Abstract
The Kurukshetra war is the central
event of the Mahabharata, and the tradition has always been clear that it was
not a war sought by the Pandavas. The five brothers spent thirteen years in
exile and a fourteenth in disguise. They sent ambassadors. They offered to
settle for five villages. They exhausted every avenue of negotiation before the
war became unavoidable. And then, when it came, it was still not approached as
anything other than a catastrophic last resort. This article explores the
Mahabharata's understanding of the conditions under which war can be considered
dharmic, how the text distinguishes between war as a political tool and war as
the final instrument of justice when all others have failed, what the specific
stages of the failed diplomacy before Kurukshetra reveal about the tradition's
framework for just conflict, and what the war's aftermath, with all its grief
and emptiness, says about the tradition's view of what war costs even when it
is just.
Keywords: War, last resort,
Mahabharata, Kurukshetra, dharmic war, just war, diplomacy, Udyoga Parva,
Krishna, Pandavas, Sanatana Dharma, ethics of conflict
Introduction
The Mahabharata does not glorify
war. This is a point that tends to be obscured by the epic's extraordinary
battle narratives, its heroic figures, its detailed descriptions of combat. But
the text's own moral framework is unambiguous: war is the worst possible
outcome, the final instrument of justice when all other instruments have been
exhausted, and its costs, in lives, in grief, in the moral corruption it
produces in those who fight it, are too high to be incurred lightly or
prematurely. The Pandavas fought the Kurukshetra war, but they did not want to
fight it, and the text makes this want-not visible through the Udyoga Parva's extended
account of the diplomatic efforts that preceded the battle.
This is not merely the tradition
managing its own discomfort with the violence at its narrative centre. It is a
philosophically serious engagement with the question of when conflict is justified
and what must be attempted before it is permitted. The Mahabharata's answer to
this question is more sophisticated and more demanding than most of the just
war theories that have been developed in other traditions, precisely because it
is embedded in specific characters' specific choices rather than stated as
abstract principle.
The Thirteen
Years: Patience as Dharmic Requirement
The Pandavas' thirteen years of
exile after the dice game are not merely the punishment imposed by the terms of
the wager. They are, in the text's moral logic, the required demonstration that
the person who will eventually fight a war has genuinely exhausted every
alternative. The exile is the period during which the Pandavas might have
organised rebellion, might have sought allies and returned before the full term
was complete, might have done any number of things that would have shortened
the period of deprivation. They did not. They fulfilled the terms.
This fulfilment is presented as a
dharmic requirement: the party that will eventually wage war must be able to
demonstrate that the conflict is genuinely unavoidable, not a choice made when
other options were still available. The thirteen years are the proof. By the
time the Pandavas return and begin the negotiations that will fail, they have
established beyond any reasonable challenge that the war they are about to
fight is truly a last resort.
क्षमा रूपं तपस्विनां क्षमा ब्रह्मविदां बलम्। क्षमा यज्ञस्य फलं चैव क्षमा शान्तिः परा स्मृता॥
Kshama rupam
tapasvinam kshama brahmavidam balam, Kshama yajnyasya phalam caiva kshama
shantih para smrita.
(Forbearance is
the form of the ascetic; forbearance is the strength of those who know Brahman;
forbearance is the fruit of sacrifice; forbearance is known as the highest
peace.)
Mahabharata,
Udyoga Parva, 35.36
Kshama, forbearance or patience, is
not weakness in the Mahabharata's framework. It is the highest virtue of the
strongest people: the ascetics and the knowers of Brahman. The Pandavas'
thirteen years of kshama are their highest dharmic qualification for the war
that follows. It is because they have genuinely practised forbearance,
genuinely attempted every alternative, genuinely absorbed enormous injustice
without retaliation, that the war when it comes is not retaliation but justice.
Krishna's Mission:
The Final Diplomatic Attempt
Krishna's embassy to the Kaurava
court in the Udyoga Parva is the Mahabharata's most concentrated demonstration
of the good faith effort for peace that must precede any dharmic war. Krishna
goes not as a partisan of the Pandavas but as the representative of a genuine
offer: five villages, one for each of the five brothers, in exchange for peace.
