanyu’s son
Parikshit, Arjuna’s grandson, who continues the dynasty at
Hastinapura. (It is to Parikshit’s son, Janamejaya, that the story
of the Mahabharata is told at the beginning of Book One.) The
Pandavas set out on foot towards the east, in the direction of the
Himalayas.5 On the way, Draupadi and Yudhishthira’s brothers
fall one by one. Yudhishthira trudges on alone, ‘never looking
down’. A stray dog follows him. As he nears heaven, Indra, king
of the gods, approaches him in his celestial chariot.
‘Get in,’ says Indra, welcoming him to heaven.
‘But this dog, O lord of the past and the future, is devoted to
me. Let him come with me,’ pleads Yudhishthira.
‘You have become immortal like me,’ says Indra. ‘Leave the
+ dog. There is nothing cruel in that. There is no place for
+
dogs in heaven.’
‘But people say that abandoning someone devoted to you’,
replies Yudhishthira, ‘is a bottomless evil, equal—according to
the general opinion—to killing a brahmin. And I think so too.’6
The god, Dharma, who has been present all along in the guise
of the stray dog, transforms himself into his own form and
speaks to Yudhishthira, offering affection and gentle words of
praise:

Great king, you weep with all creatures. Because you turned down
the celestial chariot, by insisting, ‘This dog is devoted to me,’ there
is no one your equal in heaven. You have won the highest goal of
going to heaven with your own body.7

It had been a trial all along. Yudhishthira’s father, Dharma, had

been testing him. Recall, Kunti could not have children from
Pandu. So, she employed a boon that she had received from a

+
 +

258 / The Difficulty of Being Good

holy man. Thus, she had the gods sire her children. Yudhishthira
was born from the god Dharma. The epic often refers to
Yudhishthira as dharmaputra, Dharma’s son, but he now meets
his real father formally. Dharma is happy that his son has passed
the test.

‘Compassion is the highest dharma’

This was not his first trial, however. Dharma reminds him of
their earlier meeting during a test in the Dvaita forest when the
Pandavas were in exile.

Once upon a time, my son, I tested you in the Dvaita forest. Your
brothers had died from thirst. [Given a chance of reviving only one
of them] you abandoned Bhima and Arjuna, your own brothers,
and chose to save the life of [your stepbrother] Nakula, because
you wanted to deal equally with their two mothers [leaving each
with a surviving son].8
+ +
The incident in question occurred towards the end of the
Pandavas’ exile, in their twelfth year in the wilderness, before
they went into hiding and disguise at the court of Virata.9 In their
final days in the forest, a deer ran off with fire sticks which a
brahmin was using in a holy sacrifice. In horror, the brahmin
went to Yudhishthira for help to recover them from the deer’s
antlers, and the Pandavas set off in pursuit. The deer, however,
eluded them. At the end of the day, exhausted and suffering
from extreme thirst and hunger, they stopped below ‘the cool
shade of a banyan tree’.
Nakula expresses their accumulated frustration of the past
twelve years in exile.

In our house dharma never sets,

Nor does our purpose fail because of idleness,
Then why do we, so superior to all creatures,
Suffer such difficulty, King?10

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 259

In short, ‘why us?’ The past comes rushing back to the brothers.
Bhima looks back and wishes that he had killed the man who
had dragged Draupadi into the assembly; Arjuna blames himself
for not killing the charioteer’s son, Karna, after he had insulted
Draupadi; Sahadeva regrets he did not slay Shakuni during the
rigged game of dice.
Nakula then climbs on a tree to look for water. When he
reaches the top, he hears the screeching of cranes, and thinking
there must be water nearby he rushes off. He finds a pond but
as he approaches it, a voice calls out to him: ‘Do not act rashly;
I have a prior claim. You may drink only after answering my
questions.’11 He pays the voice no heed, drinks the water, and
falls down dead. One by one, the other brothers go to the pond
and suffer the same fate. Finally, Yudhishthira arrives to find the
bodies of his brothers along with a strange, one-eyed, fiery
creature in the shape of a baka, heron, standing beside the water.
The creature identifies itself as a Yaksha, a tree spirit, and
+ demands answers to its questions. Unlike his brothers,
+
Yudhishthira accepts the demand.
The Yaksha’s questions are about the meaning of life but they
are in the form of a verbal puzzle. Known as prashnas, these
riddles are connected to an ancient speculative tradition going
back to the Upanishads. Philosophical, sometimes metaphysical,
the questions are formulaic, brief, and appear to be
unanswerable.12 Yudhishthira’s life hangs on every answer. Dying
of thirst and surrounded by his dead brothers, he is a tormented
and embattled figure, something out of a Greek tragedy rather
than out of a pastoral Upanishadic dialogue. In this chilling,
surreal setting survival is at stake, not merely wisdom.13
The Yaksha asks a series of three one-line questions to which
Yudhishthira provides three one-line answers. Many questions
deal with the moral life—for example, what is happiness?
Yudhishthira must have been thinking of his lonely exile when
he answers this as follows: ‘[A person] who cooks vegetables in

+
 +

260 / The Difficulty of Being Good

his own home, who has no debts and who is not in exile, [he] is
truly happy.’14
The Yaksha next asks the baffling question, ‘What is
extraordinary?’ Considering that a single error could mean his
death, Yudhishthira’s reply is cool, ironic and elegant: ‘What is
extraordinary is that one sees people dying every day, and one
thinks that one will live forever. What could be more
extraordinary!’ The Yaksha then returns to the subject of human
mortality as he asks the question, ‘What is the news?’ Yudhishthira
replies baldly, ‘Time cooks beings—that is the news.’15 Thus,
Yudhishthira replies satisfactorily to each of the Yaksha’s
questions. Finally, the Yaksha asks his most significant question:
‘What is the highest dharma in the world?’ Yudhishthira replies:
‘Compassion is the highest dharma.’16
Yudhishthira uses an unusual Sanskrit word anrishamsya
(pronounced as a-nri-shumsya) for ‘compassion’ rather than the
more usual karuna.17 It is the same word that the epic employs
+ towards the end in describing Yudhishthira’s virtuous attitude
+
towards the stray dog.18 Literally, it means possessing an attitude
of non-nri-shamsya, which means one who does not injure; who
is not mischievous, not-noxious, not-cruel, not-malicious.19 It is a
double negative, like ahimsa, and hence weak, but ‘the word has
more than a negative connotation; it signifies good-will, a fellow
feeling, a deep sense of the other. [It is close to] anukrosha, to cry
with another, to feel another’s pain.’20 When Indra praises
Yudhishthira in the same episode above—‘Great king, you weep
with all creatures’—he employs anukrosha, which is also sometimes
translated as ‘compassion’. In any case, Yudhishthira’s insistence
on taking the stray dog into heaven certainly goes beyond
‘uncruelty’ or ‘non-injury’ and is closer to ‘compassion’ in
English.21
The Yaksha is satisfied, and rewards Yudhishthira by agreeing
to resurrect one of his fallen brothers. Faced with this painful
and impossible choice, Yudhishthira does not hesitate. He selects

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 261

Nakula. Strange choice! Why not one of his real brothers, Arjuna
or Bhima, born from his own mother? Yudhishthira explains that
his father had two wives, whom he, Yudhishthira, regards as
equal. He believes that each mother deserves to be left with a
surviving son.
In making this choice, Yudhishthira demonstrates through his
actions the significance of ‘the highest truth of dharma’:
anrishamsya. This is no longer an academic discussion.
Yudhishthira has ‘put his money where his mouth is’ as the
Americans would say. The Yaksha appreciates his extraordinary
choice, so much so that he rewards him by reviving all his dead
brothers.
Yudhishthira’s earlier answer to the Yaksha’s question—what
is man?—begins now to also make sense. He had answered the
Yaksha by saying, ‘The repute of a good deed touches heaven
and earth; one is called a man as long as his repute lasts.’22 In
other words, a man is only as good as his deeds. And Yudhishthira
+ has proven his own worth by choosing Nakula. +

‘Of what use is heaven to me?’

The reason that the father has now reminded his son of their
earlier encounter in the forest also becomes clear. The virtue that
Yudhishthira had displayed by choosing Nakula is the same as
he has shown in his behaviour towards the stray dog. On passing
his second test, Yudhishthira enters the triple-tiered heaven. The
epic suggests that because Yudhishthira is ‘bestowed with a-nri-
shamsya’, he has been given the rare honour of entering heaven
with his body.23
In heaven, the first person Yudhishthira sees is Duryodhana
‘luxuriating in glory, shining like the sun’.24 He frowns at this but
is told that Duryodhana is in heaven because he is a kshatriya
hero who happened to die in battle. Yudhishthira cannot bear
this injustice, and he turns away in disgust. He is reminded of
his own brothers and of Draupadi. He looks around but he does

+
 +

262 / The Difficulty of Being Good

not see them anywhere. Indra says, ‘Even today the human state
touches you, O king. [But] this is heaven.’25
‘Best of the gods, of what use is heaven to me if I don’t have
my brothers . . . this is no heaven in my opinion,’ says
Yudhishthira in bewilderment.26
A messenger of the gods then takes Yudhishthira on a journey
to look for his brothers and Draupadi. On the way, he finds that
the path is

covered with darkness, horrible, with hair for its moss and grass,
full of the smells of evil-doers, with flesh and blood for its mud;
covered with flies and mosquitoes, and with crickets with uprisings
of biting insects, surrounded on all sides with corpses on this side
and that; strewn with bones and hair, full of worms and maggots,
surrounded on all sides by blazing fire; overrun with crows and
vultures with iron beaks, and covered with ghosts the size of
Vindhya mountains but with mouths like needles; with severed
+ arms, thighs, and hands that are covered in fat and blood, and +
severed stomachs and feet scattered here and there; hair-raising
with a bad smell of corpses.27

Revolted by what he has seen, Yudhishthira asks the messenger,

‘How long do we have to go on this road?’28
The messenger replies, ‘If you are tired, lord of the kings, let
us go back.’29
Feeling depressed and faint, Yudhishthira is thinking of turning
back when he suddenly hears the sad voices of his brothers,
‘Royal sage, born of dharma, stop . . . when you are nearby, a
cool breeze blows which brings relief to us . . . don’t go away.’30
Draupadi and all of Yudhishthira’s brothers, including Karna,
are in hell. Yudhishthira wonders why. Did someone make a
mistake? Or ‘am I asleep?’ He remembers Duryodhana luxuriating
in heaven, and gets angry again. Overwhelmed by grief, he
curses the gods, including Dharma, and tells the messenger to go
back. ‘I am staying,’ he says with finality.

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 263

As he utters these words, the hellish vision disappears. Dharma

appears and says, ‘I tested you before by taking on the form of
a dog, and now this was another test, and you chose to stay in
hell for the sake of your brothers.’ Indra explains:

Great armed, Yudhishthira, don’t be angry . . . All kings have to

see hell . . . There are two piles—one of good and another of evil.
He who first enjoys his good deeds must afterwards go to hell. And
he who experiences hell must go to heaven. Those with the
majority of bad karma come first to heaven. You had to see a vision
of hell because you deceived Drona on the battlefield on that day
about his son’s death . . . [But] come, come now, and let this fire
in your mind disappear.31

At this, the Pandava heroes and the Kaurava anti-heroes lose

their human condition.32 They are transformed into the divine
state from which they had emerged and go on to worlds ‘beyond
which there is nothing’.33 Thus, the Mahabharata ends.
+ +
A pair of sparrows nest on Jajali’s head

As Yudhishthira was trying to cope with dashed heroic

expectations, I was reminded of my own quest to understand
dharma, which too was nearing its end. In ‘weeping with all the
creatures’, Yudhishthira taught me that moral integrity begins
with the awareness of other human beings. The reality of others
looms large in Yudhishthira’s consciousness—it is the shining
feature of his personality, which leads him to ‘the highest dharma’.
In the last chapter, I had gone along with him when he was
reeling under the impact of the war. I had concurred with his
formulation that ahimsa (non-violence) was the highest virtue.
Now I felt that his behaviour during his three tests—first, in
reviving Nakula rather than his blood brothers, second, in insisting
on taking a stray dog into heaven, and finally, in preferring to
stay with his brothers and his wife in hell rather than return to
heaven—entailed something other than ahimsa, ‘not harming

+
 +

264 / The Difficulty of Being Good

others’. It was a stronger, more positive attitude, exhibiting

maitri, ‘benevolence’, which is entailed in acting ‘for the sake of
others’, and this is ultimately ‘the highest dharma’.
Jajali had learned the same lesson. We had left Jajali in the
previous chapter when he was attracted to self-effacing Tuladhara,
who believed in living his life like a twig randomly borne along
in a stream. Jajali returned to the forest filled with a desire to
become selfless and detached like him.34 I too was struck by
Tuladhara’s attitude. He does not seek praise and leads his life
avoiding harm to others; he does not cut trees to construct his
house; he sells only legal merchandise and he weighs it honestly
and gives proper change to customers. Tuladhara seems to be
happy to go along with life’s flow without trying to impose his
ego.35 Yet something in Tuladhara’s detached and passive attitude
left me uneasy. It was similar to the discomfort I had felt in
Chapters 4 and 5 with regard to Krishna’s advice to Arjuna
about nishkama karma as the war was about to begin. My unease
+ with Tuladhara gradually led to admiration for the new Jajali
+
after he returned to the jungle.
Late in Book Twelve, Yudhishthira asks Bhishma, ‘What are
the meritorious works Jajali performed by which he achieved
this great success?’36 Bhishma takes up the thread of Jajali’s life:

At one time the great ascetic, fasting, subsisting on air, stood as

steady as a piece of wood, never moving at all. As he stood
motionless like a tree trunk, O Bharata, a pair of sparrows made
their nest on his head. The wise seer compassionately disregarded
that couple as they made their nest in his hair with the straws of
grass. As the great ascetic, acting as a tree trunk, never made the
slightest movement, the pair happily dwelt there [on his head] in
complete confidence.37

Bhishma describes to Yudhishthira how the birds slowly gained

confidence from their intimacy and became infatuated with love.
When the monsoon season had passed and autumn came, the

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 265

birds married ‘according to the dowry-less rite’ and laid eggs on

Jajali’s head. ‘In the fullness of time, [baby] birds were born; and
the ascetic became aware of those little birds [who had now]
sprouted wings.’ Jajali might have shooed the birds away, but he
did not. As a result, he changed from a self-absorbed person who
cared only for his own achievements to someone who cared for
others. From a self-centred person he became altruistic. Tuladhara,
observing what has happened, says to Jajali, ‘The birds, cherished
by you, cherish [you as their] father; and assuredly you are their
father. Call them [your] children, Jajali.’38 Tuladhara likens Jajali’s
altruism to the natural sentiments of parents for their children.
Just as Jajali cherished the birds, so will they esteem him. ‘In this
story, Jajali’s kindness is never repaid—and indeed, like a parent’s,
it never can be fully repaid.’39
The birds remind Jajali that the obstacle in the way of achieving
this new dharma is Jajali’s earlier competitive egoism (spardha),
which is not only harmful to his personality but also diminishes
+ his karma:
+

Thereupon Jajali summoned the birds, [and] verily at the behest of

dharma, they sang with wonderful voices, [saying:]
‘Competitiveness destroys in this world and the next the merit
generated by harmlessness and the like, O Brahman. If
[competitiveness] is not destroyed, it destroys the person [who is
so afflicted]. We have alighted together [on you] out of a sense of
dharma, wishing to put you to the test. Strike down [your]
competitiveness.40

The birds suggest that there exists an order in the universe which
is based on karma and dharma. Good behaviour grounded in
dharma earns good karma. The birds warn Jajali that his
accumulation of ahimsa-generated merit will be dissipated by
spardha, ‘excessive competitiveness’.41
Tuladhara and Jajali’s story reminded me again of the
limitations of selflessness. Tuladhara upholds the ideal of

+
 +

266 / The Difficulty of Being Good

equanimity—of going through life disinterestedly like a piece of

wood flowing randomly in the river without seeking the approval
or applause of society. While such a person is attractive and
superior to the earlier Jajali, who was filled with competitive
egoism, his detached and disinterested attitude also runs the risk
of becoming uncaring and uninvolved. It is not natural for birds
to nest on human heads. But if one has dusty and matted hair
and stands stationary in the forest for a long time, then birds will
be tempted. In providing a resting place for the sparrows, Jajali
expressed the sort of affectionate behaviour that human beings
save for their children. It becomes altruism when such concern is
expressed towards strangers. The later Jajali’s positive feeling of
compassion and benevolence towards the birds does seem to
express a superior dharma.

The heart of moral virtue

+ What is one to make of Yudhishthira’s insistence in taking a +

stray dog into heaven? His blunt explanation to Indra is that the
dog is a bhakta—he is ‘devoted’ to him. Indra’s negative response
is also predictable within a tradition that considers a dog asprishya,
‘unclean’. The loyal nature of the dog, however, trumps traditional
prejudice. Because Yudhishthira ‘weeps with all creatures’,
humans and animals alike, he is rewarded with the unique
distinction of being allowed to take his own body into heaven.
(Other humans who qualify for heaven are merely given a new
‘heavenly’ body.) The other striking thing about this episode is
that the god, Dharma, incarnates himself as an animal, and an
unclean one. ‘It is as if the God of the Hebrew Bible became
incarnate in a pig.’42 The epic has thus made another ethical
point. Compassion, godliness and heaven must extend to all
creatures.
At the centre of Yudhishthira’s anrishamsya is the empathetic
question: how would I feel if it was I who was suffering? I would
be more inclined to feel compassion towards the other person’s

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 267

suffering if I realized that I am equally vulnerable and the

suffering could be mine. This empathetic thought helps to remove
barriers with other persons, especially barriers created by class
and caste. Yudhishthira’s empathy extends all the way to a stray
dog. The ‘thought of similarity is not absolutely necessary as a
conceptual condition: we can in principle feel compassion for
others without seeing their predicament as like one that we
could experience. Our compassion for the sufferings of animals
is a fine example: we are indeed similar to animals in many
ways, but we don’t need that thought in order to see that what
they suffer is bad, and in order to have compassion for them.’43
Yudhishthira’s anrishamsya is a form of altruism, and it is at
the heart of moral virtue. It was the French philosopher Auguste
Comte who first used the word ‘altruisme’. It came into the
English language through Comte’s translators in mid-nineteenth
century England, where it created something of a sensation in
the Victorian Age.44 Comte taught that ‘the grand duty of life [is
+ to] . . . strengthen the social affections by constant habit and by
+
referring all our actions to them’ and ‘moral discipline should
have but one object, to make altruism . . . predominate over
egoism’. The Victorians were obsessed with selflessness and
were quick to observe a conflict between altruistic duty and
selfish inclination. The characters in Victorian novels judge each
other constantly, especially when it comes to vanity and
selfishness. They weave their narratives between the poles of
egoism and altruism. George Eliot, in particular, shows a very
deep concern with altruism. But even she does not adopt Comte’s
extreme position, which makes it an obligation for all our actions
to benefit others. Neither does the pragmatic Mahabharata go that
far.
Today, when ordinary people use the word ‘altruism’, they
invariably think of noble acts of self-sacrifice. This places altruism
on a pedestal and beyond the reach of the common person. I
favour a more modest understanding of the word, one that has

+
 +

268 / The Difficulty of Being Good

to do with limiting one’s interests by a constant awareness of

others’ interests. The Mahabharata does not clarify what it means
by anrishamsya. But in preferring to give up heaven for the sake
of a stray dog or choosing to revive his stepbrother before his
own, Yudhishthira did reinforce the self-sacrificing connotation
of the word.
Our contemporary usage of altruism has been deeply influenced
by the Christian idea of charity. It influenced the eighteenth-
century philosopher Francis Hutcheson, for example, who
believed that a man’s duty is ‘calm universal benevolence’, a
virtue that requires one to further the good of others. His
contemporary David Hume, however, did not think that one’s
love of mankind could stretch that far.45 He conceded that
human beings did have ‘benevolent dispositions’, such as
sympathy for other individuals. When one sees a person in
trouble, one feels sympathy and this makes one want to help her
or him. Obviously, one’s sympathy is greater for one’s family
+ and friends, but it also extends to strangers.46 But this is a far cry +
from ‘calm, universal benevolence’ or Comte’s idea that all our
actions should benefit others.
In Chapter 5, I drew a distinction between two types of self-
directed acts. The first benefits the agent but it might also harm
others, and one calls it ‘selfish’. The second type of action simply
furthers the agent’s interest without harming others, such as
waking up in the morning or carrying an umbrella when it rains.
In the same way, one can make a distinction between acts that
take the interests of others into account versus those actions that
are positively intended to benefit others. We commonly use the
word ‘altruism’ to refer to the latter, and this is also the sense in
which the Mahabharata uses anrishamsya. Comte fully expects that
when one thinks of the beneficiaries of one’s actions, it ought to
be humanity as a whole and not merely family, neighbours, or
even one’s fellow countrymen. Limiting compassion to the latter
would mean being ‘partial’ or ‘selfish’ towards a particular
group.

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 269

Comte deeply influenced the English thinker John Stuart Mill,

who wrote famously that ‘selfishness [is] the principal cause
which makes life unsatisfactory’. He hoped that the advance of
civilization would lead to ‘a fellow-feeling with the collective
interests of mankind’.47 He was enthusiastic about Comte’s
‘Religion of Humanity’, and thought it superior to traditional
religion. He disliked Christianity because it appealed to man’s
selfish motives in pursuit of salvation and heaven. Later
Utilitarians thought that the duty of benevolence was excessive
and argued that, ‘I have a duty to help others but without
hurting myself.’ If I hurt myself then total utility in the world
would diminish.
One cannot escape the considerable irony in the Victorian
rhetoric of furthering the interests of humanity at the height of
Britain’s empire in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries. This is, perhaps, the reason that Victorians went to
considerable lengths to reassure themselves that colonial
+ conquests were part of a ‘civilizing mission’. To move from one’s +
duties to all human beings towards those especially beneath
one’s social scale was merely a logical step taken by the socialists
and Labour Party intellectuals in England. ‘It was during the
middle decades of the nineteenth century that in England the
impulse of self-subordinating service was transferred, consciously
and overtly, from God to man.’48 The Mahabharata’s dharma of
anrishamsya is strikingly similar. It too ‘subordinates’ the self for
the sake of others; its focus is on man rather than God. The quest
for ‘dharma’ is more important than the quest for ‘God’ in the
epic, something quite remarkable in a semi-religious text.

How would I feel if it was I who was suffering?

It is all very well to conclude, as the Mahabharata does, that

anrishamsya is the highest dharma, but can the ordinary person,
in fact, behave altruistically and do so consistently? Most people
that I know are usually considerate to their family and friends,

+
 +

270 / The Difficulty of Being Good

but it is rare to find someone who consistently acts keeping

others’ interests in mind. Hence the question: can the interest of
others motivate human beings in significant numbers?
What is there in human nature that would make one want to
further other people’s well being or happiness? One can answer
this question by posing another one: ‘How would you feel if
someone did that to you?’49 One usually thinks of the latter in a
context when one is a victim or when one does not want to be
hurt. But it might also help explain benevolent behaviour. When
one puts oneself in the shoes of another person, even in a
hypothetical situation, it forces one to acknowledge the reality of
others. Exchanging places with another makes one realize
something about oneself. This self-discovery about one’s attitude
to one’s own needs comes with the awareness that these are
‘simply someone’s needs, desires, and interests rather than [mine]’.50
The reason to help another person is simply that someone is in
need of help. In admitting that one does not like to be harmed,
+ one is making a rational judgement. One realizes that altruism is
+
not only possible, it is the sensible and rational way to behave.
For rare individuals—Yudhishthira, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus
Christ—the other person was very real in their imaginations.
They did not have to play this thought game. For most of us,
however, the ‘other’ is remote, and it is useful to try to put
ourselves in their place. It leads us to ‘an objective element in the
concern we feel for ourselves, and generalizing from that’.51
A tough-minded egoist like Duryodhana will reject a sentiment
like anrishamsya, dismissing it as typically weak behaviour on the
part of a weak individual like Yudhishthira. He firmly believes
that one acts only to further one’s interest. If someone needed his
help, Duryodhana would probably reply, ‘what’s in it for me?’
The answer to Duryodhana’s question is the opposite one: what
if you were in extreme distress which could easily be relieved by
another person, would you want that person to ask, ‘What’s in
it for me’?

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 271

What if you had a gouty toe and it was under Bhima’s heel?
‘The pain which gives him a reason to remove his gouty toes
from under another person’s heel does not in itself give the other
[person a] reason to remove the heel, since it is not his pain.
Anyone who thinks he is an egoist should imagine himself in
either role in such a situation. Can he truly affirm that the owner
of the heel has no reason whatever to remove it from the gouty
toes? Particularly if one owns the toes, it shows a rare detachment
not to regard the pain as simply in itself a bad thing, which there
is reason for anyone to avert,’ says Thomas Nagel.52 If Duryodhana
were to try to imagine that he was the victim of pain and Bhima
could relieve it, he would then expect Bhima to act
compassionately. It would be the rational course of action as the
position of the victim and the oppressor could be reversed. Thus,
Duryodhana is not able to sustain his position of ethical egoism.
Immanuel Kant also believed that the duty of altruism flows
from human reason. It is irrational not to help others knowing
+ that one may need their help one day.53 The question—how
+
would you like it if someone did that to you?—appeals to human
reason as well as the human ability to empathize with others.
Hence, ‘the force of altruism springs from our common
humanity’.54
Even though I think that altruism is rational and sensible, I do
not feel capable of acting like Yudhishthira. As I approached the
end of the Mahabharata, I felt torn between an ideal and a
practical way to live. While I admired Yudhishthira’s ideal of
anrishamsya, I did not think it could serve as a moral rule for
ordinary people. As we were walking one day in Lodhi Gardens
near my house, my philosopher friend Vineet Haksar reminded
me of the difference between moral rules and moral ideals.55 One
ought to punish a person for being unjust but one can only
dislike or despise him for not being compassionate.56 Christians
will recognize this distinction—the Ten Commandments are
moral rules which inform us of our duties. The Sermon on the

+
 +

272 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Mount offers us moral ideals. Moral rules are the minimum

demands of behaviour that a civilized society expects from its
members. We do not expect our friends to be saints or heroes,
but we expect them to be ‘second best’ and obey the rules. John
Stuart Mill made a similar distinction between a perfect obligation
to obey moral duties and an imperfect obligation to obey moral
ideals.
A society without saints and heroes would be impoverished,
however. Moral rules and moral ideals have different functions.57
Having followed Yudhishthira on his dharma journey, I can only
say that a moral ideal like anrishamsya has an awesome quality.
Even though it is seemingly unattainable, it is inspiring and
capable of stirring us to action. When Mahatma Gandhi turned
the other cheek to the British colonial rulers, he was holding up
an ideal of moral perfection. The ideals of dharma, by inspiring
us, can give significance to a life that might otherwise be adrift.

+ The making of an ‘un-hero’ +

Yudhishthira must have wondered after his third and final test,
how long is this testing business to go on? When he came down
into hell from heaven, he cried in anguish:

Did someone make a mistake? Am I asleep? I am in pain and my

mind is disoriented.58

Since he did not receive a satisfactory answer, he cursed the

gods. For someone who has just been praised so lavishly by the
gods—‘great king, there is no one your equal in heaven’—it did
seem a tad ungracious to reciprocate a compliment with a curse.
Yet, as I think about it, there is only so much that a man can
take. The ‘mistake’ that the tormented Yudhishthira mentions
seems to have been made a long time ago. Otherwise, why
would he, at the very moment of his greatest triumph—after
being consecrated ‘king of kings’—have had to play and lose in
a rigged game of dice? And his queen, Draupadi—why did she

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 273

have to be humiliated before an assembly of nobles? Because of

the same ‘mistake’, he and the Pandavas had to suffer thirteen
years in exile. After they came back from exile, Duryodhana did
not return their kingdom, and he had to fight a war when he
would have been happy to live peacefully with his brothers in
five villages. Even after he did win the bloody war, it turned out
to be a hollow victory as he had to rule over an empty kingdom.
If this was not enough, Yudhishthira is rewarded in the end with
a series of tests. Talk about mistakes—life has been a non-stop
blunder as far as he is concerned. Dharma has been failing him
continuously since the beginning.
There is, of course, the possibility that Yudhishthira’s problem
may have something to do with the fact that the world itself
lacks balance—the epic calls it an ‘uneven’ world.59 The human
condition might be defective. ‘Dharma is opaque because our
experience is opaque.’60 Like every human being Yudhishthira
yearns for an ‘even’, predictable world in which the good are
+ rewarded and the bad are punished. But in a world where the
+
rules of the game are determined by a loaded game of dice,
enigma and opacity are man’s destiny. Draupadi’s question in
the forest did go to the heart of the matter. She had asked, ‘What
kind of a world is it where the good suffer and the wicked
prosper?’ He has never truly owned up to the possibility that our
world may be at odds with dharma. Suffering and happiness
may be irrelevant to dharma. This world does not care for my
suffering. So, why be good?
It is not that we were not warned. Perhaps, we did not pick up
the signals. Did Krishna not tell Gandhari, who was grieving for
her sons at the end of the war, that the Mahabharata was divinely
pre-planned in order to rid the earth of kshatriyas?61 This is the
epic’s way of reminding us that human lives are vulnerable—
there is much in this world that we do not control. The
Mahabharata calls this uncontrollable sphere daiva, ‘fate’.
Yudhishthira recognizes his vulnerability, but being the sort of

+
 +

274 / The Difficulty of Being Good

person he is, he also realizes that his defencelessness is the same

as that of the next person. From this thought empathy is born.
For him the suffering of a hungry peasant matters, unlike most
of us who see the peasant as a distant object. Yudhishthira is able
to bring the peasant into his circle of concern and this leads him
to the ‘highest dharma’ of anrishamsya.62
We begin to understand our hero. Yudhishthira’s anguished
curse at the end of the Mahabharata is an existential protest
against the unsatisfactory human condition. It is a cry of
frustration against at least two injustices—of having to live in a
world where goodness is not necessarily met with goodness; and
having to die suddenly without any explanation from anyone.
His angry cry at the end is a reaction to ‘the central condition of
the world of the epic, where action is contingent, where right
and wrong behaviour exist but there is no overarching morality,
no super-potent or binding system of rules . . . The Mahabharata’s
time is one in which the end is always imminent [just as] death
+ hangs over every warrior in the battle.’63 This reluctant kshatriya
+
conducts a war in this opaque world, but he is able to learn
something from it, and it leads him to ahimsa. Despite his own
painful experiences in the uneven world, he is able to think of
the other person’s suffering, and it leads him to anrishamsya.
Hence, he offers refuge to a stray dog before going into heaven.
While in heaven, he thinks only of the distress of his brothers
and of Draupadi, and chooses to go to hell to be with them.
I had earlier compared Yudhishthira’s situation to that of
Sisyphus. Recall, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push
a rock up a hill. Just as the rock reaches the top it comes rolling
down, and he must begin his futile labour all over again. The
look on Sisyphus’s face at seeing the rock go down is similar to
Yudhishthira’s during his third and final test in hell. On the faces
of both men is written the absurd, vulnerable human condition
in which the only certainty is that ‘time cooks all beings’.64
It is Yudhishthira’s destiny to keep on searching for the dharma

+
 +

Mahabharata’s Dharma / 275

that ‘is hidden in a cave’. Having rejected the comfortable,

kshatriya sva-dharma of his family and society, he is an anayaka,
‘un-hero’, who treads the lonely path in search of a different
dharma—one that lies within his own conscience. By being true
to this different dharma of goodness, he creates his own meaning
in an inscrutable world. This is how he defies the ‘time cooker’.65
By choosing to live in a certain way, Yudhishthira creates
moral value, and this serves as a shield against human
vulnerability. Despite repeated references to daiva, ‘fate’, what
shines through is the value of human effort in the Mahabharata.
Plato and Aristotle tried to cope with human defencelessness by
demonstrating the power of human reason, which could help
make human beings more self-sufficient.66 Immanuel Kant
believed that the moral value of the human being’s ‘good will’
helped to protect a person from uncertainty. In the same way
Yudhishthira has snatched victory in dharma from the tragedy
of a dark war, ‘which so disillusioned both sides that everyone
+ was plunged into confusion and despair in the end’.67
+

+
 +

CONCLUSION
The difficulty of being good

With uplifted arms I cry, but no one heeds;

from dharma flow wealth and pleasure.
Then why is dharma not pursued?
—Mahabharata XVIII.5.49

It was my grandmother who first introduced me to the

+ +
Mahabharata. When I was four, and India was still undivided, she
would take me along on her social rounds in Lyallpur. She
would be dressed in a starched white sari and we would set off
at eleven in the morning in our horse-drawn carriage, sometimes
to mourn a death and at other times to celebrate a birth or even
an engagement. On the way home she would take a longer route
and reward me with a story from the epic. I would listen with
fear and pity to these stories of her great heroes.1
My grandmother had no doubt that the events actually
happened. They had taken place before our degraded times
when the gods mingled with men, and human beings were more
inclined to adhere to dharma. She had a sense of cosmic time
and she believed that the epic was a true account of the deeds of
her righteous ancestors in the Punjab, who with the aid of God,
Sri Krishna, defeated unrighteous foes. She had faith in the
continuity of our tradition and regarded the epics as itihasa,
‘history’.2 She also felt that the Mahabharata was a divine work

276

+
 +

Conclusion / 277

and, hence, she would have found my attempts at grasping the

epic’s dharma in ironic, human terms as mildly distasteful.3
When I went to school, I forgot the Mahabharata. Ever since
India became a secular republic in 1947, our educational
establishment has been somewhat shy about teaching the epic in
our schools in the mistaken belief that it is a ‘religious’ text. I
returned to it only after I took early retirement from my business
career, in response to my ‘third stage melancholy’. I discovered
that like any great work, one can read the Mahabharata at many
levels. It is a cosmic allegory of the eternal struggle between
good and evil on one plane. At another level, it is about an all-
too-human fight between the cousins of a royal family, which
leads to a war and ends tragically in the death of almost
everyone. At a third level—and this is primarily the subject of
my book—it is about the crisis of conscience of some of its
characters.
After spending six years continuously with the epic, I have
+ learned that the Mahabharata is about the way we deceive +
ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow
human beings, and how deeply unjust we are in our day-to-day
lives. But is this moral blindness an intractable human condition,
or can we change it? Some of our misery is the result of the way
the state also treats us, and can we redesign our institutions to
have a more sympathetic government? I have sought answers to
these questions in the epic’s elusive concept of dharma, and my
own search for how we ought to live has been this book’s
motivating force.

Anrishamsya: the answer to my third stage melancholy

During my business career I worked in a number of countries,

and I found everywhere that middle-class parents wanted their
children to grow up to be more like Arjuna and less like
Yudhishthira. They wanted them to be talented and successful,
and become winners in life’s rat race. Indeed, the pursuit of

+
 +

278 / The Difficulty of Being Good

competitive success and status seems to be hard-wired in human

genes. Sometimes, however, this ideal gets shaken, as it did in
2009 by the Satyam scandal, whose reverberations were felt
around the world. In the Prelude, I asked if the Mahabharata
might offer some insight into why B. Ramalinga Raju, the founder
of the highly successful software company Satyam, committed
one of the great corporate frauds of all time. He had everything
going for him—success, money, fame and power. He had created
an outstanding world class company; why did a person of such
extraordinary achievement turn to crime?
Even as the story was unfolding, it seemed clear to me that the
moral failing was not greed as everyone thought. Nor was it a
Duryodhana-like hubris, which made Raju believe, like investment
bankers on Wall Street, that he was ‘master of the universe’. Was
it, perhaps, that Raju’s stake in Satyam had dwindled to 8.6 per
cent, and the company was in danger of slipping out of the
family’s control? Raju has two sons and a sense of filial duty
+ drove him, perhaps, to create companies in real estate and
+
infrastructure, two sectors of the Indian economy that had not
been reformed, and where politicians insisted on bribes to be
paid upfront for favours delivered. Since revenues from the new
companies were far away, Raju dipped into Satyam to pay the
politicians. It might have worked if the price of real estate had
continued to rise. But no one counted on a downturn and a
liquidity crisis. Desperately, Raju tried to restore the stolen assets
to Satyam by merging it with his son’s companies but that did
not work.
Raju was ruined by his Dhritarashtra-like weakness for his
sons. The Mahabharata seems to be saying that one ought to
nurture one’s children, but one does not have to indulge them
like Duryodhana, nor leave them a company each, and certainly
not by crossing the line of dharma. It takes moral courage to
resist the sentiment of partiality towards one’s family.
Yudhishthira, as we have seen, challenges the old sva-dharma of

+
 +

Conclusion / 279

family and caste in the epic, preferring instead the newer,

universal sadharana-dharma, which teaches one to behave with
impartiality towards everyone.
Ramalinga Raju’s story caused much discomfort in the Indian
middle class because it challenged its unexamined definition of
success. It forced them to ask if there is another way to live.
Yudhishthira also challenged the kshatriya concept of success in
the Mahabharata, reminding us to give equal status to persons
who are kind, considerate, and who are guided by ahimsa and
anrishamsya.4 Soon after I took early retirement at age fifty, I met
a fourteen-year-old low-caste boy named Raju in a village in
Tamil Nadu. His ambition was to grow up to run a computer
company and become ‘the richest man in the world like Bill
Gates’. I applauded this boy for thinking big because he reflected
the spirit of a new, self-confident, decolonized India.5 A dozen
years later I find myself holding up to this younger Raju the
cautionary tale of the other Raju of Satyam. There is a fine line
+ between healthy ambition and selfish greed, but it is very
+
real.
Yudhishthira’s insistence on taking a stray dog into heaven
was the defining moment of my own dharma journey. His
defiance of the conventional life helped to shake me out of my
third stage melancholy. Even though at times the world appeared
to be a rigged game of dice and the prize seemed to go to wicked
Duryodhana, Yudhishthira remained firm like tormented Dido
in the Aeneid who said, ‘Not inexperienced in suffering, I learn
how to bring aid to the wretched.’ He went on to become a
dharmic king who identified with the suffering of his subjects—
not only human subjects, but all sentient beings, including stray
dogs. In this way he gave meaning to a life without intrinsic
meaning, one in which the only certainty, he keeps reminding us,
is that ‘time cooks all beings’.6
In Chapter 3, I raised the question about the nature of the good
life. Is it to die young in battle and go to heaven? Or should one

+
 +

280 / The Difficulty of Being Good

live a long, peaceful, and probably unremarkable dharmic life of

non-violence and compassion? Where does true honour lie? This
question certainly was the driving force behind the Pandavas’
search for the meaning of dharma, but I also felt that it was
relevant to my own search for meaning. I had felt the emptiness
of conventional success. When Yudhishthira says after the war,
‘This victory seems like defeat’, it was as though he was expressing
my feelings at the height of my corporate career.
After emerging victorious from the Kurukshetra War,
Yudhishthira feels responsible for the suffering of so many and
is filled with remorse. From remorse is born his commitment to
ahimsa, ‘non-violence’. When the epic says, ‘Great king, you
weep with all creatures’, it announces the next step in
Yudhishthira’s moral journey. When the feeling of having
wronged a specific individual is transformed to a general feeling
of anrishamsya, ‘compassion for others’, one has made the leap.
One learns to identify not only with their suffering, but also their
+ happiness. One begins to ‘rejoice with those who rejoice’. This
+
leads to acts of benevolence. Both ahimsa and anrishamsya are
double negatives, but obviously they do not have a weak
connotation in Sanskrit as double negatives do in English. They
require the acknowledging of the other person as the Mahabharata
reminds us:

Who has in his heart always the well-being of others, and is wholly
given, in acts, thoughts, and in speech, to the good of others, he
alone knows what dharma is.7

Yudhishthira has come to understand the right way to engage

with the world.
What comes in the way of engaging correctly with the world
is human vanity, whose many faces the Mahabharata displays in
abundance. Vanity in the form of mischievous ahamkara, ‘the I-
maker’, enslaves human beings, and is sometimes expressed as
Duryodhana’s envy, or Dhritarashtra’s hypocrisy, or Karna’s

+
 +

Conclusion / 281

status anxiety, or Ashwatthama’s revengeful emotions. Vanity is

an irresistible aspect of the human condition and it invariably
spoils our engagement with the world.8 It is so powerful and
persistent that if all the gods died vanity would still survive.
Sometimes it comes from our attachment to the pride and
prestige of our family’s past, but much of it is of our own
making. Hence, the famous Vedic invocation to Varuna: ‘Lord,
release us from the deceits of our ancestors and from those that
we have perpetrated ourselves.’
When Yudhishthira rejects the kshatriya tradition of dharma,
he teaches us to question society’s values rather than lead an
unquestioning life. This is what, I suppose, Socrates also meant
when he asserted that the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’.9
I had never quite reflected on my life in this deliberate way. I
had just assumed that one really did not have a choice in these
matters. When Kripa tried to restrain Ashwatthama from
committing his heinous act of revenge, he told him the story of
+ two farmers. One works hard, ploughs his field and when it
+
rains, he reaps a fine harvest. The other idles, wastes his time in
drink. One cannot ensure that it will rain but one does have a
choice in tilling one’s field. One does not control the outcome of
one’s acts, but one can choose to work or not.10 The Mahabharata’s
position is quite clear—human initiative does matter even though
there is much beyond one’s control. Kant believed that it is at
‘the moment of choosing’ that one truly experiences one’s
autonomy. Yudhishthira shows the way. After losing the rigged
game of dice, he confronts the arbitrariness of the world by
choosing to live a certain kind of life despite the protests of his
family. He decides to stick to his word and stay true to his
conscience.11
On more than one occasion, I wondered why the climactic
scene in a heroic epic has a stray dog following an indecisive,
non-competitive ‘un-hero’, who is bent on questioning dharma
when he ought to be upholding it. The Mahabharata ought to

+
 +

282 / The Difficulty of Being Good

have concluded in a glorious, martial panorama featuring the

magnificent Arjuna—‘the Indian Achilles’.12 It might even have
closed with Duryodhana dying on the battlefield. Instead the
epic goes on to recount the inglorious and melancholic old age
of its heroes, expressing profound disappointment with heroic
expectations. There is sadness and profound awareness of
mortality at the sunset of its heroes’ lives. This mood finally
precipitates the Pandavas’ decision to retire from the world and
enter sanyasa, the fourth stage of life.13
If Yudhishthira had abdicated his throne in Arjuna’s favour
and gone off to the forest to pursue an ascetic life, it would have
confirmed my initial, uninformed prejudice against Hindu ethics.
From my stray readings of historians, I had acquired the notion
that traditional Indian dharma was passive and quietist. I believed
that Indian tradition valued above all else not harming others,
not speaking harshly or dishonestly, keeping one’s anger in
check, and tolerating insults without retaliation. In short, the
+ emphasis was on negative virtues—not doing wrong, not
+
injuring—rather than on positively striving to help others and
doing good.
I began to question this unthinking assumption towards the
end of the Pandavas’ exile in Book Three, when Yudhishthira
chose to revive his stepbrother, Nakula, rather than one of his
real brothers. The Mahabharata reinforces the value of compassion
in another tale in Book Thirteen, in which a parrot who lives in
a tree remains loyal. After the tree is struck by a hunter’s
poisoned arrow, it begins to wither. The other birds abandon it,
but the parrot remains loyal and stays on. Indra is so delighted
with the parrot’s altruistic act that he revives the tree.14 This is
merely a preview to the grand acts of altruism that Yudhishthira
displays at the end—insisting on taking a stray dog into heaven
and preferring to stay in hell to comfort his family rather than go
to heaven.
Both ethical tendencies sit side by side in the Mahabharata (and

+
 +

Conclusion / 283

in the broad Indian tradition, I imagine), highlighting the need

for both Jajali’s positive and Tuladhara’s negative virtues.
Goodness entails actively helping those in need as well as
passively not harming others and being fair and just in one’s
judgements. Mahatma Gandhi tried to combine the two. He
fought for a nation’s freedom in the public space, but challenged
himself constantly in the private space with regard to the negative
virtues. His political philosophy of non-cooperation and passive
resistance combined the two virtues. Gandhi believed, like Seneca,
that ‘what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality’. If this
is too ambitious for ordinary persons, and if they cannot change
the external environment, they can at least try and transform
themselves.
How does one learn anrishamsya? Listening to or reading the
Mahabharata’s moral tale is a good place to start. Like all good
literature, it is a conduit for expanding the mind and cultivating
a moral sensibility. Yudhishthira teaches by example and not by
+ ‘ethical prophecy’.15 It is not easy to become virtuous; it requires +
a leap from thought to action, and it takes painstaking effort to
learn to identify with people whom one dislikes or to whom one
is indifferent.16 It is best to begin by trying to empathize with one
individual.17

When turning the other cheek sends a wrong signal

When Yudhishthira made the reluctant decision to go to war, he

was following a more practical and achievable dharma. In making
this decision he was aware that while ahimsa, non-violence, is the
ideal way to act, violence is inevitable when one is up against a
certain kind of adversary. He was acting according to a middle
path which is the foundation of justice in society and the basis of
moral rules. It is situated somewhere between the unacceptable
amoralist position of Duryodhana and the guileless ‘super-
morality’ of the earlier Yudhishthira in Book Three and embraces
the moral ideals of ahimsa and anrishamsya, which the later

+
 +

284 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Yudhishthira tries to live up to after he is chastened by the

Kurukshetra War.
The Mahabharata’s middle path is grounded in enlightened
self-interest, which pragmatic, upright statesmen like Bhishma
and Krishna, who have the responsibility of running a state,
must try to follow. In a world of power politics, the dharma of
the leader cannot be moral perfection. It is closer to Edmund
Burke’s ‘prudence’, which he called a ‘god of this lower world’.
The political ideology of the Mahabharata rejects both the amorality
of Duryodhana as well as the idealistic position of the earlier
Yudhishthira in exile. It is akin to the evolutionary principle of
reciprocal altruism, which socio-biologists have made popular in
recent decades: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not
allow yourself to be exploited. This down-to-earth approach is
based on the assumption that there will always be cheats in the
world like Duryodhana and they must be kept in check. Turning
the other cheek sends them a wrong signal that cheating pays.
+ Prudence does not mean that one merely weighs the pros and
+
cons of going to war as King Dhritarashtra does.18 The claims of
dharma are part of the deliberations of the prudent ruler of the
middle path, as Yudhishthira shows. He is weighed down with
moral concerns during the peace negotiations even as he is more
and more resigned to the inevitability of war:

Why should a man knowingly go to war?

