Queen Gandhari

A bride from Gandhara

Gandhari was the daughter of King Subala of Gandhara, on the far northwestern edge of the epic's world, and the sister of Shakuni. She was known for a boon from Shiva that promised her a hundred sons, and that boon is why Bhishma sought her for Dhritarashtra, the blind eldest prince of Hastinapura. When she learned her husband could not see, she folded a cloth, bound it over her eyes, and resolved never to enjoy what he was denied. She kept it on for the rest of her life.

The hundred sons

Vyasa, pleased with the care she showed him as a guest, confirmed the boon. But her pregnancy lasted two years without a birth. When word came that Kunti had borne Yudhishthira, Gandhari struck her own womb and delivered a hard mass of flesh. Vyasa divided it into a hundred and one portions and set them in jars of ghee. From them came Duryodhana, then Dushasana and the rest, and one daughter, Dussala. At Duryodhana's birth jackals howled, and Vidura urged the king to give the child up. Dhritarashtra would not.

Counsel her son would not take

After the dice game Gandhari told her husband to cast off Duryodhana before he destroyed the family. When Krishna came to Hastinapura as envoy, she called her son into the hall and told him to make peace. Through the eighteen days of war, when Duryodhana asked for her blessing, she answered only that victory lies where dharma is. She would not lie to him, and she would not bless him either.

The curse on the field

After the war Vyasa gave her sight to see the whole field of Kurukshetra. Her anger was so strong that when she glimpsed Yudhishthira's feet beneath the edge of the cloth, his toenails were scorched. She questioned Bhima about Dushasana's blood and the blow below Duryodhana's waist. Then she turned on Krishna. He could have stopped the war and did not, she said, and she cursed him: in thirty-six years his own kinsmen would destroy one another, and he would die alone in the wilderness. Krishna accepted it. The curse came true at Prabhasa.

She lived fifteen more years in Hastinapura, then went with Dhritarashtra and Kunti to a hermitage on the Ganga. There, on the night Vyasa called the dead up from the river, she saw her sons again. She died with her husband in a forest fire.

Devotion or protest

The blindfold can be read as perfect loyalty to her husband, or as the only protest open to a bride nobody consulted. The epic does not choose. What it does show is a mother who told her son the truth every morning and still watched him ride out to die.