The Half-Lie That Killed Drona

Yudhishthira's technical defence is exact and he never abandons it: the words he spoke were true. An elephant named Ashwatthama had died, Bhima had killed it, and the sentence he uttered contained the qualification. He did not manufacture a falsehood. What he did was decline to ensure that the true statement was correctly heard, which is a different thing in law and, he would argue, not the same sin.

His substantive defence is about scale. Drona had taken up the celestial weapons against foot soldiers who had no protection from them, and the sages themselves had appeared before him and told him that a brahmin conducting this kind of slaughter had left his own dharma behind. Yudhishthira is a king, and a king who allows his army to be annihilated in order to keep his personal record of truthfulness intact has confused a virtue with a possession.

But the striking thing about the scene is that he does not argue any of this at the time. He knows, before he opens his mouth, that his chariot rides above the ground because of what he has been, and he says the words anyway and feels the wheels come down. The epic gives him no speech of self-justification, only the physical fact of the descent, and Yudhishthira accepts it as the correct accounting.

Krishna's argument is that the situation had already left the domain in which the rules applied. Two days earlier Drona had presided over the killing of Abhimanyu, a boy of sixteen, disarmed, surrounded by six maharathis at once, in flat violation of the conventions both armies had sworn to. The night fighting had continued past dusk. The code had been broken by the side now relying on it for protection.

He would then make the argument from consequence. Drona with the celestial weapons could not be stopped by any means available to the Pandavas, and every hour he was allowed to continue cost thousands of lives on both sides. The choice was not between a clean victory and a dirty one. It was between one deception and the annihilation of an army, followed by the war being lost by the side with the just claim.

His third point is the hardest and he makes it several times in the epic: that when dharma has already been abandoned by everyone, the man who refuses to get his hands dirty is not preserving dharma, he is only preserving his own reputation. Krishna consistently takes the position that he will carry the stain himself, and the epic consistently makes him pay for it, most directly through Gandhari's curse.

Drona's position is closer to Bhishma's than it first appears. He was a poor brahmin who came to Hastinapura with nothing, was given a livelihood, a house and the teaching of the princes, and he considered that debt binding. He taught the Pandavas and loved Arjuna best of all his students, and he still took command of the army opposing them, because the salt of Hastinapura had fed his son.

On the fifteenth day his defence is that he was doing what a commander must. The astras were legitimate weapons in the hands of a man entitled to use them, and the army opposite had already killed Bhishma by placing Shikhandi in his way. When he heard that his son was dead he did the one thing available to a man who cannot verify a report in the middle of a battle: he went to the person on the other side whose word had never once been false in a lifetime.

That is the part that makes his death an indictment rather than a defeat. Drona's fatal act was to trust Yudhishthira. He put down his weapons because the most reliable man in the world had told him something, and he sat down in meditation to compose himself for the news. The Pandavas did not overcome Drona's skill. They overcame his belief in their eldest brother.

Dhrishtadyumna's claim is that his existence is the argument. Drupada, humiliated by Drona and stripped of half his kingdom, performed a sacrifice for the express purpose of obtaining a son who would kill him, and Dhrishtadyumna came out of the fire fully armed with that purpose declared aloud by a voice from the sky. Everyone present, including Drona, knew what he was for. Drona took him as a student anyway.

So he would say that the stratagem was not what killed Drona, it was only the occasion. He had been given a vow at birth, he was the commander of the Pandava army, and Drona had that day killed his father Drupada. There was no version of the fifteenth day in which he did not attempt this, and no rule of engagement that had survived Abhimanyu's death intact enough to stop him.

He also answers Arjuna directly in the text, and his answer is uncomfortable. Arjuna cries out to spare the teacher. Dhrishtadyumna replies that a man who has abandoned his own duty to become a butcher of armies has stopped being a brahmin and a teacher, and that Arjuna's tenderness would be more convincing if it had appeared before the Pandavas asked him to lead their army.

Arjuna is the only man on the field who objects at the time, and his objection is not sentimental. He shouts to take Drona alive. He had already fought Drona for days without pressing his full advantage, and he had told his brothers that the acharya should be captured rather than killed, precisely because there is a difference between defeating a teacher and murdering him.

His argument is about what victory does to the victor. The Pandavas went to war on the claim that the other side had abandoned every standard: the burning house, the rigged game, the assault in the sabha, the six warriors around Abhimanyu. If the response is a false report and a beheading in meditation, then the claim to be the side that keeps its word is gone, and with it the only thing distinguishing the war from a land grab.

He is also protecting something specific. Drona taught him. Drona gave him the brahmastra and made him what he is, and the bond between them is the closest thing to unmixed affection in the epic, surviving even Drona's demand of Eklavya's thumb on Arjuna's account. To win by exploiting his teacher's trust in his brother's honesty is, for Arjuna, a use of the family's virtues as a weapon.

Bhima's position is that the whole controversy is a piece of squeamishness. He went out, found an elephant named Ashwatthama, killed it, and announced across the field that Ashwatthama was dead, which was true. He did not qualify it because he did not think a qualification was owed to the commander who had just presided over the killing of his nephew.

His argument against Yudhishthira is one he has been making since the sabha. His elder brother's scruples are expensive, and other people pay for them. It was scruple that made Yudhishthira accept the dice invitation, scruple that kept them in the forest for thirteen years while Draupadi wore her hair unbound, and now scruple that would let Drona finish the army in order to keep one man's record clean.

He also has the merit of consistency. Bhima never claims to be fighting a clean war. He tears open Dushasana's chest, breaks Duryodhana's thigh below the belt, and says beforehand in each case exactly what he intends to do and why. Whatever else he is, he is not a man who arranges for the sentence to be technically true so that he can keep calling himself honest.