Who cursed by his fate would choose war?
The Parthas who hunger for happiness act
For the fullness of dharma and the common weal.19

To make sure his moral conflicts are not misunderstood for

weakness, he reminds Sanjaya: ‘I am just as capable of peace as
I am of war . . . as I am of gentleness and severity.’20
Nevertheless, Yudhishthira is profoundly embarrassed after
the war and like the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, he feels ashamed
and guilty for ‘having killed those who ought not to be killed’.

+
 +

Conclusion / 285

He begins to see an inherent contradiction between ruling a state

and being good. He wants to renounce the world and become a
hermit. To avert a crisis of the throne the dying Bhishma instructs
him in Book Twelve. Yudhishthira learns that a human being
also has the responsibility to fulfil the ‘worldly’ goals of life. To
try to escape from the world of action means that one loses
something valuable. The Mahabharata, thus, asserts the realm of
politics against the contemplative path of ‘the renouncer’, which
had taken such a mesmerizing hold on young people of its time.
The duty of the king, moreover, is to enforce danda, the rod of
force, which is embodied in the laws of justice. A just ruler must
employ the police and the army in order to protect the innocent.
As Bhishma puts it: ‘If the rod of force did not exist in this world,
beings would be nasty and brutish . . . because they fear
punishment, beings do not kill each other.’21
In the end, Yudhishthira is persuaded of the necessity of via
active, ‘the life of action’. He assumes the throne, albeit reluctantly,
+ and goes on to become a great and just king, making his
+
kingdom fertile, prosperous and secure. He eschews the ‘ethic of
ultimate ends’, accepting Bhishma’s advice that an ‘ethic of
responsibility’ is more appropriate to political life and not the
purity of one’s soul.22 When dharmic goodness and ideology
become the driving force of politics then room for negotiation
and compromise is significantly diminished and this makes for
a dangerous world. He has understood that societies are held
together by ‘laws, customs and moral habits’, and it is these that
make up dharma, whose rules are meant to get citizens to
collaborate rather than to fight.23
The moral temper of the Mahabharata is, thus, pragmatic.24 Its
ideal is a world of sociable human beings who find reward in the
nobility of character. What that ‘nobility’ consists of is contentious
and is the source of tension right to the end of the epic. It has a
place in it both for danda, ‘retributive justice’, and benevolence.
Machiavelli had offered the same advice as Bhishma to his own

+
 +

286 / The Difficulty of Being Good

prince when he said, ‘a man who wishes to profess goodness at

all times will come to ruin among so many who are not so good.
Hence it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his
position to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge
. . . according to necessity.’25 Bhishma and Machiavelli are telling
us that society exists because it is in everyone’s interest to have
peace, and peace can only prevail if there is a sovereign authority
to punish those who breach it.

A tale for a time of crisis

The Mahabharata is a tale for a time of crisis and it is relevant to

the economic upheaval that gripped the world in 2008. The epic
had a problem with the self-destructive kshatriya institutions of
its time, and there are parallels between the Mahabharata’s lament
and the things that we might say or ought to say about our own
crisis. The person who lost her job in the economic calamity
+ would have asked the same question as Draupadi when the +
Pandavas were in exile. When everything was going so well and
Yudhishthira had been consecrated ‘universal sovereign’, why
did this tragedy have to strike? Why was our kingdom stolen in
a rigged game of dice?
The person rendered unemployed because of troubles that
began on Wall Street, asked insistently, ‘Why me? What did I do
to deserve this?’ When confronted with a similar question,
Draupadi had ‘staggered with wonder’ and ‘condemned the
Placer’.26 Later, Uttanka, the hermit, had put Krishna, the God,
on the mat for not preventing the war at Kurukshetra. He had
accused him for allowing so many to suffer through no fault of
theirs.27 When they were in exile, Draupadi, with her bias for
action, had exhorted her husband to go off, raise an army, and
win back their kingdom. But Yudhishthira had reminded her
that he had given his word. Draupadi countered, what is the
point of being good in a world where there is unmerited suffering?
Isn’t it better to be powerful and rich than to be good? To which

+
 +

Conclusion / 287

Yudhishthira replied in the only way that he knew, ‘I act because

I must’. It was the uncompromising, compelling voice of dharma.
This is an answer that the investment bankers, who tipped the
world into this crisis of capitalism, might ponder over.
The most damaging fallout from the economic crisis may well
have been a loss of trust in the democratic capitalist system,
especially if those who were unemployed and suffering, began to
believe that ‘anything goes’ in an unfair world. The actors in the
financial crisis would have done well to also consider the other
reasons that Yudhishthira gave in Chapter 3 for being good.
Aside from the fact that it is one’s duty to be good, he told
Draupadi that good acts produce good consequences. If people
do not keep their commitments, the social order will collapse.
Finally, virtue or dharma is necessary for leading a good and
flourishing life.28
‘Oh, so you are one of them!’ is how someone greeted my
nephew, who was embarrassed to tell people that he was one of
+ those investment bankers. ‘I’d rather say that I run a brothel,’ he
+
said. ‘At least, that’s a business people understand.’ Bankers,
having brought the world economy to its knees, became pariahs
overnight and a target of people’s rage. The International Labour
Organization reported in early 2009 that global unemployment
would hit a staggering 50 million. A typical knee-jerk reaction
pointed a finger and called it ‘greed’. But that was not very
helpful, for we have always known that if envy is a sin of
socialism, greed is the failing of capitalism (as we noted in
Chapter 1).
There were many dharma failures in this drama in which all
actors seemed to behave rationally. When US house prices were
rising and interest rates were low, even the poor got a chance to
get a mortgage and a home. Who could oppose that! Banks
combined these mortgages into a collateral debt obligation (CDO),
got it rated, and sold it to institutions, that also gained through
better returns. When the housing market turned downwards, the

+
 +

288 / The Difficulty of Being Good

CDOs became toxic. Who was at fault? In a sense all were guilty.
There is a fine line between rational self-interest and selfishness,
and the balance of dharma tipped the wrong way. The
undeserving recipient of the loan lied about his ability to repay;
the banker, moved by short-term reward, promoted the ‘sub-
prime’ mortgage; the rating agency was dishonest in colluding
with the bank; the institution that bought the risky CDO failed in
its duty to protect its shareholders.
The calamity might have been contained if Lehman Brothers
had been bailed out on 14 September 2008. The old rivalry
between Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, and Hank
Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, may have come in
the way. The bluebloods at Goldman Sachs had long harboured
a deep prejudice against the upstarts at Lehman. Fuld was
arrogant and had always managed to steal the limelight. But
Paulson, who was US Treasury Secretary when the world
economy went into recession, possibly unconsciously, allowed
+ personal prejudice to influence his thinking when he refused to
+
save Lehman. When Lehman collapsed, so did confidence and
bank liquidity, and this was the tipping point of the global
collapse.
President Barack Obama castigated Wall Street for paying
bonuses to executives at a time when they had been bailed out
by the American taxpayer. Particularly embarrassing was the
disclosure about John Thain, chairman of Merrill Lynch, who
had spent $1.2 million to do up his office, which included a
$1400 waste paper basket and a $35,000 commode in the
bathroom. He paid $4 billion in bonuses to executives when
Merrill Lynch had declared a loss of $15 billion in the fourth
quarter of 2008. When he said that the bonuses were needed ‘to
retain the best people’, someone asked him, ‘What best people?
They just lost you $15 billion!’
‘Resign or commit suicide’ was the honourable choice that the
Republican senator Charles Grassley offered to executives at

+
 +

Conclusion / 289

American International Group (AIG) who had received $220

million in bonuses after the insurance giant was bailed out.
When senators begin advising executives to kill themselves,
something had gone terribly wrong with the nation’s dharma.
President Barack Obama sought a legal way to claw back the
bonuses and democratic leaders in the Congress suggested an
extortionate tax. To want to punish someone in this crisis was
understandable but it was a dangerous path. What the world
needed instead was the calm and principled voice of a
Yudhishthira. In Obama’s place he would have appealed for a
‘voluntary’ return of bonuses while explaining to the American
people that Wall Street had been bailed out to save Main Street’s
pain and honouring bonus contracts was necessary to the rule of
law.
It was a lesson for the millions in China and India, who had
just risen into the middle class. Successes of capitalism over time
produce enervating influences when a generation committed to
+ saving is replaced by one devoted to spending. The ferocious
+
competition ‘of interests and passions’ that Duryodhana
exemplifies is a feature of the free market and it can be corrosive.
There is another way to live—like Tuladhara’s, the trader of
spices, who prefers to float calmly like a twig in the river and
does not feel the need to dominate his neighbour. But competition
is also an economic stimulant that promotes human welfare, as
my father used to say. The choice is not between the free market
and central planning but in getting the right mix of regulation.
No one wants state ownership of production where the absence
of competition corrodes the character even more. The answer is
not to seek moral perfection which inevitably leads to theocracy
and dictatorship. Since it is in man’s nature to want more, one
learns to live with human imperfection, and one seeks regulation
that not only tames Duryodhanas but also rewards dharma-like
behaviour in the market.
For those who had lost their jobs through no fault of their own

+
 +

290 / The Difficulty of Being Good

it was easy to become cynical and amoral. It was tempting to

believe that life is unfair, and so anything goes. It is to them that
the Mahabharata holds up Yudhishthira’s inspiring words—‘I act
because I must’. The epic’s message for our leaders in these
morally difficult times is to restore trust in the idea of a free
society of laws where anything does not go. The task of an
inspiring leader in Kali Yuga is not just to think about the
difficulty of being good but how to confront that difficulty—and
to place that thinking in the great textual confrontations of the
past.

‘A series of precisely stated problems imprecisely resolved’

I find that I have been guilty in seeking a singular, coherent

dharma in the epic. When I ask, ‘What is the epic trying to say?’
I seem to be suggesting that the meaning of a work of art is
unified and whole for all time. But, of course, this is not true.
+ Even in concluding that the Mahabharata’s political ideology is a +
pragmatic middle path, I may have been culpable of expecting
too much logical coherence in the epic when its real position may
well be agnostic—that the nature of political power is unsolvable.
Consider a traditional reading of the Karna episode in Book Five.
When a devotee of Krishna reads the epic he sees the hero as
cursed by daiva, ‘fate’, which leads him to ignore God’s wise
counsel to switch sides. Karna’s refusal to heed God leads him to
his foolish and blind end. A perfectly legitimate way to read the
epic and one which is very different from mine. The epic seems
to be saying a multiplicity of things to different readers at
different moments in history. Hence, my quest for the meaning
of dharma in the early twenty-first century is as legitimate as a
second century Vaishnavite devotee of Krishna’s.29
It is rich irony that the Pandavas waged a war reluctantly in
support of a dubious claim, and then employed deceit to gain a
victory for which they were rightly censured. The genealogy of
both sets of cousins is confused. Karna is the true claimant to the

+
 +

Conclusion / 291

throne and he turns out to be fighting on the wrong side. The

Pandavas are warned that Draupadi was born out of a powerful
sacrifice in order to wipe out their Kuru race, but they go ahead
and marry her anyway. Vidura cautions Yudhishthira not to
engage in the game of dice but he does so, and with disastrous
consequences.
All this leaves one in a state of moral confusion.30 I find it
difficult to slot the characters into neat compartments labelled
‘good’ and ‘bad’. Even the great war at Kurukshetra may not
have been a fight between good and evil as the epic would
sometimes have us believe. Although it claims that the war is a
dharma-yuddha, a ‘just war’, the fact is that dharma, the measure
by which we judge good and evil, is itself contested, ambiguous
and subtle. Both sides did plenty of good and bad deeds. Hence,
it might be better to call the Pandavas the ‘preferred’ side and
not the ‘good’ side.31
The epic judges its heroes harshly and packs them off to hell,
+ albeit briefly. Both Yudhishthira and Arjuna face genuine +
dilemmas, get confused, and are reluctant to act. Each time
Krishna has to step in and goad them on. When they do act they
tend to make a mess. Krishna reasons with Yudhishthira that
since his cause is just, and he deserves to win, what is the harm
in telling a half-truth? The alternative is far worse—losing his
kingdom. Either way, he would be wounding a principle of
dharma. Telling a lie would compromise satya or truth. Losing
the war would wound both distributive and retributive justice.
Duryodhana would usurp the Pandavas’ share of the kingdom
and escape punishment for his many wicked acts (including the
disrobing of Draupadi). ‘Had Duryodhana won the war, it would
have wounded our sense of dharma far more.’32 In the end
Yudhishthira tells half a lie to Drona, and his chariot hits the
ground. He pays for it by going to hell (from where he rescues
his wife and his brothers).
Arjuna’s dilemma is to choose between his duty as a soldier
and a duty not to kill. He can either be true to his kshatriya ethic

+
 +

292 / The Difficulty of Being Good

and fight a ‘just war’, or he can observe the dharma of his

conscience and eschew the violence of war. As we know, he
accepts Krishna’s advice and decides to fight. Although the
Pandavas win the war, it is a hollow victory. Almost everyone
dies and the Pandavas are condemned in having to rule over an
empty kingdom, filled with feelings of guilt, shame and remorse
for violating the moral principles of satya and ahimsa. Arjuna
pays an additional price of facing the humiliation of the loss of
his great heroic powers at the end of the epic. He cannot even
protect the few Yadava women of Krishna’s tribe who had been
left in his care from an attack by ordinary robbers.
Try as it might to justify these ambiguities, the epic leaves one
in a vague, hesitating and pessimistic mood with regard to
dharma. True, there are mitigating circumstances. A rich network
of curses and oaths have predetermined the outcome and
diminished human culpability to that extent. True also, dharma
has been in a state of decline—it has been declining by one-
+ fourth in each age beginning with the ‘golden age’. Only one-
+
fourth is left by the time the Mahabharata unfolds on the eve of
Kali Yuga.33 But the ethical impulses that drive individuals are
seldom straightforward. A person resolves a moral dilemma in
one way at one time and in another way on another occasion.
Although the two acts may be similar, a person does not follow
the same moral standard in judging them. Actions that might be
considered selfish in a member of the family may well be
acceptable in the larger context of the state, as the good Vidura
explains. One might think a friend inconsiderate, but tolerate
him as a national leader for ‘reasons of state’. Regrettably, it does
seem to matter whether the victim is a friend or a foe. The
Mahabharata does not shy from this incoherence. Neither should
we in our lives. ‘We are citizens who have a feeling for justice in
public affairs, only because we have faction-ridden souls,
ambivalent desires and the experience of contrary impulses . . .
and we are persons who are normally in dispute with ourselves.’34

+
 +

Conclusion / 293

Certainty is not a virtue, and human goals, heroes and virtues

come in many shapes and sizes, as the epic tells us:

Heroes of many kinds . . . hear from me, then, their goals. Rewards
are assigned to the families of heroes and to the hero himself.
Heroes of sacrifice, heroes of self-control; others who are heroes of
truth; heroes of battle are also proclaimed, and men who are heroes
of giving. Others are heroes of intellect, and heroes of patience are
others; and also heroes of honesty, and men who live in tranquillity.
But there are many other heroes by various disciplines. There are
heroes of Vedic study, and heroes who delight in teaching. There
are heroes in obedience to teachers and others in obedience to
fathers. There are heroes in obedience to mothers, and others are
heroes in alms. And many are heroes of samkhya, and others are
heroes of yoga. There are forest-dwelling heroes, and householder
heroes, and heroes in the honouring of guests. All go to heavens
won as fruit of their own acts.35
+ Since there are many ways to be a hero, a good society must
+
accept different pulls and pressures. Most of the characters in the
Mahabharata tend to be more concerned with the group’s survival
and identity. They value cohesion above other virtues, and we
would call them ‘conservatives’ today. Yudhishthira (and Arjuna
occasionally) is keener to protect the individual, and we would
call him a liberal. The Mahabharata is willing to accommodate
both points of view. It does not reject the old morality of the
Vedas, nor the growing unequal social order, and allows it to
flourish side by side with the individualistic search of
Yudhishthira for a more just society.
The Mahabharata could never be a ‘how to’ book since it offers
more questions than answers. My friend A.K. Ramanujan says,
‘It is not dharma or right conduct that the Mahabharata seems to
teach, but the “subtle” nature of dharma—its infinite subtlety, its
incalculable calculus of consequences, its endless delicacy.’36
Hence, the epic is deeply concerned with dharma understood as

+
 +

294 / The Difficulty of Being Good

‘law’, and legal discussions play an important role: What is the

legal position of five brothers marrying a woman? What are
Karna’s rights after he is crowned king of Anga? Was the game
of dice legal and was Draupadi legally wagered? This is the
context in which one must judge Bhishma’s frustrating and
deplorable non-answer to Draupadi’s question.
For these and other reasons my search for dharma has been
ambiguous, uncertain and frustrating. Not that I was not warned.
The Mahabharata itself had issued an alert:

Because of its subtleness, the deeply hidden [true dharma] cannot

be discerned . . . At first sight [dharma] appears in the form of a
fairyland city, but when scrutinized by the wise it dissolves again
into invisibility . . . Because people are inclined to abide by the
principle of political [advantage], no kind of generally-beneficial
behaviour presents itself, [for indeed the behaviour] by which one
person profits, grieves another. Modes of behaviour are universally
+ characterized by diversity . . . For [this] reason one should seek +
[true] dharma and not follow the ways of the world.37

Hence, the epic is a ‘series of precisely stated problems imprecisely

and therefore inconclusively resolved, with every resolution
raising a new problem, until the very end, when the question
remains: whose heaven and whose hell?’38

‘I see it now: this world is swiftly passing’

When Draupadi challenged the nobles in the assembly at

Hastinapura, insistently demanding to know the nature of
dharma, no one turned to God for an answer. We saw in Chapter
2 that Bhishma and Vidura wrestled with the problem, but there
was no appeal to a higher authority. Draupadi also appealed to
the moral conscience of the assembly rather than to God, and
Bhishma’s conclusion—‘dharma is subtle’—was an admission of
intellectual defeat, implying thereby that his powers of reason
were unable to come up with an answer. The entire ineffectual

+
 +

Conclusion / 295

interchange on that fateful day was based on the assumption

that dharma has a rational foundation rather than being based
on faith. The very act of questioning implied that human beings
had the freedom to act and were responsible for their actions.
Ultimately, it is left to individuals to decide how best to order
their lives, and Indians seem to have come up with two broad
approaches to the problem of living. The first we might call
Draupadi’s way (known in tradition as pravritti), which affirms
the world and believes that by observing one’s social duties
(such as the warrior duties of a kshatriya) one attains swarga-loka,
‘the heaven of the gods’. The second is Yudhishthira’s way
(called nivritti), which is a tendency to deny this impermanent
world and its worldly duties and seek liberation from its bondage
via an ascetic life of meditation.39
Whichever way one chooses, there is the familiar pain of being
human, being alive, and not knowing when one is going to die.
Karna expresses his sense of mortality thus:
+ +
40
I see it now: this world is swiftly passing.

Whereas Yudhishthira thinks of mortality as ‘time cooking us’,

Karna regards it as unyielding duration. This is the ultimate
human dilemma. ‘Never very distant is the elegiac regret that no
other way seems possible, that the relentless passage of time
carries all before it, that the alternatives to this inescapable cycle
can only be dimly sensed, like memories from a fading dream.’41
What is ‘dimly sensed’, it seems to me, is the very modern
possibility that an act of goodness might actually triumph over
one’s mortality, and this could also give meaning to one’s life. To
a person who may or may not find ultimate meaning in God, the
Mahabharata offers an alternative life dedicated to dharma.
Since my father believed firmly that life had a divine purpose,
he would not have agreed with my interpretation of the
Mahabharata. He would have pointed to passages in the epic
where the goal of dharma is subservient to the higher goal of

+
 +

296 / The Difficulty of Being Good

moksha, ‘liberation from human bondage’. While he might have

conceded that acts of goodness make for a better world, he
would have insisted that the greater advantage in practising
dharma lies in improving one’s karma and one’s ability to
achieve spiritual progress. Although not a Vaishnavite, he was
drawn to bhakti and the devotional life. The epic itself is so vast
and voluminous that it lends itself to differing interpretations.
I once remarked to my father, somewhat whimsically, ‘Is there
any point to our life beyond the fact that we should make it to
the station on time?’ We had arrived late at the railway station
in Beas, barely in time to catch the Frontier Mail to Delhi. I don’t
remember what my father said in reply but he was not amused.
He did not say that ‘the purpose of life is to serve God’,
however. This is the sort of thing a Christian might have said.
Nor would my father have thought that ‘obedience to God’s
command is a way to avoid damnation’. He would have spoken
about moksha. The Bhagavad Gita and the ‘Sanatsujatiya’ were
+ his favourite parts of the epic. The Gita is, of course, world
+
famous, but the ‘Sanatsujatiya’, while less well known, has a
minor reputation as a philosophical classic. It is from the late
Upanishadic period, and the great philosopher Shankara also
wrote a famous commentary on it in the early ninth century.42
The standard Indian response to the Mahabharata’s repeated
intimations of mortality is to quote from these two texts, saying
that atman, ‘the human soul’, is immortal and does not die when
the body dies. Krishna offered this consolation to Arjuna just
before the war, as did Vidura to the troubled and insomniac
Dhritarashtra when he recounted the tale of the ancient and
eternal youth Sanatsujata.43
The average person continues to link morality with religion,
and this makes the Mahabharata’s rational deliberations on dharma
seem modern and even revolutionary. The three great Semitic
religions promise heaven for being good. Christians, Jews and
Muslims turn to God to discover their duties.44 Buddhists are

+
 +

Conclusion / 297

atheists but they too think of goodness within the context of the
‘Buddhist faith’. Religion, of course, does not create moral ideas,
but as Plato explained in the Euthyphro, it gives authority to
moral rules that are already present. The West began to separate
religion and morality in the eighteenth century as a part of its
modernity project. Western thinkers in the nineteenth century
were passionately secular: Hegel asserted that reason was superior
to belief; Feuerbach said that God diminished man’s sublimity;
Marx called religion an ‘opiate of the masses’; and Freud thought
of it as ‘an illusion’. Finally, Nietzsche came and declared that
‘God is dead’. Despite this intellectual history, the ordinary
person in the West connects being moral with being religious.
My own search for dharma has led me to the conclusion that
morality is natural to the way human beings have evolved as
social, intelligent and enduring mammals. One can be sceptical
about the existence of God, but one can still believe in being
good and live a deeply moral life.45 The values of the Mahabharata’s
+ heroes may not always be mine but I can grasp what it would be
+
like to live by them. Reading the Mahabharata has made me shed
my earlier arid scepticism and relativism. It seems to me
impossible to counter moral scepticism. No form of scepticism,
whether epistemological or moral, can be shown to be impossible.
The best one can do is to ‘raise its cost, by showing how deep
and pervasive are the disturbances of thought which it involves’.46
One has to imagine oneself being beaten to death as a slave in
order to realize that it is almost impossible to support slavery.
Even Duryodhana would shed his scepticism if he were to
imagine Bhima’s heavy foot weighing down on his gouty toe. He
would want Bhima to behave morally towards him. ‘What if I
were the victim?’ is the question that helps to shed moral
scepticism.
Commentators through the ages have wrestled with the overall
meaning of the Mahabharata. Among the most celebrated was
Anandavardhana, who lived in Kashmir in the ninth century AD.

+
 +

298 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Towards the end of his Dhvanyaloka, he suggests that the

protagonist of the epic might not be Yudhishthira but Krishna—
and that the epic’s world-weary message is that we should cease
to desire and seek liberation from the worldly life. ‘Although the
Mahabharata contains much beauty, it is a didactic work. The
miserable end of the Vrishnis and the Pandavas suggests that the
great sage who was its author meant to convey a disappointing
conclusion within a poetic mood of peace. The aim of this work
is to produce disillusionment with life and point us towards the
human aim of liberation from the worldly life.’47 My father
would have agreed.
My reading of the Mahabharata, however, suggests that the
epic favours dharma as an end in itself and not subservient to
spiritual moksha. Yudhishthira does not act compassionately in
order to achieve a higher, ‘religious’ goal. Although the
Mahabharata gives us a longish lecture on world-weary moksha,
Yudhishthira seems to act for the sake of moral rectitude—from
+ a struggle in his soul to do the right thing. The epic delights in
+
all manner of altruistic acts—actions done for their own sake.
The continuous tension between the ends of dharma and moksha
reflects a crisis in the Mahabharata’s society, especially its kshatriya
institutions. Stubborn and perverse Duryodhana represents much
that is wrong with these institutions, and his violation of the
menstruating Draupadi is the driving force of the narrative.48 To
give people a way out from the failing kshatriya morality of the
times, Vaishnav redactors of the epic raised Krishna’s stature,
converting a god into the God. It was a comforting idea.
Confronted by so much bad behaviour, especially in the ruling
class, people began to take refuge in the otherworldly ideal of
moksha. Thus, moksha trumped dharma in the later classics of
India. The hero became the ‘renouncer’, who surrendered his
will to the love (bhakti) of God, and was thus freed from the
bondage of karma.

+
 +

Conclusion / 299

The Nasadiya temper

The tentativeness of the Mahabharata’s dharma reflects a sceptical

streak both in the epic and in the Indian tradition. It goes back
3,500 years to its very first text, the Rig Veda, and it may well
have originated in the charming humility of its ‘Nasadiya’ verse,
which meditates on the creation of the universe:49

There was neither non-existence nor existence then . . . There was

neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing
sign of night nor of day . . . Who really knows? . . . The gods came
afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows
whence it has arisen?50

The verse ends with a doubt if even the gods know how the
universe was born. This questioning attitude is quite unlike the
mindset of the Christian, Jewish or Islamic traditions which
proclaim an omniscient and omnipotent God. It might also have
+ led to the invention of a Hindu creator, whose name is the +
interrogative pronoun ka (cognate with the Latin quis, French
qui): ‘The creator once asked Indra: “Who am I?” Indra replied,
“Just what you said: Who.” And this is how the creator got the
name, Ka or Who.’51
Yet the Vedic ancients also believed that the very substance of
the universe is divine. Each god has a secondary or illusory
status compared to the divine substance, but it is a powerful
symbol nevertheless, and it can help to guide the seeker to the
divine. Many gods coexist comfortably in this non-hierarchic
pantheon in which no god can afford to be jealous. And one
ought to expect the devotee of many non-hierarchical gods to
more likely see the many sides of truth—and accordingly be
more tolerant.
In early 2006, when the controversy over Islamic cartoons was
testing the boundaries of religious tolerance in Europe, my
Hindu neighbour in Delhi claimed with some satisfaction that
Hindus were tolerant and he traced their broadmindedness to

+
 +

300 / The Difficulty of Being Good

their many gods. His assumption was that a belief in many gods
ought to make one more tolerant as no god could afford to be
jealous.52 So, I asked him: how did our tolerant pluralism turn
into the intolerance of the Hindu Right?53
The source of the Hindu Right’s intolerance or for that matter
any fundamentalist’s bigotry lies in politics and it is futile to seek
answers in belief. All fundamentalists are insecure, I am
convinced, and seem to take an excessive interest in others. The
rise of the Hindu Right in the 1990s in India is part of a global
revival of religion with a political face. Laurie Goodstein had this
to say in the New York Times on 15 January 2005: ‘Almost
anywhere you look around the world . . . religion is now a rising
force. Former communist countries are crowded with mosque
builders, Christian missionaries and freelance spiritual
entrepreneurs of every persuasion . . .’ Philip Jenkins’s insightful
book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,
describes this in the America after 9/11. The rise in
+ fundamentalism around the globe threatens the secular agenda
+
everywhere.
With the rise in religious fundamentalism, it is increasingly
difficult to talk about one’s deepest beliefs. Liberal Hindus are
reluctant to admit to being Hindu for fear they will be linked to
extreme nationalists of the Right. A friend of mine is ashamed to
tell her ‘secularist’ friends that she visits a temple regularly. I
blame both sides—Right-wing nationalists for appropriating
religion and culture, making it a political agenda, and intolerant
secularists who behave no better than fundamentalists in their
callous antipathy to religious tradition. As a liberal and secular
Hindu, I oppose the entry of religion into the public domain and
teaching religion in state schools. I admire the ‘wall’ which the
American founding fathers have built. But what does one do
when the great literary classics of one’s country are ‘semi-
religious’?
In late 2005, I received a phone call from one of Delhi’s best

+
 +

Conclusion / 301

schools, asking me to speak to its students. ‘Oh good!’ I told the

principal enthusiastically, ‘I have been reading the Mahabharata,
and I should like to speak about dharma.’
There was silence at the other end. Suddenly the voice became
defensive. She finally blurted out, ‘Oh don’t, please! There are
important secularists on our governing board, and I don’t want
controversy about teaching religion.’
‘But surely the Mahabharata is a literary epic,’ I protested, ‘and
dharma is about right and wrong. Where does religion come in?’
My remonstrations were to no avail. She was scared. I
wondered why a successful, professional woman had reacted in
this odd way. I asked myself if Italian children can proudly read
Dante’s Divine Comedy in school or English children can read
Milton, why ‘secularist’ Indians should be ambivalent about the
Mahabharata. True, the Mahabharata has many gods, and in
particular the elusive divinity, Krishna, but Dante and Milton
have plenty of God as well. Dante’s great poem, which practically
+ ‘created’ the Italian language, is a deeply religious work.
+
John Rawls makes the distinction between ‘public reason’ and
‘secular reason’. Public reason limits itself to political and civic
principles while secular reason is broader and concerns itself
with a secular person’s deepest beliefs (or ‘first philosophy’ as he
puts it). Fundamentalists must not forget this distinction and
must refrain from introducing ‘secular reason’ into public and
civic debate. 54 Everyone, however, would gain from the
unassuming, searching attitude of the Mahabharata, whose
sceptical streak goes back to the Nasadiya hymn in the Rig Veda.
The ‘Nasadiya temper’ of the Mahabharata is reflected, somewhat
surprisingly, at the end of the Gita, the most ‘religious’ part of
the epic. After initiating Arjuna into the mysteries and knowledge
of the holy, Krishna asks him to consider his message carefully,
and having considered it, he ought to act as he will.55 The searching
disposition of the Mahabharata is a text from which
fundamentalists of all hues would profit. They might even learn

+
 +

302 / The Difficulty of Being Good

the virtue of open-minded scepticism, ambiguity and tolerance—

a dharma of civic virtue that the world could profit from today.

The difficulty of being good

A.K. Ramanujan used to say, ‘In India . . . no one ever reads the
Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time. The stories are
there, “always ready”.’56 He meant by this, I think, that every
generation adapts and reinterprets the Indian epics to reflect the
concerns of its time. Hence, there is a rich menu of Mahabharatas
on order, including Peter Brook’s dramatic theatre and B.R.
Chopra’s television soap opera. Each one in its own way considers
the central problem of living. It holds a mirror to our lives,
forcing us to confront a world that is ‘in permanent crisis, a
world whose karmic dominoes of human weakness reach into
past and future horizons until bounded by creation and
apocalypse’.57 Each version engages us in some way because the
+ epic ‘is the content of our collective unconscious . . . We must +
therefore grasp the great book with both hands and face it
squarely. Then we shall recognize that it is our past which has
prolonged itself into the present. We are it,’ says V.S. Sukthankar.58
In its closing lines, the Mahabharata throws up its hands in
frustration:

With uplifted arms I cry, but no one heeds; from dharma flow
wealth and pleasure. Then why is dharma not pursued?59

A strange question you would think from a text that has been so
discouraging about the prospects of being good. It has thrown us
into a world without moral closure. No one answers Draupadi’s
question in the assembly and Yudhishthira is still looking for
dharma at the epic’s end. Draupadi herself remains unconvinced
by everything that Yudhishthira had said about why we must be
good. Good behaviour is not rewarded generously in the epic;
the virtuous suffer banishment and deprivation, while the wicked
flourish in their palaces. Nor does the epic seem to explain why

+
 +

Conclusion / 303

‘good’ persons, who had a strong and persuasive case to make

war, could win only by unfair means? And if so, how can we still
call them ‘good’? It has told us that dharma is hidden in a cave,
but even if it is found, it is so subtle that it slips from our grasp.
But the epic’s question—why dharma is not pursued—is a
rhetorical one. It pitches us into our postmodern world of doubt,
its lack of certainty consistent with our temper of empirical
scepticism. The epic’s tentative world of moral haziness is closer
to our experience as ordinary human beings in contrast to the
certainty of the fundamentalist. Its dizzyingly plural perspectives
are a nice antidote to the narrow and rigid positions that surround
us amidst the hypertrophied rhetoric of the early twenty-first
century. The epic would have had much to say to our present-
day fundamentalist fanatics who undertake suicide missions,
certain that they will go to heaven, and who are not unlike the
kshatriyas who fought on the plains of Kurukshetra and expected
to go to heaven after they died in battle.
+ Since the beginning, human beings have been busy denouncing
+
each other’s bad behaviour, and where has it gotten us? Like the
heroes of the Mahabharata, we are still searching for dharma. We
are a mixture of good and evil, and perfectibility is an illusion.
The Mahabharata seems resigned to this pessimistic view, which
Immanuel Kant expressed famously in these words: ‘Out of
timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing
entirely straight can be built.’60 Ahamkara, ‘the I-maker’, and
kama, ‘desire’, tend to enslave us. There are many ugly sides of
human vanity, and we have examined a few in this book—envy,
self-importance, status anxiety, a desire for revenge. If all the
gods were dead, these frailties would still exist as an integral
part of the human condition. The epic is saying that deliverance
is not easy.61 Its 100,000 verses have led us to an abyss with ‘no
exit’ and a feeling that no matter what we do we shall fail.
Because the Mahabharata is a ‘continuing repository of crisis in
the public discourse of classical India’,62 I had hoped that it

+
 +

304 / The Difficulty of Being Good

might throw light on the governance crises of our times and the
pathetic state of our public discourse. Just as the Mahabharata
had a problem with its kshatriya social institutions, so do we
face grave deficiencies in our governance institutions—failings
that are not only institutional but also moral. I had hoped that
reading the epic would somehow lend a healing touch to the
daily wounds inflicted by the state—to our shocked discovery in
2004, for example, that more than one in five members of the
Indian parliament had criminal charges against them, and one in
eighteen had been accused of murder or rape; and to my horror
at learning that all major political parties in India had united to
prevent political and electoral reform that might have stopped
criminals from entering politics. 63 I had hoped that the
Mahabharata’s deliberations on dharma might help one to cope
with criminality and dishonesty on the part of government
officials of the United States, who led their country into a
disastrous war in Iraq. Or, perhaps, the pervasive failures of
+ corporate governance—such as Enron, Satyam and others.
+
Modern democracies expend a huge amount of energy in debates
between the political Left and the Right when the greater divide
is between conduct in accordance with dharma and adharma.
Draupadi’s question in the assembly about the dharma of the
ruler should be an inspiration to free citizens in all democracies.
When there is no other recourse to governance failures, I have
concluded that citizens must be prepared to wage a Kurukshetra-
like war on the corrupt to achieve accountability in public life.
The purpose of the destructive war in the Mahabharata, as
Dhritarashtra was told in the end, was to cleanse the earth,
which was groaning under the accumulated iniquity of its rulers.
If our politicians would devote even a fraction of their attention
to concerns that moved Yudhishthira, we might have fewer wars
or acts that one regrets when it is too late. Only after President
Truman saw the photographs of innocent victims of Hiroshima
did he abort the plan for dropping further atomic bombs over

+
 +

Conclusion / 305

Japanese cities. He could not undo what had been done but at
least by identifying with a common humanity of the victims, he
did manage to prevent further harm. One yearns for statesmen
like Yudhishthira, who not only measures the material pros and
cons of going to war but also weighs the dictates of his conscience.
He holds out the promise that politics need not necessarily be a
dark world of realpolitik in which force and cunning have to be
the only currency. The Mahabharata offers us a meaningful ideal
of civic virtue in its exposition of the dharma of the king.
Yudhishthira has an abiding sense of the tragic. While striving
for rationality, he senses the underlying irrationality of human
existence. Having discarded the conventional sva-dharma of
society, he is on a lonely search for true dharma. This leads him
to Jajali, whose story reawakens the ‘impartial spectator’ within
him, and he says: ‘Dharma is recognized by men [to be] the
ancient [quality of] compassion for the welfare of all creatures.’
Thus, he arrives at the moral point of view—that is, an ability to
+ think beyond oneself. By choosing to live in a certain way,
+
Yudhishthira has offered us an answer that might shield us
against the tragic vulnerability of life in our ‘uneven’ world.
Despite its dark, chaotic theme, and despite ironic reminders
about how difficult it is to be good, the Mahabharata is able to
snatch victory in the character of its ‘un-hero’, Yudhishthira. He
teaches us that it is part of the human condition to also aspire.
He shows that it is possible for good to triumph ‘even in a time
of cosmic destructiveness’, making us realize that the theme of
the Mahabharata is not war but peace.64 The king ‘who weeps
with all creatures’ demonstrates through his example that the
epic’s refrain—‘dharma leads to victory’—is not merely an ironic
hope.65 I may not care for the ascetic streak in his character, but
I do believe that ascetics rarely cause the mayhem and violence
that conventional heroes do. Yudhishthira demonstrates that an
act of goodness might be one of the very few things of genuine
worth in this world.

+
 +

DHARMA—THE STORY OF A WORD

The word ‘dharma’ is as complex as it is ubiquitous. It is used in

a bewildering variety of ways within the Indian tradition and
before closing this book, I thought it useful to trace its historical
development and look at the fascinating way its meaning has
evolved over time.1
As always, one must begin with the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BC), the
oldest text of India, where we are told that the word ‘dharma’
occurs sixty times and refers mostly to religious rites.2 By +
+
performing these rituals and traditional duties, Vedic man
achieved a sense of order in his world.3 Dharma helped to
preserve the identity and continuity of his tradition and
established order and harmony in his universe.4 The word comes .
from the Sanskrit root dhr, meaning to ‘support’ or ‘uphold’.
Scholars link dharma to dharana, which means ‘supporting’ or
‘maintaining’, and in this sense refers to ‘the eternal laws which
maintain the world’.5 A commitment to upholding the space of
the world is extended to ‘holding apart’ in Vedic cosmogony. It
is the means of holding apart heaven and earth,6 as well as other
things such as plants, rivers and the four main castes in society.
Thus, the Vedic ritual of dharma re-enacts the original cosmic act
of ‘upholding’ and ‘holding apart’.
Later, in the Atharva Veda, dharman becomes the more abstract
noun dharma. Here it does not refer to ‘upholding’ as an action
or event, but to its result—a norm, a law or an established order.7
The Mahabharata follows this idea, reminding us that ‘the creatures

306

+
 +

Dharma—The Story of a Word / 307

are kept apart or upheld in their respective identities by dharma’

and the ideal of ahimsa or non-violence is a form of dharana or
‘preserving’ and ‘upholding’.8 By the time we get to Manu,
dharma’s ‘upholding’ is incumbent on all qualified men; it is also
the condition which preserves, is preserved, and destroys when
it is violated. It protects its protectors.9 Such a balance of
‘upholding’ in the cosmos and in ethics—both in ‘human action’
and ‘natural events’—is central to the classical Indian world-
view.
In Indian philosophical literature, the usage of dharma is
extended to mean the essential quality or the characteristic
attribute of an entity, such as the ‘dharma of fire is to burn’.10 The
philosophers of the Nyaya school viewed dharma (along with its
negative counterpart adharma) as a property or ‘disposition’
inherent in the soul. In the normative Dharmashastra literature,
however, which elaborates the rules of dharma in detail, ‘dharma’
is not a universal law—it applies only to the Aryans, especially
+ to brahmins. It excludes the mleccha, ‘outcastes’. It represents the
+
traditional Hindu dharma of the ‘order of the castes and the
stages of life’.11 However, the related concept of karma did tend
to mitigate dharma’s particularity. Karma is, of course, always
universal—its causality of retribution, which fundamentally binds
the actor to the results of his action, applies to everyone.
Buddhists and Jains appropriated ‘dharma’ and began to use
it to suit their own needs, and this led to a plurality and rivalry
of usages. Soon the Vishnu and Shiva sects of Hinduism took it
over, describing theirs as the only true dharma.12 The word
yogadharma appeared in the fifth century BC commentary by
Vyasa on Patanjali’s text on yoga.13 All these represented clear
challenges to the orthodox Vedic view of dharma.
The greatest challenge came from the ethical and universalistic
concept of dharma in the famous edicts of the Buddhist emperor
Ashoka in the third century BC, who in turn seems to have
influenced the character of Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata.

+
 +

308 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Not only the epics but also popular texts like the Panchatantra
began to relate dharma to universal moral ideals, satya,
‘truthfulness’, ahimsa, ‘non-violence’, and anrishamsya,
‘compassion’. The Mahabharata, as we know, repeatedly calls
ahimsa the ‘highest dharma’ (paramo dharmah).
There was bound to be a reaction from the orthodox defenders
of the Vedas, and it came from the powerful Mimamsa school.
According to Kumarila, its most forceful exponent, dharma is the
practise of ritual. It can only be learned from the Vedas and there
is no other means of knowing it. Those brahmins who excel in
sacrificial rites are ‘penetrated by dharma’, which is only found
among Aryans and not among mlecchas. It is dangerous to leave
dharma to reason. In the Mimamsa and the Dharmashastra texts,
dharma separates the castes and distinguishes an Aryan from a
non-Aryan. Clearly, in the orthodox tradition, the ‘upholding’ of
dharma is the upholding of a social and religious status quo.
Thus, the concept of dharma kept evolving and kept being
+ contested. Its meaning shifted from a ritual ethics of deeds to a
+
more personal virtue based on one’s conscience and back again.
In Vedic times dharma meant doing visible rituals and gaining
merit. These deeds were usually specific to one’s caste, and this
dharma is often called sva-dharma. With the rise of yoga sects,
Buddhism and Jainism, this meaning of dharma gradually
changed to mean social harmony, the cultivation of an ethical
self, and actions required of all castes. In this sense, dharma has
universal appeal and is called sadharana-dharma. In the latter
sense, dharma has to do with inner traits which determine one’s
character. Both these senses of dharma, as we have seen, coexist
in the Mahabharata.14
Let us now ‘fast forward’ to the early nineteenth century. For
the first time we find Hindus, especially Bengali Vaishnavs of
Chaitanya’s school, have begun to use the word ‘dharma’ as
Hindudharma, to identify their faith as something different from
Islam and Christianity. Till then Hindus had never used ‘dharma’

+
 +

Dharma—The Story of a Word / 309

to mean ‘religion’. The pre-Muslim Hindu might have called

himself Arya—the whole of his life was ‘religion’ in a sense. This
usage was in part a reaction to the Christian missionaries in
Bengal who laid claim to ‘dharma’, using it to proclaim
Christianity as the ‘true dharma’. The English–Sanskrit dictionary
by Monier-Williams (1851) lists the first meaning of ‘religion’ as
dharma.
That a foundational idea of the Hindus had been appropriated
by Christian missionaries was clearly a challenge to Hindu self-
identity. The missionaries recognized that dharma was the binding
norm of Hindu life which provided legitimacy to their religious
practices and society, and they capitalized on it by presenting the
Christian message under the title of dharma. Hindus reacted in
two ways. On the one hand, they argued that Hinduism was
universal—one religion, one dharma for all, and thus distinct
from other religions; on the other hand, dharma was projected as
a superior idea to ‘mere religion’.
+ Rammohan Roy (1774–1833) was one of the first Bengalis to
+
respond to this challenge. He wished to reform Hinduism via an
open, deistic organization called Brahmo Samaj. Those opposed
to Rammohan and his reforms employed the word ‘dharma’ as
a central notion of Hindu self-assertion. One of them, Kasinath
Tarkapanchanana, described himself as ‘one who is concerned
with defending dharma’. Another critic, Radhakanta Deb, founded
an association named Dharma Sabha. Following this, many
dharma societies arose during the second half of the nineteenth
century, often explicitly opposed to the Brahmo Samaj and other
reform movements, in particular the Arya Samaj of Dayanand
Saraswati in the Punjab. The expression sanatana-dharma, ‘eternal
religion’, became an increasingly popular way to assert the
claims of the traditional orthodoxy.15
At the same time, Western modern ideas began to shape the
meaning of ‘dharma’. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, the Bengali
writer, under the influence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste

+
 +

310 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Comte and their religion of humanity, proposed dharma to be

the link between being and duty. According to him, dharma
flows from the ‘essence of man’, manushyatva, and imposes a
moral obligation on each human being.16 In his humanistic
interpretation of the concept, Bankim takes us back to
Yudhishthira’s normative, universal concept of dharma that we
have observed in the Mahabharata, and away from Draupadi’s
varnashrama-dharma and the hereditary order of the castes. Not
surprisingly, Bankim’s individualistic interpretation led him to
the devotional bhakti yoga path of spiritual liberation in the Gita,
and away from Vedic rituals of the brahmins. In this he was
influenced by the eleventh century medieval saint Ramanuja’s
commentary on the Gita, who concluded that bhakti was the
‘highest dharma’ (paramo dharmah).
Akshay Kumar Datta (1820–86), another Bengali, went further.
He secularized and naturalized the concept of dharma, declaring
that to observe dharma was ultimately to conform to the ‘laws of
+ nature’. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Swami
+
Vivekananda took this universal dharma to Europe and America.
He spoke about a ‘dharma of humanity’, regarding dharma to be
an ethical code applicable to the whole of mankind. He and
other Bengali proponents of neo-Hinduism deeply influenced
B.G. Tilak, Mohandas Gandhi and other leaders of India’s freedom
struggle in the early part of the twentieth century. This new
understanding of dharma and self-representation of Hinduism,
which had grown from an encounter with the West, in turn
influenced Westerners like Annie Besant, the leader of the
Theosophical movement. She came to India in 1893, the same
year in which Vivekananda attended the Parliament of Religions
in Chicago. Sanatana-dharma began to be increasingly associated
with the Western concept of philosophia perennis, a ‘universal or
eternal religion’ in search for a commonality of all religions.
The philosopher S. Radhakrishnan advanced this ‘neo-Hindu’
agenda in the twentieth century. He maintained that dharma ‘is

+
 +

Dharma—The Story of a Word / 311

the norm which sustains the universe, the principle of a thing by

virtue of which it is what it is’. And a ‘person who follows the
dharma realizes the ideal of his own character and manifests the
eternal lawfulness in himself’. Thus, ‘the basic principle of dharma
is the realization of the dignity of the human spirit’.17 It is quite
extraordinary how a word and an idea from the ancient Rig
Veda has evolved and enriched itself over three thousand years
through a process of contestation and adaptation.

+ +

+
 +

A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Following the example of Chinese mandarins, I have thought of

my quest for dharma in the Mahabharata primarily as an exercise
in self-cultivation. Since it has led to a book, however, I should
like to express my debt to authors, books and friends that have
helped and influenced me. The list of books and articles cited
here might serve as a ‘reading list’ for someone similarly inclined.

+ The Mahabharata and its translations +

My acquaintance with the written Mahabharata began with two
slim paperbacks in English—one by R.K. Narayan (The
Mahabharata, London: Penguin Classics, 2001) and the other by
C.V. Narasimhan (The Mahabharata, Delhi and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996). There are other abridged prose versions
but these are the best in my view for first-time readers.
Since there is no satisfactory translation of the complete
Mahabharata in English, I have been promiscuous in my readings.
The late nineteenth century, Victorian translation by K.M. Ganguli
is too stilted for my taste although it has been digitized and is
available on the Net (The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana
Vyasa, 2nd ed., 12 vols, 1884–96, Calcutta: P.C. Roy/Oriental
Publishing Co; republished 1970, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal).
The rendering by P. Lal is a ‘transcreation’ and the one by
Ramesh Menon a ‘modern rendering in prose’—they are not
translations. For the first five books of the epic, I employed the

312

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 313

translation of J.A.B. van Buitenen (Mahabharata, 3 vols, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1975–78). For Books Eleven and
Twelve, I used James Fitzgerald’s in the same Chicago series
(2004). W.J. Johnson has done a fine verse translation of Book
Ten, and I drew upon it for my chapter on Ashwatthama’s
revenge (The Sauptikaparvan of the Mahabharata, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998).
In the case of the epic’s battle texts—Books Six to Nine—I
turned to the recent, beautiful but incomplete parallel translations
from the Clay Sanskrit Library/New York University Press (2005–
08). Ten volumes have appeared in this series. Like the Book of
Bhishma preceding them, the epic has named the battle books
after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for
its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam
Bowles’s Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive.
I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical
Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing
+ several hundred versions from across India and beyond. Clay
+
follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the seventeenth-century
scholar Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (R. Kinjawadekar, The
Mahabharatam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha,
2nd ed., 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp., 1979).
Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different. Clay’s
promise to have the complete translated Mahabharata by 2010 has
been disrupted, alas, by the illness of the philanthropist John
Clay, and there is uncertainty about its future. Unless another
philanthropist steps in, I fear that the potential fruits from this
outstanding project may remain unfulfilled.
For the last books of the epic, I have quoted from Wendy
Doniger’s unpublished translation. On many occasions I have
turned to the Sanskrit Critical Poona Edition to make specific
modifications in the translations (Vishnu Sukthankar, S.K.
Belwalkar, P.L. Vaidya, et al., eds., Mahabharata, 19 vols plus 6
vols of Indexes, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute,

+
 +

314 / The Difficulty of Being Good

1933–72). The idea of a Critical Edition was inspired by a

Viennese scholar, Moriz Winternitz, in 1899, but the colossal task
did not take off until after the First World War when it was taken
up by V.S. Sukthankar, who was a student of Winternitz, and did
. ’ in
not end until the publication of the appendix, the Harivamsa,
1970. Muneo Tokunaga rendered a machine-readable version in
Kyoto in 1991. Those interested in the fascinating debates in
preparing the Critical Edition (such as which scene to select and
which to reject from the numerous manuscripts of the epic)
should read V.S. Sukthankar’s Critical Studies in the Mahabharata,
Bombay: Karnataka Publishing House, 1944, 77–78; Franklin
Edgerton, Sabhaparvan: Introduction and Apparatus, vol 2 of the
’
Critical Edition, 1944 and R.N. Dandekar, Salyaparvan, vol 11,
’
1961, Anusasanaparvan, vol 17, 1966.
Occasionally, I have gratefully borrowed from the translations
of Sanskrit scholars who have written on specific issues or
characters—Alf Hiltebeitel, David Shulman, Ruth Katz, Jim
+ McGrath, Ian Proudfoot, Nick Sutton, Norbert Klaes and others +
(see below).

Translations of the Gita

The Bhagavad Gita is found in Book Six of the Mahabharata at

VI.63.23. I have quoted from Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation
(Bhagavadgita, New York: Bantam Books, 1986). When I searched
for a good English translation of this text, I discovered that there
were more than thirty to choose from and like the Pandava
heroes, I became confused. A fine article by Gerald Larson, ‘The
Song Celestial: Two Centuries of the Bhagavadgita in English’,
served as a nice guide, however (Philosophy East and West, 31.4,
October 1981, 513–41). Vedanta enthusiasts directed me to the
slim Christopher Isherwood–Prabhavananda translation, which
has an introduction by Aldous Huxley on ‘perennial philosophy’
(Bhagavad-gita: The Song of God, New York: Signet/Penguin
Putnam Inc., 2002). While I thought it satisfying as literature, it

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 315

is not the most accurate, and its interpretation is a ‘de-ethnicised

Shankara combined with western mysticism’, according to Larson.
S. Radhakrishnan’s rendition is ‘dull and commentarial’.
Indologists recommended R.C. Zaehner’s, and although his
translation turned out to be stilted, his wonderful discussions on
Ramanuja, Shankara and the Upanishads that run parallel in the
text make it quite exciting (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973). Although an accomplished Orientalist, Zaehner is attractive
because he was clearly attracted to the notion of bhakti and the
love of a personal god.
The most poetic is still the Victorian version of Sir Edwin
Arnold, and it has the virtue also of being the cheapest in the
Dover Thrift edition (New York: Dover, 1993). Those seeking
pure accuracy should read either Edgerton’s translation or van
Buitenen’s, who views the Gita as an integral part of the epic and
challenges the traditional idea that it was inserted later (J.A.B.
van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata: Text and
+ Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). I was
+
told not to trust Mascaro’s version, which tries unsuccessfully to
be poetic. Bhaktivedanta’s rendition is a dull, sectarian, Sunday
school textbook, reflecting the Vaishnavite values of Chaitanya.
I found Winthrop Sargeant’s very useful, although relatively
expensive even in paperback; it is accompanied by an interlinear
Sanskrit text, a word for word grammatical commentary and
vocabulary (ed. Christopher Chapple, Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1994).
In the end, I chose Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation because
it is both accurate, poetical, and has the great virtue of simplicity.
Before she died in 1993, she was professor of Sanskrit at Barnard/
Columbia and she created the translation for our generation. I
have also cited a few verses from Eknath Easwaran’s eloquent
translation (London: Arkana/Penguin, 1985). Through this process
of selecting I have come to realize that there is no right or wrong
translation and each one serves its particular audience. Van

+
 +

316 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Buitenen’s version is no good to a follower of Sai Baba, as

Arnold’s account will not interest a Sanskrit scholar. Mahatma
Gandhi’s or Tilak’s use of the Gita in our freedom struggle is as
valid as Edgerton’s reading of the text as a Vaishnav brahmin
document of the first century AD. Emerson and Thoreau discovered
the Gita through Wilkins’s translation. Hegel used Humboldt’s
(as well as Schlegel’s and Wilkins’s). Gandhi used Sir Edwin
Arnold’s, while post-Independence Indians turned to
Radhakrishnan’s.

Aspects of the Mahabharata

The best discussion of the moral ideas in the Mahabharata is by

the philosopher Bimal K. Matilal, who taught at Oxford for
many years but also studied earlier with Ingalls. See his The
Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Ethics and Epics, ed.
Jonardon Ganeri, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002; his edited
+ collection, Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Motilal +
Banarsidass; and his essay in Arvind Sharma (ed.) Essays on the
Mahabharata, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991, 384–400. As to religious
ideas in the epic, I would read Nicholas Sutton, Religious Doctrines
in the Mahabharata, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 2000 and James
Laine, Visions of God: Narratives of Theophany in the Mahabharata,
Vienna: Gerold & Co., 1989.
Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka is a medieval classic related to
the aesthetics of the epic (with the Locana commentary of
Abhinavagupta and the Balapriya commentary of Ramasaraka,
’
ed. Pt. Pattabhirama Sastri, Kashi Sanskrit Series 135, Benares
Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1940). So is Gary Tubb’s
contemporary essay on Anandavardhana’s ‘Santarasa ’ in the
Mahabharata’ (in A. Sharma [ed], Essays on the Mahabharata,
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 171–203).
When it came to the overall epic, I found the following three
most stimulating: V.S. Sukthankar’s On the Meaning of the
Mahabharata, Bombay: The Asiatic Society of Bombay, 1957;

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 317

Krishna Chaitanya’s The Mahabharata: A Literary Study, New

Delhi: Clarion Books, 1993 and a feisty slim work by Iravati
Karve, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch (Hyderabad: Disha Books/
Orient Longman, 1991). I would add to this list, several essays on
the epic by A.K. Ramanujan in his The Collected Essays of A.K.
Ramanujan, gen. ed. Vinay Dharwadker, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999.

Individual characters in the epic

As to individual characters in the epic, I would recommend Ruth

Cecily Katz’s masterly discussion of Arjuna in Arjuna in the
Mahabharata: Where Krishna Is, There is Victory, University of
South Carolina Press, 1989. Katz was also a student of Ingalls. I
found her analysis of Arjuna’s aristeia particularly interesting,
especially her comparison to Achilles. For those interested in
comparative lessons from Greek heroes I would recommend
+ Werner Jaeger’s classic that I read in college—Paideia: The Ideals +
of Greek Culture, New York, vol I, 1939. Worth looking at is
Gregory Nagy’s The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in
Archaic Greek Poetry, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
The most thoughtful analysis of Draupadi and her question is
by Alf Hiltebeitel in Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader’s Guide
to the Education of the Dharma Kings, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001. He has also written The Cult of Draupadi, 2
vols, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988 and 1991. S.M.
Kulkarni also explores issues regarding Draupadi’s question in
‘An Unresolved Dilemma in Dyuta-Parvan’ in Bimal Matilal,
1989.
As for Karna, Kevin McGrath’s The Sanskrit Hero: Karna in the
Epic Mahabharata, Leiden: E.J. Brill, Boston, 2004, is excellent.
When it comes to Duryodhana, David Gitomer’s essay is worth
reading, ‘King Duryodhana: The Mahabharata Discourse of Sinning
and Virtue in Epic and Drama’, Journal of the American Oriental
Society, 112. 2 (April–June 1992), 222–32. I.M. Thakur’s analysis of

+
 +

318 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Bhishma, however, is uneven in Thus Spake Bhishma, Delhi:

Motilal Banarsidass, 1992.
In Yudhishthira’s case I was most influenced by Norbert
Klaes’s Conscience and Consciousness: Ethical Problems of the
Mahabharata (Bangalore: Dharmaram College, 1975) and
Buddhadev Bose’s The Book of Yudhishthir (trans. Sujit Mukherjee,
London: Sangam Books/Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1986).
But David Shulman clearly offered the most exciting insights in
‘The Yaksa’s’ Question’ (The Wisdom of the Poets: Studies in Tamil,
Telugu and Sanskrit, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001,
also appears in G. Hasan-Rokem and D. Shulman [eds.], Untying
the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes, New York:
Oxford, 1996). I learned much from Gregory Bailey, ‘Suffering in
the Mahabharata: Draupadi and Yudhisthira, . Purusartha
. 7.109,
109–29. Mukund Lath’s ‘The Concept of anrsamsya . .’ in the
Mahabharata’ confirmed to me the importance of this moral idea
in the epic (in R.N. Dandekar [ed.] The Mahabharata Revisited,
+ Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1990).
+
The literature on Krishna’s role in the epic is vast and the best
way to begin is to read Alf Hiltebeitel’s biographical essay,
. . . and the Mahabharata’, in Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental
‘Krsna
Institute, 60.65–107. His The Ritual of Battle: Krsna
. . . in the Mahabharata
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976) is a classic.
The genealogical table at the beginning of my book is reproduced
from this book with the kind permission of the author. I would
also commend Bimal Matilal’s ‘Krishna: in Defence of a Devious
Divinity’, in Arvind Sharma (ed.), Essays on the Mahabharata,
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991. The accounts of Krishna in Chaitanya and
Karve, noted above, are provocative.
The best account of the story of Jajali and Tuladhara in the
Moksadharmaparvan section of Book Twelve is Ian Proudfoot’s
excellent monograph, Ahimsa and a Mahabharata Story (Asian
Studies Monographs, New Series no. 9, Faculty of Asian Studies,
Australian National University, Canberra, 1987).

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 319

Historical background

For those seeking a general introduction to classical India, A.L.

Basham’s The Wonder That Was India is still a good place to begin
(New York: Grove Press, 1989; Delhi: Rupa, 1981). John Keay’s
more recent India: A History is a fluent, readable and balanced
overview (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Romila Thapar’s The
Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, Penguin
Books, 2002, is an updated classic. Unlike the arid accounts of
dynasties, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History is
about women, merchants, lower castes, animals, spirits and, of
course, Dead Male Brahmins (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). I
found Romila Thapar’s voluminous collection of essays, Cultural
Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History fascinating to read about such
things as the connection of the Arya Samaj to India’s independence
struggle and the role of the ‘renouncer’ in Indian history (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
+ I grew up with the notion of an ‘epic period’ in Indian history. +
C.V. Vaidya has explored this idea in Epic India or India as
Described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana (Bombay: Radhabhai
Atmaram Sagoon, 1907). Vaidya has argued that it was the
period from 3000 BC to 300 BC and he places the war in
Kurukshetra between 1400 and 1250 BC; he builds his argument
around the founding of Indraprastha (Delhi) by the Pandavas
and the conquest of Taxila (in West Punjab) by Janamejaya
among other things. Although Vaidya had a keen appreciation of
the epic’s literary value, I find that he was basically creating a
‘national mythology’ and not writing serious history. Painted
Grey Ware artefacts discovered at sites identified with locations
in the Mahabharata suggest that the great war probably occurred
between 1000 BC and 400 BC (H. Kulke and E. Rothermund, A
History of India, London: Routledge, 1986).
Similarly, E.W. Hopkins suggested the notion of an
‘encyclopaedic period’ for the epic’s composition, from 400 BC to
400 AD when didactic portions and myths were added to it later

+
 +

320 / The Difficulty of Being Good

and it became an encyclopaedia (The Great Epic of India: Its

Character and Origin, 1901; Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1969) His
idea of a five stage development of the epic, however, was
demolished by V.S. Sukthankar, editor of the Critical Edition,
who said: ‘I will say candidly that for all intents and purposes
this pretentious table is as good as useless’ (On the Meaning of the
Mahabharata, Bombay: Asiatic Society of Bombay, 1957). I am
inclined to go along with Alf Hiltebeitel’s suggestion that the
Mahabharata was written over a much shorter period than is
usually believed, sometime from mid-second century BC and
year zero (Alf Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader’s
Guide to the Education of the Dharma Kings, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001).
As to the enticing issue of the relationship between Yudhishthira
and the historical Buddhist king, Ashoka, I would read James
’
Fitzgerald’s outstanding introduction to his translation of the
Mahabharata, Books 11 and 12 (vol 7, University of Chicago Press,
+ 2004). Nick Sutton has explored this in greater depth in ‘Asoka ’ +
and Yudhisthira:
.. A Historical Setting for the Ideological Tensions
of the Mahabharata’, Religion 27.4 (1997), 333–41. For the historical
background to the Mauryan period, see Romila Thapar’s Ashoka
and the Decline of the Mauryas, as well as her Interpreting Early
India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. See also John Strong,
’
The Legend of King Asoka: ’
A Study and Translation of the Asokavadana,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Etienne Lamotte
illuminates the Buddhist period in the History of Buddhism from
’
the Origins to the Saka Period (trans. Sara Webb-Boin and Jean
Dantinne, Louvain: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988).
What led the Sanskrit poets to develop the epic genre? Romila
Thapar suggests the possible influence of Alexander as the
kingdom of Magadha transformed into the Mauryan empire (From
Lineage to State: Social Formations in Mid-first Millennium B.C. in
the Ganga Valley, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). Alf
Hiltebeitel speculates on this subject in Rethinking the Mahabharata:

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 321

A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma Kings, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2001. On the relationship between
the epic and empire see David Quint’s Epic and Empire: Politics
and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993.

Moral ideas discussed in the book

In my book I have explored a number of moral ideas as they

emerged from reading the Mahabharata, and I give below a brief
reading list related to the most important ones: envy, duty,
status anxiety, war, revenge, evil, remorse, non-violence, altruism,
compassion. A nice, easy way to enter the world of moral
philosophy is to read one of Peter Singer’s books—How Are We
to Live: Ethics in an Age of Self-interest (London: Mandarin, 1995)
or Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

+ Envy +
Although Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour is
the standard text on envy (London: Martin Secker & Warburg,
1969), I found Joseph Epstein’s slim and charming book the more
enjoyable (Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003). A comprehensive survey of historical
sources will be found in H. Schoeck. John Rawls’s discussion on
envy is most insightful in his classic The Theory of Justice,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Morality of war
Two works influenced my education in the morality of war:
Michael Walzer’s classic Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument
with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977) and
Thomas Nagel’s essay, ‘War and Massacre’ in Moral Questions,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 53–74. With regard
to Arjuna’s dilemma, Martha Nussbaum’s eloquent essay is
instructive, ‘The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Limits of Cost-

+
 +

322 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Benefit Analysis’, Journal of Legal Studies, XXIX (2), Pt.2, June

2000, 1005–36.

Status anxiety and caste

Although numerous philosophers have written with great insight
on the insidious human craving for status, I would read an
elegant, slim volume by Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (New
York: Vintage Books, 2005). The literature on caste in India is
huge. J.H. Hutton’s Caste in India introduced me to the subject
(4th ed, London: Oxford University Press, 1963). For a historical
discussion of the development of the caste system, I recommend
Romila Thapar, Early India, 124–26, 278; Vijay Nath, Puranas and
Acculturation: A Historico-Anthropological Perspective, New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal, 2001, 27ff; G. Ghurye, Caste and Race in
India (Delhi: South Asia Books, 1986); and M.N. Srinivas, Social
Change in Modern India (Berkley: University of California Press,
1966).
+ As the body of literature on American affirmative action is
+
even larger, I would begin with a fine bibliography appended to
Robert Fullenwider’s entry in the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy entitled ‘Affirmative Action’. The best case for the
‘integration argument’ is made by Elizabeth Anderson in a long
article, ‘Integration, Affirmative Action, and Strict Scrutiny’, New
York University Law Review, 77 (November 2002), 1195–1271. Two
other books build on this case: Robert Fullenwider and Judith
Lichtenberg’s Levelling the Playing Field: Justice, Politics, and College
Admissions, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004;
and Lesley Jacobs, Pursuing Equal Opportunities, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004. As always, I liked Thomas
Nagel’s viewpoint in ‘Equal Treatment and Compensatory Justice’
published in 1973 in Philosophy and Public Affairs. Alan Goldman
makes a strong argument in support of preferences in Justice and
Reverse Discrimination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1979).

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 323

Duty ethics
Yudhishthira’s bald reply to Draupadi, ‘I act because I must’,
raises the question of the place of duty in the moral life. The
great philosopher of ‘duty ethics’ (also called ‘deontology’) is, of
course, the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel
Kant, and I recommend two of his works that I read in college:
The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral
Philosophy, trans. L.W. Beck, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1949 and The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M.G. McGregor,
New York: Harper and Row. I would also read W.D. Ross who
is less absolutist and more plural, The Right and the Good, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1930.

Consequentialism
The British philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
criticized ‘duty ethics’ for failing to specify which principles
should take priority when rights and duties conflict—a problem
+ that the ascetic Kaushika faced in the Mahabharata. Like Vidura
+
in the epic, they proposed that the rightness of an act be judged
by its consequences, based on the famous Utilitarian principle,
‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. Those wishing to read
more should pick up two paperback collections of essays, one
edited by Philip Pettit called Consequentialism (Dartmouth:
Aldershot, 1993) and another by Samuel Scheffler, Consequentialism
and its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

The problem of evil

The classic on the problem of unmerited suffering is Alvin
Plantinga, The Nature of Necessary (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1974) and God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1974). John Hick offers a creative solution in Evil and
the God of Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Eleonore
Stump claims that suffering has value in ‘The Problem of Evil’,
Faith and Philosophy (October 1983, 392–420). C.S. Lewis’s Mere

+
 +

324 / The Difficulty of Being Good

Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943) is full of sensible ideas.

Finally, Harold Kushner, a Rabbi, offers a Hindu-like answer in
a widely read book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New
York: Schocken Books, 1981).

Revenge, punishment and forgiveness

A good place to begin is Jeremy Bentham’s The Rationale of
Punishment, originally published in 1830 but a digitized version
is available. In the past fifty years the writings of H.L.A. Hart
and John Rawls, both centrist liberals, have greatly influenced
thinking about retributive justice (H.L.A. Hart, ‘Prolegomenon to
the Principles of Punishment’ [1959], reprinted in Hart, Punishment
and Responsibility, Oxford University Press, 1968, 1–27; John
Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Philosophical Review, 64, 1955,
3–32).
The debate on crime and punishment is divided between those
who insist on revenge and retributive justice and those who
+ believe that forgiveness has a place. On the side of retributive
+
justice are Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton (Forgiveness and
Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Michael
S. Moore, (‘The Moral Worth of Retribution’ in Ferdinand
Schoeman ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New
Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987; Jean Hampton, ‘The Moral Education Theory of
Punishment’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 13, 1984, 208–38; Susan
Jacoby, Wild Justice, New York: Harper & Row, 1983; and Joram
Haber, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Study, Lanham, Md: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1991).
On the side of forgiveness are Trudy Govier (Forgiveness and
Revenge, London: Routledge, 2002), Uma Narayan (‘Forgiveness,
Moral Reassessment and Reconciliation’ in Thomas Magnell ed.,
Explorations of Value, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, 169–78). See
Mark Amstutz’s inspiring account of reconciliation in the case of
nations: The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 325

Forgiveness. For an extensive bibliography, see H.A. Bedau,

‘Punishment’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online), 2005.

Remorse
Raimond Gaita’s Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception is a classic
defence of remorse (London: Macmillan, 1991). However, Spinoza
did not think much about this moral emotion (Benedict de
Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, in The
Collected Works of Spinoza, vol I, trans. E. Curley, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985, 115). Bernard Williams has
brought some clarity to it (‘Moral Luck’, Philosophical Papers
1973–1980, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 27). Martha
Nussbaum offers an extensive and sympathetic account in
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Non-violence
+ +
Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Non-violent Action is in three volumes
but you only have to read the first short book, Power and Struggle,
to see that what he has done for non-violence is what Clausewitz
did for war (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973). On reflection I wish
I had devoted more attention to Gandhi in my book. Obviously,
there is voluminous literature on this, but I enjoyed reading the
following: Suzanne and Lloyd Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi and
Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Rainer
Hilderbrandt, From Gandhi to Walesa: Non-violent Struggle for
Human Rights; and George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism
and Letters, vol 4, 469).

Self-interestedness
The concept of nishkama karma in the Gita raises the question if
human beings are purely self-interested. Albert Hirschman tells
us in The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism
Before its Triumph, how the idea of the self-interested human

+
 +

326 / The Difficulty of Being Good

being triumphed in the West in the eighteenth century (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Adam Smith in An Enquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations endorsed it
(1776, republished Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). But
the same Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiment wrote that no
matter how selfish man may be, he exhibits unselfish emotions
like pity or compassion. Jean-Jacques Rousseau agreed with him
in his famous Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Amartya Sen
in our times has also argued that ‘self-interest’ does not fully
explain the behaviour of people, ‘Rational Fools: A Critique of
the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory’, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, 6 (1977). Jane Mansbridge brings all these
arguments together in her introduction to Beyond Self-Interest (ed.
Jane J. Mansbridge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Hegel had a lot of problems with nishkama karma and his
objections are spelled out in G.W.F. Hegel, On the Episode of the
Mahabharata Known by the Name Bhagavad-Gita by Wilhelm von
+ Humboldt (Berlin 1826, ed. and trans. Herbert Herring, New +
Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995).

Selflessness and motivation

The concept of nishkama karma raises the question if ‘self-forgetting’
can enhance performance. Like Arjuna in the Mahabharata,
Buddhists have always believed this and Eugen Herrigel shows
us why in Zen and the Art of Archery (trans. R. Hull, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1953). So does the psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper, 1991). Patanjali, of course, had set the stage
centuries ago for the yogic experience of ‘self-forgetting’ (B.K.S.
Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, London: Thorsons,
1993).

Altruism
The American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s The Possibility of
Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) was my

+
 +

A Short Bibliographic Essay / 327

starting point, but what influenced me deeply was Martha

Nussbaum’s discussion on altruism in Upheavals of Thought: The
Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001) and in Compassion: Human and Animal (for the festschrift in
honour of Jonathan Glover, eds. Richard Keshan and Jeffrey
McMahan, Oxford University Press). Stefan Collini offers a lively
account of altruism in the Victorian moral temper in Public
Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–
1930, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999, and it led me to read David
Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, Book III, Part 2, section I (ed.
Ernest Mossner, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984) and
John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (The Collected Works of John Stuart
Mill, ed. John M. Robson, vol X, Toronto and London, 1863). I
also consulted the following on altruism: C.D. Batson, The Altruism
Question: Toward a Social Psychological Answer, Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991; Bernard Williams, ‘Egoism
and Altruism’ in Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge
+ University Press, 250–65; S.P. Oliner and P.M. Oliner, The Altruistic
+
Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, New York: Free Press,
1988; and Kristen Munroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a
Common Humanity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. I
would also recommend Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral
History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), not so much for its discussion of altruism, but for its
grand moral perspective.

Reciprocal altruism
The evolutionary idea of reciprocal altruism helped me to
understand the change in Yudhishthira’s character from Book
Three to Book Five in the epic. Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal:
Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995) introduced me to this idea and E. Sober and D.S.
Eilson’s Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish
Behaviour (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), helped

+
 +

328 / The Difficulty of Being Good

to amplify it. Those wishing to dig deeper should read the

following key texts on the development of this nascent discipline:
W.D. Hamilton, ‘The Genetic Evolution of Social Behaviour I and
II’, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7 (1964), 1–16, 17–32; George C.
Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1966; Robert Trivers, ‘The Evolution of
Reciprocal Altruism’, Quarterly Review of Biology, 46 (1971), 35–
56; E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1966; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish
Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; Richard D.
Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems, New York: Aldine de
Gruyter, 1987; Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, New
York: Basic Books, 1984; and Anatol Rapaport, Fights, Games and
Debates, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.

+ +

+
 +

NOTES

Prelude

1. While it sounds romantic in hindsight, it was my most arduous

class in college. Ingalls was an old-fashioned schoolmaster who
insisted on ramming down Panini’s rules of grammar. The rules, of
course, are elegant; learning them is akin to learning mathematics
or logic (which I was studying with W.V.O. Quine at the same
time). In the spring semester, we were rewarded by Ingalls with
selections from literature—the story of Nala and Damayanti from +
+
the Mahabharata, animal tales from the Hitopadesha, selections from
Manu, and others, which we read dutifully from Lanman’s reader,
with the help of Whitney’s grammar and Apte’s dictionary.
2. Association for Democratic Reforms, www.adrindia.org,
jchhokar@gmail.com
3. Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan, Nazmul Choudhary and
Jeffrey Hammer, ‘School Absences in India: A Snapshot’, Journal of
European Economic Association, III (2–3), 658–67.
4. Neesha Patel, ‘Evaluating the Role of Primary Health Centres in
India’, Express Healthcare Management, 16–31 August 2005; Jishu Das
and Jeffrey Hanmer, ‘Money for Nothing: The Dire Straits of
Medical Practice in Delhi, India’, World Bank Policy Research
Working Paper No. 3669 (July 2005).
5. The Dharma Sutras are the definitive texts which prescribe the four
stages of life for the twice-born Hindu male in a system called
. ’
varnasramadharma. It is a wrong impression that the codes are
unanimous in instructing all twice-born males to enter each of
these stages in the given order. The earliest Dharma Sutras seemed

329

+
 +

330 / Notes: Prelude

to value the ‘one asrama’ ’ view, which was focused on the

householder stage that followed the period of studentship and
initiation. This view recognized that the householder asrama ’ was
indispensable for the viability of society in accordance with Vedic
’
tradition. Other asramas were permitted and endorsed, but there
was no pressure to enter them. The four-asrama ’ view came to
predominate over time and this view is reflected in the later
Dharma Sutras. In the third stage the forest-dweller is expected to
become celibate again, clothe himself sparsely, practise austerity,
depend on nature and beg (for food). ‘He is not to hoard food
unduly and should provide for visitors in his forest retreat so far
as he is able. He is to recite the Veda (even if it is only the sacred
syllable “Om!”) and keep the sacred fire. He may cook his food
and, according to some early traditions, eat meat that he has not
killed himself. He is expected gradually to adopt a more strict
regimen, becoming more and more ascetic, refraining from all self-
indulgence and cooked food, and eating only vegetarian food. He
is on the threshold of the fourth and last stage, that of the renouncer.’
+ ’
See Patrick Olivelle, The Asrama System: The History and Hermeneutics +
of a Religious Institution, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
T.N. Madan focuses on the householder’s life-stage in Non-
Renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1987.
6. Patrick Olivelle, ‘The Renouncer Tradition’, in Gavid Flood (ed.),
The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, 2007; T.N. Madan (ed.), Way
of Life, King, Householder, Renouncer: Essays in Honour of Louis
Dumont, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982; J.M. Masson, ‘The
Psychology of the Ascetic’, Journal of Asian Studies, 35.4 (MJI, 1976),
611–25.
7. Rene Guenon writes: ‘The term “religion” is difficult to apply
strictly outside the group formed by Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, which goes to prove the specifically Jewish origin of the idea
that the word now expresses.’ Rene Guenon, Introduction to the
Study of the Hindu Doctrines, London: Luzac & Co., 1945, 105.
8. Some European scholars characterize Aryanism as a nineteenth
century myth. See E. Leach, ‘Aryan Invasions over Four Millennia’,
in E. Ohnuki-Tierney (ed.), Culture Through Time, Stanford, 1990;

+
 +

Notes: Prelude / 331

L. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, New York, 1974. For the connection of
the Arya Samaj to India’s independence struggle, see Romila Thapar,
Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2000, 1114–15.
9. E.H. Carr says, ‘Learning from history is never simply a one-way
process. To learn about the present in the light of the past also
means to learn about the past in the light of the present.’ E.H.
Carr, What is History? London, 1962, 20, 31, 62.
10. I.56.34–35. (When quoting from the Mahabharata, I shall only
mention the book, chapter and verse numbers.) The epic has good
reasons to brag. It is a bit like an encyclopaedia, and often gets
carried away with a delight in knowledge for its own sake. Some
scholars are bothered by contradictions within it (due in part to it
superimposing successive historical layers of composition over the
centuries). I believe, like Ingalls, that the original story and characters
have always been intact. Ingalls says: ‘. . . there are older and
younger parts of the Mahabharata, and these can be identified by
linguistic analysis. One may thus come to discover changes of
+ custom, changes of geographical knowledge, changes in the art of +
warfare from passages of earlier to those of later composition. But
I see in the text no reason to suppose that any real change occurred,
despite the long period of composition, in the main story line or in
the characters who act out the story.’ Daniel H.H. Ingalls’s Foreword
to Ruth Cecily Katz, Arjuna in the Mahabharata: Where Krishna Is,
There Is Victory, University of South Carolina Press, 1989, xv.
11. II.60.43, 47
12. ‘The ancient Egyptian maat has a meaning far closer to dharma than
anything in today’s English,’ says Vaughan Pilikian, the Sanskrit
scholar in his Introduction to Drona (vol 1), Book Seven of the
Mahabharata, Clay Sanskrit Library, New York University Press, 19.
13. In the Brahmanas, texts devoted to analysing and interpreting
rituals, dharma is narrowly conceived as ritual excellence.
Transgression is merely a ritual mistake, a blunder of negligence.
The Brahmanas declare, for example, that the impurity of the most
heinous deeds, even the killing of a brahmin (priest), can be wiped
away by performing a horse sacrifice. On the other hand, another
dharma text, Vasistha Dharmasutra, says: ‘Neither austerities nor

+
 +

332 / Notes: Prelude

[the study of] the Veda, nor [the performance of] rites, nor lavish
liberality [to priests] can ever save him whose conduct is vile and
who has strayed from the path of dharma’ (VI.3).
14. Dharma can be both universal and relative to the situation and the
person. Thus, there is a dharma of a husband, of a wife, of a
student, of an ascetic, of a caste, even of a courtesan. There is
dharma during peace and dharma at the time of war. Epistemologists
speak of dharma in a descriptive (rather than a prescriptive) sense:
as the essence of something. For example, the dharma of fire is to
burn.
15. kalah. pacati bhutani sarvani,
. XVII.1.3
16. III.313.118. (trans. David Shulman, ‘The Yaksa’s Question’, in The
Wisdom of the Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001, 40. The essay also appears in G.
Hasan-Rokem and D. Shulman (eds.), Untying the Knot: On Riddles
and Other Enigmatic Modes, New York: Oxford University Press,
1996. Shulman employs the vulgate text of the Mahabharata with a
commentary by the late medieval commentator Nilakantha
+ Chaturdhara. +
17. Reason = tarka
18. Tarko ‘pratisthah ’
. . . srutayo vibhinna naiko .rsir
. yasya matam. pramanam/
.
dharmasya tattvam . nihitam
. guhayam . . . (Shulman trans. 54).
19. Shulman, 51
20. I.56.19
21. See Christopher Minkowski, ‘Snakes, Sattras, and the Mahabharata’,
in Arvind Sharma (ed.), Essays on the Mahabharata, Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1991, 384–400.
22. Pilikian, 18
23. XII.1.13 (J. Fitzgerald trans.)
24. Krishna may be God, but in the end he ‘lives to see the ignominious
destruction of his own tribe in a drunken orgy and is himself killed
by a silly mistake in circumstances far from glorious’. R.C. Zaehner,
Foreword to Norbert Klaes, Conscience and Consciousness: Ethical
Problems of the Mahabharata, Bangalore: Dharmaram College, 1975,
vii–viii.
25. Pilikian, 18
26. Drona 2.4. (Pilikian trans.)