This is a proposal so minimal, so obviously reasonable, that its rejection by
Duryodhana removes any remaining doubt about whether the war was avoidable.
Duryodhana refuses. He says he will
not give the Pandavas the amount of land that the point of a needle could
pierce. Krishna's response is to offer an even more minimal settlement as a
final gesture of good faith, and when this too is rejected, to reveal his
cosmic form in the court itself, a demonstration so overwhelming that even
Dhritarashtra is temporarily given sight to witness it. The war is not
Krishna's choice. It is what remains when every door has been closed by the
party that chose to close them.
न चेत् प्रदास्यते राजन् शान्तिमेषां कुरूत्तम। युद्धं तर्हि भविष्यामः संग्रामं ते प्रवक्ष्यते॥
Na cet pradasyate
rajan shantim esham kurottama, Yuddham tarhi bhavishyamah samgramam te
pravakshyate.
(If you, O king, O
best of the Kurus, will not give them peace, then war shall follow; I declare
to you this battle.)
Mahabharata,
Udyoga Parva, 95.18
The declaration of war comes only
after the declaration of what peace requires and the refusal of that
requirement. This sequencing is not accidental. It is the Mahabharata's formal
demonstration that the just war must be preceded by the exhaustion of peaceful
alternatives and that the party that forces the war bears responsibility for
what the war produces. Duryodhana's refusal of five villages is the thing that
makes Kurukshetra possible. The Pandavas' acceptance of Duryodhana's refusal,
rather than accepting peace at any further cost to themselves, is what makes it
dharmic.
The Aftermath:
What Victory Costs
The Mahabharata does not end with
the war's victory as a triumphant conclusion. It ends with the grief.
Yudhishthira, on the throne he has fought for and won, wants to abdicate. The
victory feels like ashes. Gandhari's curse on Krishna. The empty city of
Hastinapura stripped of its men. The Pandavas themselves walking out of the
world at the end, the final journey to the mountain. The text's insistence on
spending as much time with the aftermath as with the battle is its clearest
statement about war: it may sometimes be necessary and even dharmic, but it is
never not devastating.
This honest accounting of the war's
full cost is what distinguishes the Mahabharata's treatment of war from most
epic literature. The war was necessary. The tradition affirms this. The war was
also catastrophic. The tradition affirms this too, and insists that both things
are true simultaneously, that the necessity does not cancel the catastrophe and
the catastrophe does not cancel the necessity. Any ethics of war that ignores
either half of this is, in the Mahabharata's view, not actually engaging with
war but with a fantasy of it.
Conclusion
The Mahabharata's framework for war
as a last resort is one of the most seriously developed in world ethical
thought, not because it is stated as principle but because it is embedded in
the full weight of a narrative that shows what each stage of the descent into
war looks like and what each stage of the refusal of peace costs. The Pandavas'
thirteen years, Krishna's embassy, Duryodhana's needle-point refusal, and then
the war itself and its aftermath: the text gives the reader not a theory but an
experience of what it means for conflict to be genuinely unavoidable.
The lesson is not that war is
sometimes good. The lesson is that justice sometimes cannot be achieved without
conflict, and that the person who faces this situation must approach it with
the full weight of all the alternatives they have already exhausted, the full
weight of what the conflict will cost, and the full weight of the responsibility
they carry for both. The Pandavas carried this weight. The Mahabharata makes
sure the reader feels it too.
References and
Suggested Reading
Mahabharata, Udyoga Parva and
Shanti Parva
Bibek Debroy, The Mahabharata
(Complete Translation)
P.V. Kane, History of
Dharmashastra, Volume 3
S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of
Life (1927)
Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of
Battle: Krishna in the Mahabharata (1976)
Devdutt Pattanaik, Jaya: An
Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata (2010)
No comments:
Post a Comment