The Kurukshetra war · Mahabharata questions
How many days was the Mahabharata war?
The war at Kurukshetra lasted eighteen days. