Arjuna's Crisis

Arjuna's case in the first chapter of the Gita is a consequentialist one and it is correct in every particular. He argues that killing the elders will destroy the family; that with the family destroyed the customary law fails; that with the law failed the women of the house are unprotected and the order of generations breaks; and that the ancestors, deprived of their rites, fall. He is not saying that violence is wrong. He is a warrior and has killed all his adult life. He is saying that this particular war destroys the thing that all wars are supposedly fought to protect.

His second argument is about proportion. What is at stake is a kingdom. What is being spent is Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, a hundred cousins and the entire warrior class of the subcontinent. He says openly that he does not want sovereignty on these terms, not even sovereignty of the three worlds, and offers to be killed unarmed rather than do this. The epic does not treat this as a foolish sentiment; Yudhishthira has said versions of it repeatedly.

Krishna's answer to him is significant partly for what it does not deny. Krishna does not tell him that his predictions are wrong, because they are not: the family is destroyed, the generation is wiped out, and the survivors inherit a kingdom of ashes. What Krishna disputes is that Arjuna's withdrawal would prevent any of it, and that the option of clean hands exists at all for a man standing where he is standing.

Krishna's answer moves through three levels and each is a separate argument. The first is metaphysical: the self is not born and does not die, and grief over the destruction of bodies mistakes the garment for the wearer. This is the coldest part of the teaching and Krishna presents it first precisely because it addresses Arjuna's stated reason, which was grief.

The second is about duty and identity. Arjuna is a kshatriya standing in a righteous cause that others have created, and there is no honourable withdrawal available: if he leaves, the war continues without him, his own side is destroyed, and the world says he ran. Krishna's phrase is that it is better to do one's own duty imperfectly than another's well, and that a man who abandons his nature does not escape action but only performs a worse version of it.

The third is the transformation of action itself. Krishna does not tell Arjuna that killing is good. He tells him that the poison is not in the act but in the attachment: act because the situation requires it, surrender the fruit, do not make the deaths into a personal harvest of kingdom and revenge. When Arjuna asks to see who is really speaking, Krishna shows him the eleventh chapter's vision of time consuming all these men already, and says that Arjuna is the instrument and not the cause.

Draupadi is the reason there is an army on that field, and she has been the least ambiguous voice in the story about why. She was staked at dice, dragged into a hall by the hair, and told by a hall full of the wisest men in the world that the question of whether this was lawful was too subtle to answer. She swore that her hair would stay unbound until it was washed in Dushasana's blood, and she kept the vow in front of her husbands every day for thirteen years.

Her argument against Arjuna's crisis is not that compassion is worthless. It is that his compassion is selective, and that it arrives only for the people opposite him and never for the people beside him. Bhishma and Drona are honoured teachers to Arjuna; to Draupadi they are the men who watched. A scruple about killing them that surfaces on the field, after everyone has marched, is a scruple that costs its owner nothing and would cost her everything.

She also makes the argument about what peace would mean in practice. Returning to Hastinapura without a settlement would mean living under the men who did it, in a world that had established that this could be done to a queen with no consequence. Her position throughout the exile, argued repeatedly against Yudhishthira's patience, is that forgiveness offered from weakness is not a virtue but an invitation.

Bhishma's view of Arjuna's hesitation is the professional soldier's view, and he states it before and during the war without any bitterness. When Yudhishthira crosses the field to seek his blessing, Bhishma gives it, tells him he is bound to fight for Hastinapura, and adds that although his arms belong to Duryodhana his heart does not. He is not asking to be spared.

His argument is that a kshatriya's life is organised around a death of this kind, and that being spared out of affection is a form of contempt. He has said all his life that the warrior's road ends on a field, and he prefers to reach that end at the hands of the greatest archer of the age rather than to be nursed through it by a grandson's reluctance. When Arjuna fights him softly in the early days, Bhishma notices and is insulted by it.

And he demonstrates the point at the end. Asked how he can be defeated, he tells the Pandavas himself: place Shikhandi before me. It is the answer of a man who regards his own death as a technical problem to be solved rather than a tragedy to be avoided, and it puts Arjuna's crisis in a hard light. The person Arjuna could not bear to kill was actively arranging to be killed.

Yudhishthira is the character best positioned to sympathise with Arjuna's collapse, because he had it first and never really recovered from it. He had told Krishna to settle for five villages. He tells his brothers repeatedly that he would rather beg than kill Bhishma and Drona. Before the first day he walks across the open ground between the armies, unarmed, to touch the feet of the men he is about to try to kill.

But he is the king, and the difference between his position and Arjuna's is that Arjuna could withdraw and Yudhishthira could not. Eleven armies are drawn up on his authority, kings have committed their houses to his claim, and Draupadi's injury stands unanswered. Calling it off at the last hour would not restore innocence to anyone; it would only transfer the ruin onto everybody who had come when he called.

His conclusion is not that the war was right but that refusing it at that point was not available. He fights it, wins it, and then spends the rest of the epic trying to give the result back: attempting to abdicate on the field, refusing the throne until Vyasa and Bhishma and Krishna talk him into it, performing the horse sacrifice as expiation, and finally walking north to die. The epic's most reluctant king is also the only one who never claims the victory settled anything.