+
 +

Notes: Prelude / 333

27. Iris Murdoch says, ‘A genuine sense of mortality enables us to see

virtue as the only thing of worth; and it is impossible to limit and
foresee the ways in which it will be required of us.’ The Sovereignty
of Good, London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, 96–
97.
28. The Mahabharata, as I explain in Chapter 10, employs the Sanskrit
. ’ .
word anrsamsya (‘aan ri shum sya’) to describe Yudhishthira’s
. ’ .
insistence on taking a stray dog into heaven. Literally, anrsamsya
’
means possessing an attitude of non-nrsamsya,
. . which means one
who does not injure; who is not mischievous, not-noxious, not-
cruel, not-malicious. The scholar Mukund Lath explains, ‘the word
. ’ .
[anrsamsya] has more than a negative connotation; it signifies
good-will, a fellow feeling, a deep sense of the other. [It is close to]
anukrosa,’ to cry with another, to feel another’s pain.’ (Mukund
. ’ .
Lath, ‘The Concept of Anrsamsya in the Mahabharata’, in R.N.
Dandekar [ed.], Mahabharata Revisited, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi,
1990, 113–19). Soon after the incident with the dog the epic describes
. ’ .
Yudhishthira as a person bestowed with ‘anrsamsya’ . ’ .
or anrsamsya-
+ samayukta (XVII.3.30–32). However, in the dialogue with the Yaksha +
at the end of Book Three, it had also described Yudhishthira’s
. ’ .
attitude by the same word: anrsamsyam . paro dharmah,
. III.313.75–76
CSL. In the dialogue with the Yaksha, Van Buitenen translates it
as ‘uncruelty’; Shulman uses ‘non-injury’; W.J. Johnson employs
‘absence of cruelty’ on the first occasion (75–76), but changes it to
‘compassion’ the second time.
Eighteenth-century English texts would have used ‘sympathy’ to
denote Yudhishthira’s moral sentiments towards the dog. Today,
‘sympathy’ does not connote a bias for action that compassion
does. While ‘empathy’ may reconstruct imaginatively another
person’s experience, it too does not require the agent to act on
behalf of the sufferer. ‘Pity’ is not right as ‘it has acquired
connotations of condescension and superiority that it did not have
earlier when Rousseau invoked pitie,’ according to Martha C.
Nussbaum (Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 12). Hence, ‘compassion’
is probably the right word to express Yudhishthira’s insistence on
taking the dog to heaven. It is more intense than the alternatives,

+
 +

334 / Notes: Prelude

suggesting both greater suffering of the sufferer and greater

engagement of the agent.
29. XII.121.31
30. David Seyfort Ruegg’s advice to the historian of ideas is: ‘beware
of anachronistically transposing the unsystematically imposing
concepts of modern semantics and philosophy, which have
originated in the course of particular historical developments, on
modes of thought that evolved in quite different historical
circumstances and which have therefore to be interpreted in the
first place in the context of their own concerns and ideas they
themselves developed.’ ‘Does the Madhyamika Have a Thesis and
Philosophical Position?’, in B.K. Matilal and R.D. Evans (eds.),
Buddhist Logic and Epistemology, Dordrecht Kluwer, 1986, 236.
31. I am indebted to Professor Sheldon Pollock for encouraging me to
think of the Mahabharata in these terms.
32. V.S. Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, Bombay: The
Asiatic Society of Bombay, 1957, 29.
33. The Mahabharata describes the historical period which was an
+ interregnum between the Mauryan and Gupta empires on the +
Ganges plain. The period saw the rise of Buddhism as well as a
Hindu brahmin reaction during the rule of the Shungas after the
fall of the Mauryan empire in 185 BC. The epic refers to a quasi-
Mauryan text of statecraft, Arthashastra (X. 1.47), particularly when
seeking textual support for its realpolitik policy. The evolution of
Hinduism is clear in the rising influence of Krishna in the epic.
Krishna’s role is magnified as he emerges as an earthly incarnation
of the supreme Lord Vishnu. Thus, the poem becomes an important
early textual source for Vaishnavism, a sectarian form of Hinduism.
The triumph of the Pandavas celebrates their (especially Arjuna’s)
devotion to Krishna. The Bhagavad Gita, a section of the epic’s
sixth book, in which Krishna exhorts Arjuna to fight this righteous
war and reveals himself as the all-loving God, became one of the
central texts of Hindu devotionalism.
34. The epic has been translated in India and Indonesia since the
eleventh century. In 1591 the Mughal emperor Akbar commissioned
his chronicler, Badayuni, to translate it into Persian.
35. Van Buitenen explains: ‘the Bharata of 24,000 couplets grew to the

+
 +

Notes: Prelude / 335

Mahabharata of 100,000. The original story was in the first phase of

complication expanded from within, in the second phase
mythologized, in the third phase brahmanized. One might even
discern a fourth phase, after the epic was written down, when this
collection of manuscripts became, as it were, a library to which new
books could be added. Almost any text of “Hindu” inspiration
could be included in this expanding library, so that in the end the
custodians could rightly boast that “whatever is found here may be
found somewhere else, but what is not found here is found
nowhere!” (I.56.34)’ (Mahabharata by J.A.B. van Buitenen, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, vol 1, 1975, xxiii).
36. D.D. Kosambi was satisfied that the epic took its present form
between 200 BC and 200 AD. See Romila Thapar’s insightful essay,
‘The Historian and the Epic’, in Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts:
Essays in Early Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2000, 613–29. Alf Hiltebeitel, in his Introduction to Rethinking the
Mahabharata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma Kings,
says: ‘the Mahabharata was composed between the mid-second
+ century BC and the year zero’ (18) . . . ‘I propose further that the +
Mahabharata was written by “out of sorts” Brahmans who may have
had some minor king’s or merchant’s patronage’ (19). Van Buitenen
argues that the epic evolved from 400 BC till AD 400, saying: ‘Such
a [long] dating . . . is of course absurd from the point of view of a
single literary work. It makes sense when we look upon the text
not so much as one opus but as a library of opera. Then we can say
that 400 BC was the founding of the library, and that AD 400 was the
approximate date after no more substantial additions were made to
the text.’ (Mahabharata by J.A.B. van Buitenen, vol 1, xxv). At the
beginning of the twentieth century scholars believed that there was
an ‘original’ epic (narrative story) and a ‘pseudo’ epic (didactic
sections). E. Washbrook Hopkins, The Great Epic of India, New York,
1901.
37. The project for a Critical Edition was first inspired by a Viennese
scholar, Moriz Winternitz, in 1899, but the colossal task did not
take off until after the First World War when it was undertaken by
V.S. Sukthankar, a student of Winternitz, and did not end until the
publication of the appendix, the Harivamsa,. ’ in 1970. Curiously, the

+
 +

336 / Notes: Prelude

editors gave a lot of importance to the manuscripts from ‘remote

and conservative Kashmir’.
38. Cited in Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
39. F.R. Leavis, an influential British literary critic of the mid-twentieth
century, wrote in his book The Great Tradition that works of literature
are great only if they enhance our ‘awareness of the possibilities of
life’ and show concern with the ‘interests of life’. F.R. Leavis, The
Great Tradition, London: Peregrine, 1962, 10, 16 (first published in
1948).
40. There is a large post-colonial literature on this subject beginning
with Edward Said’s Orientalism and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined
Communities. Said analysed the construction of the ‘Orient’ in
Western imagination, and concluded: ‘The Orient is an idea that
has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary
that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.’
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Random House, 1978;
Vintage Books, 1979, 5. The most comprehensive account purely
+ from the Indian point of view is Ronald Inden’s Imagining India, +
Indiana University Press, 1990, from where I have taken Hegel’s
quote below. What gave ‘Orientalism’ a bad odour is this typical
statement of John Mill (the less worthy father of John Stuart Mill):
‘Our ancestors,’ Mill says, ‘though rough, were sincere; but under
the glossing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to
deceit and perfidy.’ James Mill, The History of British India, London:
1817; republished Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, 247.
41. Hegel’s verdict is stereotypical when he says that the spirituality of
India ‘has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans’.
Amartya Sen says that ‘this home of endless spirituality has
perhaps the largest atheistic and materialist literature of all the
ancient civilizations’. ‘Indian Traditions and the Western
Imagination’, Daedalus, Spring 1997, American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, 1. Sen adds, ‘Even on religious subjects, the only
world religion that is firmly agnostic (Buddhism) is of Indian
origin, and, furthermore, the atheistic schools of Carvaka and
Lokayata have generated extensive arguments that have been
seriously studied by Indian religious scholars themselves . . .’ For

+
 +

Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy / 337

example, the fourteenth-century book Sarvadarsanasamgraha

(‘Collection of All Philosophies’) by Madhava Acharya (himself a
good Vaishnavite Hindu) devotes the first chapter to a serious
presentation of the arguments of the atheistic schools.
42. V.121.25

1. Duryodhana’s Envy

1. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Book Two are from

the University of Chicago Press translation by J.A.B. van Buitenen,
which is based on the Critical Edition. I have also used Paul
Wilmot’s translation of Book Two in the Clay Sanskrit Series,
which I have indicated by CSL; it is based on the ‘vulgate edition’
(not the Critical Edition) and its numbering of the verses is different
from that of the Critical Edition’s. (See my note on translation and
transliteration.) In a few cases, I have edited the quotes.
2. II.43.3–8
3. In Book One, Duryodhana is described as a ‘wicked soul’, one
+ ‘scorched by envy’ (irsyaya
. cabhisamtaptah),
. . who cannot bear anyone +
speaking well of the Pandavas (I.129.4–10). Like English, Sanskrit
does not make a clear distinction between ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’ in
common usage. I shall have more to say on the distinction below.
The online Monier-Williams Sanskrit–English dictionary offers many
variants for envy and jealousy, the most common ones being: irsita,.
matsarya, apadhyana, amarsa..
4. II.43.18
’ ’
5. II.43.19, 21. Although the text describes Arjuna as ‘svetasvasya’, I
have deleted ‘white-horsed’ from van Buitenen’s translation as it is
awkward. I have modified the second part of the verse following
Paul Wilmot’s more idiomatic rendering: ‘I am drying up like a
shrunken pond in the hot season.’
6. II.47.29 CSL. ‘Amarsa’. is the word in Sanskrit, which Wilmot
translates as ‘jealousy’, but it can also mean impatience, indignation
and anger.
7. II.43.35
8. II.44.18–22
9. II. 45.6, 8–9, 12

+
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338 / Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy

10. II.50.1–6
11. asamtosah ’
. . . sriyo mulam. tasmat (II.50.18): ‘Discontent is at the root of
prosperity’.
12. II.50.22–24, 27
13. II.58.14–16 CSL
14. See footnote 21 below
15. II.55.10
16. II.58.31
17. Alf Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader’s Guide to the
Education of the Dharma Kings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
262.
18. II.49.40: ‘niyatam. tam . vijesyami
. krtva
. tu kapatam
. . vibho/anayami
samrddhim
. . tam divyam. copahvayasva tam’. I have quoted from Paul
Wilmot’s translation of Book Two (‘The Great Hall’), in CSL, New
York University Press, 2006. CSL follows the vulgate seventeenth
century version of the epic of Nilakantha Chaturdhara; hence, the
numbering of the verses is different from the Critical Edition of the
earlier verses quoted in this chapter.
+ 19. II.46.10–12 CSL +
20. Many have wondered why Yudhishthira was forced into such a
catastrophic decision. Van Buitenen makes a plausible case that
Yudhishthira had no choice because a game of dice was required of
the king in the Vedic rajasuya sacrifice. Thus, when Yudhishthira
replies to Vidura, ‘Once challenged, I cannot refuse’ (II.52.13,16), he
could be thinking of the Vedic ritual. See J.A.B. van Buitenen
(trans.), Mahabharata, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, vol 2,
1975, 27–30). Others have pointed out that Yudhishthira was led
along this ruinous path because he was addicted to gambling and
he could not resist. It was a fatal flaw in his character. Julius Lipner
says, ‘from the story’s point of view, more specifically from the
point of view of tension between freedom and determinism in the
context of dharma, we know perfectly well what led Yudhishthira
to obey the summons. The text has been careful to tell us:
Yudhishthira loves to gamble. This adharmic addiction is a chink
in his dharmic armour’ (Hindus: Their Beliefs and Practices, London:
Routledge, 1994, 201). Van Buitenen’s counter-argument is that
although Shakuni claims that he has a passion for gambling, ‘this

+
 +

Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy / 339

is disingenuous, for Yudhishthira has so far not been at all fond of

gambling’ (28). S.M. Kulkarni wonders why no one stopped him:
‘It is noteworthy, though astonishing, that no one prevented
Yudhishthira from betting . . .’ S.M. Kulkarni, ‘An Unresolved
Dilemma in Dyuta-parvan: A Question Raised by Draupadi’, in B.K.
Matilal (ed.), Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 151.
21. The ‘cosmogonical rite was intended to bring about the recreation
of the universe and the birth of the king’. J.C. Heesterman, The
Ancient Indian Royal Consecration, The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1957,
153. Heesterman’s is a classic study of this ritual.
22. Aaron Rester, ‘Playing with Tradition: Sacrifice, Ritual, and the
Mahabharata’s Dice Game’, www.aaronrester.net/writings/
mahabharatagameCCL
23. II.49.39 CSL
24. The Rig Veda: An Anthology, trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty,
London: Penguin Books, 1981, 240.
25. Protagoras, 352b–356c, Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. E. Hamilton
+ and H. Cairns, New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. +
26. Ethica Nicomachea, 7.2, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R.
Mckeon, New York: Random House, 1941.
27. Bimal K. Matilal, The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Ethics
and Epics, Oxford University Press, 2002, 63. ‘. . . According to
classical Indian wisdom, weakness of the will is part of human
nature (svabhava evaisa
. bhutanam).’
28. ‘Game theory’ uses the rational choices that individuals make in
games to determine their interests and positions and even to
unravel moral dilemmas. In 1955 the British philosopher Richard
Braithwaite argued that many questions about distributive justice
have the same structure as ‘the bargaining problem’. R.B.
Braithwaite, Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. In the late 1960s,
David Gauthier used game theory to develop a moral theory (in the
same way as the philosopher John Rawls derived the content of
fundamental moral principles). Gauthier not only derived moral
principles, but tried to show that rational agents would act
morally. Most contemporary authors in ethics who use game

+
 +

340 / Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy

theory in their work are either Contractarians or Evolutionary

theorists. The Contractarian tradition, with its emphasis on fully
rational agents and bargaining, represents a more traditional use of
game theory. The evolutionary approach, on the other hand, with
its emphasis on bounded rational agents and repeated interactions,
is a more recent arrival. We shall discuss it later in Chapter 3. See
also Alf Hiltebeitel, ‘Gambling’, in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea
Eliade, gen. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1987, vol 5, 469.
29. On the Vedic rajasuya, see J.C. Heesterman, The Ancient Indian
Royal Consecration, The Hague: Thesis Utrecht, 1957.
30. Unevenness = vaisamya;
. evenness = avaisamya.
. After the war, Krishna
tells the hermit Uttanka that he tried his best to create ‘evenness’
(sausamya)
. between the Kauravas and the Pandavas (XIV.53–55).
Uttanka wants to know why Krishna, a god, could not prevent the
war. Matilal concludes that Krishna was not omnipotent. Shulman
questions this conclusion. He says that Krishna always took the
side of the Pandavas. ‘But we know that Krsna . . . is lying: the god
works in a world that the Mahabharata consistently discloses to us
as basically and essentially visama,
. uneven, inherently off balance,
+ +
always spiralling downward towards destruction. Krishna himself
consistently feeds this imbalance, fosters disorder, undermines
surface symmetries.’ David Shulman, ‘The Yaksa’s . Question’, in
The Wisdom of the Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, 51.
31. kalah. pacati bhutani sarvani,
. XVII.1.3
32. Shulman, 40
33. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, New York: The
Penguin Press, 2009, chapter 10.
34. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M.G. McGregor,
New York: Harper and Row, Part II, 127.
35. ‘A person who is truthful (satya) and trustworthy must be free of
envy (amatsarya). It is a freedom acquired by a good man, possessing
the truth’ (XII.156.14).
36. This quote as well as the previous one about envy’s relationship
with hatred is from the German philosopher Schopenhauer. Cited
in Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, London:
Martin Secker & Warburg, 1969, reprinted 1987 by Liberty Fund,
206–07.

+
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Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy / 341

37. Helmut Schoeck notes that envy ‘is a silent, secretive process and
not usually verifiable. It is surreptitious’ (86).
38. Krishna Chaitanya, The Mahabharata: A Literary Study, New Delhi:
Clarion Books, 1993, 45.
39. Peter Walcot, Envy and the Greeks: A Study of Human Behavior, New
York: Aris and Phillips, 1978; Svend Ranulf, The Jealousy of the Gods
and Criminal Law at Athens: A Contribution to the Sociology of Moral
Indignation, vol 1, London and Copenhagen, 1933, 133. The quote
below of Aristides the Just is also from Peter Walcot.
40. Joseph Epstein, Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003, 98.
41. Schoeck, 249
42. Hu Hsien-chin, ‘The Chinese Concept of “Face”’, American
Anthropologist, 46 (1944), 45–64. Quoted in Schoeck, 67–68.
43. II.54.6 CSL. I have translated svadharma as duty here; Wilmot
leaves it as svadharma.
44. II.55.7-8 CSL
45. II.55.11 CSL
+ 46. Dutavakya, 1.24 +
47. II.46.20, II.50.18, 22, 27. Glaucon in Plato’s Republic tells the story of
Gyges, the shepherd, who served the king of Lydia. Gyges found
a magical ring one day while tending his flock. When he accidentally
turned the ring on his finger, he discovered that others could not
see him. He made his way to the king’s palace and used the ring
to seduce the queen. He then conspired with the queen, killed the
king, and assumed the throne. Glaucon argues that we act justly
only because we are afraid of being punished.
48. This quote of Thucydides is from Thomas Hobbes’s translation of
the great Greek historian. David Greene (ed.), The Peloponnesian
War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 194.
49. XII.15
50. In the myth of the flood, a tiny fish asks Manu to save him from
the big fish who will otherwise devour him. The stated assumption
is that without a king wielding tough punishments, the strong will
devour the weak as big fish eat small fish (Manu 7.20).
51. II.62.3 CSL
52. See footnote 11 and 21.

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342 / Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy

53. Although the epic claims that the great war at Kurukshetra is a
dharma-yuddha, a moral war, it also raises doubts in the heat of the
battle if this is indeed a fight between good and evil. It keeps
reminding one that dharma, the measure by which we judge good
and evil, is itself contested, ambiguous and subtle. The fact is that
both sides did plenty of good and bad deeds. For this and other
reasons, Matilal refuses to call the Pandavas the ‘good’ side. He
refers to them as the ‘preferred’ side. Bimal Krishna Matilal,
‘Krishna: In Defence of a Devious Divinity’, in Arvind Sharma
(ed.), Essays on the Mahabharata, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991, 4.
54. Rudolph Otto pointed this out long ago and Alf Hiltebeitel more
recently. Rudolph Otto, The Original Gita: The Song of the Supreme
Exalted One, trans. J.E. Turner, London: George Allen and Unwin,
1939; Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle: Krsna
. . . in the Mahabharata,
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976.
55. yuyam . vihatasamkalpah. socanto vartayisyatha
. (Salyaparvan, 60, 50).
This memorable speech includes the line, ko nu svantatarno maya,
‘Whose end is more admirable than mine?’ Bhasa, the playwright,
+ took this further and his plays Pancharatra and Urubhanga +
tended to magnify, even ennoble, the character of Duryodhana to
heroic proportions. At one level, the Mahabharata’s war is between
good and evil. Indeed, the oft-repeated first line of the Gita tells us
this and the field of battle, Kurukshetra, is also a dharmaksetra
. and
the war is over dharma (‘Dharmaksetre. kuruksetre’
. Gita 1.1). ‘This
war was for the sake of Dharma,’ says V.S. Sukthankar. At this
level, Yudhishthira is Dharmaraja or righteousness incarnate.
Duryodhana, on the other side, is the incarnation of adharma or
evil. He is also symbolic of Kali, Kalipurusha,
. the mark of time and
death. Draupadi, on the other hand, is a symbol of Sri, the splendour
of legitimate sovereignty. Therefore, not surprisingly, her sexual
violation by Duryodhana directs the narrative.
56. V.34.41, CSL
57. Epstein, 74
58. John Rawls, The Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard
University Press, 1971, 531.
59. This is also known as Sayre’s Law, named after Wallace Stanley
Sayre (1905–72), US political scientist and professor at Columbia

+
 +

Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy / 343

University. On 20 December 1973, the Wall Street Journal quoted

Sayre as saying: ‘Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter
form of politics, because the stakes are so low.’ Justin Kaplan,
editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, asked Henry Kissinger
whether he had stated it. According to him, Kissinger, ‘foxy as
ever, said he didn’t recall saying it but that it “sounded” like him.
In other words, he didn’t say it but wouldn’t mind if we thought
he did.’
60. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills (trans. and ed.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 129–56.
61. Epstein, 61
62. Ibid, 64
63. Rs 15,000 was roughly equal to US$2000 at the then prevailing
exchange rate.
64. I have written extensively about this period in my book India
Unbound. See especially Chapter 13, which recounts the story of the
Ambani family. I knew those times well as I was working in
+ Mumbai, selling Vicks Vaporub in the bazaars of India. +
65. The phrase is from Hamish McDonald’s book The Polyester Prince:
The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani, Allen and Unwin, 1998. He was
bureau chief in Delhi for the Far Eastern Economic Review and his
book is still banned in India.
66. See Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of the ‘slave revolt in morality’ in
On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark and A. Swensen,
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998; Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego, trans. J. Strachey, New York: Liverwright,
1949. This link can be found as far back as Aristotle. A
comprehensive survey of historical sources is to be found in
Schoeck, 1969. Envy receives a sympathetic treatment in R. Nozick,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, 1974, though he
does not explicitly endorse it. A relatively recent defence is by
D. Cooper ‘Equality and Envy’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 16,
35–47.
67. Freud, 120; see also D. Cooper, 35–47.
68. Rawls, 532
69. Loc. cit.

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344 / Notes: Duryodhana’s Envy

70. Rawls writes: ‘Sometimes the circumstances evoking envy are so

compelling that given human beings as they are, no one can
reasonably be asked to overcome his rancorous feelings . . . A
person’s lesser position . . . may be so great as to wound his self-
respect . . . cause a loss of self-esteem.’ Ibid, 534
71. Rawls, op. cit.
72. Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, New York:
Penguin Press, 2005.
73. Kierkegaard explains that envy will probably be greater in a society
dedicated to equality than a feudal one with large differences.
Adam Smith, on the other hand, was naïve in believing that envy
would disappear once inequalities diminished. Smith’s solution to
inequalities was a state founded upon law and order. He wrote:
‘Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one
very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor. The
affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many, who are
often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his
possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that
+ the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the +
labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations,
can sleep a single night in security.’ So far so good, but he was
clearly wrong when he added: ‘Where there is no property, or at
least none that exceeds the value of two or three days’ labour, civil
government is not so necessary.’ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations,
Modern Library edition, 670.
74. Y. Olesha, Envy (introduction by Gleb Struve), London, 1947;
reprinted New York: New York Review of Books, 2004.
75. The British socialist and Labour MP C.A.R. Crosland defended
himself against allegations of envy in 1956 in The Failure of Socialism.
In it, he discussed why his party invariably chose to leverage the
envy of the lower classes even when they had become comparatively
prosperous.
76. Luck egalitarians include some well-known names in philosophy:
Ronald Dworkin (Sovereign Virtue 2000), Richard Arneson (‘Equality
and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophical Studies [1989],
77–93), G.A. Cohen (‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics
[1989], 906–44), Thomas Nagel, Eric Rakowski, John Roemer and

+
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Notes: Draupadi’s Courage / 345

Philippe Van Parijs. Elizabeth S. Anderson is a critic of luck

egalitarianism (‘What is the Point of Equality?’ Ethics [1999], 287–
337).
77. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek
Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986, 1.
78. Shulman, 42–43
79. ‘Poor mental hygiene’ is Joseph Epstein’s phrase, 98.

2. Draupadi’s Courage

1. II.62.12. When quoting from the Mahabharata, I shall only mention

the book, chapter and verse numbers. Unless otherwise indicated,
the quotations from Book Two are from the University of Chicago
Press translation by J.A.B. van Buitenen based on the Critical
Edition. I have also employed Paul Wilmot’s translation of Book
Two of the epic in the Clay Sanskrit Series, which I have indicated
by CSL.
+ 2. jitam = won (II.58.45 in the Critical Edition; II.65.45 CSL). Van +
Buitenen employs ‘maddened with pride’ (II.60.1), but I prefer
Wilmot’s ‘drunk’ with pride in the more recent CSL translation.
3. II.59.1
4. He calls him ‘Bharata’ after the name of the clan to which the
Kauravas and Pandavas belong. Hence, ‘Mahabharata’ is a story
about the ‘great’ Bharatas (II.59.3–4). I have substituted ‘fool’ for
van Buitenen’s ‘nitwit’ and replaced the second line, ‘You dumb
deer to anger tigers’, by Wilmot’s more readable ‘You are a deer
provoking a tiger’s wrath’ (CSL II.66.4: vyaghran mrgah. . kopayase
’tivelam!)
5. II.67.4 CSL
6. II.60.46
7. II.60.5. Paul Wilmot translates it more simply: ‘What prince wagers
his wife in a game?’ II.67.5 CSL
8. II.60.7 (II.67.7 CSL: kim
. nu purvam
. parajaisir
. atmanam atha vapi mam?.
9. II.60.13
10. II.60.22
11. II.60.25

+
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346 / Notes: Draupadi’s Courage

12. Kurun bhajasva: ‘enjoy the Kurus’, II.60.20; dasi = slave II.60.22–27
13. II.60.35, 36
14. Literally, ‘wives always act upon a husband’s orders’: striyas’ ca
bhartur vasatam ’ samiksya,
. II.67.47 CSL
15. II.60.40: ‘na dharmasauksmyat . ’
saubhage vivaktum/saknomi te
’
prasnam imam . yathavat’ (II.60.40ab). Van Buitenen translates
Draupadi’s prasnam ’ as riddle, but I believe ‘question’ is more
appropriate. Bhishma, who is used to thinking about property in a
legal way, says, ‘One without property cannot bet another’s, but
considering that a wife is under a husband’s authority . . .’: asvo
’
hy asaktah . panitum
. parasvam/striyas’ ca bhartur vasatam
’ . samiksya.
(II.60.40.cd).
16. II.61.20–24; Critical Edition II.68.23–24 CSL. I have edited Vikarna’s
speech, using both the van Buitenen and the Wilmot translations.
17. The text has Karna say, ‘Strip the Pandavas and Draupadi of their
clothes!’: pandavanam
.. . draupadyas’ capupahara.
ca vasamsi
18. David Shulman, ‘The Yaksa’s Question’, in Galit Hasan-Rokem and
David Shulman (eds.), Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other
Enigmatic Modes, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 153.
+ +
Shulman, of course, employs the transliteration of prashna = prasna. ’
19. Alf Hiltebeitel points out this anomaly. The messenger says ‘kasyeso ’
nah. parajaisih’, . and then proceeds to repeat Draupadi’s question,
‘kim. nu purvam . parajaisir
. atmanam mam nu’. Alf Hiltebeitel,
. Rethinking
the Mahabharata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma
Kings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 242–43.
20. Among others, M.A. Mehendale discusses this legal aspect of the
issue. M.A. Mehendale, ‘Draupadi’s Question’, Journal of the Oriental
Institute, Baroda, 35, 3–4, 183.
21. S.M. Kulkarni and Shalini Shah also come to this conclusion.
S.M. Kulkarni, ‘An Unresolved Dilemma in Dyuta-parvan: A
Question Raised by Draupadi’, in B.K. Matilal (ed.), Moral Dilemmas
in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989, 150–53. Shalini
Shah makes this point eloquently in The Making of Womanhood:
Gender Relations in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Manohar, 1995, 30–31.
22. amargena . ’
. nrsamsavat, II.53.3
23. Hiltebeitel, 242. See also Hiltebeitel’s discussion under ‘Gambling’
in Encyclopaedia of Religion, gen. ed. Mircea Eliade, New York: Free
Press, vol 5, 1987, 468–74.

+
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Notes: Draupadi’s Courage / 347

24. Hiltebeitel, 262

25. II.60.42
26. II.62.12
27. II. 60.43, 47
28. II.61.52: ‘dharmo ‘tra pidyate’,
. II.68.59 CSL. pidyate
. = tormented.
29. viddho dharmo hy adharmena . sabham. yatropapadyate (II.68.77 CSL)
30. II.68.78 CSL. Although the text does not name them, Vidura clearly
thinks of Duryodhana as the leader, Duhshasana as the culprit, and
the men in the assembly (especially the elders) who are guilty of
silence.
31. II.68.89 (II.71.1. CSL)
32. II.62.7
33. II.63.27. She is called ‘Panchali’ because she is the daughter of King
Drupada of Panchala.
34. The quote is from Hiltebeitel, 262. Mehendale does not think that
Draupadi’s question remained unanswered or that Draupadi
regained her freedom through the intercession of bad omens. He
argues that it is because Arjuna gave a decisive reply to Draupadi’s
question that she got the boons from Dhritarashtra. He translates
+ +
Arjuna’s reply in II.63.21 as follows: ‘When the game of dice began
Yudhishthira was our master. But once he has lost himself, whose
master can he be? Kauravas take note of this’ (‘iso raja purvam asid
glahe nah. kuntiputro dharmarajo mahatma/isas ’ tv ayam. kasya parajitatma
taj janidhvam. kuravah. sarva eva’). Thus, he concludes, ‘Arjuna’s reply
is quite clear. “Whose master defeated Yudhishthira?” Of course, of
none—not even of Draupadi.’ His argument rests on the translation
of janidhvam . above, which van Buitenen translates as ‘decide’, and
this according to him is incorrect. He gives a number of examples
from the epic to prove that vibruta would have been the right
translation of ‘decide’ had the poet meant to say this. Mehendale
believes that the right translation is ‘realize’ or ‘take note’. Arjuna
wants them to realize that Yudhishthira in the circumstances could
not be the master of anyone. Hence, in his view, Arjuna did answer
Draupadi’s question, and the intercession of bad omens was
unnecessary and an ‘interpolation’ in the Poona Critical Edition of
the epic. Mehendale, 188–91.
Other scholars, however, hold the opposite view. They believe
Draupadi’s question remained unresolved to the end. N.R. Pathak

+
 +

348 / Notes: Draupadi’s Courage

in his 1967 Marathi translation says: ‘The significant question

which Draupadi had raised at this extremely critical moment could
not be answered satisfactorily by anyone. Therefore, Dhritarashtra
managed to somehow get out of the fix by offering boons to
Draupadi’ (cited in Mehendale, 181). Van Buitenen also concludes:
‘There is much argument, but it remains inconclusive’ (Mahabharata,
trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
vol 2, 1975, 30). Purely from a literary point of view, personally, I
find it more satisfying that Draupadi’s question remains
unanswered. Just as I found Edgerton’s notion of ‘cosmic justice’
more satisfying in the disrobing episode, I think the omens here
vindicate her commitment to dharma, and Dhritarashtra says so
when he refers to her as dharmacarini.
35. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, New York: The
Penguin Press, 2009, 793.
36. Hiltebeitel, 250–51. With regard to the disrobing, Hiltebeitel points
to a parallel with Nala’s story. He says the body stripped ‘is a self
laid bare. As Nala is stripped, so is Yudhishthira. For each, their
+ project becomes that of restoring themselves, their kingdoms and +
their marriages. But the women are never stripped. Damayanti
retains half a sari, and Draupadi receives endless saris . . . As in
Nala, it is a question of the self, as atman, only with the royal hero
and not with the heroine’ (257).
37. II.68.42–44 CSL
38. Franklin Edgerton, ‘Sabhaparvan, Introduction and Apparatus’, V.S.
Sukthankar et al. Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, Poona, 1933–70,
vol 2, xxix. Julius Lipner agrees that ‘Draupadi as a righteous
woman was not righteously treated . . . and in the final analysis
dharma has vindicated Draupadi’ (Hindus: Their Beliefs and Practices,
London: Routledge, 1994, 207). Lipner adds: ‘Her faith in dharma
has not been void, although it has cost her dear . . . whatever the
solution to the riddle may be, the text implies that Draupadi as a
righteous woman has been righteously treated. Otherwise her final
humiliation would not have been thwarted and her modesty
miraculously preserved.’ Hiltebeitel also endorses the decision.
‘Within the context of the passage itself the Critical Edition’s
accumulated evidence leaves no grounds to refute these conclusions.

+
 +

Notes: Draupadi’s Courage / 349

The reconstituted text has continuity without Krishna’s intervention

and the tendency of later redactors (both northern or southern) to
embroider the story is evident.’
39. Ibid, xxix
40. Purshottam Aggarwal calls the public disrobing an example of a
patriarchal world view: ‘Duryodhana could think of no better way
than ordering the public disrobing of Draupadi to decisively
emphasise the humiliating and final defeat of the Pandavas in the
game of dice, and the Pandavas could not protest for the simple
reason that Duryodhana, even in his reprehensible act, was justified
in terms of the moral paradigm of patriarchy which was binding
upon the Pandavas.’ ‘Savarkar, Surat, and Draupadi’, in Tanika
Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (eds.), Women and the Hindu Right: A
Collection of Essays, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995, 39.
41. Leo Tolstoy, The Krentzer Sonata, New York: Modern Library, 2003;
R.F. Christian (ed.), Tolstoy’s Diaries, abridged edition, New York:
HarperCollins, 1996. I wish to thank Martha Nussbaum for this
quote from Tolstoy’s diaries. It appears in her article ‘Body of the
+ Nation: Why Women Were Mutilated in Gujarat’, Boston Review: A +
Political and Literary Forum, Summer 2004.
42. I.99–100
43. Doniger, 346
44. See Romila Thapar, Early India, 193, 228; also see Doniger, 356.
45. Iravati Karve, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, Hyderabad: Disha
Books/Orient Longman, 1991, 10.
46. Ibid, 99
47. II.62.14, 17, 19, 20
48. This is why philosophers call moral statements prescriptive and
not descriptive.
49. Philosophers call this the ‘principle of universalizability’ of moral
judgements.
50. B.K. Matilal discusses the question of dharma’s rationality in his
paper, ‘Dharma and Rationality’, in S. Biderman and B.A. Scharfstein
(eds.), Rationality in Question: On Eastern and Western Views of
Rationality, E.J. Brill: Leiden, 1989. It is reproduced also in Bimal K.
Matilal, The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Ethics and Epics,
Oxford University Press, 2002. The quote above is on 51.

+
 +

350 / Notes: Draupadi’s Courage

51. The Laws of Manu, 2.6, trans. Wendy Doniger with Brian K. Smith,
London: Penguin Books, 17. Wendy Doniger translates ‘dharma’ as
‘religion’ in this verse but ‘law’ elsewhere; Patrick Olivelle translates
it as ‘law’ here. I think it is best to leave the word (dharma) as it
is. The Law Code of Manu, trans. Patrick Olivelle, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004, 23.
52. XII.234.10
53. X.3.3
’
54. Kulluka, in fact, cites Garga, another author of The Dharmashastras
in support of his claim. Matilal, 57.
’
55. Kâlidâsa, Abhijñana-sakuntala, ed. Narayana Rama Acharya,
Bombay: Nirnay Sagar Press, 11th edn., 1947, I, 22.
56. Bimal K. Matilal concludes that the openness and the plurality of
authorities ‘bespeaks of the rational stream of the tradition as well
as the lesser importance accorded to blind faith’ (57).
57. XII.173.45–47. ‘Atheist’ translates as nastika, which is usually taken
to mean denial of a world to come. (Translation by Nicholas Sutton,
Religious Doctrines in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
2000.)
+ +
58. James Fitzgerald describes this change nicely in his excellent
introduction to Book Twelve of the Mahabharata, vol 7, Books XI
and XII, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 101–28.
59. XII.184.15cd
60. XII.60
61. Fitzgerald explains the usage of this second sense of dharma in the
Mahabharata : ‘[It] was the result of the new religious perspectives
and values of yoga that gradually emerged alongside the older
Vedic ones in the middle third of the first millennium BC in
northern India.’ He goes on to elaborate what these ‘new religious
perspectives’ are: ‘Upanishadic brahmins worked, in meditation, to
displace limited forms of desire with the bliss of the “knowledge
of” Brahman; Jainas sought to stop the influx of fresh karman and
ascetically “burn off” old karman; Buddhists sought to undermine
the psychological basis of desire, thereby “extinguishing” (nirvana) .
the erroneous idea of selfhood, desire, karman, and rebirth. Each
tradition developed institutions of “withdrawal” (nivrtti) . and
renunciation peculiar to itself’ (109–110). (See also footnote 133 in
Chapter 9.)

+
 +

Notes: Draupadi’s Courage / 351

62. III.34.19, 22, 65. Bhima reminds Yudhishthira again in III.49.13 that
rajyam eva param . dharmam. ksatriyasya
. vidur budhah:
. ‘The wise know
that kingship is the highest dharma of a kshatriya’.
63. Homer, Iliad, 24.725 ff
64. Bhagavad Gita III. 20. Krishna speaks of loka-samgraham, which is
maintaining the world or promoting the welfare of the people, and
cities King Janaka as a model monarch who acted in this manner.
He repeats it in verse 25.
65. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry, 26, 4 (Summer
2000), 821.
66. Indeed, Thomas McCarthy, an influential philosopher, has recently
argued: ‘In fact, it seems to have been Kant who first introduced
the idea of explaining racial differentiation by postulating in our
original ancestors a fund of four germs or seeds, each of which
contained . . . one set of racial characteristics.’
67. See www.antislavery.org, the website of Anti-Slavery International,
for detailed statistics on present-day slavery.
68. Arun Shourie, Governance and the Sclerosis that Has Set In, New
Delhi: ASA–Rupa, 2004, 3–7. This book is a treasure house of such
+ +
examples.
69. dharmaksetre
. kuruksetre,
. Gita 1.1. Sukthankar explains as follows:
‘This war was for the sake of Dharma, moral law, an abstract
principle difficult even to define precisely; it is so subtle.’ V.S.
Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, Bombay: The
Asiatic Society of Bombay, 1957.
70. B.K. Matilal, ‘Moral Dilemmas: Insights from Indian Epics’, in B.K.
Matilal (ed.), Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1989, 2.
71. Bhishma will teach the king’s dharma to Yudhishthira in Book
Twelve at interminable length. The poet Kalidasa also describes
this in his play Raghuvamsha 1.25; 17.57.
72. Kautilya, Arthashastra, trans. R.P. Kangle, Part II, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1972, 1.7.
73. The French playwright Jean Anouilh wrote a version of Antigone
that was staged in German-occupied France. It was meant to be a
rallying call to resist the Nazi regime, but I’m not sure that
Sophocles would have sympathized with this interpretation of his
play.

+
 +

352 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Duty

74. II.63.21
75. The quote is from Alfred Collins, cited in Hiltebeitel, 261–62.
Alfred Collins, ‘Dancing with Prakriti’, Paper delivered at the
annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, 1994. Collins/
Hiltebeitel raise questions such as: Is it the sovereign self (purusha)
that replicates itself in other selves? Or is it mind-ego-intellect
(prakriti) that is unconscious matter, which becomes a conscious self
‘for the sake of the purusha’?
76. Hiltebeitel, 262: ‘Yudhishthira is put into the position of raising for
himself and others in the court, including incarnate demons, the
Pascalian/Faustian question of what it means to have “wagered
one’s soul”.’
77. Hiltebeitel, 242. See also Hiltebeitel’s discussion under ‘Gambling’,
468-74.
78. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, New York: Macmillan, 1929,
reprinted Transaction, 1982, 77.

3. Yudhishthira’s Duty
+ +
1. Mahabharata III.28.10–14. (As usual, I shall mention only the book
number, chapter number and verse numbers when quoting from
the Mahabharata.)
2. III.28.6; III.31.18–19
3. III.31.7–9
4. III.31.37–39
5. III.29.34–35
6. III.18.17–33. manyuh. = anger
7. Forbearance = ksama;
. anger = krodha
8. III.32.2–4
9. III.32.15
10. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mary
Gregor (trans.), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 62.
11. ‘An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals’, in L.A. Selby-
Bigge (ed.), Hume’s Enquiries, 2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1902, 272-75, first published in 1751. Hume writes, ‘When a man
denominates another his enemy, his rival, his antagonist, his adversary,

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Duty / 353

he is understood to speak the language of self-love. But when he

bestows on a man the epithets of vicious or odious or depraved, he
then speaks another language, and expresses sentiments, in which
he expects all his audience to concur with him. He must here,
therefore, depart from his private and particular situation, he must
move some universal principle and touch a string to which all
mankind have an accord and symphony. While the human heart is
compounded of the same elements as at present, it will never be
wholly indifferent to public good.’
12. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in
Moral Philosophy, trans. L.W. Beck, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1949, 193–94. Kant also wrote famously: ‘Duty! Thou sublime
and mighty name . . . what origin is worthy of thee, and where is
to be found the root of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all
kinship with inclinations and . . . is the indispensable condition of
the only worth which men can give themselves? . . . Man is certainly
unholy enough, but humanity in his person must be holy to him.
Everything in creation which he wishes and over which he has
+ power can be used merely as a means; only man, and with him, +
every rational creature, is an end in itself. He is the subject of the
moral law . . . because of the autonomy of his freedom . . . the
autonomy of the rational being.’
13. John Locke, ‘Second Treatise on Civil Government’, in E. Barker
(ed.), Social Contract, London: Oxford University Press, 1960, 7–23.
14. III.32.19
15. III.32.32
16. ’
The Law Code of Manu (Manava Dharmasastra), trans. Patrick Olivelle,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 2.2–4, 23.
17. III.181.35–38
18. II.55.10
19. XII.110.5–6
20. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, trans. Ignat Avsey,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, I, Part 2, Book 5, Chapter 4.
21. Bhishma and Krishna are Consequentialists. A Consequentialist
believes that a right act is ‘one that will produce the best outcome,
as judged impersonally and giving equal weight to everyone’s
interests’. Samuel Scheffler, Consequentialism and its Critics, Oxford:

+
 +

354 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Duty

Oxford University Press, 1988, 1. ‘Consequentialism is the theory

that the way to tell whether a particular choice is the right choice
for an agent to have made is to look at the relevant consequences
of the decision; to look at the relevant effects of the decision on the
world,’ as Philip Pettit tells us in his collection of essays
Consequentialism (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1993, xiii). Utilitarians,
like Bentham and Mill, were among the most famous
Consequentialists, who judged an action on how much it increased
the happiness of the world. Hence, their famous slogan: ‘the
greatest good for the greatest number’.
22. Bentham said famously: ‘Each to count for one and none for more
than one.’ Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation, New York: Hafner, 1049, chapter 1, n.4.
23. John Rawls points out elegantly the indifference of Consequentialism
to considerations of distributive justice in A Theory of Justice,
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1971.
24. Thomas Nagel provides other ghastly examples in a fine essay,
+ ‘War and Massacre’, in Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge +
University Press, 1979.
25. III.32.24
26. XII.270.20 is one of many examples of this.
27. III.34.2, 5. I have replaced ‘dharma’ for law, artha for profit and
kama for pleasure in van Buitenen’s translation.
28. III.34.38, 47
29. As a result of what Hindu philosophers called his svabhava, which
in turn was a result of his gunas, . and which also reflected his
karmic balance.
30. III.35.21
31. III.35.1b, 21
32. Legally minded persons will recognize Yudhishthira’s ‘bull-
headedness’ in the Latin saying, Fiat justitia et ruant coel—‘let
justice be done though the heavens fall’. Van Buitenen is quite right
in pointing out that one of the purposes of Book Three of the epic
is to build up Yudhishthira’s character, especially after his disastrous
performance in the dice game: ‘The Book of the Forest serves to build
the character of Yudhishthira . . . Faced with all these temptations

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Duty / 355

[he] remains firm . . . he had given his word . . . [It] is the celebration
of the highest value in the moral code of ancient Indians, truthfulness
and faithfulness under all circumstances.’ See his introduction to
The Book of the Forest (Aranyakaparvan),
. Mahabharata, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 177.
33. Ibid
34. V.70.55
35. V.151.20–22
36. V.151.25–26
37. It is the sage Markandeya who calls him ‘guileless’: ‘Do not grieve,
tiger among men, you are a kshatriya, enemy burner; you are
walking the road of blazing resolve that relies on the prowess of
your arms; for not the strongest bit of guile is found in you’ (na hi
te vrijinam
. . kimcid
. . ’
drsyate param anv
. api) III.276.2.
38. V.27.1–2
39. V.27.16, 20–21
40. V.28.3–5
41. van Buitenen, 133
42. V.3.20
+ +
43. V.31.22
44. At the end of the epic Yudhishthira is referred to as a person
. ’ . . ’ .
bestowed with anrsamsya—anrsamsya samayukata (XVII.3.30–32).
45. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Peter Constantine (trans.), New
York: Modern Library, 2001, 52.
46. See, for example, W.D. Hamilton, ‘The Genetic Evolution of Social
Behaviour I and II’, Journal of Theoretical Biology (1964), 7. 1–16, 17–
32; E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1975; Richard D. Alexander, The Biology
of Moral Systems, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987; Richard
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976;
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday
Life, New York: Vintage Books, 1995; E. Sober and D.S. Wilson,
Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
47. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol 1 (1871), Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971, 80.
48. George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966, Princeton
University Press, 1974, 94.

