Jatugriha Parva

The Jatugriha Parva is the eighth sub-book of the Adi Parva, and with it the epic's action turns decisively from genealogy and childhood training toward open political danger. Following directly on the Sambhava Parva's account of the cousins' rivalry, sharpened at the tournament and hardened by Karna's elevation and by Drona's favoritism toward Arjuna, this sub-book narrates the first serious attempt by the Kauravas to remove the Pandavas altogether, an attempt by arson rather than open battle that gives the sub-book its name, the House of Lac.

The sub-book opens with the political situation in Hastinapura after Pandu's death and the princes' return to court. Yudhishthira, eldest of the Pandavas, quickly wins the affection of the citizens and the nobility through his evident righteousness and capability, and this popularity alarms Duryodhana, who fears that Dhritarashtra, moved by public sentiment, will pass over his own sons and install Yudhishthira as heir apparent. Duryodhana brings his anxiety to his father, and through persistent pressure, aided by his uncle Shakuni and his allies Karna and Duhshasana, persuades the conflicted and partial Dhritarashtra to send the Pandavas away from the capital under the pretext of a religious festival at the town of Varanavata.

Before the princes depart, Dhritarashtra's brother Vidura, wise and clear-sighted throughout the epic and already suspicious of Duryodhana's intentions, manages to warn Yudhishthira of the danger without speaking openly in front of the court, using a coded exchange in the Mlechchha tongue that only Yudhishthira understands, so that the eldest Pandava travels to Varanavata already alert to peril even as his brothers and mother Kunti remain unaware of the full danger. At Varanavata, Duryodhana's agent Purochana has been sent ahead to prepare a magnificent residence for the visiting princes, a house built secretly from lac, resin, and other combustible materials, designed to be set ablaze once the family is settled and asleep within it.

Recognizing the house's true nature from small telltale signs and confirming his suspicion with Vidura's covert help, Yudhishthira arranges through a miner sent by Vidura for a secret tunnel to be dug beneath the residence, providing an escape route unknown to Purochana. The Pandavas live outwardly at ease in the house for a time, giving no sign of their knowledge, until the night comes when Purochana intends to fire the building. In a further stroke of grim foresight, Kunti and her sons first host a feast for the poor, at which a Nishada woman and her five sons, having eaten and drunk to excess, fall asleep within the house; when the Pandavas at last escape through their tunnel and the house is set ablaze that same night, either by their own hand to cover their escape or by Purochana's design, the bodies of this unfortunate woman and her sons, along with Purochana himself, who perishes in the flames he set, are left behind to be discovered in the ruins.

The people of Hastinapura, and Duryodhana's party with them, take the charred remains for those of Kunti and her five sons, and the kingdom mourns the Pandavas as dead, performing funeral rites in their honor while Duryodhana's faction privately rejoices at having removed its rivals. Unbeknownst to the court, however, the Pandavas and their mother have escaped through the tunnel into the surrounding forest, where they now begin a period of concealment, traveling in disguise and avoiding recognition, uncertain themselves at first how thoroughly Purochana's plot has been foiled and wary of revealing their survival too soon.

Within the epic's larger design, the Jatugriha Parva marks the first true act of attempted fratricide in the story, transforming the cousins' rivalry from a matter of favoritism and slighted pride into a matter of attempted murder, and it establishes a pattern that will recur across the epic: Duryodhana's schemes conceived in secret, Vidura's quiet loyalty to the Pandavas exercised through warning rather than open defiance of his own family, and the Pandavas' survival owed as much to caution and stratagem as to strength. It also sends the Pandavas into the forest exile and disguise that will structure the immediately following sub-books, in which, believed dead, they wander among common people and encounter the adventures, Hidimba, Baka, and eventually Draupadi's svayamvara, that will restore their fortunes.

The theme that a reader should carry forward from this sub-book is the corrosive power of unchecked favoritism and envy within a single family, and the way that same family's better members, Vidura chief among them, must resort to quiet subversion rather than open confrontation to protect the innocent from it. The burning of the lac house also plants, early in the epic, the recurring motif of mistaken death and rumor, for the Pandavas' presumed destruction here, false as it proves, previews the pattern of loss, concealment, and eventual return that will structure much of their later exile as well.