Eklavya

Turned away from Drona's school

Eklavya grew up among the Nishadas, a hunting people of the forests beyond the Kuru farmland, where his father Hiranyadhanus was chief. He heard of Drona, the master of arms who taught the Kuru princes at Hastinapura, and walked to the city to ask to become his pupil. Drona refused him because he was a Nishada and not one of the princes he had been engaged to train. Eklavya bowed at his feet and went back into the forest.

The clay teacher

In a clearing he made an image of Drona out of river clay, honoured it as his teacher, and practised in front of it with complete discipline. Over the years he became a better archer than any of the princes.

One day the princes went hunting in that forest, and a dog that ran ahead with them found Eklavya and barked at him. Without harming it, he shot seven arrows into its open mouth in a single moment. The princes followed the dog back and found a dark, dust-covered archer who told them he was Drona's pupil. Arjuna, whom Drona had promised that no pupil would ever surpass, went to his teacher troubled by what he had seen.

The teacher's fee

Drona went to Eklavya, who received him with joy. Since Eklavya called him his teacher, Drona asked for the teacher's fee, the guru-dakshina, and named the thumb of his right hand. Eklavya cut it off at once and gave it to him without complaint. He went on shooting with his fingers, later with leather guards on them, but he never again drew as quickly as he once had, and Arjuna's place was secure.

King of the Nishadas

Eklavya later ruled the Nishadas. When Duryodhana listed the tribute brought to Yudhishthira's Rajasuya, he named King Eklavya as the one who brought the shoes. During the war Krishna told Arjuna that Eklavya, with his thumb, could not have been beaten by gods, demons and serpents together, and that he himself had killed Eklavya in battle for Arjuna's sake. Later material, gathered in the Harivamsa, places him among Jarasandha's allies against the Yadavas. After the war his son, then king of the Nishadas, fought Arjuna when the horse of Yudhishthira's horse sacrifice came into his land.

The price of excellence

Eklavya's story is one of the most debated in the epic. It praises a devotion so complete that a student gives up his gift to a teacher who never taught him, and it exposes a system that closed its best training to a forest-born boy. When Krishna recalls the episode during the war, he calls the taking of the thumb an act of guile. Eklavya is remembered less for what he did with the bow than for what was taken from him.