+
 +

356 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Duty

49. William Hamilton and Robert Axelrod connected reciprocity to

evolution via kin selection based on the insight that altruism does
flow towards one’s relatives in their seminal paper in Robert
Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, New York: Basic Books, 1984.
50. Robert Trivers, ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, Quarterly
Review of Biology (1971), 46.35–56.
51. Robert Axelrod, the American social theorist, conducted the
Prisoner’s Dilemma round-robin tournament in which Anatol
Rapaport won. See Anatol Rapaport, Fights, Games and Debates, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.
52. It is a pity that we use ‘tit for tat’ in unflattering ways. The Times
of India’s headline on 6 August 2006 read: ‘Tit for tat: India, Pak
play spy games, expel envoys’. The New York Times called
Pakistan’s firing of the Abdali nuclear missile ‘tit for tat’ in response
to India’s Prithvi, 26 March 2003.
53. III.33.23
54. III.33.8
55. Aristotle says: ‘States of character arise out of like activities. This is
+ why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because +
the states of character correspond to the differences between these.
It makes no small difference whether we form habits of one kind
from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all
the difference.’ Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a.
56. III.32.37
57. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 74.
58. Mrinal Miri, Identity and the Moral Life, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2003, 98. In this essay, Miri quotes Kierkegaard, who said
that the moral life is difficult because it requires the ‘transformation
of our whole subjectivity’.
59. M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with
Truth, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
60. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale, Allan Simmons (ed.), London:
Penguin Classics, 2007.

+
 +

Notes: Arjuna’s Despair / 357

4. Arjuna’s Despair

1. The offer is so appalling to Yudhishthira’s brother Bhima that he is

totally consumed by it in the first act of the eighth-century drama
Venisamhara.
2. V.57.18 (As usual, I mention only the book number, chapter number
and verse numbers when quoting from the Mahabharata.)
3. Many historians believe that the Mahabharata’s war did take place.
Although 3102 BC is the much-cited traditional date for the war, it
probably took place around 950 BC based on the evidence of Vedic
texts (John Keay, India: A History, New York: Grove Press, 2000).
Painted Grey Ware artefacts discovered at sites identified with
locations in the Mahabharata suggest that the great war probably
occurred between 1000 BC and 400 BC . (H. Kulke and E.
Rothermund, A History of India, London: Routledge, 1986, 45.)
4. V.196.1–4
5. V.197.17ff
6. J.A.B. van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata: Text
and Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 4. +
+
7. In Book Six, Bhishmaparvan, the Mahabharata goes backwards, as
we shall see in the next chapter. Sanjaya, the bard, has just told
Dhritarashtra that their commander-in-chief has fallen on the tenth
day of battle. Suddenly, at this point, the epic takes us back in time.
The war at Kurukshetra is about to begin. The slaying of Bhishma
is still on our minds when Arjuna feels confused and dejected in
the first chapter of the Gita. Scholars have long debated whether
the Gita belongs in the epic at all; many have called it an
interpolation. But to the ordinary Indian, it belongs there
incontrovertibly. A.K. Ramanujan reminds us that its central incident
in which a warrior suffers a failure of nerve, an attack of cowardice,
before battle, but who is then counselled and urged into battle,
occurs at least five times in the epic. The most ironic of these is
immediately before the big battle scenes, a comic scene in
Virataparvan. The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, gen. ed. Vinay
Dharwadker, Oxford University Press, 1999, 426.
8. Bhagavad Gita I.1. The Gita begins in Book Six of the Mahabharata
at VI.63.23. I shall be quoting from Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation

+
 +

358 / Notes: Arjuna’s Despair

of the Bhagavad Gita. As I looked for a good English translation of

this text, I discovered that there were more than thirty to choose
from, and like the Pandavan hero, I too became confused. A fine
article by Gerald Larson, ‘The Song Celestial: Two Centuries of the
Bhagavadgita in English’ was a good beginner’s guide. Vedanta
enthusiasts directed me to the slim Isherwood–Prabhavananda
translation, which has an introduction by Aldous Huxley on
perennial philosophy. While I thought it satisfying as literature—
after all Christopher Isherwood is a great writer—I felt it was not
the most accurate, and its interpretation was a de-ethnicized
Shankara combined with Western mysticism. Radhakrishnan’s
rendition I found to be dull and commentarial. Indologists
recommended Zaehner, and although his translation turned out to
be stilted, his wonderful discussions on Ramanuja, Shankara and
the Upanishads that run parallel in the text make it quite exciting.
Although an accomplished Orientalist, Zaehner was clearly attracted
to the notion of bhakti and the love of a personal god.
The most poetic is still the Victorian version of Sir Edwin Arnold,
+ and it has the virtue also of being the cheapest in the Dover thrift +
edition. Those seeking pure accuracy should read either Edgerton’s
translation or van Buitenen’s, who views the Gita as an integral
part of the epic and challenges the traditional idea that it was
inserted later. Don’t trust Mascaro’s version, which tries
unsuccessfully to be poetic. Bhaktivedanta’s rendition is a dull,
sectarian, Sunday school textbook, reflecting the Vaishnavite values
of Chaitanya. Since I am a beginner in Sanskrit, I found Winthrop
Sargeant’s very useful (but expensive); it is accompanied by an
interlinear Sanskrit text, a word-for-word grammatical commentary
and vocabulary.
In the end, I chose Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation because it
is both accurate, poetical, and has the great virtue of simplicity.
Before she died in 1993, she was professor of Sanskrit at Barnard/
Columbia and she created the translation for our generation.
Through this process of selecting I have come to realize that there
is no right or wrong translation and each one serves its particular
audience. Van Buitenen’s version is no good to a follower of Sai
Baba, as Arnold’s account will not interest a Sanskrit scholar.

+
 +

Notes: Arjuna’s Despair / 359

Mahatma Gandhi’s or Tilak’s use of the Gita in India’s freedom

struggle is as valid as Edgerton’s reading of the text as a Vaishnav
brahmin document of the first century AD. Emerson and Thoreau
used the Wilkins translation. Hegel used Humboldt’s (as well as
Schlegel’s and Wilkins’s). Gandhi used Sir Edwin Arnold’s, while
post-Independence Indians turned to Radhakrishnan’s.
9. Bhagavad Gita 1.14
10. Bhagavad Gita I.21–22
11. Bhagavad Gita I.26
12. Bhagavad Gita I.29, 30, 31
13. Bhagavad Gita I.47
14. Bhagavad Gita II.1–2
15. Bhagavad Gita II.5, 9
16. Karl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter
Paret, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, 76.
17. V.70.58
18. ‘700 fratricidal verses’ are the words of the Marxist historian D.D.
Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 2nd edition,
+ Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1975, 128. See Kunal Chakrabarti, +
‘The Lily and the Mud’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 July 2008,
60–70; Romila Thapar, ‘The Contribution of D.D. Kosambi to
Indology’, Interpreting Early India, Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1993.
19. Bhagavad Gita II.31
20. Bhagavad Gita II.37
21. Bhagavad Gita II.19
22. Bhagavad Gita II.21
23. Bhagavad Gita II.47: karmany . evadhikaras te ma phalesu. kadacana.
Eknath Easwaran translates this line as: ‘you have the right to
work, but never to the fruit of work’ (The Bhagavad Gita, trans.
Eknath Easwaran, London: Arkana/Penguin, 1986, 66). Van Buitenen
explains that ‘the right to work’ (adhikara) or ‘entitlement’ as he
translates it, is a technical term among Mimamsa philosophers,
who would not necessarily have agreed with Krishna’s advice: ‘it
is his desire for fruit that is the person’s entitlement. But Krishna
condemns such kamya (desire motivated) acts as conducive to
rebirth, and he upholds as ultimately beneficial only those acts that

+
 +

360 / Notes: Arjuna’s Despair

are naturally incumbent on one’ (J.A.B. van Buitenen, The

Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata, 163, footnote 13).
24. ‘Preserve the world’ is the celebrated notion of lokasamgraha..
Bhagavad Gita III.20 and 25 = Mahabharata VI.25.25.
25. Bhagavad Gita III.35; XVIII.47 = Mahabharata VI.25.20 and 35.
26. Martha Nussbaum has eloquently pointed this out in an essay,
‘The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis’,
Journal of Legal Studies, XXIX, 2, Part 2 (June 2000), 1005–36.
27. See the discussion between ‘duty’ (or deontological) ethics and
Consequentialism in Chapter 3.
28. From Pat Parker’s novel Regeneration, London: Penguin, 1992. Robert
Graves is one of the historical characters in this first part of a
trilogy on World War I.
29. Bhagavad Gita XI.12–13
30. Bhagavad Gita XI.23, 25
31. Bhagavad Gita XI.32–33
32. Bhagavad Gita XVIII.63
33. VI.102.36
+ 34. VI.102.37 +
35. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, London: Faber and Faber, 1944, 31.
36. Thomas Nagel explains how a person can feel strongly both types
of moral intuitions and how it can lead to an unsolvable moral
dilemma. See his essay ‘War and Massacre’ in Mortal Questions,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 53–74.
37. Amartya Sen, ‘Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason’, The
Journal of Philosophy, XCVI. 9 (September 2000), 485.
38. Nussbaum, 1009
39. V.60.1–3
40. Nussbaum, 1011
41. VII.34.19
42. VII.49.14–16, 22–23 CSL
43. VII.49.32–35 CSL
44. VII.50.1–4 CSL
45. XI.20.32
46. VII.51.20ff. ‘Oaths [in the Mahabharata] are connected directly with
the proper functioning of world order, insofar as their fulfilment
depends upon and helps to preserve that order; likewise, to frame

+
 +

Notes: Arjuna’s Despair / 361

it as an oath raises any act to the level of action in support of

dharma and truth.’ Ruth C. Katz, Arjuna in the Mahabharata: Where
Krishna Is, There is Victory. Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 1989, 140.
47. VII.56.6ff
48. VII.75.28
49. VII.121.15
50. Poona Critical Edition, 7, Appendix 1, 16, 5–10. This impressive
moment is not recorded in the Critical Edition, but is found in
Bengali and Devanagari texts.
51. VII.121.30ff
52. I shall return to the dubious moral quality of Krishna’s advice in
killing the vile Jayadratha in Chapter 7.
53. Iliad XVIff. I am indebted to Ruth Katz’s interesting discussion of
Arjuna’s aristeia, and her comparison of Arjuna and Achilles. See
Katz, 137–39; 151, footnote 14.
54. VII.125.1–2. Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the
Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 26ff. Cited in Katz, 144, footnote 44.
+ +
55. Literally: kshetra
. = field; dharma = righteousness.
56. The literature on the Western realist tradition in international
affairs is vast. A good starting point for the uninitiated might be
Robert Kaplan’s entertaining article, ‘Kissinger, Metternich and
Realism’, Atlantic Monthly (June 1999), 73–82, which is a longish
review of Kissinger’s masterly book, The World Restored.
57. M.A. Mehendale discusses this subject insightfully in Reflections on
the Mahabharata War, Simla: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1995.
He reaches the same conclusion. With reference to the third criterion
above, ‘the Kuruksetra war turns out to be a dharmayuddha for the
Pandavas, but not for the Kauravas’ (2). As to the second criterion,
he says, ‘the conclusion . . . can only be that from the point of view
of the observance of the rules of war, the Mahabharata cannot be
called a dharmayuddha, the heroes of both sides having to share the
responsibility for this’ (23).
58. IX.60.39–46
59. Such as Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546), Francisco Suarez (1548–
1617), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1704),
Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Emerich de Vattel (1714–67).

+
 +

362 / Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness

60. Sheldon Pollock comments that unlike the Mahabharata, Homer,

Virgil, Tasso and other pre-modern writers of the Western narrative
poetry were sensitive to the pity of war but not as much to the
possibility of its injustice.
61. Michael Walzer discusses this issue in Just and Unjust Wars: A
Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, New York: Basic Books,
1977, 81, 90.
62. Vaughan Pilikian’s Introduction to his translation of Drona (vol
1), Book Seven of the Mahabharata, Clay Sanskrit Library, New
York: New York University Press, 18.
63. V.70.55–58
64. V.26.3 CSL
65. Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins
to AD 1300, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2002, 278.

5. Bhishma’s Selflessness

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote is from Frederic Carpenter, Emerson

+ and Asia, New York: Haskell House, 1968. Emerson also wrote a +
famous and influential poem, ‘Brahma’, which Friedrich read out
to us in class. Thoreau’s is from his Journal, vol 1, reproduced in
Paul Friedrich’s fine book, which he wrote some years later, Gita
within Walden, New York: State University of New York Press,
2008, 1.
2. Bhagavad Gita II.47: karmany . evadhikaras te ma phaleshu
. kadacana. As
in Chapter 4, I shall be quoting mostly from Barbara Stoler Miller’s
translation.
3. Bhagavad Gita III.8
4. vimatsarah. = free from envy. Bhagavad Gita IV.22. The previous
quotes are from IV.20 and IV.21.
5. Bhagavad Gita II.48. The previous quote about ‘unattached and
free’ is at IV.23. Barbara Stoler Miller translates the word ‘yoga’ as
‘discipline’, which is sometimes unsatisfactory. R.C. Zaehner and
others leave it alone. Van Buitenen mostly leaves it as yoga, but he
clarifies the problem: ‘Any translator will have difficulty in giving
a satisfactory rendering of the word yoga. First of all, let the reader
not mistake the yoga of the Bhagavadgita for the Yoga of Patanjali

+
 +

Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness / 363

or, worse, Hatha-Yoga or even Kundalini Yoga. The word yoga

and cognates of it occur close to 150 times in the Gita, and it needs
attention . . . When yoga occurs by itself it is oftentimes an
abbreviation for karma- or bhakti-yoga. Yoga, then, implies (1) the
process of a difficult effort; (2) a person committed to it; (3) the
instrument he uses; (4) the course of action chosen; and (5) the
prospect of a goal.’ J.A.B. van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgita in the
Mahabharata: Text and Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981, 17–18.
6. Bhagavad Gita II.50. In the second line, I have substituted ‘yoga’ for
‘discipline’ in Miller’s translation. Zaehner translates the second
line, yogah ’
. karmasu kausalam, as: ‘for Yoga is skill in [performing]
works’. Van Buitenen translates ‘yoga’ here as ‘singleness of
purpose’, which also makes sense. When one acts with singleness
of purpose one is ‘intent on the act’ and is not distracted by the
‘fruits of the act’. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood
render this less literally, but in keeping with the spirit of the text:
‘Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done
+ without anxiety.’ This classic translation with an introduction by +
Aldous Huxley is still in print. Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God, New
York: New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam, 41.
7. My father’s mystic way was the Gita’s favourite way of salvation.
The Gita’s religion is a compromise between the speculation of the
intellectuals and the emotionalism of popular religion, which in
later times comes to play a great role; the cult of Krishna (identified
with the Vedic god Vishnu in the Gita XI.24 and 30) must have
originated in such local popular circles. The impersonal Brahman is
still the First Principle, devotion to God is preferred. As the Gita
says, it is not so easy to feel a mystic’s warm personal devotion for
an abstract, impersonal Absolute. The mystic vision of God in the
eleventh chapter is the climax of the poem.
8. Barbara Stoler Miller, Afterword to her translation of the
Bhagavadgita, New York: Bantam Books, 1986, 155.
9. J.A.B. van Buitenen speculates about whether the Gita was written
partly to justify Bhishma’s killing (16–17). In making the connection
of Arjuna’s dilemma and Bhishma’s death in the preamble of the
Bhagvadgitaparvan, van Buitenen concludes: ‘In the light of all this

+
 +

364 / Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness

it cannot be reasonably argued that the setting of the Gita is a

random choice dictated by purely dramatic (read melodramatic)
considerations. The preamble tells us that Bhisma . is dead, that
Arjuna’s reluctance to fight in this war was therefore fully justified,
and that consequently a need existed to override Arjuna’s reluctance
with a higher truth, so that in fact that will come about which we
know is already the case. This is a very subtle narrative weaving
that requires the preamble so often forgotten and that also
masterfully contrasts the high dilemma of the Gita with the chapter
following immediately—the formal approval-seeking by
Yudhisthira’
.. (3).
10. V.23.7 (As usual, I mention only the book number, chapter number
and verse numbers when quoting from the Mahabharata.)
11. I.94.91
12. VI.41.36ff
13. Iravati Karve, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, Hyderabad: Disha
Books/Orient Longman, 1991, 15-16. Others have also condemned
Bhishma’s behaviour. M.A. Mehendale, ‘Draupadi’s Question’,
Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda, 35 (1985), 3–4.194; I.M.
+ +
Thakur, Thus Spake Bhishma, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992, 141–
47.
14. I.M. Thakur has expressed concern about the possible political
implications of exposing Shakuni in public and the potential damage
to the alliance between the Gandhara and Hastinapura states.
Gandhara was an ally of the Kauravas through Gandhari’s marriage
to Dhritarashtra. Thus Spake Bhishma, 145–46.
15. Karve, 8
16. Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, 1776; republished by Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976; also in the Collected Edition of the Works and Correspondence of
Adam Smith, London: Dent, 1910, vol 1, 13.
17. Albert Hirschman describes in his classic, Passions and Interests, that
the idea of the basic self-interested nature of beings originated with
statecraft in the seventeenth century, and gradually it grew to
cover all human conduct by the eighteenth century. Albert O.
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
Capitalism Before its Triumph, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1977, 42.

+
 +

Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness / 365

18. Amartya Sen points out in a famous essay, ‘Rational Fools’, that
‘self-interest’ does not fully explain the behaviour of real people,
and it is inaccurate to identify Smith’s ‘prudence’ with ‘self-interest’.
See On Ethics and Economics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, 22;
‘Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of
Economic Theory’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1977).
19. Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (I.I.I.), writes:
‘Howsoever selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently
some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of
others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he
derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind
is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of
others, when we either see it or are made to conceive it in a very
lively manner.’
20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The
Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol 3, ed. Roger D. Masters and
Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters,
Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall, Hanover, NH: University
+ Press of New England, 1992, 36. See also Pierre Force, Self-Interest +
before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003, 8. Amartya Sen makes the point
that an emotion like Smith’s sympathy (or Rousseau’s pity) is
laudable but it is still egoistic for ‘one is pained at others’ pain’,
such as in seeing a child tortured, ‘and the pursuit of one’s own
utility is helped by sympathetic action’. Therefore, he proposes
‘commitment’ as a better option since ‘it does not make you feel
personally worse off, but you think it is wrong and you
are ready to do something to stop it’. ‘Rational Fools’, 6.
21. Donald Hall, the American poet, recounts that Henry Moore, the
sculptor, was perpetually in this state, and his wife had to drag him
home from his studio at midnight because he had forgotten lunch
and dinner, and also to send bills to his customers. Donald Hall,
Life Work, Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
22. See Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, New York: Harper, 1991; Abraham Maslow, Motivation
and Personality, New York: Harper, 1954.
23. I.123.60–64

+
 +

366 / Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness

24. Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, New York: Taylor &
Francis, 1953, republished New York: Vintage, 1989, 6.
25. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863), The Collected Works of John
Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson, 31 vols, Toronto and London,
1965–91, vol x, 215, 231.
26. Bhagavad Gita IV.22
27. This appeared in an essay on war and action in the Cambridge
Review in 1920, when E.M. Forster was writing A Passage to India.
Cited by Barbara Stoler Miller in her Afterword to her translation,
158.
28. David Riesman, the American social thinker, characterized persons
as ‘inner directed’, who tend to set their own standards and seem
to care less about what others think of them. On the other hand,
‘outer directed’ persons let others set the mark and are less in
control of their actions and feelings. David Riesman and Nathan
Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character,
1950.
29. See note 27 above.
+ 30. T.N. Madan, Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu +
Culture, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, 2; Louis Demont,
‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions’, Contributions to Indian
Sociology, 9 (1960), 67–89.
31. Romila Thapar explains this in a fascinating essay, ‘Renunciation:
The Making of a Counter-culture?’ in Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early
Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, 877–79.
32. Van Buitenen says, ‘Krsna’s
.. . argument for action is two-pronged:
he defends the right kind of action against, on the one hand, the
overzealous advocates of Vedic ritualism and, on the other, the
propounders of the doctrine that all acts should be given up. His
argument is at once simple and complex: simple, because he finds
cause to propose that action is both necessary and unproductive of
rebirth; complex, because he attempts to hold on to the orthodoxy
of social action while revolutionizing it from within, and at the
same time to demolish the heterodoxy of renunciation-at-any-price
without discarding the value of renunciation per se. These were the
issues of the time, and Krsna
. . . addresses them before going on to the
consolations of personal religion’ (16–17).

+
 +

Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness / 367

33. Bhagavad Gita III.30–31. I have used van Buitenen’s translation

here as it is more effective, partly because he has not translated
karman into ‘action’ as Miller does. Van Buitenen says, ‘[Krsna’s] .. .
overriding concern is that a person can act without karman, however
one might philosophically confront this issue. His Vedanta
successors recognize the distinction and hold, with Mimamsa, . the
self/soul/person is not the agent of his acts and the experient of
their fruits (kartr. as well as bhoktr)
. and reject the Samkhya
. view that
only prakrti
. acts, and that the purusa. is solely the experient (bhoktr)’
.
(23).
34. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Dharmatatva, trans. Apratim Ray,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. See also Sudipta Kaviraj,
The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the
Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
35. Shankara (c. 788–820) offered an influential Advaita Vedanta reading
of this concept; Ramanuja (c. 1017–37) had an attractive ‘modified
non-dualist’ interpretation, closer to the bhakti or devotional spirit
+ of the Gita. +
36. G.W.F. Hegel, On the Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name
Bhagavad-Gita by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Berlin, 1826, ed. and trans.
Herbert Herring, New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical
Research, 1995.
37. Ibid, 15
38. Hegel’s other major objection is that ‘to act means nothing else than
achieving some purpose; one acts to achieve something, some
result. The realization of the purpose is success; that the action is
successful gives some satisfaction, a fruit inseparable from the
performed action’ (ibid, 47). Hence, Hegel is dubious about Krishna’s
principle about remaining indifferent to the fruits of action. In fact,
he says, ‘the more senselessly and stupidly an action is performed,
the greater the involved indifference towards success.’ Certainly, it
is normal to feel satisfaction for a job that is completed, but
Krishna’s advice to act without attachment to reward does not
preclude, I think, this sense of satisfaction that a disinterested
person feels at a job well done. The agent’s satisfaction when
achieving the purpose of the activity is not the same thing as the

+
 +

368 / Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness

agent’s yearning for personal advancement or material rewards.

Hegel is right in thinking that an action cannot exclude its result or
goal. But an agent who acts in a disinterested manner is fully aware
of those results. There is a difference between fulfilling the purpose
of an activity and desiring personal rewards from it. The karma yogi
is focused on doing the job well but not on what it means for his
personal advancement. So, I think this objection of Hegel’s is
unsustainable.
39. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, London: Faber and Faber,
1963, 120–23. Hannah Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany before
Hitler’s rise to power, and who reported on Eichmann’s trial for
the New Yorker, concluded that aside from a desire for improving
his career, Eichmann showed no trace of an anti-Semitic personality
or of any psychological damage to his character. She called him the
embodiment of the ‘banality of evil’, as he appeared at his trial to
have an ordinary and common personality, displaying neither guilt
nor hatred. To her mind, he discredits the idea that the Nazi
criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from ordinary
+ people. +
40. Peter Singer, How Are We to Live? Amherst, New York: Prometheus
Books, 1995, 186. Singer quotes from R. Hilberg, The Destruction of
the European Jews, Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961, 218–19.
41. Posted on the web on 4 December 2004 under Comments to the
Speaking Tree on http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com.
42. Aristotle, Politics, Book II, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1905, 61–63.
43. Isaiah Berlin pointed this out in a classic essay called ‘The Pursuit
of an Ideal’ in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (first published in
1959), New York: Knopf, 1991. The title of the collection comes
from Immanuel Kant’s line: ‘Out of timber so crooked as that from
which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.’
44. Jane Mansbridge discusses these issues in her introduction to
Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Jane J. Mansbridge, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990.
45. The expression ‘general benevolence’ belongs to Henry Sidgewick,
the nineteenth century moral philosopher, who also emphasized
the importance of achieving an impartial perspective in moral acts.

+
 +

Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness / 369

In rather dramatic words, he called it the ability to adopt ‘the point

of view of the universe’. Henry Sidgewick, The Methods of Ethics,
7th edn., London: Macmillan, 1907, 379–83.
46. Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf
Hoess, ed. Constantine Fitz Gibbon, London: Pan, 1961.
47. Benedict R. Anderson, Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese,
Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Dept. of Asian Studies, Cornell
University, 1965.
48. Claude Adrien Helvetius, A Treatise on Men, trans. W. Hooper,
New York: Burt Franklin, 1969, vol 2, 18.
49. Martha Nussbaum explains this in Upheavals of Thought: The
Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003.
50. T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets, Faber and Faber:
London, 1944.
51. Ibid, 31
52. This is a rough paraphrase of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1.5–22, 29–35.
53. Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada
+ Buddhism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 4. +
54. Contemporary Buddhist scholars are divided. The monks of the
orthodox Southern Buddhism (Theravada) believe in anatta literally.
However, many scholars, such as the flamboyant Mrs Rhys Davids,
felt the original teaching of the Buddha did not contain this
doctrine. Zaehner agreed with her, arguing that in denying the self,
the Buddha merely meant the ‘elimination of the ego’. The renowned
Austrian Buddhist scholar Frauwallner also regarded anatta merely
as the ‘strategic denial of any description of the self’. Steven Collins
believes that the way the texts present anatta is in opposition to an
aspect of the human experience; for example, ‘consciousness is not-
self’, and he concludes that ‘Buddhist metaphysics could be reduced
to a kind of pragmatic agnosticism in which the self is not so much
denied as declared inconceivable.’ Collins, 10.
55. David Hume, 1739, Treatise on Human Nature, London.
56. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, 1637. Descartes wrote: ‘I next
considered attentively what I was; and I saw that while I could
pretend that I had no body, that there was no world, and no place
for me to be in, I could not pretend that I was not; on the contrary,

+
 +

370 / Notes: Bhishma’s Selflessness

from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other
things it evidently and certainly followed that I existed. On the
other hand, if I had merely ceased to think, even if everything else
that I had ever imagined had been true, I had no reason to believe
that I should have existed. From this I recognized that I was a
substance whose whole essence or nature is to think and whose
being requires no place and depends on no material thing.’
57. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series, New York: Harvest/
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960, 154.
58. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little Brown
and Co., 1991, 429. Dennet writes: ‘“Call me Ishmael” is the
beginning sentence of Moby Dick. But who do we call Ishmael? Call
Melville, Ishmael? No. Call Ishmael, Ishmael. Melville has created
a fictional character named Ishmael. As you read the book you
learn about Ishmael, about his life, about his beliefs and desires, his
acts and attitudes. You learn a lot more about Ishmael than Melville
ever explicitly tells you. Some of it you can read into the character
as the story progresses by our own imagination. The self in the
+ same way is rather like a fictional character. Let us imagine a +
novel-writing machine, and the first sentence of the novel reads,
“Call me Gilbert”. It is an autobiography of some fictional character,
Gilbert. This thought experiment is to condition us to the fact that
we are a consciousness-creating machine; there is no “thinker”
sitting behind our thoughts. The same is true of your brain: it
doesn’t know what it’s doing either.’
59. Mundakopanisad
.. . III. The image can also be found in the Mahabharata
in Dronaparvan (VII. 201.76). The poet, A.K. Ramanujan, has rendered
this passage freely and elegantly into English. A.K. Ramanujan, The
Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, Oxford
University Press, 1999, 181.
60. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and
the Making of Consciousness, London: Heinemann, 1999.
61. Ibid
62. Robert Kirk, Raw Feeling: A Philosophical Account of the Essence of
Consciousness, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
63. Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience, Schoningh: Imprint
Academic, 1995, 9. Joseph Levine is credited by the Oxford Companion

+
 +

Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety / 371

to the Mind for having called attention to qualia in a well known

paper in 1983, ‘Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap’. His
examples were the smell of fresh ground coffee, or the taste of
pineapple. The most celebrated literary example of qualia is the
moment in Marcel Proust’s novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,
when the taste of the Madeleine dipped in tea triggers in the
narrator a vivid and intense childhood memory of another time
and place. Only Proust’s narrator will ever know the exact taste of
the Madeleine on that day, and only his memory can transport him
to his childhood.
64. Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review
(1974), 435–50.
65. Quoted in David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel, London:
Secker and Warburg, 2002, 18.
66. Metzinger, 3
67. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans.
S.C. Middlemore, 2 vols, New York: Harper, 1958, vol 1, 143.
68. William Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.58.
+ 69. Ibid 3.1.85 +
70. Cynthia Marshall gives a fine account of the emergence of this new
subjectivity in the early modern texts. Cynthia Marshall, The
Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
71. Lodge, 16.

6. Karna’s Status Anxiety

1. Mahabharata I.127.15: katham adityasamkasam

. mrgi
. vyaghram janisyati.
.
As usual, I mention only the book number, chapter number and
verse numbers when quoting from the Mahabharata. I gratefully
acknowledge the use of the following translations in this chapter:
(1) K.M. Ganguly, Mahabharata, Calcutta: P.C. Roy (1883 to 1896),
reprinted New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, Book Eight. (2)
Adam Bowles, Mahabharata, Book Eight, Karna, vol 1, Clay Sanskrit
Library, New York: New York University Press, 2006. (3) Kevin
McGrath, The Sanskrit Hero: Karna in the Epic Mahabharata, Lieden
and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2004. (4) Quotes from the Adiparvan, Book

+
 +

372 / Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety

One of the epic, are from van Buitenen’s Chicago University Press
translation.
2. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Boston, 1890. William’s
equally famous bother, Henry James, wrote great novels such as
Portrait of a Lady and Wings of the Dove, which also explore the
anxiety of human beings about their status.
3. The epic employs the Sanskrit word vidhana for this trial of martial
skills.
4. I.124.18–25
5. Although this is Karna’s official entry in the epic, we have already
been informed of his inborn attributes (earrings and breastplate)
that make him invincible. Book One, Adiparvan, mentions that the
earrings made his face shine and his breastplate distinguished him
from ordinary beings: sahajam . kavacam . bibhrat kundaloddyotitananah
.. .
(I.57.82).
6. One of the meanings of the word ‘Karna’ is ‘the one with ears’ or
‘the ear-ringed one’. Kevin McGrath explains that it is entirely
fitting for a hero who is intensely preoccupied with fame (‘that
+ which is heard’) should have his name connected with ‘hearing’. +
The Sanskrit Hero: Karna in the Epic Mahabharata, Leiden: E.J. Brill,
2004, 31.
7. ’.
Do it ‘better’, visesavat: partha yat te krtam ’.
. . karma visesavad aham. tatah/
.
karisye
. ’
pasyatam
. nrnam
. matmana vismayam . gamah . (I.126.9). During
his dramatic entry in the epic, Karna is also described as padacariva
parvatah, . ‘like a walking mountain’. This and the subsequent
translations of the specific verses are by Kevin McGrath. Kripa, like
Drona, is a teacher of the princes. He is also the ‘match referee’ of
this tournament.
8. yat krtam
. . tatra parthena tac cakara mahabalah: ‘What was done by
Arjuna—that the mighty one [Karna] has done’ (I.126.12).
9. vridavanatam
. ananam: ‘his face [was] bowed down by shame’
(I.126.33).
10. bhayam arjunasamjatam
. ksipram
. antaradhiyata: ‘The fear born of Arjuna
quickly vanished’ (I.127.23), when Duryodhana realizes that he
may have found a match in Karna.
11. Duryodhana says there are three classes of king: acarya trividha yoni
rajnam ’
. sastraviniscaye tatkulinas’ ca suras
’ ca senam
. yas ca prakarsati
.

+
 +

Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety / 373

(‘Master, in the opinion of sacred teaching, the origin of kings is

threefold; one, of family; [the second is] a hero; and [third] whoever
leads an army’) (I.126.34).
12. I.127.1–4
13. sutaputra or the ‘son a charioteer’ is the epithet that attaches to
Karna for all his life. The Pandavas and the Kauravas, sometimes
from meanness and at other times just unthinkingly, address him
thus throughout the epic. And so do others. Practically every
Indian child today seems to know that sutaputra is the derogatory
way to refer to a low-caste person.
14. katham adityasamkasam
. mrgi
. vyaghram . janisyati
. (I.127.15). Although
the epic uses both words vira and sura ’ to describe Karna, McGrath
’
translates sura as ‘hero’, saving vira for ‘warrior’. In this instance,
Duryodhana uses the grander sura ’ to describe Karna.
15. I.127.10
16. Draupadi says: naham . varayami sutam (I.1827.3). This incident is
located at I.174–85 in the Critical Edition. The rejection by Draupadi
was not included in the Critical Edition of the epic because according
+ to the editor, V.S. Sukthankar, it is from ‘late and inferior or +
conflated manuscripts’. Nevertheless, he says that ‘this seemingly
beautiful little passage . . . won its way into people’s hearts’.
Sukthankar adds, ‘the brave little Draupadi . . . snubs openly . . .
the semi-divine bastard, the understudy of the villain . . . the
unwanted suitor’. V.S. Sukthankar, Critical Studies in the Mahabharata,
Bombay: Karnataka Publishing House, 1944, 77–78.
17. James Tod depicts Karna as ‘the Hindu Apollo’, because of his
radiance. This is similarly an aspect of Achilles. Annals and Antiquities
of Rajasthan, 1929, vol II, 9.637, Reprinted in 1990 by Low Price
Editions.
18. yad ayam. katthate nityam hantaham . pandavan
.. iti/nayam. kalapi sampurna
.
pandavanam
.. . mahatmanam.
19. garjitva sutaputra tvam ’
. saradabhram ivajalam.
20. ’
sura garjanti satatam. pravrsiva
.. balahakah. phalam ’ prayacchanti
. casu
bijam uptam .rtav iva (VII.133.25).
21. A.K. Warder, Indian Kavya Literature, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1989, 89.
22. Adam Smith throws light on Karna’s anxiety about his social

+
 +

374 / Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety

position when he asks: ‘To what purpose is all the toil and bustle
in the world?’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. ‘What is the end of
avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and pre-
eminence? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of
with sympathy, complacency and approbation . . . To feel that we
are taken no notice of necessarily disappoints the most ardent
desires of human nature.’ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002, 61.
23. Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, New York: Vintage, 2005, 5.
24. Ibid, 9
25. The apt phrase, ‘leaky balloon’, is de Botton’s. See note above.
26. J.H. Hutton, Caste in India, 4th edn., London: Oxford University
Press, 1963, 1.
27. VIII.32.44–48 CSL
28. The body of literature on American affirmative action is large. I
would commend the reader to the fine bibliography appended to
Robert Fullenwider’s entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy entitled ‘Affirmative Action’. The best case for the
+ +
‘integration argument’ is made by Elizabeth Anderson in a long
article, ‘Integration, Affirmative Action, and Strict Scrutiny’, New
York University Law Review, 77 (November 2002), 1195–1271. Two
other books build on this case: Robert Fullenwider and Judith
Lichtenberg’s Levelling the Playing Field: Justice, Politics, and College
Admissions, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, and Lesley
Jacobs, Pursuing Equal Opportunities, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004. The most insightful piece I have read from
the viewpoint of moral philosophy is Thomas Nagel’s ‘Equal
Treatment and Compensatory Justice’ published in 1973 in Philosophy
and Public Affairs. He argues that affirmative action might be
beneficial and not necessarily be unjust because the system of
linking of rewards to credentials might itself be wrong. Alan
Goldman, in support of preferences, argues that the rule of
competences should normally apply in selection. However, if the
application of this rule might compound existing injustice where
opportunities are unequal, then violation of the rule is justified.
Justice and Reverse Discrimination, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979.

+
 +

Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety / 375

29. My friend, the historian Rajat Kanta Ray, burst into song one day
over dinner with this Bengali song from Tagore’s Gitabitan. Ray
then graciously wrote down this translation on a paper napkin for
me.
30. Thomas Nagel explains these in his ‘A Defence of Affirmative
Action’, Testimony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, 18 June 1981.
31. Amartya Sen, in a book, Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, edited
by Kenneth Arrow and others, points out that merit is a dependent
idea and its meaning depends on how a society defines a desirable
act.
32. ‘You will be king’: raja bhavisyasi . (V.138.9); ‘royal fan’: vyajana;
‘great white umbrella’: chatram . . . mahac chvetam; padau tava
grahisyanti:
. ‘they will touch your feet’ (V.138.12).
33. vijayam . vasusenasya
. ghosayantu
. ca pandavah/sa
.. . tvam . parivrtah
. . parthair
naksatrair
. iva candramah . (V.138.26–27).
34. .sasthe
. tvamca
. tatha kale draupadi upagamisyati . (V.138.15).
35. anrtam
.. . notsahe kartum. dhartarastrasya
. dhimatah. (V.139.17). David
+ Shulman has pointed out that Karna is the quintessential hero and +
his hero’s dharma is different from that of a king. ‘[Karna] is
wholly identified with the ethos of the hero’s . . . path to fame . . .
His world is closed, relatively static, locked into meaning.’ He
would be endangering the hero’s eternal fame were he to switch
sides. The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 399.
36. Karna’s elegantly crafted reply is at V.139.3–22: ‘inauspicious’:
yatha na kusalam ’ (V.139.3–4); ‘from affection’: sauhardat; ‘not from
birth’: samjatam
. . kamabandhanam (V.139.9–11).
37. Yudhishthira then ‘will not uphold the kingdom’: na sa rajyam
grahisyati
. (V.139.21); ‘be forced to pass the kingdom on to
Duryodhana’: prapya . . . mahad rajyam . . . .sphitam . duryodhanaya . . .
sampradayam
. (V.139.22); ‘Let conscientious Yudhishthira be king
forever’: sa eva raja dharmatma sasvato ’ ’ stu yudhisthirah
.. . (V.139.21).
38. kundali
.. baddhakavaco devagarbhah . ’
sriya vrtah
. . (V.143.5).
39. asadhyam kim . nu loke syad yuvayoh . sahitatmanoh . (V.143.10).
40. ‘obey his mother’s wishes’: matrvacah . . kuru; ‘does not make him
waver’: cacala naiva karnasya . matih . satyadhrtes
. tada (V.144.3).

