Princess Amba

Carried off from Kashi

Amba, Ambika and Ambalika were the daughters of the king of Kashi, and their father held a swayamvara at which they would choose husbands from the assembled kings. Bhishma, seeking brides for his young half-brother Vichitravirya, drove into the hall alone, declared that he would take the princesses by force as the warrior's form of marriage allowed, and defeated every king who opposed him. Shalva, king of Saubha, pursued him and fought hard, but Bhishma beat him and let him go with his life.

Refused by two men

At Hastinapura, as the weddings were prepared, Amba told Bhishma that she had already chosen Shalva in her heart, that he had chosen her, and that her father had known of it. Bhishma released her and sent her to Saubha with an escort.

Shalva would not take her. Bhishma had carried her off in front of all the kings, he said, and he would not marry a woman another man had won. Vichitravirya would not accept a bride who loved someone else, and Bhishma, bound by his vow of celibacy, could not marry her himself. With every door closed, Amba decided that Bhishma was the root of her ruin.

Parashurama's duel

She took refuge among forest ascetics. There her mother's father, the royal sage Hotravahana, found her and sent her to Parashurama, Bhishma's own teacher, and Parashurama's friend Akritavrana reminded him of his vow to protect those who came to him in fear. Parashurama summoned Bhishma to Kurukshetra and ordered him to take Amba back. When Bhishma refused, they fought for twenty-three days with celestial weapons until the sages, the gods and Parashurama's own ancestors ended the combat undecided. Parashurama told Amba he could do no more.

The pyre and the second birth

Amba then turned to austerities so severe that she wasted to skin and bone, until Shiva appeared to her. He promised that she would kill Bhishma, not in that body but in her next birth, when she would be born a woman in Drupada's house, become a man and remember everything. She built a pyre by the river and entered the fire, declaring that she died for Bhishma's destruction.

She was reborn as Shikhandini, daughter of Drupada of Panchala, raised as a son and later made a man through a bargain with the yaksha Sthuna; that life is told on the Shikhandi page. On the tenth day of the war Bhishma, who would not fight one born a woman, lowered his bow before Shikhandi, and Arjuna's arrows brought him down.

The cost of Bhishma's vow

Amba's story shows what Bhishma's great vow cost other people. Every man she turned to acted correctly by his own rules, and together they left her nowhere to stand. She is the one figure in the epic who plans the grandsire's death across two lifetimes, and the war's turning on the tenth day is, in the end, her answer to the day he carried her away.