+
 +

376 / Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety

41. ‘abandoned by her’: avakirno . smi te; ‘denied fame and glory’:
’. ’
yasahkirtinasanam (V.144.5). ‘I was born a kshatriya, but never
received what was due to a kshatriya/What enemy would do
anything so evil’: aham . ca ksatriyo jato na praptah
. ksatrasatkriyam/
.
tvatkrte
. kim
. nu papiyah
. ’
satruh
. kuryan mamahitam (V.144.60).
42. kim. mam ksatram
. vadisyati
. (V.144.10).
’.
43. ‘She will thus always have her five sons’: na te jatu nasisyanti putrah
pañca (V.144.22). Iravati Karve chastises Karna for this answer.
Although not mean-hearted, she does not think that his answer
stands up to moral scrutiny: ‘On the face of it it appears to be a
generous gesture. It seems like one of the exaggerated gestures he
[Karna] was so fond of making . . . He had neither love nor pity for
Kunti. He was equally indifferent to his so-called brothers. When
he said he would not kill the others, it was not generosity or love
which prompted him, but extreme contempt. The meaning of his
promise was that he would engage with the one he thought his
equal. He was not concerned with the others. This contempt and
overconfidence was not misplaced in a kshatriya. But it was certainly
+ not appropriate in this context. This was a real war, not a +
tournament. It was his duty to help Duryodhana win the war and
not to engage in an empty boast. He was hurting Duryodhana’s
cause in promising not to kill the others, especially Dharma
[Yudhishthira]. It has to be said that he ignored Duryodhana’s
need and was carried away by a false notion of his own greatness.’
Iravati Karve, Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, Hyderabad: Disha
Books, 1991, 151.
44. I.123.10–39
45. For a historical discussion of this process of assimilation in the
development of the caste system, see Romila Thapar, Early India,
124–26, 278; Vijay Nath, Puranas and Acculturation: A Historico-
Anthropological Perspective, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2001,
27ff; M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India; Ghurye, The
Scheduled Tribes.
46. Shashikant Hingonekar, ‘Ekalavya’, cited in Gail Omvedt, Dalit
Visions: The Anti-caste Movement and the Construction of an Indian
Identity, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 8.
47. III.284.10–18

+
 +

Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety / 377

48. III.284.35
49. III.285.4; 6–7
50. ‘One whose vow is true’: satyavrata.
51. In the previous sentence: ‘Karna reminds him laughingly’ (prahasan
III.294.9); ‘he would become vulnerable’ (‘accessible’, gamaniya); ‘If
I would give you, O deity, both my ear-rings and breastplate/I
would give myself a death sentence’: yadi dasyami te deva kundale .
kavacam. tatha/vadhyatam upayasyami (III.294.16).
52. ‘celestial creatures’: danavas and siddhas (III.294.36).
53. karnam ’
. . loke yasasa yojayitva (III.294.40).
54. Kevin McGrath concludes, ‘Without his ear-rings, Karna is a hero
without himself’. He is dead, or soon to be dead—the earrings
being an emblem for ‘the identity of his life’ (31–32). Hence, Karna
is referred to as kundali kavaci suro, ’ a hero with ‘earrings and
breastplate’ (III.291.17).
55. In return Karna receives a missile from Indra, sakti, ’ which is
flawless. Thus, although he is no longer invincible, he still has the
potential to destroy Arjuna. But he will never be able to use the
+ weapon against Arjuna, thanks to a clever strategy of Krishna’s, +
who never underestimated Karna’s capabilities and reminded the
Pandavas on more than one occasion, ‘What man is there in the
world who can withstand Karna/with a missile in his hand?’:
’
saktihastam. punah. karnam
. . ko lokesti puman iha/ ya enam abhitisthet.. ...
(VIII.155.13).
56. bibhemi na tatha mrtyor
. yatha bibhye’ nrtad
. aham (III.296.6).
57. For Bhishma’s vilification of Karna, see V.16–21; 48.32–41; 6.94,
6–9; 61.15–17; 165.2–7). McGrath discusses the antagonism between
Bhishma and Karna, 100–11.
58. Earlier, Duryodhana had told his warriors something very similar
in the Karnaparvan: jayo vapi vadho vapi yudhyamanasya samyuge: . ‘For
one fighting in battle, there is either victory or death’ (VIII.2.9).
59. VIII.32.49–52 CSL. Note that the Shalya episode follows the vulgate
and not the Critical Edition.
60. He likens Karna to the sun: Adityasadrsa. . ’
61. napi sutakule jatam
. karnam
. . manye kathamcana
. (VIII.24.151).
62. ‘Just as Shalya is superior to Krishna, so am I superior to Arjuna.
As [Krishna] knows horsemanship . . . so does Shalya. Just as no

+
 +

378 / Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety

one bears bows as I do, so no one can match Shalya in leading

horses’ (VIII.22, 53–56).
63. The interchange between Shalya and Karna takes place from VIII.26
to VIII.29. ‘. . . an enemy with the face of a friend’: mitramukhah.
’
satruh.. He also refers to Shalya as a ‘betrayer of friendship’:
mitradroh (VIII.29.22).
64. The epic fight is described in VIII.66. See Georges Dumezil’s work
on the opposition of Surya and Indra, Mythe Et Epopee, I, II and III,
Paris: Gallimard, 1968–73, reprinted in one volume, 1995. See vol I
(1965), chapters 1–4. Kevin McGrath also writes about the dualism,
explaining how this binarism is part of the kshatriya world view
(72, 85, 95ff).
65. Karna charged his arrow with a speech act. hato’ si vai phalguna:
‘You are dead, Arjuna’ (VIII.66.9).
66. Then, ‘the earth swallowed the wheel’: agrasan mahi cakram
(VIII.66.52).
67. ‘I think dharma does not always protect’: manye na nityam . paripati
dharmah. (VIII.66.43).
+ 68. ‘Karna weeps in anger’: kopad asruny ’ . avartayat; ‘wait a moment’: +
muhuratam . ksama
. pandava.
..
69. ’ ’ ca dharmas ca jayas’ marisa/priyani
yasas . . sarvani
. ca tena ketuna . . .
apatan (VIII.67.16). McGrath explains this verse thus: ‘“Glory”,
because no other hero in the poem is as passionate about glory as
Karna is, and one could reasonably aver that no other hero possesses
or obtains such glory as Karna held. “Dear things”, because this
was a younger brother slaying an older half-brother. As for
“dharma”, perhaps dharma here collapses because the Pandavas
made use of deceptive stratagems in order to win the battle—much
as the Kauravas had behaved illicitly in the gambling match—and
their claim to dharma is somewhat counterfeit’ (98).
70. This translation is from K.M. Ganguly’s Mahabharata, Calcutta: P.C.
Roy, 1883 to 1896, reprinted New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,
1970, Book Eight, 249–51, 255.
71. dehat tu karnasya
. nipatitasya/ tejo diptam
. kham
. vigahyaciren. (VIII.67.27).
72. Rajmohan Gandhi, Revenge and Reconciliation, New Delhi: Penguin
Books India, 1999, 4.
73. XII.5.11–13

+
 +

Notes: Karna’s Status Anxiety / 379

74. Adam Bowles, Mahabharata, Book Eight, Karna, vol 1, trans. Adam
Bowles, Clay Sanskrit Library, New York: New York University
Press, 2006, 32, 23. The metaphor of the ‘sacrifice’ is developed in
the Udyogaparvan (V.29.57). See David Shulman, The King and the
Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985, 384–96.
75. His tejovadhas, V.8.27 and V.41.81.
76. tat . . . karnam
. . prati mahad bhayam (III.284.3).
77. VIII.30.6, VIII.57.38
78. sakhitvam . tvaya (I.126.15)
79. Hiltebeitel examines the importance of ‘friendship’ in epic culture.
See Alf Hiltebeitel, ‘Brothers, Friends, and Charioteers: Parallel
Episodes in the Irish and Indian Epic’, in Edgar Polome (ed.),
Homage to Georges Dumezil, Journal of Indo-European Studies, 3, 85.
80. Karna is ‘happy’: hrsta, . . . II.60.38; he calls her bandhaki, ‘harlot’,
II.61.35, 81; and dasi, ‘slave’, II.63.1–4; ‘. . . she be disrobed’:
vasamsi
. . . . upahara, II.61.38.
81. na hi me samyate’ duhkham
. . karno
. yat prahasat tada (III.13.113). She
+ repeats the same words at V.93.11. +
82. ‘It was terrible to Arjuna’s heart, a stab in the vitals, cutting to the
bone, arrogant; an arrow, from Karna, made of words, sharply
caustic that stuck in his heart’ (V.29.37): yo bibhatsor hrdaye . praudha
.
.
asid asthipracchin marmaghati sughorah/karnac . . charo vanmayas
tigmatejah. pratisthito
.. hrdaye
. phalgunasya.
83. yad abruvam aham . krsna
. . . katukani
. sma pandavan/priyartham
. . .
dhartarastrasya
.. tena tapye dya karmana
. (V.139.45).
84. mitramukhah satrur’ or the ‘betrayer of friends’ (mitradrohin), VIII.27.28;
VIII.27.68.
85. Alf Hiltebeitel also notes the irony: ‘Salya ’ is thus put to the test of
friendship and fatefully accepts, [which] is a reflection of the
symbolism of Karna’s fall’ (IX.5. 23). Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of
Battle: Krishna in the Mahabharata, Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1990, 250.
86. X.23.4–5
87. ‘breakdown of social order’: varnasamkara; . . ‘customary behaviour’:
dharmasamkara.
. See Adam Bowles’s Introduction to his translation
of Book Eight, 43, footnote 3.

+
 +

380 / Notes: Krishna’s Guile

88. For a discussion of Shalya and Karna, and friendship and betrayal,
see Hiltebeitel, 256–59.
89. yato dharmas tato jayah
. (V.141.33). It is totally out of Karna’s character
to make a Vaishnav devotional statement: ‘Where there is dharma
there is Krishna, and where there is Krishna, there is victory’
(V.41.55). This seems to be the work of later ‘mischievous’ Bhargava
brahmin editors. See Kevin McGrath, 153, footnote 48.
90. Alf Hiltebeitel is referring to a contemporary Tamil drama. See The
Cult of Draupadi, 2 vols, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988,
412. The lyrical lament of the women in the Striparvan is also a
touching example. An example of Karna’s continuing popularity in
contemporary India is the Song of Karna sung in Gujarat by Muslim
members of the Tragada Bhavaya caste, who perform the rural folk
theatre, in which Hindu and Muslim cultural practices are combined.

7. Krishna’s Guile

1. IX.60.27. I am indebted to Alf Hiltebeitel’s analysis and translation

+ of specific verses in the episode relating to the death of Drona in +
his book, The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Sri
Satguru Publications, 1991, 250–54.
2. IX.60.27–38, IX, 61.27–37 CSL
3. Ruth Katz, Arjuna in the Mahabharata: Where Krishna Is, There is
Victory, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989,
168–69. Katz also provides many examples of deceptions in Greek
epics, 189, footnote 40. The episode of Athena posing as Hector’s
brother to put him off guard is from the Iliad, XXII.227ff.
4. The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, trans. K.M Ganguli
and Pratap Chandra Roy, 2nd ed., vol 6, Calcutta: Oriental
Publishing Co., 1962, 447.
5. IX.126.1, 6, 10, IX, 61.43–44 CSL
6. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with
Historical Illustrations, New York: Basic Books, 1977, 32.
7. Ibid, 32–33
8. VI.1.28–32
9. Bhishma reminds us about this rule, ‘One does not fight a person
who has laid down his weapons or armour, nor a woman or one

+
 +

Notes: Krishna’s Guile / 381

who bears a woman’s name, or one who is injured . . .’ (VI.103.72–

73).
10. ‘I shall cast down my weapons after hearing bad news’
(sumahadapriyam) (VI.41.61).
11. ‘Cast aside virtue’ (dharmamutsrjya)
. . . . ‘let a device be adopted for
victory’ (asthiyatam jaye yogo) (VII.164.68). I am indebted to Alf
Hiltebeitel’s analysis and the translation of this verse (and other
verses below) from the episode relating to the death of Drona, in
his book, The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahabharata, Delhi: Sri
Satguru Publications, 1991, 250–54.
12. Yudhishthira accepts the advice ‘with difficulty’ (krcchrena) . .
(VII.164.70).
13. ‘Drona had firm knowledge (sthira buddhir) that Yudhishthira would
not speak an untruth (anrtam),
. even for the sake of the sovereignty
of the three worlds (trayanam
. api lokanam aisvaryarthe). Therefore, he
asked him especially, and no one else, for in this Pandava, beginning
with childhood, Drona surely had his hope for truth (satyasa)’ ’
(VII.164.95–96).
+ 14. tasya purvam. rathah. prthvyas
. ’
caturangula uttarah. babhuvaivam tu tenokte +
tasya vahasprsanmahim
. (VII.164.106–07).
15. VI.154.70
16. VI.165.51
17. ‘Untruth may be better than truth (satyajjyayo ‘nrtam . bhavet). By
telling an untruth for the saving of life, untruth does not touch
. ’
one (na sprsyate ‘nrtah)’
. (VII.164.98–99).
18. ‘Sunk is the fear of untruth (atathyabhaye magno) but clinging to
victory (jaye sakto)’ (VII.164.105).
19. ‘For someone who is conversant with dharma’: dharmajñena sata;
‘untruth in the garb of truth’: satyakakañcukam . . . anrtam; ‘for the
sake of sovereignty’: rajyakaranat. (VII.167.33–35, 47). Alf Hiltebeitel
makes a good point that Arjuna believes that the adharma committed
by Yudhishthira attaches to all the Pandavas (254).
20. XII.110, VII.49
21. VIII.66.62–63
22. V.S. Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, Bombay, 1975,
95.
23. VI.61.14ff

+
 +

382 / Notes: Krishna’s Guile

24. VII.168.3–5
25. VII.168.9; ‘immorally’: adharmatah..
26. II.61.11ff
27. VI.78.45ff
28. XV.15.19ff
29. Even though his sympathies are for the Pandavas, he fights like a
professional. He tells Duryodhana, as he lies dying on the battlefield,
‘O tiger among men, today I am fulfilling my obligation to you
based on the food you have provided me’ (VI.105.27). It is a
moment of pathos that the grandfather, who brought up these
Kauravas and Pandavas, should feel so dependent, so vulnerable,
so powerless. Ruth Katz makes an interesting observation: ‘Insofar
as Bhishma, Drona, and Kripa are all viewed as incarnations of
gods, not demons (I.61.63) their participation on the demonic side
in the war makes better sense in human rather than heroic terms’
(173–74). She cites the pioneering work of Madeleine Biardeau,
‘Salvation of the King in the Mahabharata’, Contributions to Indian
Sociology, NS 15 (1981), 191, 81ff, footnote 67.
+ 30. Krishna Chaitanya makes this point eloquently in his stimulating +
study, The Mahabharata: A Literary Study, New Delhi: Clarion Books,
1993.
31. Adolf Holzmann the Younger propounded an extravagant ‘Inversion
Theory’ (subsequently discredited) to explain the sins of the
Pandavas, arguing that it was, in fact, the Kauravas (rather than the
Pandavas) who were the embodiments of righteousness in the
original epic.
32. ‘A Cloak of Clever Words: The Deconstruction of Deceit in the
Mahabharata’, published in Chong Kim Chong and Yuli Liu (eds),
Conceptions of Virtue East and West, Singapore: Marshall Cavendish
Academic, 2005, and in Frederic Squarcini (ed), Boundaries, Dynamics
and Construction of Traditions in South Asia, Florence: Florence
University Press, 2005.
33. XII.156.22–24. The epic also refers to truth as ‘indeed imperishable,
eternal and unchanging. Not in conflict with any moral duty’
(XII.156.3–10). In a similar vein, Bernard Williams, the philosopher,
has an insightful discussion of truthfulness as an intrinsic value.
He notes two aspects of the virtue of truth—sincerity and accuracy.

+
 +

Notes: Krishna’s Guile / 383

A sincere person says what he or she believes in. Thus, sincerity

makes one trustworthy and reliable. Accuracy ensures that one’s
beliefs are based on the way things really are. Bernard Williams,
Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002,
92–93.
34. Adiparvan I.218
35. udyoga: ‘effort’. ‘The effort in Sanskrit, Udyoga, may be understood
both as a peace effort . . . and a war effort,’ says J.A.B. van
Buitenen. ‘It is to the latter meaning that the etymology of the word
points: yoking up of the horses, chariots, and elephants of the
army in preparation for making an attack; also, simply yoga, “the
yoking”.’
36. The tree ‘whose . . . trunk is Karna, its ripe fruit Duhshasana, and
the ignorant king Dhritarashtra its root’ (Adiparvan I.110; V.31.20).
37. Bhagavad Gita XI.28–29, 40.
38. Barth is one of the scholars who suggested the kuladevata theory;
Hopkins said he was ‘patron god of the Pandavas’. E. Washburn
Hopkins, The Great Epic of India, New York, 1901, 63.
+ 39. Sukthankar also interprets the epic in terms of Hindu psychology +
and refers to Krishna as the ‘Inner Self’ (paramatman) or the divine
inside each one of us. Taking off from Sukthankar, Alf Hiltebeitel
adds, ‘After all, such a psychology becomes intelligible in a religious
tradition which places such regular emphasis on the belief that the
divine is found in every man, the centre to which all else relates.’
Sukthankar concludes sensibly: ‘We must, therefore, be content
with taking Sri Krsna
. to be a person of the same order of reality as
the other heroes of the epic, the Pandavas and the Kauravas . . . As
I said, there is no passage in the epic which does not presuppose,
or which contradicts, his character as an incarnation of the Supreme
Being, who is generally called in our epic, Visnu or Narayana.’ V.S.
Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, Bombay: Asiatic
Society, 1957, 47.
40. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Krishna-charitra, trans. Pradip
Bhattacharya, Calcutta: MP Birla Foundation, 1991. According to
Buddhadev Bose, Bankimchandra ‘strung term after legal term in
order to convert Krishna into a law-abiding person untouched by
blame or fault’. Buddhadev Bose, The Book of Yudhishthir, trans.

+
 +

384 / Notes: Krishna’s Guile

Sujit Mukherjee, London: Sangam Books/Hyderabad: Orient

Longman, 1986, 157.
41. Peter Brook’s essay in P. Lal (ed), Vyasa’s Mahabharata: Creative
Insights, Calcutta: Writers’ Workshop, 1985/1992, 308.
42. I am indebted to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad for this interpretation
of ‘Krishna’s mystery’.
43. The exchange takes place at V.70.49–64; ‘a sin’: vrjinam
. (V.70.53).
44. Krishna’s argument is at V.29.5–29; ‘duty to family’: kuladharma;
‘duty to kingship’: rajadharma; ‘duty to society’: svadharma; ‘it is
improper and cowardly to lead the life of non-activity’: this is the
classical distinction between nivrtti
. (non-activity) and pravrtti
. (path
of works); ‘even the gods have to engage in work’: karma.
45. V.31.19f
46. V.138–49. ‘His first strategy is reconciliation’: V.148.7; ‘the tactic of
fear’: bheda; ‘policy of generosity and gifts’: dana; ‘only recourse is
force’: danda.
.
47. II.62.7, 9
48. See Chapter 1 for an explanation of the game of dice.
+ 49. suhrddyuta: II.51.21. +
50. In thinking about Kali Yuga, Vidura says, ‘When brothers are split,
[you are bound to] have a quarrel’ (kalahah) . (II.51.24).
51. II.60.40
52. III.148. The French scholar Madeleine Biardeau also found comfort
in the Kali Yuga theory. Madeleine Biardeau, vol 80.8, 131ff; vol 82,
90. Another scholar, Dahlmann, also regarded the epic as the
victory of good over evil. Ruth Katz, however, finds both these
views optimistic. She believes quite sensibly that ‘Yudhishthira and
his successors . . . are destined to be good kings in a bad world’.
Certainly, the downswing in the epic’s mood after the war seems
to support Katz. She accepts the Kali Yuga theory and argues that
since time has declined in the ‘human age’ from the earlier ‘heroic
age’, Krishna has to be deceptive in order to win: ‘At the heroic
level there is no doubt that human effort will succeed: fate and
human effort will not be in opposition to one another. At the
human level, the Kali Yuga represents the interference of fate. What
has been fated is the destruction of the ksatriyas
. (the heroes), as
prophesied at the time of Draupadi’s birth . . . One might say that

+
 +

Notes: Krishna’s Guile / 385

the allowance of trickery by the good side in the battle books [of
the epic] marks an attempt to outwit opposing fate by human
effort; but fate cannot really be outwitted.’ Ruth Katz, Arjuna in the
Mahabharata: Where Krishna Is, There is Victory, Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 1989, 179. She expresses her
disagreement with Biardeau and Dahlmann in footnotes 87, 93,
193–94.
53. IX.59.21
54. yatah krishnas tato dharmo yato dharmas tato jayah (VI.62.34;
XIII.153.39). Madeleine Biardeau agrees with the believer’s
perspective. She too felt that the Mahabharata’s purpose was to
advocate bhakti or devotion to Krishna. This she felt was related
to Krishna’s conception in the Gita, and in particular of nishkama.
karma (desireless action). Krishna teaches that action which is free
from selfish desires, and in the name of God, is true moral action.
Thus, she felt the epic’s morality is subordinate to Krishna the God.
See her Etudes V; Etudes IV, 173; Etudes V, 195; Salvation, 88. The
epic tells us in the first book that the war in the Mahabharata was
+ needed because demons began to oppress the world. The earth +
appealed to Brahma, who asked the gods to help. Thus, many gods
assumed human forms. One of them was Krishna (as an avatara of
Vishnu), another was Indra, in the form of Arjuna. Many scholars
have seen this blatant attempt to make Krishna (Vishnu) supreme
over all the other gods as a way to ‘Vaishnavize’ the epic.
55. I.155.44
56. Chandogya Upanishad III.27.6
57. R.G. Bhandarkar, the Indologist, says in an essay, ‘Krsna,. . . the son
of Devaki, was still regarded in the Vedic period as a wise man
enquiring into the highest truth, and only at a later time was he put
on an equality with Visnu.
. . Vasudeva, the god, and Krsna,
. . . the sage,
were originally different from each other, and only afterwards
became by a process of syncretism, one deity, thus giving rise to a
theory of incarnation.’ R.G. Bhandarkar, ‘Vaisnavism ’
and Saivism’,
..
Works, vol II, 58. Elsewhere, he adds, ‘It thus appears that a
religion of devotion arose in earlier times, but it received a definite
shape when Vasudeva [Krishna] related the Gita to Arjuna and led
to the formation of an independent sect . . .’ (13).

+
 +

386 / Notes: Krishna’s Guile

58. The epic narrates the important myth of Daksha, which shows how
the Vedic gods were replaced by sectarian gods—the example of
Shiva in this case (XII.274.2–58). ‘Once upon a time, when Shiva
was living on Mount Meru with his wife Parvati, the daughter of
the mountain Himalaya, all the gods and demigods thronged to
him and paid him homage. The Lord of Creatures named Daksha
began to perform a horse sacrifice in the ancient manner, which
Indra and the gods attended with Shiva’s permission. Seeing this,
Parvati asked Shiva where the gods were going, and Shiva explained
it to her, adding that the gods had decided long ago not to give him
any share in the sacrifice. But Parvati was so unhappy about this
that Shiva took his great bow and went with his band of fierce
servants to destroy the sacrifice. Some put out the sacrificial fires
by dousing them with blood; others began to eat the sacrificial
assistants. The sacrifice took the form of a wild animal and fled to
the skies, and Shiva pursued it with bow and arrow. The gods,
terrified, fled, and the very earth began to tremble. Brahma begged
Shiva to desist, promising him a share of the sacrificial offerings
+ forever after, and Shiva smiled and accepted that share.’ I have +
quoted above from Wendy Doniger’s account of this famous myth,
which is repeated at several places in the epic. Wendy Doniger,
Hinduism, New York: Penguin Books, 2009, 260.
59. Jayadeva Goswami’s Gita Govinda, or ‘Song of the Cowherd’, is a
twelfth century poem about Krishna’s romance with Radha and the
gopis. This work is of great importance in the development of
bhakti or the devotional tradition of Hinduism. There are rich
traditions of painting and music associated with this theme.
60. Katz, 241
61. IX.61.60–63, 68 CSL
62. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 44.
63. See Jorg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–45, trans.
Allison Brown, Columbia University Press, 2006.
64. At a joint press conference with Tony Blair on 26 May 2006,
George W. Bush finally conceded that this scandal was the biggest
mistake of the Iraq War. ‘We’ve been paying for a long period of
time,’ he said. Not surprisingly, this act of contrition came when
both leaders’ popularity rating had plunged to its lowest depths.

+
 +

Notes: Krishna’s Guile / 387

‘They looked like two defeated men in the twilight of their careers,’
reported the Times of India’s Chidanand Rajghatta from Washington.
The Washington Post’s story was headlined ‘Blair and Bush are Duo
Even in Descent’.
65. Michael Walzer expressed his views in a programme on the
Australian Broadcasting Company with the reporter Mark Colvin
on 4 August 2005. The print version of the story is available at
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1430514.htm.
66. Walzer, 38
67. Ronald Lewin, Rommel as Military Commander, New York, 1970, 294,
311.
68. The discussion between Uttanka and Krishna takes place in Book
Fourteen, Ashvamedhikaparvan, immediately following the Anugita
section (XIV.53–55). The Sanskrit word papa comes closest to sin or
evil and it appears in the Rig Veda with a moral meaning—for
example, adultery is a sin, incest is evil. See Wendy Doniger
O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1976; Arthur L. Herman, The Problem of Evil and Hindu
+ Thought, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. +
69. Epicurus, as quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief. Epicurus himself did
not leave any written form of this argument. It can be found in
Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and in Christian theologian Lactantius’s
Treatise of the Anger of God where Lactantius critiques the argument.
In Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et
l’origine du mal, a well-known essay written in 1710, Leibniz
introduced the term ‘theodicy’ to describe the formal study of this
subject. This term is also used for an explanation of why God
permits evil to exist without it being a contradiction of his perfect
goodness.
70. III.31.39
71. . . . In Defence of a Devious Divinity’, in The
Bimal K. Matilal, ‘Krsna:
Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, vol 2, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002, 91–108. Max Weber argued that ‘the
most complete formal solution of the problem of theodicy is the
special achievement of the Indian doctrine of karma. Max Weber,
The Sociology of Religion, trans. E. Fischoff, 4th edn., London, 1963,
145.

+
 +

388 / Notes: Krishna’s Guile

72. After Duryodhana’s fall, Krishna tells Yudhishthira: ‘thus it was

meant to be’: distya
. vardhase.
73. Shankara, Brahmasutra II.1.34: ‘No partiality and cruelty [can be
charged against God] because of [His] taking other factors into
consideration.’ In II.1.35, he adds: ‘If it be argued that it is not
possible [to take karma into consideration in the beginning], since
the fruits of work remain still undifferentiated, then we say, no,
since the transmigratory state has no beginning.’ The opponent
now argues that there could have been no ‘previous birth’ at the
very beginning of creation, before which karma could not have
existed. Shankara replies that it is not so, for the number of creation
cycles is beginningless. See Swami Gambhirananda, Brahma Sutra
Bhasya of Shankaracharya, Ramakrishna Math; J.N. Mohanty, Classical
Indian Philosophy, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. According to
A.B. Keith, the theory of karma does not appear until the later
period of the Upanishads. A.B. Keith, The Religion and Philosophy of
the Vedas and Upanishads, Harvard Oriental Series, vols 31–33,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 570 ff.
+ 74. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessary, Oxford: Oxford University +
Press, 1974; God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1977. Other solutions to the problem include John Hick’s, who
rejects the traditional view of the Fall, wherein human beings were
created perfect but fell disastrously. Instead, he thinks human
beings are unfinished and evolving. Although capable of reasoning
and responsibility, they must now (as individuals) go through a
second process of ‘soul-making’. Natural evil presumably helps
them to become humble and ‘spiritual’. John Hick, Evil and the God
of Love, revised edn., New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Eleonore
Stump claims that a world full of evil and suffering has value:
‘Natural evil—the pain of disease, the intermittent and unpredictable
destruction of natural disasters, it tends to humble him, show him
his frailty, make him reflect on the transience of temporal goods,
and turn his affections towards other-worldly things.’ Eleanore
Stump, The Logic of Disputation in Walter Burley’s Treatise on Obligation,
Netherlands: Springer, 1985, 409.
75. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1943, 52.
Plantinga (1974) agrees with this. God can create free creatures, but

+
 +

Notes: Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 389

He cannot ensure that they do only the right thing. If He did, then
they would not be free (166–67). Harold Kushner, a Rabbi, offered
a Hindu-like answer. In a widely read book in 1981, When Bad
Things Happen to Good People, he argued that God does not ignore
suffering; He knows about it and feels the pain. He can’t do
anything about it because He’s not omnipotent. He is kind-hearted
and would like to help, but He does not have the power to do it.
(This answer did not go down too well with many believers.)
Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, New
York: Schocken Books, 1981.
76. XI.25.36ff
77. Mausalaparvan 2
78. Buddhadev Bose, 165
79. V.S. Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, 95.
80. A.K. Ramanujan, The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, gen. ed.,
Vinay Dharwadker, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

8. Ashwatthama’s Revenge
+ +
1. Mahabharata, X.4.21, 23
2. I shall be quoting from the verse translation of the Sauptikaparvan
(Book Ten of the Mahabharata) by W.J. Johnson. (The Sauptikaparvan
of the Mahabharata, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
James Fitzgerald says ‘the word Sauptika is unusual, and its
meaning is not obvious on its face. [It is derived from the participle
supta (“fallen asleep”)] . . . Of the word’s seven occurrences in Book
X, one in particular allows us to determine that it signifies “an
attack upon some who are asleep”, jijnasamanas tattejah. sauptikam . ca
didrksavah
. . . (X.7.48ab). This sentence refers to the hordes of
preternatural beings who had gathered outside the Pandava camp
after Asvatthama worshipped Mahadeva just prior to getting his
blessing and receiving a sword from him (X.7.64). These beings
“were eager to ascertain his [Asvatthama’s] fiery energy (tejas) and
see the sauptika.” The word sauptika here is a noun that refers to the
upcoming attack upon and slaughter of those asleep.’ The
Mahabharata, ed. and trans. James Fitzgerald, vol 7, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004, xxix, footnote 25.

+
 +

390 / Notes: Ashwatthama’s Revenge

3. X.1.32,34, 36, 37–40, 43–44

4. X.1. 64–65
5. X.4.5
6. X.4.21, 23–24
7. I.1.143
8. X.4.26, 31
9. X.5. 9, 11–12, 15
10. X.5.25
11. X.6.3–4, 6, 8
12. X.6.30, 31
13. X.8.12–21
14. X.8.39–40, 78
15. The epic’s mood (rasa) has been famously discussed by
Anandavardhana, who calls it Santarasa. See Gary Tubb’s essay,
’
‘Santarasa in the Mahabharata’, in A. Sharma (ed.), Essays on the
Mahabharata, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 171–203.
16. Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king, uttered similar words
to his generals, when they thought they were drowning in the
Indian monsoon. Arrian recounts that a single narrow boat carried
+ +
history—the king himself with his great captains, who would one
day rule vast parts of the world: Ptolemy, the future king of Egypt;
Lysimachus, the future king of Thrace; Perdiccas, the future Regent;
and Seleucus, who would inherit Alexander’s vast Asian empire.
They were afraid that they would drown in the Jhelum river that
stormy night before engaging Raja Puru (Porus) of the Punjab, but
Alexander reassured them that their fame was secure back in
Greece, and their grandchildren would sing their praises.
17. Virataparvan, chapter 50.
18. Dronaparvan, chapter 150.
19. X.4.27
20. Charles Malamound, Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient
India, trans. David White, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996,
156–57.
21. Pietro Marongiu and Graeme Newman, Vengeance, New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1987, 47.
22. Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology, New York: Norton, 1967, 102.
23. Jeffrie Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003.

+
 +

Notes: Ashwatthama’s Revenge / 391

24. This is also the position of Susan Jacoby, Wild Justice: The Evolution
of Revenge, New York: Harper and Row, 1983, 4.
25. XII.121.8–9, judicial process = vyavahara.
26. Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Punishment, originally published
in 1830, digitized version at http://www.la.utexas.edu/labyrinth/
rp/. In the past fifty years the writings by H.L.A. Hart (1959) in
England and John Rawls (1955) in the United States, both centrist
liberals, have had much influence in thinking about retributive
justice in the Anglo-Saxon world. Herbert L.A. Hart, ‘Prolegomenon
to the Principles of Punishment’, reprinted in Hart, Punishment and
Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, 1–27; John
Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Philosophical Review, 64, 3–32.
27. Michael S. Moore, ‘The Moral Worth of Retribution’, in Ferdinand
Schoeman (ed), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays
in Moral Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
28. Jean Hampton, ‘The Moral Education Theory of Punishment’,
Philosophy and Public Affairs, 13 (1984), 208–38.
29. Robert Martinson, ‘What Works?—Questions and Answers About
+ Prison Reform,’ The Public Interest (10), 1974, 22–54. +
30. It is worth remembering what the Indian political leader Mahatma
Gandhi also said about this: ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole
world blind.’
31. XII.122.40–42
32. H.A. Bedau, ‘Punishment’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online),
2005. See also his 1978 paper, ‘Retribution and the Theory of
Punishment,’ Journal of Philosophy, 75, 601–20.
33. Ibid
34. X.11.13–14. W.F. Johnson tells us in a note to his translation of the
Sauptikaparvan about Madeleine Biardeau’s consistent reminder
about the connection ‘between the princess [Draupadi] and the
goddess Earth: the latter calls on the gods to restore dharma, but
that very restoration involves, inevitably, the death of her human
“children”’ (119–20).
35. Some Indians believe, as did the director Peter Brook, that when
Ashwatthama’s weapon of mass destruction entered the wombs of
the Pandava women and destroyed their foetuses, it was a foretelling
of the nuclear threat in the world today. According to Tibor de

+
 +

392 / Notes: Ashwatthama’s Revenge

Viragh, King Dhritarashtra’s inability to see symbolizes the

metaphorical blindness towards nuclear weapons of our present-
day political leaders.
36. X.16.9–12
37. III.40.42. The good Vidura repeats these words of Yudhishthira’s in
the Udyogaparvan: ‘forgiveness is the strength of the virtuous’,
during his interminable moral teaching to the insomniac
Dhritarashtra (V.34.75).
38. III.28.10–14; manyuh. = anger; forbearance = ksama;
. anger = krodha.
39. Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
40. Joram G. Haber, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Study, Lanham, Md:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
41. Trudy Govier in her influential book Forgiveness and Revenge,
catalogues why revenge is immoral. Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and
Revenge, London: Routledge, 2002, 11. She adds: ‘Any satisfaction
an avenging party might feel would be morally objectionable
because it would amount to satisfaction at having brought about
+ the suffering of another human being.’ +
42. Jean Hampton, 208–38
43. V.3.20
44. XII.121.34–35. Bhishma recounts a story about punishment to
Yudhishthira: ‘Once upon a time the rod of force disappeared
because Brahma was in a happy mood. After the rod disappeared,
people became mixed up . . . Lawlessness prevailed, and they
harmed one another: They tore at each other like dogs fighting over
a piece of meat, the strong killing the weak. Then the Grandfather
[Brahma] paid his respects to the everlasting blessed Vishnu and
said to the Great God, the God who grants wishes, “You absolutely
have to relieve the virtuous here. You must devise a way for there
to be no confusion here” . . . Eventually, [Vishnu] created his own
self as the rod of force’ (XII.122.18–19, 22–23, 25).
45. XII.121.2
46. X.10.9
47. X.8.144–45
48. XI.10.15–30
49. XII.41.4–7

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 393

50. William O. Stephens draws this distinction in his review of Trudy

Govier’s book on Forgiveness, in Essays in Philosophy, 4.2 (June
2003). Also see Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, ‘What Should
“Forgiveness” Mean?’ The Journal of Value Inquiry, 36 (2002), 483–98.
51. See Mark Amstutz’s excellent account of this subject in his book,
The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness,
New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
52. David A. Crocker, ‘Retribution and Reconciliation’, Report from
the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy 20 (Winter/Spring
2000), 6.
53. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of
Truth Commissions’, in Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson
(eds), Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000, 35–36.
54. Quoted in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The
Politics of War Crimes Tribunals, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000, 286–95.
55. ‘Jaime Malamud-Goti, a senior legal advisor to President Alfonsín,
has argued that the prosecutions tended to undermine the existing
+ +
legal order, rather than strengthen the rule of law and emerging
democratic institutions,’ according to Mark Amstutz.
56. The quote belongs to the theologian Walter Wink.
57. Amstutz, 104.
58. Murad Ali Baig, ‘Revenge’, Times of India, 9 August 2007.

9. Yudhishthira’s Remorse

1. X.10.13. Unless otherwise indicated, the English translation

employed in this chapter is by James Fitzgerald, Mahabharata,
Books Eleven and Twelve, 2004. It is volume 7 of the University of
Chicago Press series. I have also quoted from the recent translation
of Book Seven, Drona, vol 1 by Vaughan Pilikian, Clay Sanskrit
Library (CSL), New York: New York University Press, 2006. The
translation of the Tuladhara and Jajali story is from the monograph
Ahimsa and a Mahabharata Story by Ian Proudfoot, Asian Studies
Monographs, new series no. 9, Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian
National University, Canberra, 1987. Finally, quotes from Book
One of the epic are from van Buitenen’s Chicago Press translation.

+
 +

394 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse

2. XI.15.3–4
’
3. James Fitzgerald writes: ‘The Book of Peace (the Santiparvan) and its
’
companion, Book XIII, The Book of Instructions (the Anusasanaparvan),
make up the first canonical library of “Hinduism”. This library
covers a very wide range of ancient Indian intellectual history and
was intended to serve as a comprehensive, Brahmin-inspired basis
of living a Good Life in a Good Society in a Good Polity.’ James L.
Fitzgerald, Introduction to Book Twelve of the Mahabharata, trans.
James Fitzgerald, vol 7, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004,
79.
’
4. soka, ’
from the root suc, related to ‘burning too hot’ from the
Vedic ritual for a king who is made ready for ruling (ibid, 94–100).
5. XI.9.19–21
6. XI.16.11–15
7. XI.16.55cd–56
8. ‘She caresses his body with sexual hunger’, according to James
Fitzgerald in his Introduction, 15.
9. XI.20.15–16ab, 17cd
+ 10. XII.1.38 +
11. I.137
12. III.36
13. 8.90.106, 108, 112–15 CSL: smrtva. dharmopadesam’ . tvam/muhurtam
. .
ksama
. pandava.
..
14. XI.27.18, 20
15. XII.6.9cd–10
16. XII.7.8–10
’
17. XII.7.33. ‘Now this grief holds me in check’: soko mam
. rundhayaty
ayam!
18. XII.7.37
19. XII.9.3–4
20. XII.9.12–19. I have added ‘hurting’ to Fitzgerald’s translation to
emphasize the ethic of non-violence which is driving Yudhishthira.
21. XII.8.3-5. The only other time that Arjuna spoke thus to his elder
brother was in the middle of the war in VIII.48–50, when he had
called him a dharmabhiruka, a ‘coward because of his commitment
to dharma’. Whereas in this dialogue vaiklavya means ‘feebleness’,
Fitzgerald defends his use of the sexual innuendo in calling him a

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 395

‘sissy’ because Arjuna had immediately followed up these

exclamations with explicit accusations that Yudhishthira was
unmanly. Arjuna also calls him kliba, a eunuch. ‘Daft’ is a fair
translation for buddhilaghavat, ‘light-minded’. See notes XII.8.3 and
4 (681–82) in Fitzgerald’s translation.
22. XII.14.36, 35b
23. XII.7.5–8
24. XII.14.15–16
25. V.70.53–57. In the Udyogaparvan, while preparing for the war,
Yudhishthira repeatedly argued for peace. He called the dharma of
the warrior sinful–—papah. ksatriyadharmo yam (V.70 46) and warriors
always wicked—sarvatha vrjinam . yuddham (V.70.53).
26. ’
sham agaskarah papah. (XII.27.22); maya hy avadhya bahavo ghatita
rajyakaranat
. (XII.32.10).
27. XII.27.4, 12–13; Yudhishthira makes it clear that he coveted kingship
and hence he is guilty of sin: sa maya rajyalubdhena papena gurughatina/
alpakalasya rajyasya krte
. mudhena. ghatitah.
.
28. XII.27.14–17. ‘I put a little jacket on the truth’: satyakañcukam asthaya.
+ Fitzgerald explains that ‘a kañcuka is a small tight-fitting garment +
worn on the upper body . . . Sometimes the word means “disguise”
and that translation may be more apposite. But I think the point
here is a kañcuka covers half the body . . . and Yudhishthira spoke
only half the truth.’ Note to 27.17 (702). As to the lie itself,
Yudhishthira is right to be afraid, for at the end of the epic he will
have to visit hell, albeit briefly (XVIII.3.14).
29. idam. tu me mahad-duhkham. . vartate
. hrdi
. nitya (XII.1.13). Apart from an
occasional perfunctory remark, the other Pandavas do not appear
to express much regret. Like good kshatriyas, they assume that
killing is a natural part of warfare. See XII.7–19 where the family
tries to persuade Yudhishthira to change his disastrous decision to
give up the throne.
30. Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, London:
Macmillan, 1991, 45.
31. Ibid, 47
32. Ibid, 34
33. This is a variant to the philosopher Bernard Williams’s example of
a lorry driver and a passenger, which first introduced me to the

+
 +

396 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse

difference between regret and remorse. He writes that when a child

is accidentally hit by a truck, the passenger feels regret, wishing
that the accident had not happened. The driver, however, feels
remorse even if it was not his fault—when he was neither legally
nor morally culpable. Williams uses slightly different terminology—
he distinguishes between ‘regret’ and ‘agent-regret’. Bernard
Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981, 27.
34. Benedict de Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being,
in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol I, trans. E. Curley, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985, 115. He writes, ‘[Some] might
perhaps think that Remorse and Repentance would bring them to
the right path, and conclude, as the whole world does, that these
are good. But if we consider them correctly, we shall find that they
are not only not good, but on the contrary, injurious, and
consequently evil. For it is manifest that we always come to the
right path more through reason and love of truth than through
Remorse and Repentance. And because they are species of sadness,
+ which we have already proven to be injurious, and which we must +
therefore strive to avoid, as an evil, these two are injurious, evil,
and to be shunned and fled.’
35. Aldous Huxley, Foreword to Brave New World, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1950, 7.
36. Bernard Williams, ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’, in
Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, 44f.
37. Nussbaum claims that moral emotions, far from being irrational
distractions, are ‘intelligent responses to the perception of value’.
They proceed from judgements we make concerning objects and
people that are beyond our control but important to our flourishing,
and as such are ‘part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning’.
She believes that human beings enter the world dependent on
objects beyond their control, most notably their mothers, and
emotional development is a response to this fact. Recognizing our
common vulnerability, our inevitable victimization by fate should
lead us to an ethics of empathy and compassion. The pain and
partiality of emotion are a value-laden mode of thinking that must
be acknowledged if we are to create a just and compassionate

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 397

world. In taking this position Nussbaum courageously stands up to

the weight of the Western philosophical establishment. Not only
Spinoza (whom I have quoted above), but Plato, the Stoics, Kant
and others felt that emotions are dangerous, arising from parochial
needs and interests, and they subvert human reason. Kant was
particularly dismissive of moral sentiments—he felt that they had
to be subordinated to reason for achieving a rational grasp of moral
principles.
38. dharmacarya ca rajyam . ca nityam eva virudhyate (XII.38.4). See James
’
Fitzgerald’s analysis of soka ’
and santi in his introduction to vol 7,
86–100. The cooling, he explains, is via a time-honoured process
’
called prasamana ’
and santi ’
in the Vedas. See D.J. Hoens, Santi: A
Contribution to Ancient Indian Religious Terminology, Granvenhage:
N.V. De Nederlandsche Boek en Steendrukkerij v.h., H.L. Smits,
1951.
39. Many Indians accuse Yudhishthira of being indulgent and tender-
minded. Alf Hiltebeitel, Buddhadev Bose and James Fitzgerald
offer three different views of Yudhishthira’s character, his role in
+ the war and his sorrow. Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle, 229–86; +
James Fitzgerald, Introduction to Book Twelve of the Mahabharata,
vol 7, 86–100; Buddhadev Bose, The Book of Yudhisthir.
40. ’
‘The santi ’
of the Santiparvan ’
is basically an apotropaic santi that
functions first of all to render Yudhisthira,
.. the king, fit to rule,’
James Fitzgerald, Introduction to vol 7, 98.
41. Van Buitenen points out that Bhishma’s instruction of Yudhishthira
before dying at the solstice ‘must be the longest deathbed sermon
on record’.
42. Sheldon Pollock reminds us that ‘the integral theme of Sanskrit
epic literature is kingship itself’. In Robert Goldman (ed), The
Ramayana. of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol 2, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991. 10.
43. XII.91.3, 4
44. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London: JM Dent, 1973, 49.
45. Ibid, 64–65
46. Romila Thapar, Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 255–56; Nikam and McKeon, The Edicts of Ashoka,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 27–29.

+
 +

398 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse

’
47. John Strong writes, ‘Asoka seems to have been obsessed with
’
Dharma. The Asokan state was to be governed according to
Dharma. Wars of aggression were to be replaced by peaceful
conquests of Dharma. Special royal ministers were charged with
propagation of Dharma. True delight in the world came only with
delight in Dharma, and the old royal pleasure tours and hunts
were replaced by Dharma-pilgrimages . . . Dharma seems to have
’
meant for Asoka a moral polity of active social concern, religious
tolerance, ecological awareness, observance of common ethical
precepts and the renunciation of war.’ The Legend of King Asoka,’
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2nd edn., 2008, 4.
’
48. Nick Sutton, ‘Asoka and Yudhisthira:
.. A Historical Setting for the
Ideological Tensions of the Mahabharata’, Religion, 27.4 (1997), 333–
41, points out that ‘the extended debates that surround
[Yudhishthira’s] dharma reflect controversy that arose in the reigns
’
of Asoka and other rulers of similar disposition.’ Sutton’s suggestion
is that ‘it was reinterpretation of dharma, and in particular royal
dharma, that lies behind the characterization of Yudhisthira .. and
+ the debates in the epic on the use of violence, with the fictional +
Yudhisthira
.. ’
representing the historical Asoka and other kings of
similar inclination.’ Another scholar has noted the similarity between
Arjuna and Ashoka. Israel Selvanayagam in his article ‘Asoka and
Arjuna as Counterfigures Standing on the Field of Dharma: A
Historical Hermeneutical Perspective’, History of Religions, 32 (1992–
93), 59–75.
49. Romila Thapar places Ashoka’s accession date as 269–68 BC in
Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (33); John Strong offers the
more cautious ‘circa 270 BC’ (The Legend of King Asoka,’ 3). Magadha
was the most prominent of the early monarchical states, ruled by
low-caste Nandas from their capital Pataliputra (modern-day Patna
in Bihar) from 340 BC. They were supporters of the new sect of
Jains. Soon after Alexander the Great’s invasion in 326 BC, the
Nandas were overthrown by the Mauryas, who created the first
empire to cover large parts of the then known India. Chandragupta
Maurya, founder of the dynasty, also became a Jain, but grandson
Ashoka converted to Buddhism.
50. Strong, 4

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 399

51. Thapar, 255–57. The word ‘Dhamma’ means dharma in Pali, the
common language of the people adopted by the Buddha. Although
John Strong thinks Ashoka renounced violence, James Fitzgerald
disagrees. He believes that this very twelfth Major Rock Edict,
which expresses remorse over the Kalinga war, ‘has a clear
’
ultimatum directed at the “forest tribes of the empire” . . . Asoka’s
edicts represent a remarkably aggressive policy of attempting to
shape the thinking and behavior of his subjects’ (118–19).
52. Ibid, 255
53. See Lamotte, Histoire, 388. According to Panini, the Shungas were
descendants of the seer Bharadvaja, as was Drona, the famous
brahmin teacher who taught the martial arts to the Pandavas and
the Kauravas (ibid, 389). The Shungas were succeeded in
paramountcy in northern India by another brahmin dynasty, the
Kanvas, whose four rulers reigned from 75 BC to 30 BC (ibid, 388).
James Fitzgerald argues that the Mauryan empire and the deliberate
effort to spread Buddhist ideas by Ashoka ‘were profound challenges
to pious Brahmins. These may well have influenced the development
+ and redaction of the Mahabharata.’ See his Introduction to vol 7, +
120. In footnote 172, he elaborates the views of Haraprasad Shastri,
Romila Thapar and others.
.
54. James Fitzgerald writes: ‘I have no doubt that the Sunga revolution
contributed a great deal to the development of our Mahabharata:
however, one very important trait of the Mahabharata does not fit
.
with the Sunga era and may be a reaction against it. I refer to the
critically important insistence in the Mahabharata upon rule being
appropriate to ksatriyas
. and not brahmins. For these reasons, I
have suggested that the first major written Sanskrit redaction of the
.
Mahabharata was post-Sunga and post-Kanva . as well as post-
Mauryan’ (122).
55. Sheldon Pollock writes about a ‘politically incapacitating bifurcation’
in Ashoka’s situation in his introduction to Ayodhyakanda, . in Robert
Goldman (ed), The Ramayana . of Valmiki, 2.10. The bifurcation relates
to the dilemma of a monarch who believes that violence is sinful.
How then does he respond to external military threats and internal
lawlessness? This was the central problem crucial to the survival of
the ancient Indian state.

+
 +

400 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse

56. ‘Thus, the Mahabharata’s narrative tension lies in its effort to

combine a hugely violent story based on the older sense of right
and wrong with the new ethics of yoga and ahimsa that had caught
the Indian imagination at the time. The ambivalent Yudhishthira is
at the centre of this tension’ (Fitzgerald, 122).
’
57. ‘pacifying instruction’: prasamana ’
anusasana.
58. XII.98.1
59. The complete quote goes thus: ‘The highest dharma is non-violence;
look upon on all creatures equally’: ahimsa . paramo dharmah.
sarvapranabhrtam
. . smrtah.
. .
60. Ashoka’s fourth Rock Edict regards non-violence as the special
ideal of the ascetic: avihisa bhutanam (Bloch, Inscriptions d’Asoka
[99]), whereas the Arthashastra sees ahimsa as a social ideal (I.3.13–
14).
61. XII.253.6. I am indebted to Ian Proudfoot’s excellent monograph
Ahimsa and a Mahabharata Story for the translation and a wise
retelling of this story from the Moksadharmaparvan section of Book
Twelve (XII.252–56). Ian Proudfoot, Ahimsa and a Mahabharata Story,
+ Asian Studies Monographs, new series no. 9, Faculty of Asian +
Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1987.
62. Phrases like tulyanindastuti suggest indifference to blame or praise
and a devaluing of the ego, Ian Proudfoot notes (99).
63. XII.253.2, 35ff. Proudfoot’s translation: ‘O Jajali, a [truly] wise man
would immediately grasp [the distinction between] dharma and a
mode of behaviour: [it would be] thus {with one] who is restrained,
[and] acts properly, without enmity.’
64. Ian Proudfoot adds this elegant, classical liberal twist to this story:
‘The petty trader, with a multiplicity of suppliers and a multiplicity
of buyers, is not dependent for his livelihood upon the grace and
favour of any individual. His gains or losses need not be made
directly at the expense of others, but as a result of the impersonal
action of market forces’ (105).
65. XVIII.116.37–41. Scholars have speculated if vegetarianism in India
emerged from the concept of ahimsa, from a belief in the immanence
of God in all living beings. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, ‘The
Brahman soon rose above the old savage notion that “the eater will
hereafter be eaten by the eaten”, as a reason for not killing animals.

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 401

He began to see life as a whole and . . . he declared that “to take

oneself as the norm” in ethics was the inevitable corollary of “every
soul is part of the All-soul” in philosophy. Love any neighbour as
thyself, in a new interpretation, became his rule. Moralizing his law
of retribution he turned it for himself into a law of mercy. As I
suffer (said he), so suffers the one whom I hurt; and the animal
pleading for life suffers as well as the man injured and dying. To
injure this other life, which in reality is one with my life, as both
our lives are one with divine life, what could be more sinful?’ G.M.
Hopkins, Ethics of India, 231.
66. ‘not taking life’, III.199.27–29; ‘not causing pain’, XII.269.5; ‘not
causing injury’, XII.285.23–24. In the Laws of Manu, ahimsa connotes
‘not having an aggressive attitude’ (Manusmriti 11.223); ‘not having
an unstilled spirit’, Patanjali, Yoga Sutra 2.30–31.
67. Ian Proudfoot, 1. I owe the different senses of ahimsa to Proudfoot.
68. Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea,
London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
69. Gene Sharp, The Politics of Non-Violent Action, Boston: Porter Sargent,
+ 2. +
70. George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol 4, 469.
Originally published in 1949 in the Partisan Review.
71. With regard to the limitations of ahimsa, Lloyd Rudolph made this
interesting observation in Mahatma Gandhi’s defence in an e-mail
to the author: ‘The default position here is Gandhi’s view that it is
better to resist and die than to give your consent to violent death.
You will have my body but not my consent [my will]. Most Jews
in Germany went to their death in places such as Auschwitz
without resisting. They were complicit in their death. Vikram
Seth’s Two Lives recounts how his Aunt Henny’s sister served as a
top official of the main German gemeinde in Berlin but, like all such
officers of Jewish welfare organizations, ended by being sent to the
gas chambers. She was among the very last of the German Jews to
go but go she did.
‘The question is, when and how could German Jews have resisted.
Some say that krystal nacht, November 9, 1938, when SA Brown
Shirts, the lumpen “storm troopers” of the Nazi party, attacked
Jewish shops, homes and synagogues, was a moment when

+
 +

402 / Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse

resistance might have made a difference. The event made clear that
Hitler’s threats to annihilate the Jews had to be taken seriously. At
the same time, educated, middle class Germans were shocked by
this evidence of the regime’s encouragement of lawlessness and
violence. But it was not to be. Although Jews were being deported
and fleeing the general view among assimilated, educated
professional Jews was one of denial and avoidance of “disorder”.
That is where the gemeinde fit in; they provided a sense of “order”,
a way to cooperate rather than to resist.
‘If, in Hitler’s Germany, non-violent resistance was not
contemplated, much less tried, it was tried with considerable
success in the countries of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe,
particularly in Poland where Lech Walesa is given much credit and
in Czechoslovakia where Vaclav Havel is featured. (See Rainer
Hilderbrandt, From Gandhi to Walesa: Non-Violent Struggle for Human
Rights.) Similarly, Nelson Mandela’s leadership of the struggle
against the apartheid regime in South Africa was influenced by
Gandhi’s ideas about inclusiveness and commitment to non-violence,
+ a commitment that after the Sharpesville massacre in 1960 was +
modified to allow violence against property but not persons. And
there are quite a few other examples of the effectiveness of non-
violence against oppressive regimes. Martin Luther King, of course,
learned from Gandhi not only about non-violence but also about
inclusiveness. The point is that Gandhi launched an idea and a
practice that can succeed under a broader array of circumstances
than those posed by a “civilized” British colonial regime. In any
case, and more important, is the Gandhian lesson that it is better to
die resisting, non-violently and even violently if courage requires
it, than to die consenting.’ See Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph,
Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2006.
72. Gene Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971, 52.
Michael Walzer makes the same point in Just and Unjust Wars, 330.
73. The expression ‘bath of tears’ is used by James Fitzgerald in the
introduction to his translation of Book Eleven of the Mahabharata;
he may or may not have got it from the English poet John Donne’s
famous poem, ‘An Anatomy of the World’:

+
 +

Notes: Yudhishthira’s Remorse / 403

For in a common bath of tears it bled,

Which drew the strongest vital spirits out . . .
74. See note 15 to Chapter 8.
75. The expression belongs to Werner Jaeger, the great scholar of
classical Greece, who contrasted public and private spheres and
did not think that the rules of private morality applied to the public
sphere: ‘the principle of force forms a realm of its own, with laws
of its own, as distinct from the laws that inform the moral life of
ordinary human beings.’ Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek
Culture, New York, 1939, vol I, 402.
76. The quotes from Thucydides are from Thomas Hobbes’s translation
of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. Richard
Schlatter, New Brunswick, NJ, 1975, 377–85. See Michael Walzer, 9.
77. Buddhadev Bose, The Book of Yudhisthir: A Study of the Mahabharata
of Vyasa, trans. Sujit Mukherjee, London: Sangam Books, 1986, 20.
Bose adds that even Yudhishthira’s archery teacher, Drona, thought
him incompetent in the martial arts. ‘Give up, you are worthless,’
he says in Adiparvan, I.132.
+ 78. Economist, 4 February 2009. The comparison in the previous sentence +
to the French aristocracy was suggested to me by John Gapper of
the Financial Times in January 2009.
79. The Mahabharata says that only human beings have the ‘freedom’
to choose whereas the lower orders behave through instinct. Hence,
only human beings can be blamed or praised in the practise of
dharma. ‘Dharma and adharma apply only to human beings, O
king. They do not exist in the world among creatures, other than
man’ (XII.283.28). For an excellent discussion of this subject, see
Julian F. Woods, Destiny and Human Initiative in the Mahabharata,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Immanuel Kant
also believed that human beings become conscious of their freedom
at the moment of making a decision and this perception of autonomy
results in their capability for leading moral lives.
80. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘One word of truth . . .’: The Nobel Speech
on Literature 1970, trans. BBC Russian Service, London: The Bodley
Head, 1972, 27.

+
 +

404 / Notes: Mahabharata’s Dharma

10. Mahabharata’s Dharma

1. XV.28.10f
2. XV.46.8
3. XVI.8.52–64
4. XVII.1, 2
5. The text says that they ‘desired to circumambulate the earth, with
yoga as their dharma’ (XVII.1.44); the Pandavas finally turn
northward and ascend into the Himalayas (XVII.2.1).
6. 17.3.1, 7–8, 10–11. My gratitude to Wendy Doniger for allowing me
to use her unpublished translation of Books Seventeen and Eighteen
of the Mahabharata. According to some versions of the epic (though
not the Critical text), Yudhishthira insists on taking the dog into
heaven because of a vow never to abandon one who is frightened,
devoted, afflicted, or for whom ‘there is no other [recourse]’ (Poona
Critical Edition, XVII.13).
7. XVII.13.16–17
8. XVII.3.18–19
9. The incident of the fire sticks is at III.295–99 in the Critical Edition. +
+
I have also quoted from William J. Johnson’s translation, Mahabharata,
Book Three, The Forest, vol 4, Clay Sanskrit Library, New York: New
York University Press. In the Poona Critical Edition the incident is
at III.311–15.
10. III.311.22–25. W. Johnson’s translation in CSL. In the Critical Edition
it is at III.295.18–20.
11. III.296.13 in the Critical Edition.
12. David Shulman explains, ‘The prasna ’ points to a baffling, ultimately
insoluble crystallization of conflict articulated along opposing lines
of interpretation . . . Both questions and answers tend to the
metaphysical, with the latent centre of meaning—the ultimate
reality that is the true object of the quest—usually present only as
a suggested power situated somewhere between the two explicit
poles of the contest.’ David Shulman, ‘The Yaksa’s . Question’, in
The Wisdom of the Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001 and Untying the Knot: On
Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes, New York: Oxford, 1996.
13. David Shulman adds, ‘The Yaksa . fulfils all three of the major

+
 +

Notes: Mahabharata’s Dharma / 405

conditions for what might be called, abstracting and generalizing to

some extent, the classical Upanisadic . “riddling” scenario: (1) the
situation of the contest on the border between life and death, so
that wrong answers (and also other wrong moves, such as excessive
questioning) may prove fatal; (2) the presence, within the contest,
of a concealed ultimacy’ (ibid).
14. III.313.115 CSL. The dialogue between the Yaksha and Yudhishthira
is a long one, with dozens of questions and answers. I have used
only a few questions and answers to illustrate my point.
15. bhutani kalah. pacati vartta (III.313.18d).
16. . ’ .
anrsamsyyam . paro dharmas is at III.313.75–76 CSL; Yudhishthira
repeats it at III.313.129 CSL.
17. . ’ .
Transliterated properly as anrsamsya.
18. A few lines later the epic describes Yudhishthira as a person
. ’ .
‘bestowed with anrsamsya’ . ’ .
or anrsamsya-samayukta, XVII.3.30–32.
The word occurs three times in four verses (XVII.3.7, 8, 10, 30).
19. In the dialogue with the Yaksha, van Buitenen translates it as
‘uncruelty’; David Shulman uses ‘non-injury’; W.J. Johnson employs
+ ‘absence of cruelty’ on the first occasion (75–76), but changes it to +
‘compassion’ the second time at III.313.129 (CSL) in the Clay
Sanskrit version. Nilakantha Chaturdhara, the famous commentator
of the Mahabharata in the seventeenth century, glosses ‘cruelty’ as
‘lack of pity’ (nirdayatvam) and so, according to Wendy Doniger,
‘“lack of cruelty” which is the form that occurs in the text (a-nr-
samsya), would be “pity”’. She adds in her inimitable way: ‘“Anti-
cruelty”, for the abstract noun, has the dubious advantage of
conjuring up, for a contemporary American reader, the name of a
prominent society concerned with animals.’ Wendy Doniger,
The Hindus, New York: Penguin Books, 2009, footnotes 2 and 3.
20. Mukund Lath, ‘The Concept of Anrsamsya in the Mahabharata’, in
R.N. Dandekar (ed.), Mahabharata Revisited, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1990, 113–19.
21. English also has its own verbal confusions. It is important to get the
word right in English to describe Yudhishthira’s attitude. ‘Pity’ is
obviously not right, for, as Martha Nussbaum explains, ‘it has
acquired connotations of condescension and superiority that it did
not have earlier when Rousseau invoked pitie.’ Eighteenth-century

+
 +

406 / Notes: Mahabharata’s Dharma

texts would have used ‘sympathy’ to denote Yudhishthira’s

sentiments towards the dog. Today, however, ‘sympathy’ no longer
suggests the bias for action that compassion does. Similarly, while
‘empathy’ may reconstruct imaginatively another person’s
experience, it too does not require the agent to act on behalf of the
sufferer. Hence, ‘compassion’ is probably the right word to express
Yudhishthira’s insistence on taking the dog to heaven. It is more
intense than the alternatives, suggesting both greater suffering of
the sufferer and greater engagement of the agent. See Nussbaum’s
discussion on this in Upheavals of Thought, 12.
22. divam . ’ bhumim
. sprsati ’
. ca sabdah . punyasya
. karmanah/yavat
. . ’
sa sabdo
bhavati tavat purusa
. ucyate (III.313.120 CSL, III.297.63 in the Critical
Edition). I have followed J.A.B. van Buitenen’s translation. The
connection between ‘man’ and ‘deed’ becomes clearer in David
Shulman’s literal translation of this verse: ‘The word [or sound]
touches heaven and earth together with [in association with,
through] a good deed, as long as that word exists, one may be
called a man.’
+ 23. . ’ .
anrsamsya samayukta (XVII.3.30–32). +
24. XVIII.1.4–5
25. XVII.3.33
26. XVIII.2.12
27. XVIII.2.22
28. XVIII.2.26
29. XVIII.2.29
30. XVIII.3.32
31. XVIII.3.10–19
32. ‘human condition’ is manuso . bhavah. (XVIII.3.34).
33. XVIII.1–5
34. Moksadharmaparvan section of Book Eighteen (XVIII.252–56). I have
employed with gratitude the translation from Sanskrit of Tuladhara
and Jajali’s story from the monograph Ahimsa and a Mahabharata
Story by Ian Proudfoot. The portions quoted below are from
Proudfoot’s deconstruction of the text into two alignments, whose
authors (Proudfoot speculates) might have been different.
35. XII.254.6, 7ab, 8bd
36. XII.253.12

+
 +

Notes: Mahabharata’s Dharma / 407

37. XII.253.18ff
38. XII.256.2
39. This is the wise conclusion of Ian Proudfoot, 116.
40. XII.254.15cd
41. Proudfoot, 116
42. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, New York:
Penguin Books, 2009, 267.
43. Martha C. Nussbaum, Compassion: Human and Animal, festschrift in
honour of Jonathan Glover, edited by Richard Keshan and Jeffrey
McMahan, Oxford University Press. Also recounted in her book
Upheavals of Thought.
44. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life
in Britain 1850–1930, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 199. Collini provides
an excellent account of the moral temper of the Victorian age.
45. Hume wrote: ‘there is no such passion in human minds as the love
of mankind, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of
relation to ourself.’ David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Book
III, Part 2, section i, ed. Ernest Mossner, London: Penguin Books,
1984.
+ +
46. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751.
47. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863), The Collected Works of John
Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson, 31 vols, Toronto and London,
1965–91, vol x, 215, 231.
48. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship, London, 1926; reissued by
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 143.
49. I am indebted to the American philosopher Thomas Nagel for this
idea. See The Possibility of Altruism, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978, 82.
50. Ibid, 84
51. Loc cit, 84
52. Ibid, 85
53. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans.
James W. Ellington, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993.
54. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 400.
55. Vinit Haksar, ‘Ideals of Perfection’, in John Skorupski (ed.), Routledge
Companion to Ethics, London: Routledge, 2009 (forthcoming).
56. J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Representative Government,
Letchworth: The Aldine Press, 1957.

+
 +

408 / Notes: Mahabharata’s Dharma

57. J. Urmson makes this distinction between moral rules and ideals in
his essay, ‘Saints and Heroes’, in A. Melden (ed.), Essays in Moral
Philosophy, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958.
58. XVIII.3
59. vaisamya
. = unevenness. David Shulman points out this possibility
in his essay, ‘The Yaksa’s
. Question’, 51.
60. W.J. Johnson, Introduction, The Sauptikaparvan of the Mahabharata:
The Massacre at Night, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998,
xxviii.
61. James Fitzgerald explains this background: ‘The Mahabharata is a
“myth of the avatara”, that is a tale of the divine “unburdening”
. . . of the beleaguered Earth who has taken refuge with the celestial
Gods. The Mahabharata tells this story, narrating the divinely planned
purging from the Earth of a demonic ksatra, . and the subsequent
chartering of proper [brahmin guided] kingship . . . Draupadi in
the Mahabharata is an incarnation of Sri; she was born directly from
the earthen altar during a sacrifice. As soon as she was born, a
bodiless voice announced, “This most splendid of all women, this
Dark One (Krsna) . will tend to lead the ksatra
. to destruction. She
+ +
with her lovely figure will in time do the business of the Gods.
Because of her, a tremendous danger for the ksatriyas
. will develop’
(I.155.44–45), Fitzgerald, 5.
62. Martha Nussbaum explains how we learn compassion from our
vulnerability: ‘The recognition of one’s own related vulnerability is,
then, an important and frequently an indispensable epistemological
requirement for compassion in human beings—the thing that makes
the difference between viewing hungry peasants as beings whose
sufferings matter and viewing them as distant objects whose
experiences have nothing to do with one’s own life. Such a judgment
is psychologically powerful in moving other people into one’s own
circle of concern.’ Upheavals of Thought, 32.
63. Vaughan Pilikian, ‘Like Suns Risen at the End of Time: Metaphor
and Meaning in the Mahabharata’, Journal of Vaishnava Studies, 14.2,
Spring 2006.
64. kalah. pacati bhutani sarvani
. (XVII.1.3).
65. I had originally employed pratinayaka, ‘anti-hero’, but clearly anayaka,
‘un-hero’, is a better way to describe Yudhishthira. I owe this
clarification to Sheldon Pollock.

+
 +

Notes: Conclusion / 409

66. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek
Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
67. Dhvanyaloka (Kaka 5): Mahamunina vairagyajananatatparyam
’
pradhanyena svaprabandhasya darsayata moksalaksanah
. . . purusarthah
. ’
. santo
rasas’ ca mukhyataya vivaksavisayatvena
. . sucitah.
. Anandavardhana,
Dhvanyaloka, with the Locana commentary of Abhinavagupta and
the Balapriya commentary of Ramasaraka, ed. Pt. Pattabhirama
’
Sastri, Kashi Sanskrit Series 135, 1940, 4.5 9 533, cited in Gary A.
’
Tubb, ‘Santarasa in the Mahabharata’, ed. Arvind Sharma, Essays on
the Mahabharata, Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1991, 199.

Conclusion

1. Apropos a child’s engagement with narrative, Friedrich Nietzsche

says in the The Gay Science that ‘art saves us from nausea at human
life by giving us a good will toward things that we have made. We
can relax the demand for omnipotence and perfection because we
+ find that we enjoy something that is fully human’ (107). +
2. The Mahabharata is generally regarded in Indian tradition as
itihasa, ‘history’, while the other epic, Ramayana, is known as kavya.
3. If she were alive, I would be tempted to defend myself and my
project in the words of Andre Malraux, who declared in a
conversation with Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s, ‘I am endowed
with a sacred spirit without faith, which seeks to grasp the irony
behind the spiritual’.
4. Some societies seem to do a better job of it. Students in both
England and Scandinavia were asked a few years ago, ‘Are most of
your classmates kind and helpful?’ Only 43 per cent said ‘yes’ in
the UK while 75 per cent of Scandinavian youth answered in the
affirmative. Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,
London: Allen Lane (Penguin), 2005.
5. Gurcharan Das, India Unbound, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000,
xiii, xiv, 233.
6. bhutani kalah pacati vartta (III.313.18d).
7. XII.262.9; The Mahabharata: An Enquiry into the Human Condition,
trans. Chaturvedi Badrinath, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006.

+
 +

410 / Notes: Conclusion

8. Too much harm is done, T.S. Eliot pointed out, because of human
vanity and of ‘people who want to feel important’. T.S. Eliot, The
Cocktail Party, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.
9. Plato, Apology, 38a.
10. IX.2.1–15
11. In recent times the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre has made
the strongest plea for the human agent to choose ‘authentically’ in
order to avoid a life of ‘bad faith’. Sartre did not believe in a divine
plan, and hence, according to him, our choices are arbitrary.
Nevertheless, he passionately declared, ‘you are free . . . therefore
choose—that is to say, invent’. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a
Humanism’, in Walter Kaufman (ed.), Existentialism from Dostoevsky
to Sartre, New York: New American Library, 1975, 356.
12. Ruth Katz makes an excellent comparison of Arjuna to Achilles in
her book, Arjuna in the Mahabharata: Where Krishna Is, There is
Victory, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989, 6.
13. Laws of Manu VI. Also Mahabharata XII. 236f. Scholars have suggested
that vested interests may have influenced the ending of the epic.
Bhargava brahmins may have ‘brahminized’ the character of
+ +
Yudhishthira in later redactions of the text, making him the real
hero of the epic. Whereas Arjuna, Krishna’s devotee, was committed
to the path of devotion or bhakti, the brahmins favoured
Yudhishthira’s path of knowledge. Thus, they turned the epic’s
message to one of philosophical peace (instead of a mystical union
with God). Ruth Katz provides a number of examples. ‘The
Sauptikaparvan Episode in the Structure of the Mahabharata’, in
Arvind Sharma (ed), Essays on the Mahabharata, Leiden and New
York: E.J. Brill, 1991, 149. The Bhargava brahmins might have
hijacked the epic at a certain point in its history by adding to it the
Rama Jamadagnya episode and some obviously pre-brahmin
elements, such as in the Anusasanaparvan section of the epic, where
brahmins shamelessly advise the listener to give gifts of food,
money and cows to brahmins. See also V.S. Sukthankar, ‘The
Bhrgus
. and the Bharata: A Text-Historical Study’, in Critical Studies
in the Mahabharata, vol 1 of Sukthankar Memorial Edition, ed. P.K.
Godse, Bombay: Karnataka Publishing House, 1944, 278–337; also
see Robert P. Goldman, Gods, Priests, and Warriors: The Bhrgus. of the
Mahabharata, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

+
 +

Notes: Conclusion / 411

14. Indra says: ‘Amongst the virtuous, the great feature of dharma is
compassion—anukroso ’ hi sadhunam
. sumahad—dharmalaksanam
. . and
compassion always pleases those who are virtuous’ (XIII.5.23).
15. Max Weber, who gave much thought to prophecy, distinguished
between ‘ethical prophecy’ which was characteristic of the Judaic–
Christian tradition and ‘exemplary prophecy’ which is characteristic
of India. Yudhishthira is an example of the latter. I want to thank
the sociologist Andre Bétéille for bringing this to my attention.
16. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1970.
17. Graham Greene makes this point brilliantly in his novel, The Power
and the Glory, in which the ‘whisky priest’ strives to overcome
physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption: ‘Without
thinking what he was doing, he took another drink of brandy. As
the liquid touched his tongue he remembered his child, coming in
out of the glare: the sullen unhappy knowledgeable face. He said,
“Oh God, help her. Damn me. I deserve it, but let her live for ever.”
This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world:
+ all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one +
child. He began to weep; it was as if he had to watch her from the
shore drown slowly because he had forgotten how to swim. He
thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone . . .’
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, New York: Penguin
Classics, 1992, 208.
18. V.60.2–3 CSL
19. Ibid, V.26.3 CSL
20. V.31.22
21. XII.121.34
22. These expressions—‘ethic of ultimate ends’ and ‘ethic of
responsibility’—belong to the sociologist Max Weber. See his essay,
Politics as a Vocation, and From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed.
Hans Gerth, C.W. Mills, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
23. The notion that societies are held together by ‘laws, customs and
moral habits’ was articulated by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth
century in his critique of the French Revolution as well as in his
other writings.
24. The temper of the Mahabharata is closer to that of David Hume

+
 +

412 / Notes: Conclusion

than of Immanuel Kant, the two philosophers who have most

deeply influenced the modern ethical sensibility. When Yudhishthira
tells Draupadi in the forest, ‘I act because I must’, he is reflecting
an uncompromising world of absolute moral standards, similar to
Kant’s. Chastened, however, by Duryodhana’s betrayal, he slowly
becomes a reciprocal altruist, and decides to go to war. Later he
learns the art of statecraft from Bhishma and he recognizes the
need for punishment in public life. David Hume believed that one’s
reason for doing something had to link to some desire or emotion
that human beings possess. Similarly, Bhishma speaks of svabhava,
‘human inclination’. Hume’s world of sociable beings, who find
moral reward in the nobility of character, is not dissimilar to the
prudent ethical life of the good king that Yudhishthira pursues
after he becomes king. It recognizes the place of both danda and
benevolence.
25. N. Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513, ed. P. Bondanella, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984, 52.
26. III.31.39
+ 27. XIV.53–55 +
28. III.32.19, 24, 30
29. I am indebted to Sheldon Pollock for these words of caution. He
warned me not to try and seek a single meaning, nor excessive
coherence from the epic, while reassuring me about my own quest
for dharma in the epic, saying that it ‘is not only permissible but a
hermeneutic necessity’.
30. Scholars have long been perplexed at this moral confusion. As
already noted, Adolf Holtzmanns proposed a complex inversion
theory, suggesting that the Pandavas might have been villains in an
earlier version of the epic. Adolf Holtzmanns (the younger), Arjuna:
Ein Beitrag zur Reconstruction des Mahabharata, Strassburg: Karl J.
Trubner, 1879. Another scholar, E. Washbrook Hopkins, treated the
Pandava deceits as examples of an earlier morality in the epic’s
historical development. E. Washbrook Hopkins, The Great Epic of
India: Its Character and Origin, New York: Scribner, 1901.
31. This was the late Professor Bimal Krishna Matilal’s verdict. See his
essay, ‘Krishna: In Defence of a Devious Divinity’, in Arvind
Sharma (ed.), Essays on the Mahabharata, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991, 4.

+
 +

Notes: Conclusion / 413

32. Bimal Matilal, The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Ethics and
Epics, ed. Jonardon Ganeri, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
65.
33. III.148. The three ages prior to Kali Yuga are Krta, followed by Treta
and Dvapara.
34. Sir Stuart Hampshire, Address to Second Meeting of the UNESCO
Universal Ethics Project, Naples, 1997.
35. XIII.74.22–27
36. A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Repetition in the Mahabharata’, The Collected
Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, gen. ed., Vinay Dharwadker, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1999, 176–77. He adds: ‘Because dharma-
sukshmata is one of the central themes that recur in an endless
number of ways, the many legal discussions are a necessary part of
the action.’
37. XII.252.36ab, 13, 17, 50ab
38. J.A.B. van Buitenen, Mahabharata, Introduction to Book Two, 29.
39. The value system designated by the epic as nivrtti . had been
influenced by the philosophical ideas of Samkhya and Yoga. These
+ can be found in the epic’s sections called Mokshadharma, +
Ashvamedhika, and in the didactic portions of Vanaparvan. The epic’s
pravrtti value is best illustrated in the concept of sva-dharma, one’s
caste duty (also called varna dharma). There is also a third way in
the epic, of bhakti, devotion to a loving and all-powerful God (with
a capital G). The world view of bhakti is different from that of the
Vedas and the Upanishads. Its God is much more exalted, referred
to in later redactions of the epic as Narayana or Shiva. That these
three ways might be contradictory does not seem to bother the
epic. Nor is any particular character a perfect representative of one
or the other strand of thinking. Krishna praises Yudhishthira, for
example, for upholding both pravrtti . and nivrtti
. values: ‘Dharma is
greater than the winning of a kingdom and they describe the
execution of it as a penance. By executing the duties of sva-dharma
with truth and honesty, you have conquered both this world and
the next. In the beginning you engaged in study, following various
vows, and absorbed the complete science of warfare; having gained
possessions and wealth through kshatriya-dharma, you have executed
all the traditional sacrifices. You take no delight in licentious

+
 +

414 / Notes: Conclusion

pleasures and you do not strive in any way after the objects of
enjoyment. You never abandon dharma because of greed, and thus,
because of your nature, you are the dharma-raja. Having won lands,
riches and objects of pleasure, your greatest delight is always in
charity, truthfulness, austerity, faith, tranquility, determination and
tolerance’ (III.180.16–19).
40. Drona, trans. Vaughan Pilikian, vol 1, Clay Sanskrit Series, New
York: New York University Press, 2006, II.4.
41. Vaughan Pilikian, Introduction to Mahabharata, Book Seven, 22.
42. Deussen and Strauss include Sanatsujatiya in their Vier Philosophischen
Texte des Mahabharatam. Paul Deussen and Otto Strauss, Vier
Philosophischen Texte des Mahabharatam, Leipzig, 1906.
43. Vidura says, ‘The ancient and eternal youth Sanatsujata had
proclaimed that there is no death’ (V.41.2). Dhritarashtra presses
his brother to reveal this wisdom. Vidura demurs: he is the son of
a shudra woman and thus not entitled to speak. But he calls
Sanatsujata with his mind and asks him, ‘Pray do speak to
[Dhritarashtra], so that upon hearing it this Indra among kings
+ may be translated beyond happiness and misery . . . so that old age +
and death do not overwhelm him . . .’ (V.41.8).
44. Recall Yudhishthira did offer the incentive of heaven for being
good to Draupadi: ‘He who resolutely follows dharma, O beautiful
woman, attains to infinitude hereafter’ (III.32.19).
45. This is also Derek Parfit’s position in Reasons and Persons, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984, 453–54.
46. Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987; he makes the same point in The Possibility of Altruism,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
47. Dhvanyaloka (Kaka 5). Gary Tubb and Sudipta Kaviraj have
elaborated on this verse (DE 690–91). Sudipta Kaviraj was kind
enough to share with me his unpublished paper, ‘The Second
Mahabharata’, presented in a seminar at Columbia University in
honour of Professor Sheldon Pollock in 2008.
48. David Gitomer, ‘King Duryodhana: The Mahabharata Discourse of
Sinning and Virtue in Epic and Drama’, Journal of the American
Oriental Society, 112.2, (April–June) 1992, 223.
49. It has been suggested that the idea of Hindu pluralism is grounded

+
 +

Notes: Conclusion / 415

in its earliest text, the Rig Veda. See Wendy Doniger, ‘Many Gods,
Many Paths: Hinduism and Religious Diversity’, Religion and Culture
Web Forum, February 2006. An earlier draft of this article appeared
as ‘Do Many Heads Necessarily Have Many Minds? Tracking the
Sources of Hindu Tolerance and Intolerance,’ Parabola, 30.4 (Winter
2005), 10–19.
50. The poet doubts if even the gods know how the world was created:
‘Whence this creation has arisen—perhaps it formed itself, or
perhaps it did not—the one who looks down on it, in the highest
heaven, only he knows—or perhaps he does not know.’ This
famous ‘Nasadiiya’ verse is at X.129. Wendy Doniger, The Rig Veda:
An Anthology, London: Penguin Books, 1981, 25. There are many
translations of the Rig Veda to choose from; my favourite is by
Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience: Mantramañjari (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1977). Of the complete text, I recommend Ralph
T.H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rig Veda (London, 1889; reprinted
Delhi, 1973). Of the partial text, I also like A.A. Macdonell, A Vedic
Reader for Students (Oxford, 1917); Hymns from the Rigveda (Calcutta,
+ London, 1922). This simple verse about the creation of the universe +
has provoked dozens of complex commentaries by Indian
theologians and Western scholars. The open-mindedness of this
verse is in contrast to the certainty of other verses in the Rig Veda,
according to Stephen Phillip. See, for example, W. Norman Brown,
‘Theories of Creation in the Rig Veda’, Journal of the American
Oriental Society, 85 (1965), 23–34; Jwala Prasad, ‘The Philosophical
Significance of Rigveda X.129.5 and Verses of an Allied Nature’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1929), 586–98; W.D. Whitney, ‘The
Cosmogonic Hymn, Rig-Veda X.129’, Proceedings of the American
Oriental Society (1882), 109. As a general study of the Rig Veda, I
would suggest Jan Gonda, The Vision of the Vedic Poets (The Hague,
1963).
51. Aitareya Brahmana (with the commentary of Sayana), Calcutta: M.N.
Sarkar, 1895, 3.21.
52. ‘David Tracy explains that one of the chief dangers in monotheism
is an exclusivism that can (though it need not) lead to intolerance
by falsely suggesting that the one-ness of God requires totality
thinking. A polytheistic religion, by this argument, might be

+
 +

416 / Notes: Conclusion

expected to be more tolerant of the worship of other gods than a

monotheistic religion would be. A monistic religion, characterized
by infinity thinking rather than totality thinking, stands in the
middle, more tolerant than monotheism but less tolerant than
polytheism. The Hindu evidence supports this correlation. And it
reflects this skeptical attitude in the charming way as open-minded
kings in the Upanishads invite holy men of various schools to
debate religious issues.’ Wendy Doniger, ‘Many Gods, Many Paths:
Hinduism and Religious Diversity’, Religion and Culture Web Forum,
February 2006.
53. Hindutva or ‘Hindu-ness’ is the creed of the political groups at the
right wing of the Indian political spectrum, the most prominent
being the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rose to power in
India in the 1990s and ruled the country as a part of the National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) from 1999 to 2004, and was the chief
opposition from 2004 to 2009.
54. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993, 216–20. The debate on teaching the Mahabharata in our
+ schools is relevant for another reason, which I found upon reading +
Michael Oakeshott. It is the idea that there are things to be enjoyed,
but that enjoyment is almost heightened by one’s awareness that
what one is enjoying is in danger of being lost. It is the combination
of enjoyment and fear that stimulates conservative thoughts. The
epic has given me so much enjoyment that I have become a
Mahabharata addict. I feel deeply sad that many young boys and
girls in India are growing up rootless, and they will never have
access to these forbidden fruits of pleasure. My fears of the loss of
tradition may appear exaggerated. Perhaps they are. Certainly in
the villages of India, where the vast majority of Indians live, the
Mahabharata is well and alive in the oral traditions. But the future
of India does not lie in the villages but in the cities. It is there,
especially with the powerful onslaught of the global culture, that
we have to concern ourselves with to preserve continuity with the
past.
55. . ’
Bhagavad Gita XVIII.63, vimrsyaitad ’. .
asesena/yathecchasi tatha kuru:
‘Having reflected on this fully/Then act as you choose.’
56. A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’, . The Collected Essays

+
 +

Notes: Conclusion / 417

of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 158.
57. David Gitomer, 222
58. V.S. Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, republished by
Motilal Banarsidass, 2003, 24.
59. XVIII.5.49
60. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in
welbürgerlicher Absicht’ (1784). German translation by Isaiah Berlin
in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed.
Henry Hardy, New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 1. At another point,
Berlin translates it as follows: ‘Out of the crooked timber of
humanity no straight thing was ever made’ (19), which provided
the famous title to his book of essays.
61. George Orwell, I think, best captures the Mahabharata’s belief in the
lack of human perfectibility in the following famous lines: ‘The
essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that
one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that
one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly
intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be
+ +
defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of
fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.’ Richard Rovere
(ed.), The George Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage, New
York: Harcourt, 1961, 332. He could have been describing
Yudhishthira.
62. David Gitomer, 223: ‘The Sanskrit Mahabharata is a continuing
repository of crisis in the public discourse of classical India.’
63. Association for Democratic Reforms, www.adrindia.org,
jchhokar@gmail.com.
64. The expression ‘in a time of cosmic destructiveness’ is Barbara
Stoler Miller’s, in her Introduction to The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s
Counsel in Time of War, New York: Bantam Books, 1986, 3.
65. Under the powerful influence of Vaishnavism, ‘dharma leads to
victory’ was modified over time in some versions of the epic to
read, ‘Krishna leads to dharma, and this in turn leads to victory.’
From depending on oneself and one’s conscience to know right
from wrong, the devotees of Krishna surrendered themselves to
Krishna, the God, with the full expectation that He would lead
them to dharma and to victory.

+
 +

418 / Notes: Dharma—The Story of a Word

Dharma—The Story of a Word

1. I am indebted to many scholars for this story of dharma and I wish

to acknowledge my gratitude to R. Lingat, The Classical Law of India,
trans. J.D.M. Derrett, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973;
P.V. Kane, History of the Dharmasastras
. vol 1; Franklin Edgerton,
‘Dominant Ideas in the Formation of Indian Culture’, Journal of
the American Oriental Society, 62 (1942), 155–56; J.A.B. van Buitenen,
‘Dharma and Moksha’, Philosophy East and West, 7 (1956–57), 33–40;
D.D.H. Ingalls, ‘Dharma and Moksa’, . Loc cit 41–48; Wilhelm
Halbfass, India and Europe: As Essay in Understanding, State University
of New York Press, 1988, 312–43; G.J. Larson, ‘The Trimurti of
Dharma in Indian Thought: Paradox or Contradiction’, Philosophy
East and West 22 (1972), 145–53; Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,
Dharmatattva; S. Radhakrishnan, ‘The Hindu View of Life’, Indian
Philosophy, 1, 7th edn., 1962; Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of
Man; J.M. Koller, ‘Dharma: An Expression of a Universal Order’,
Philosophy East and West 22 (1975), 133–44.
2. P.V. Kane, History of the Dharmasastras, vol 1, Poona: Bhandarkar +
+ .
Oriental Research Institute, 1962–75.
3. P. Hacker, ‘Dharma im Hinduisms’, quoted in Wilhelm Halbfass,
India and Europe: As Essay in Understanding, 314. The Concept of Duty,
ed. W.D. O’Flaherty and J.D.M. Derrett, New Delhi, 1978.
4. J. Gonda, ‘Dharma, Karman, Samsaara, bilden einen Komplex, ein
weltanschauliches System’, 1, 292, quoted in Wilhelm Halbfass,
312.
5. R. Lingat, The Classical Law of India, 3.
6. According to the Rig Veda VI.70.1, dharnan is the means of separating
heaven and earth (dyavaprthivi).
.
7. The Atharva Veda refers to the dharma purana, . the ‘ancient law’
(XVIII.3.1).
8. Mahabharata XII.10.10; VII.49.49 (dharmena. vidhrtah
. . prajah).
.
9. Manavadharmasastra II.75ff.
10. Such usages are found since the time of the Brahmana . (XIV.7.3.15)
and they are conspicuous in the Nyaya and Vaisesika ’ . systems.
’
11. The varnasramadharma allocates, as we have seen, the duties of the
four castes and the stages of life as sva-dharma.

+
 +

Notes: Dharma—The Story of a Word / 419

12. The Narayaniya . section of the Mahabharata tells us about the

development of the Hindu sects. It deals with the dharma of the
ekantin, i.e. the ‘exclusive’ worshippers of Vishnu-Narayana; their
dharma, whose focus is monotheistic devotion, is also described as
‘venerable’, ‘eternal dharma’ (dharmah sanatanah).
13. Yoga Sutra II.33
14. James Fitzgerald describes this change in his excellent introduction
to Book Twelve of the Mahabharata, vol 7, Books Eleven and
Twelve, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 101–28.
15. Manu had also used sanatana-dharma in his classic text to refer to
particular statutes or norms.
16. R. Antoine, ‘A Pioneer of Neo-Hinduism, Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee’, Indica, The Indian Historical Research Institute Silver
Jubilee Commemorative Volume, Bombay, 1953, 5–21.
17. S. Radhakrishnan, Religion and Society, London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1952, 107–08.

+ +

+
 +

INDEX

Abhijnana Shakuntalam (Kalidasa), xl American International Group, 288

Abhimanyu, 92, 104, 107–08, 112, 114, Amin, Idi, 19
176, 196, 209, 227, 235–36, 240, 257 Amnesty International, 206
abuse of power, xxxiii amoral realism of Duryodhana, 82
accountability, xxxiv, 54, 230, 232 Anandavardhana, 251, 298
in public life, 59, 304 Anderson, Benedict, 142
of Yudhishthira, 38 Andrey, Prince, 207
Achilles, 51, 92, 107–08, 156, 172, 221, Andromache, 51
281 Anga, 154, 180, 294. See also Karna
action (karma), xlvii, 66–67, 82, 116, Angkor Wat, Cambodia, xxxi, xlix
119, 285, 289–90, 292 anrishamsya (compassion), xlvi, 79,
+ Adam and Eve, 210 266–69, 271–72, 274, 277–83
+
adharma of Duryodhana, 32, 40 anukrosha (compassion), 260, 267–68
Adhiratha, 153, 154, 167
anti-American sentiment, 20–21, 22
Administrative Reforms, Department
Antigone, 59
of, 55–56
Anti-Slavery International, 54
affirmative action, 53, 157, 162–63, 171
appeasement policy, 109, 113
Afghanistan, 206
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 68, 112–13
agent-sensitive evaluation, 102
Arab Bedouins, 233
aggressive strategy, 82, 109, 114
ahimsa (non-violence), xlvi, 71, 73–74, Arendt, Hannah, 135
79, 110, 197, 244, 246–47, 249–51, Argentina, 135, 231
253, 260, 263, 274, 279, 283, 292. Aristotle, xxxviii, 8, 75, 84, 85, 127,
See also Gandhi, M.K. 139, 275
Ajatashatru, 78 Nicomachean Ethics, 84, 230
Ajivikas, 244 Arjuna, xli, xliv, xlvi, 1, 2, 15, 37, 44,
Albright, Madeleine, 230 50, 60, 77, 119, 120, 123, 125, 127–28,
Alexander the Great, 230, 245 136, 141, 143, 152–55, 157, 165, 167,
Allies, 113, 186–87, 204 170–73, 176, 177, 183–84, 187, 189–
altruism, 129, 266–68, 270–71 96, 209, 211, 225, 235, 236, 237–38,
Amateur Dramatics Club, Simla, 17, 248, 253, 256–59, 261, 264, 277, 281,
158–59 282, 291–93, 296, 301
Ambani, Anil, 22–25, 28, 136–37, 141 ability with bow, 12
Ambani, Dhirubhai, 22–25, 136–37 aristeia, 107, 114
Ambani, Mukesh, 22–25, 28, 136, 141 despair, 88ff
Ambani, Tina, 24 dilemma, 96, 102, 134, 292

421

+
 +

422 / Index

Arnold, Dan, xl Bhasa, Dutavakya, 14

artha (material well being), xxxviii, Bhima, 1, 2, 9, 12, 44, 49, 60, 75, 77,
xxxix, xl, lii, 74–75 85,110, 112, 153, 154, 166, 183, 184,
Arthashastra (Kautilya), xl, 15, 45, 58, 188, 191, 193, 202, 213, 220–21, 225,
109 229, 258–59, 261, 271, 297
Arya Samaj, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii Bhishma, xlvi, xlvii, 15, 35–36, 38, 44–
Aryans, xxxvii, l, 244 47, 49, 51, 59, 60, 71, 72, 100, 103,111–
asceticism, 132 12, 133, 156, 174, 187, 188, 190, 195,
Ashoka, 243–46, 284. 199, 212, 220, 222, 223, 227, 239,
See also Buddhism 242–43, 246–47, 251, 264, 284–86, 294
Ashwatthama, xlvi, 93, 104, 184, 188, selflessness, 117ff
191–92; revenge, 213ff, 280–81 Bhurishrava, 220
Ashwatthama (elephant), 215 Bhutto, Benazir, 254
Ashvins, 44 Biardeau, Madelaine, 196
Astyanax, 51 birth and rebirth, cycle of, 133
Athena, 184 Borobudur, Indonesia, xlix
Athens–Sparta conflict, 109, 252–53 Botton, Alain de, 156
Atlanta, 186 bourgeois, 150
atman (real self), 60–61, 94, 144–45, 296 Bowles, Adam, l, 177
attachments, 127 Brahma Sutras, 209
Brahma, 160–65, 192
Augustine, Saint, 112, 203
brahmacharya, xxxiv, 133
Austrians, 20
brahman, 144–45
autonomy of rational being, 68, 255
Brahmastra, 157
+ Baig, Murad Ali, 233 brahmins, 132, 160–65, 172, 174, 244 +
balance of power management, 58, bribery and corruption, xxxiii, 23, 24,
110 56, 59, 66–67, 86, 181, 200
Balaram, 193 British Labour Party, 269
Bandukwalla, J.S., 231–32 British Raj, 150
battle formation of troops, 89 Brook, Peter, Mahabharata, 41, 195, 302
belief system, 62 Buddha, xxxiv, 13, 116, 127, 145, 228
benevolence, 141, 264, 268–70, 285 Buddhism, Buddhist(s), xlix, 47, 49,
Bengal Renaissance, 150 128, 132, 245, 297
Benin, Africa, 53 dharma campaign of Ashoka, 244,
246 Dhyana, 128
Bentham, Jeremy, 72–73
Burckhardt, Jacob, 149
Berlin, 20
Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), 56
Bhagavad Gita, 50, 89, 93, 95, 97, 114,
bureaucracy, 54–57, 158
117, 119–20, 125, 131, 133–34, 136–
Bush, George W., 114, 116, 206
38, 140–42, 144, 194, 296, 301
Bhakra Dam, 130 Calhoun, John C., 52
bhakti (devotion), xxxvii, 42, 119, 178, Camus, Albert, 180
195, 201, 209, 244, 296 capital punishment. See punishment
Bhandarkar Oriental Research capitalism, 28–31, 139, 140, 289
Institute, Pune, l caste system, castes (varnas), xlii, 49,
Bharatas, xli, xlvii, 7, 14, 16, 44, 103, 94, 160–65, 170, 180–81, 267, 278
120, 122–24, 133, 152, 161 hierarchy, 161
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), xxxv, jatis. See caste 170
xxxvii sub-castes (jatis), 162

+
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Index / 423

Catholic Church, 149, 203 consumerism, 20

chakra vyuha, 103–04 corporate morality, 130–31
Chamberlain, Neville, 113 corruption. See bribery and corruption
Chandragupta Maurya, 245 cosmic age, 7
charity, Christian idea of, 268 cosmic balance of dharma, xlii, 43, 87,
Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 134, 99
195 cosmic destructiveness, 305
Chaudhary, R.K., 55 cosmic order, 7
Chicago University, xl, l courage of Draupadi, 33ff
Chillingworth, Roger, 221 Creon, 59
China, 13, 138 crime and punishment.
invasion of India, 111 See punishment
Chopra, B.R., 302 cruelty, 109
Christian, Christianity, xxxvi, xxxvii, Czechoslovakia, 251
149, 161, 196, 299, 300
denial of physical pleasure, 87 Dalits in India, 161, 165, 170, 221
Solidarity International, 54 Damayanti, xlix
theology, problem of evil, 208 danda (rule of law and order), xlvii,
Churchill, Winston, 13, 92, 204 15, 111, 224, 228, 242, 255, 285.
civil society, 52, 163, 222 See also punishment
class divisions, 181, 267 Dang, Sat Pal, 138
Clausewitz, Karl von, 92 Dang, Vimla, 138
Clay Sanskrit Library (CSL), l, li Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, 143,
collateral damage, 203 301
+ collateral debt obligation (CDO), 287– Darfur slaughter, 113 +
88 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man,
collective guilt, 253 80
Collins, Steve, xl Dawkins, Richard, 146
communal solidarity, 230 Dayanand Saraswati, xxxvii
compassion (anrishamsya, anukrosha), death penalty, 222
xlvi, 79, 260, 266–69, 271–72, 274, deception and trickery, xliv, 10, 113,
277–83 192, 215
the highest dharma, 258–61 Delhi, water reforms, 22
competitive egoism. See egoism democracy, xxxiii, 157, 207, 254, 304
competitiveness, 25, 85, 265 Dennet, Daniel, 146–47
and envy, 17–22 Descartes, Rene, 145–46, 149–50
Comte, August, 129, 267–69 desirelessness, 127
concentric circles, theory of, 109 detachment, 120, 122, 125, 133, 248
Confucius, 127 Dhamma, 245
Congress of Vienna, 110 Dharaji, Dewas, Madhya Pradesh, 54
Congress, 60, 138 dharma (moral well being), xxxiii,
-led coalition government, 162 xxxiv, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xlii, xliii,
conscience, 49–50, 96, 107, 124, 136, xlv, xlvii, xlviii, li, lii, 7, 15, 19, 34,
149, 232, 252, 253, 294 39, 40, 57–62, 63–64, 66, 69, 70, 73–
consciousness (aham), 61, 96, 127, 143, 74, 77–78, 109, 115, 124, 129, 136,
146–50, 162, 263 140, 143, 151–52, 153, 174–77, 178,
Consequentialism, 73–74, 109, 112, 185 180, 182, 184–85, 189, 191, 197–98,
constitutional system, 115 199, 212, 215–16, 227, 236, 245, 247,

+
 +

424 / Index

253, 255, 256ff, 276, 282, 288, 290, Douglas, Stephen, 53

292, 297–98, 301–04 Draupadi, xlii, 2, 12, 63–65, 67, 69–71,
and vulnerability, 31–32 73–77, 82–83, 85–87, 92, 97, 110, 112,
as a calling, 83–84 118, 125, 140, 155, 165, 166–69, 176,
as duty, 205 178, 190–91, 196, 198–99, 200, 208,
caste specific (sva-dharma), 49, 83, 219, 221, 224, 226, 230, 238, 240, 252,
94, 182, 278 257, 259, 261–62, 273–74, 286, 290–
cosmic balance, 43 91, 294, 298, 302
field of righteousness (dharma- courage, 33ff
kshetra), 108 dilemma, 36, 51, 57, 70–71, 199
is subtle, 46–50, 71, 72, 111, 124, public disrobing of, 39–43, 124, 291
294–95, 303 resentment, 226
is sukshma, 212 swayamvara, 193
is taught, 82–87 Dresden, 186
of king/kshatriya, 4, 33, 41–46, 54, Drona, xli, 18, 26, 83, 93, 103, 104, 127–
58, 84, 238–39, 242–43, 252–53, 28, 152–53, 157, 169–71, 174, 188–92,
275, 281, 305 212, 213–15, 218–20, 225, 228, 239,
of non-violence, 100 291
righteousness, 75 Drupada, 155, 219
sadharana-dharma (of universal dualism of mind and body, 146
appeal), 49, 94, 182, 253, 279
duality, sense of, 136
tragic dilemma (dharma-sankat), 96
Duhshasana, xlii, 33, 35–36, 39–40, 54,
Dharma (god, father of Yudhishthira),
59, 124, 178
44
Dumont, Louis, 132
+ Dharmapuri district, Tamil Nadu, 83,
Durvasa, 153
+
84
Duryodhana, xlii, xlv, xlvii, 50, 54, 57,
Dhartrashtras. See Kauravas
60–61, 77, 81, 88–89, 93, 103–04, 107,
Dhrishtadyumna, 184, 188, 215, 218–
112–14, 121–22, 125, 141, 185, 197,
19, 278
204, 220, 226, 229, 235, 236, 251–52,
Dhritarashtra, 1–6, 12, 13, 16, 24, 34,
41, 47, 70, 278, 280, 283, 296, 304 261, 270–71, 278, 281, 284, 289, 297,
Dikshit, Sheila, 22 298
dilemma, moral dilemma, 8, 47, 50, amoral philosophy, 58, 79–80, 109,
125, 187, 196, 211–12, 242, 295 227
of Arjuna, 96, 101–02, 115, 134 and Bhima, fight, 183, 221
of Draupadi, 36, 51, 57, 70–71, 199 death, 183, 194, 202, 212, 213
of Karna, 171–72 denounced Krishna, 183, 185, 190
of Yudhisthira, 50. See also Prisoner’s and Karna, relation, 151, 154–55,
dilemma 166–67, 169, 175, 177–78, 179, 180–
discontent, 4, 14 82, 191
discrimination, principle of, 203 life of envy and resentment, 1ff,
divine presence in human life, 196 182, 280
divine vision, 132 realism, 111
divinity transgressions, 62
and humanity, conflict, 108 will to power, 243
of Krishna, 17 won the game of dice, 33–36, 38–39,
Doniger, Wendy, xl 41
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Dutavakya (Bhasa), 14
Karamazov, 72 duty, xlii, 40, 78, 118, 134–36

+
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Index / 425

See also dharma family, 278

and conscience, 94 versus individual, 69–73
and consequences, 76 fasts as instrument of moral growth,
argument of Krishna, 94 86
noble descent, 68 fear, 12–13, 22, 130
of kshatriya, 13–17, 49–50 female sexuality, 43
of Yudhishthira, 63ff feudal societies, 157
sense of, 68, 76, 120, 122 Fitzgerald, James, l
Dvaita forest, 63, 73, 110, 258 forbearance, 226
Dwarka, 193, 211 forgiveness, xlvi, 222, 226–28, 230, 234
and reconciliation, 228–33
Edgerton, Franklin, 42 Forster, E.M., 129, 130, 132
egalitarianism, 30–31
Foucault, Michel, 224
ego, egoism (ahamkara, ‘the ‘I-maker’,
four Ages, 7
self), xiv, xlvi, 4, 10, 127–28, 130,
free will, 210
136, 141–42, 144–45, 156, 248, 265,
freedom, 11
270, 303
freedom struggle, 254
competitive (spardha), 265
French Revolution, 27, 255
of Duryodhana, 15
Freud, Sigmund, 25
Eichmann, Adolf, 135
Friedrich, Carl, 118
Eklavya, 169–71
Friedrich, Paul, 117–18
Eliot, George, 267
friendship, 182
Eliot, T.S., 101, 129, 142
Fuld, Dick, 288
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 117, 119, 150
fundamentalism, 300, 303
+ emotional security, 158 +
ends and means, 71, 101 Gaiety Theatre, Simla, 158
English Civil War, 243 gambler’s frenetic whirl, 85
Enlightenment, 52, 142–43 gambling of Shiva, 7
Enron, 304 game of dice, xlviii, 5, 6–10, 32, 33–34,
envy, xiv 57, 63, 69, 70, 85, 112, 124, 220, 273,
a vice of socialism, 28–31 286, 291
eternal sickness or healthy Gandhari, 152, 179, 202, 210, 229, 234–
competitiveness, 17–22 35, 256, 273
of Anil Ambani, 22–25 Gandhi, Indira, xxxv, 23, 254
of childhood, 25 Gandhi, Kasturba, 247
of Duryodhana, 1ff, 182, 280 Gandhi, M.K., xxxv, 22, 69, 82, 86,
Epicurus, 208–09 100, 110, 134, 138, 247, 249–51, 270,
Epstein, Joseph, 20 272, 283
equanimity, 247–48 Gandhi, Rahul, 254
eternity, xxxix Gandhi, Rajiv, 254
ethical idealism of Yudhishthira, 82, Gandhi, Sonia, 1
101, 283
a karma yogi?, 137–40
Euripides, 51
Garden of Eden, 210
evil, problem of, 208–10
Gates, Bill, 279
evolutionary biology, 80, 82
Gaulle, Charles de, 13
Exodus, 223
generosity, 182
extremism, xxxvi
genetic coding, 137
faith, 49 Geneva Convention, 112, 204, 207, 230

+
 +

426 / Index

Germans, 20 Herodotus, Histories, 116

global economic inequality, 53 heterogeneity of Indian tradition, lii
global economy, 28, 52, 166 hierarchy, 87, 160–61
God, 47–49, 93, 141, 189, 195, 208–10, Hiltebeitel, Alf, 61
257. See also Krishna Himalayan tribes, 44
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, li Himalayas, 257
Golden Age, 8, 292 Himmler, Heinrich, 135
Goldman Sachs, 255, 288 Hindu(s), Hinduism, xxxvii, xlix, 47,
Goldstone, Richard, 231 132, 149, 170, 201, 232
Goodstein, Laurie, 300 conception of God/divine, 196, 209
governance failures, xxxiii, 24, 304 notion of creator, 299
government departments, use of orthodoxy, 245
different inks, 55–56 Right, xxxv, xxxvi, 300
government schools, absence of way of life, xxxviii
teachers, 59, 83–84 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atom
Grassley, Charles, 288 bombings, 93, 101, 204, 304–05
Graves, Robert, 97 Hitler, Adolf, 20, 92, 113, 204, 207, 250
greed and personal ambition, xiv, 10, Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 79, 243
28–31, 252 Leviathan, 243
Greek, Greeks, 12, 13, 30, 51, 75, 116, Hoess, Rudolf, 141
184, 222 Hollywood, 186, 221
idea of character, 76 Homer, Iliad, xlix, l, 51, 92, 107–08,
tragedy, 259 156, 184, 221, 108
wars, 252 Hood, General, 186
+ grihastha (man-in-the-world), 124, 132, human
+
133 anxiety over status, 151
Guantanamo Bay, 206 autonomy, 223
Guinier, Lani, 166 behaviour, 8, 127, 140
Gujarat, genocide, 232 bondage, xxxiv, 119
defencelessness, 275
Hadith, 233 desire and intentions, 70
Hamburg, 186 failures, xxxiii
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 12, 149 imperfectability, 116
Hampton, Jean, 223 initiative, 255
Hart, Liddell, 250 motivation, 26
Haskar, Vineet, 271 perception, 9
Hastinapura, 8, 16, 47, 50, 88, 122, 140, reason, 271
196, 230, 240, 251, 257, 294 rights, 68, 113, 231
alliance with Gandhara, 124 weakness, 136
hatred, 10, 11, 13, 127 humanitarian intervention, 113
Hawthrone, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 134
Letter, 221 Hume, David, 53, 68, 73, 145, 268
Hebrew, 222 humility, 136
Hector, 51, 107–08, 184 Hutcheson, Francis, 268
Hegel, G.W.F., 134–35, 137, 150, 297 Hutton, J.H., 160
Helvetius, Claude, 142 Huxley, Aldous, 241
Henry V, 205–06 hypocrisy of Dhritarashtra, xiv, 12,
Hephaestus, 107 280

+
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Index / 427

Idealism, 79, 111 jatis. See caste

identity, 127 Java, 142
ideological extremes, 79 jaya (victory), xliv
ignorance, 209 Jayadratha, 105–07
Iliad (Homer), xlix, l, 51, 92, 107–08, jehad, 233
156, 184, 221 Jenkins, Philip, 300
illusion (maya), 148, 150, 183, 191–92, Jesus Christ, 82, 110, 270
195, 199–200, 297 Jews Holocaust, 7, 19, 20, 134–35, 142,
ill-will, 127 250, 299
‘I-maker’ (ahamkara), 148 John Paul II, Pope, 231
immortality, 153 Johnson, Lyndon B., 116
inclination (asadbhava), 76, 85 Johnson, W.J., li
India Unbound, xxxii, xxxix Jordan, 206
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Judaism, xxxvi
165 Judeo–Christian theology, 209
Indian miniature paintings, xlix judicial process, 222
Indira Sagar power plant, 54 jus ad bellum (cause), 109, 185
individual and power of the state, jus in bello (conduct, rules of war),
clash, 59 109, 185, 203
Indology, xxxix just post bellum (consequences), 109,
Indo–US nuclear deal (2008), 21 112, 185
Indra, 44, 107, 153, 172, 201, 236, 257, just war doctrine, righteous war
260, 262, 266, 282, 299 (dharma-yuddha), 50, 95, 96, 109–13,
Indraprastha, 2, 8 114, 187, 203–05, 251, 291–92
+ industrial revolution, 29 justice, xlii
+
industrialization, 26 quest for, 25
inequality and caste, xlvi, 165 sense of, 220
‘I-ness’ (ahamkara), 127, 138, 144.
See also ego Kabir, xxxvii
inference, 80, 144 kala (time or death), xliii, 9
Ingalls, Daniel, xxxi, xxxix, xl, xlix, Kali Age (Kali Yuga), 8, 199–200, 246,
118 252, 290
institutional aspects, 83 Kalidasa, 48
intentions and consequences, 71, 74 Shakuntala, xl
international politics, 15 Kalinga War, 244–46
International Red Cross, 135 kama (human desire, pleasure), xxxviii,
International War Crimes Tribunal, lii, 74–75, 87, 303
231 Kamasutra, xl
Iraq, 304 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 30, 53, 67–68, 71,
Islam, xxxvi, xxxvii, 196, 233, 299, 300 136, 150, 271, 281, 303
notion of duty, 134
Jaimini, 38 Kapstein, Mathew, xl
Jainism, 49, 132 karma, 69–70, 76, 95, 137, 209–10, 265
Jains, 47, 244 as bondage, 133, 248
Jajali, 248–49, 255, 263–66, 282, 305 concept of, 84
James, William, 150–51 karma yoga, xlvi, 119–20, 134, 136–37,
Janamejaya, xliv, 257 143
Jarasandha, 193 law of, 119, 209

+
 +

428 / Index

nishkama karma (desireless action), guile, 183ff

95, 118, 121, 125, 126–27, 129, lila, 200–02
131–37, 140–43, 150, 196, 264 pragmatic defence, 205
nishphala karma, 95 punishment to Ashwatthama, 226
Karna, xlvi, 37, 39, 40, 43–44, 104, 182, transcendence, 202
183, 184, 189, 190, 212, 220, 236, 240, wrongdoings, 17
259, 290–91, 294, 295 Kritavarma, 211, 213, 216–17, 219
death, 211 Krita Yuga (golden age), 199
status anxiety, 151ff, 280 kshama. See forgiveness
Karve, Iravati, 45, 125 kshatriya (warrior), 7, 65, 74, 76, 78,
Kashmir, 298 83, 94, 96, 107, 157, 161, 166, 168,
Kashyapa, 40, 59 185, 201, 205, 220, 273–74
Kathasaritsagara, xl concept of success, 279
Kathopnishad, xxxv dharma (duty), 4, 13–17, 33, 41–46,
Kauravas (Kurus), xli, 1–2, 5, 8–9, 16, 54, 58, 76, 49–50, 84, 95, 185, 238–
18, 27, 34, 37, 39–41, 63–65, 77–78, 39, 242–43, 252–53, 275, 281, 305
83, 86, 88–89, 93, 102–04, 106, 113, social institution, 304
115, 120–22, 124, 152, 167, 176, 178, Kulluka, 48
181, 183, 184, 187, 189, 191–92, 197– Kunti, 16, 37, 44, 152, 153, 154, 166–68,
98, 201–02, 208, 211–13, 214–15, 219, 184, 189, 193, 256–57
222, 225–26, 228–29, 234, 256 Kuru, 154
Kaushika, 71 Kurukshetra, Kurukshetra War, xli, 27,
Kautilya, 15 59, 90, 107, 168, 174, 179, 186, 200,
Keats, John, l 208, 109, 112–13, 120, 197, 199, 211,
+ Kerala, 26 221, 234–35, 241, 243, 251–52, 283,
+
Khajuraho, xxxi 286, 303, 304
kick-backs. See bribery and corruption Kushanas, 170
kindness and compassion, 139
king, dharma of, 33, 41–46, 54, 58. landholder (warrior ruler), 161
See also kshatriya law and custom, xlii
King, Martin Luther, 247 law and justice, 58, 294
kingship, 14, 16, 50, 242, 246, 248 Layard, Lord, 29
Kissinger, Henry A., 19, 110 Left, 21, 23, 31
knowledge, 119 Lehman Brothers, 288
of liberation, 132 levirate, law of, 45
Kremer, Michael, 83 liberal institutions, 139
Kreutzer Sonata (Leo Tolstoy), 43 Licence Raj, 23, 24
Kripacharya, 104, 153–54, 156, 188, 213, Lincoln, Abraham, 53
215–17, 219–20, 281 Lipmann, Walter, 61–62
Krishna, xli, xliii, xliv, 2, 9, 14, 32, 42, Locke, John, 53, 68, 115, 150
66, 72, 78, 88, 90–101, 105–07, 112, Fundamental Constitution of
114, 118–23, 125–26, 129–30, 132, 134, Carolina, 53
135–37, 140–41, 143, 166, 167, 173, notion of human rights, 68
178, 182, 215, 229, 239, 248, 251, 256, Second Treatise Concerning Civil
264, 273, 276, 283, 286, 290–92, 296, Government, 52
298, 301 logic and speculative reasoning, 48
deceptions, 212 love, 119
divinity, 17, 99 Lyallpur, xxxviii, 158, 276

+
 +

Index / 429

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 79, 285–86 moral

Madhol, Sudan, 53 accounting, 132
Madri, 44, 177 action, 73
Mahabharata (Peter Brook), 41 ambiguity, 108
Mahabharata, xxxiii, xxxiv, xl, xli–lii attitudes and dispositions, 142
Arjuna’s despair, 88ff autonomy, 255
Bhishma’s selflessness, 118ff behaviour, 86
bias for action, 118–19 conduct of war, 204
dharma, 85, 256ff conscience, 294
Draupadi courage, 33ff consequences of war, 103
Duryodhana’s envy, 1ff convictions, 8
social order, 155 culpability, 102
Yudhisthira’s duty, 63ff dilemma. See dilemma
Mahajan, Pramod, 179 discipline, 267
Mahajan, Pravin, 179 discourse in post-war diplomacy,
Maharashtra, 134 111
Mahavira, 127, 228 experiments, 85
Mandela, Nelson, 232 fabric of society, 59
Manu, 48, 70, 181, 249 failure, xxxiii, 84
Manusmriti, xxxv, xl, 132 ideals, 139
Manual of Office Procedures, 55
instinct, 86
Mao Zedong, 139–40
intuition, 101
Markandeya, 70
issues, 137
Marx, Karl, xxxvi, 297
judgment, 109, 110
+ notion of equality, xlvi, 120
life, psychological basis, 241–42
+
Marxism, Marxists, 29, 138
perfection, 272
masculinity, 43
perspective, 142
materialism, 75, 87, 146
principles, 111
Mathura, 193
regime in the midst of the war’s
matsya nyaya, 15
Mauryan empire, 45, 243–46 violence, 111
maya. See illusion responsibility, 145
Mayawati, 163 rules and moral ideals, 73, 109, 139,
Meanness, counter with meanness, 82 271–72
Melos, 15, 109, 252 scepticism, 297
mental steadiness, 145 sense, 113
Mercedes-Benz, 135 sentiment, 241
Merrill Lynch, 288 standards, 78
Metternich, Prince, 110 truth, 86
Metzinger, Thomas, 149 virtue, 266–69
Middle Ages, 149 worth, 67
military power, 116 morality, xxxiv, xlviii, 24, 74, 80–81,
Mill, John Stuart, 129, 269, 272 196, 202, 205, 274
Milton, John, 301 and religion, 295–96
Mirabai, xxxvii of war, 109
modernity, 297 Mossad, Israeli intelligence agency, 135
Modi, Narendra, 232 Muhammad, Prophet, 233
moksha (spiritual liberation), xxxviii, Mujahideen, 233
xl, lii, 75, 296, 298 Mundaka Upanishad, 147–48

+
 +

430 / Index

Murdoch, Iris, xlvi, 128 ostracism, 12

Muslims, xxxvi, 161, 233 Other Backward Castes (OBCs), 157,
genocide in Gujarat, 232 162, 165
Mytilenes, 253
Pakistan, 254
Nagel, Thomas, 149, 271 Panchala, 155, 214–15, 217–18, 220
Nakula, 1, 44, 77, 258–59, 261, 263, 282 Panchali. See Draupadi
Nala, xlix, 61 Pandavas, xli, 1–2, 4–5, 8–11, 13–14,
Nanak, Guru, xxxvii 16–19, 33–34, 37, 39, 41, 43–46, 49–
Narasimhan, C.V., li 50, 57, 59–61, 63, 70, 75–76, 77, 78,
Narayan, R.K., l–li 83, 86, 88–89, 93, 103–05, 111–13,
Narayanan, K.R., 181 154, 156, 166, 169–70, 173, 176, 178,
Narmada, 54 180, 182, 183, 185–86, 189–90, 192–
Nasadiya Sukta. See Rig Veda 94, 196, 197–99, 200, 202, 204, 205,
nastikas, 245 207, 208, 209, 212, 213–15, 218–20,
natural law theory, 68 225–26, 229, 238, 240, 242, 252, 256–
naturalistic fallacy, 80 58, 273, 280, 282, 286, 290–92, 298
Nazis, xxxvii, 20, 113, 134–35, 118, 186– Pandu, 1, 16, 37, 44, 45, 121, 124, 152,
87, 204, 207, 250–51 177, 185, 201, 257
negroes, 53 Panini, 201
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 23, 110, 111 Parikshit, xliv, 225, 257
Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Parivartan, 21
146 Parjanya, 123
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 224, 297 Parsis, 161
+ Nigam, P.D., 60 Pascal, Blaise, xxxvii +
nirveda (end of desire), 251 Patanjali, 249
Nishadas, 169 Yoga Sutras, xl, 145
nishkama karma. See karma Patil, Pratibha, 59–60
nivritti (contemplative life), 246, 295 patriarchy, 38, 44, 46, 51
Nixon, Richard M., 116 Patroklos, 107
niyoga, 1 Patton, General, 92
non-cooperation and passive Peloponnesian War, 15, 252
resistance, 283 perception and meditation, 132
non-violence, 15, 71, 110, 134, 247. personal relationships, 80
See also ahimsa personal well being, 83
not-self (anatman), 145 Personnel Department, Home
nuclear weapons, 110 Ministry, 55
Nuremburg trials, 187, 204 Phillips, 26
Nussbaum, Martha, 31 Pilikian, Vaughan, l, li
Nye, Jim, xxxix Pindar, 31
O’Connor, Justice, 163 Plato, 8, 84, 139, 223, 275
Obama, Barack, 163, 288–89 Euthyphro, 297
Odysseus, 184, 193 Republic, 14
Odyssey (Homer), xlix, l, 184 pluralism, 87
Oedipus, 240–41 Plutarch, 12
Olesha, Y., 29 Poland, 251
omnipotence, 209 politics, xxxiii–xxxvi, xlvii, 69, 221, 300
Orwell, George, 250 of Afro-Americans, 221

+
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Index / 431

political ideology of Mahabharata, 290 rational self-interest and selfishness,

Pollock, Sheldon, xl distinction, 139
Polonius, 12 rationalism, 150
polyandry, 44 rationality of the West, lii
Polyneices, 59 Rawls, John, 18, 26–28, 165, 224, 301
poverty and oppression, 139, 158 realism, 15, 111
Pradyumna, 211 realpolitik, 15, 39, 58, 118, 305
pragmatism, 115 reason and faith, 48
Pramadvara, 246 reciprocal altruism, xlvii, 79–82, 114
Prashna, 38 reconciliation and non-violence, xlvi
pravritti (active life), 246, 295 Regenstein Library, xxxix, xl
Priam, King of Troy, 108 Reliance Group, 23
pride, 10, 127 religion, xxxvi, xxxvii, lii, 118, 149,
Printing Directorate, 55 269, 296–97
Prisoner’s Dilemma, 81–82, 140 religious tolerance, 300
private sector, xxxiii, 67, 165 remorse
privatization, 21 and democracy, 254
Proctor and Gamble, 131 of Yudhisthira, 234ff
Proportionality, doctrine of, 203, 223– Renaissance, xxxix, 149–50, 221
24 renunciation, 133
Pritha, 154, 191 responsibility, ethic of, 285
public institutions, 140 retributive justice, xlvi, xlvii, 223, 227–
punishment 29, 232, 253, 285
capital punishment, 224, 253 revenge of Ashwatthama, xiv, 213ff,
+ crime and punishment, 221–24 280–81
+
Punjabi middle class, xxxvii reverse discrimination, 163–64
Puranas, 201 Richardson Hindustan Ltd, 131
Puru (Porus), king of Punjab, 230 Rig Veda, 8, 299
Pushyamitra Shunga, 245 Nasadiya Sukta, 299–302
right and wrong, xxxiii, 85
Qur’an, 233 Right, 31, 39
righteousness, 15, 75, 87, 108, 230
racial discrimination, 52–53
Roman oppression of Jews, 19
Radha, 153, 167
Rommel, Erwin, 207
Radha (Karna’s mother), 201
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 120, 125, 142
Radhasoami sect, xxxvii
Roy, Arundhati, 20
Rajasthan, 208
Rudolph, Lloyd, 250
rajasuya, 2, 5, 7, 16
rules of war. See jus in bello
Rajput clans, 194
Ruru, Prince, 246
Raju, B. Ramalinga, xxxii, 28, 278–79
Rwandan genocide, 113
Rama, 201
Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of the Mind,
Ramachandran, V.S., 149
146
Ramanuja, 209
Ramanujam. A.K., xxxix, 293, 302 Sabhaparvan, 42, 60
Ramayana, xl, 201, 302 Saddam Hussein, 114
Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of Punjab, sadharana-dharma. See dharma
xxxvi saffron, xxxv
rasa (mood), 156 Sahadeva, 1, 44, 77, 259

+
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432 / Index

salvation, 132 Shakas, 170

Samshaptakas, 103 Shakespeare, William, 11, 205–06
Sanatsujatiya, 296 Hamlet, 12, 149
Sanjaya, 57, 78–79, 89–91, 98, 104–05, Shakuni, 2–3, 5–6, 7, 8, 16, 32, 33, 36–
115, 120, 187–88, 190, 196–97, 215, 37, 39, 54, 61, 112, 125, 220, 259
228, 284 Shalya, 161, 174–75, 177–79, 182, 236
Sankhya philosophy, 127, 244 Shankara, 209, 296
sanyasa, sanyasi (renouncer), xxxiv, 132 shanta (calm resignation), 251
satya (truth), xlvi, 71–72, 73–74, 249, Shantanu, 121
291–92 Sherman, General, 186
satyagraha (truth force), 249 Shikhandi, 122–23, 184, 187–88
Satyaki, 79, 211, 227 Shiva, 217, 219
Satyam, xxxii, 28, 278, 304 Shourie, Arun, 55, 56
Satyavati, 44, 121, 123–24 shudra (labourer), 161, 162
Sauptikaparvan, li Shulman, David, 9
Savitri, xlix Sikh, Sikhism, xxxvii, 161
scepticism, xxxviii Singh, Manmohan, 60
school reforms, 84 Sisyphus, xlv, 274
Schopenhauer, 11 Skamandros river, 107
secularism, xxxv slavery, 50–54
self (atman). See atman Smith, Adam, 125, 139
self (sense of I-ness, ahamkara). See Theory of Moral Sentiments, 126
egoism Wealth of Nations, The, 249
self , an illusion, 150 social
+ self’s interaction with an object, 148 behaviour, 247
+
self-advancement, 87 change, 170
self-control, 119, 133, 293 classes, 160, 161, 181
self-deception, 86, 253 consequences of actions, 74
self-defence, 109, 113 discrimination, 181
self-development, xxxvi harmony, 230
self-discovery, 86 inequality, 27–28, 30
self-esteem, 163–64, 171 institutions, 27
self-forgetting, 125–27, 141 mobility, 157
self-indulgence, 102 order, 7, 42, 84, 155
self-interest and moral commitment, prejudice, 181
103, 139–40 reforms, xxxvii, 171
selfishness, 127, 252, 268–69, 287 status, 158
self-knowledge, 86 socialism, 28–31, 138, 142
selflessness, 246, 265 Socrates, 12, 127, 281
of Bhishma, 117ff Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 255
self-righteousness, 230 Sophocles, 59
self-sacrifice, 121 Oedipus Rex, 240
Sen, Amartya, 102, 165 soul, 145, 150, 296. See also atman
Seneca, li, 283 South Africa, 231, 232
servitude, 52 sovereignty, 100
sexual desire, 155 Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, 251
sexual freedom, 44 Soviet Union, 29
sexual pleasure, 87 Spinoza, 241

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Index / 433

spirituality, lii Troy, 51

Srivastava, Ashish, 55 Truman, Harry S., 101, 127, 304
SS Einsatzgruppen, 135 truth (satya), 11, 15, 76, 99, 291–92, 299
Stalin, Joseph, 139–40, 204, 250 Tuladhara, 247–49, 264–65, 282, 289
state policy (raison d’êtat), 124 Tutu, Desmond, 231, 232
status anxiety of Karna, 151ff, 280
Subala, 112 Umar, 233
Subhadra, 105 unconsciousness, 128
subjective experience, 148 unilateral disarmament, 110
succession, rivalry/war, 2, 16, 121, 123, United Nations (UN), 113
140 United States, 97, 304.
Sufi tradition, xxxvii See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Sukhtankar, V.S., l, 190, 302 atom bombings
affirmative action, 163
Sunnis and Shias, split, 233
and Soviet Union, conflict, 110
Supreme Being, 194
civil rights movement, 247
Supreme Court, 163–64
Civil War, 53, 93, 186–87
Surya, 153, 168, 172, 174–75
Constitution, 53
svabhava, 101, 157
Declaration of Independence, 52
an inclination to act in a certain
foreign policy, 20
way, 84–85
intervention in Iraq, 114, 115, 206
sva-dharma (caste specific). See dharma
rehabilitation programmes in
swayamvara (bride choice), 155
prisons, 223
syncretism, 201
Supreme Court, 222
+ Tagore, Rabindranath, 163 University of Michigan, 163 +
Taliban, 233 untouchability, 53, 161–62, 170, 221
Tamil Nadu, 279 Upanishads, 127, 144, 148, 259, 296
Tartar conqueror, 250 Upaplavya, 178
technology, 138 Uthman, 233
telos, purpose, 75 Utilitarianism, 72, 74, 87, 102, 269
Ten Commandments, 271 Uttanka, 208, 286
Teresa, Mother, 138 Uttara, 225, 235–36
terrorism, 206
vaishamya (unevenness), 10
Thain, John, 288
Vaishnav, 200, 209
Thebes, 59 vaishya (businessman), 161, 162
Themistocles, 12 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 181
Thetis, 107 value system, 165
Thoreau, Henry David, 117–18 van Buitenen, J.A.B., xl
Thrasymachus, 14 vanaprastha (forest-dwelling), xxxiv
Thucydides, 15, 252–53 Varanasi, 247
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 134 varna system. See caste
Tillich, Paul, xxxviii Varuna, 281
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 27, 157 Vasudeva, 201
Tolstoy, Leo, 249 Vayu (the wind), 44, 153
Kreutzer Sonata, The, 43 Vedas, Vedic, 47–48, 244–45, 293
War and Peace, 114, 207 gods of nature, 201
Tomasio, Antonio, 148 sacrifice (yajnas), xlix, 244
Transparency International, 56 texts, 38

+
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434 / Index

vice, xlvi, 10 Woolf, Virginia, 146

Vidal, Gore, 18 World Bank, xxxiii, 21
Vidura, 5, 6, 15, 33, 38, 40–41, 45, 59, World Trade Centre and Pentagon,
70–71, 72–73, 121, 124, 153, 220, 292, 9/11 terrorist attack on, 20, 233, 300
294, 296 World War I, 113, 129, 143
Vietnam war, 115 World War II, xxxvii, 7, 92–93, 101,
Vikarna, 36, 191 113, 186, 204, 207
vindictiveness (anger and resentment),
222, 227 Xerxes, king of Persia, 116
violence, 15, 242–43
Yadava clan, 193, 210–11
Virata, 8, 77, 196, 220, 227, 258
Yajnaseni. See Draupadi
Vishnu, 9, 192, 195, 201
Yaksha (a tree spirit), xliii, 259–60
vote banks, 162
Yama, god of death, xlix
Vrindavana, 201
Yemeni, 206
Vrishni clan, Vrishnis, 211, 298
vulnerability of human lives, 273–75, Yoga, 49, 119, 144–45, 244, 249
305 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, xl, 145
Vyasa, xlix, 7, 45, 121, 124, 192 Yudhishthira, xli–xlv, 1–4, 10–15, 44,
58, 97, 103–05, 110, 113, 120–22, 153,
Wahhabis, 233 155, 157, 166–68, 177, 178, 182, 188–
war 89, 191–92, 194, 205, 209, 215, 222,
aftermath, 92 224, 226, 227–28, 256–58, 270, 281–
convention, 203, 205–07 86, 289–90, 293, 295, 298, 302, 304–
in Yugoslavia, 230 05
+ is hell, 186–87 and Ashoka, 243–46 +
legacy, 234–35 compassion, 129, 258–61, 267–68,
public policy, 102 271, 283
rightness, 78 dharma, 258–64, 272–75, 279, 281–
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy), 114, 207 82
warrior. See kshatriya forbearance, 197
Weber, Max, 19 guilt and shame, xliv, xlvi–xlvii
Weimar regime, 113 lost Draupadi in the game of dice,
welfare state, 139 33–34, 36–39, 41, 60–61, 64
West Bengal, 26 moral position, 50, 79, 111
Western moral philosophy, 65 policy of reconciliation, 230–31
Western tradition, 203 pragmatism, 115
Wilde, Oscar, 82 remorse, 185, 234ff
Williams, Bernard, 241 sense of duty, 49, 63ff, 94
women tried to prevent war, 88–89, 92–93,
autonomy, 44–46 196–98
openmindedness towards, 45 weakness for gambling, xlviii, 5–9,
status in society, 36 16, 291
slave, property of others, 50–54, 57
womanhood, 43 Zen, 128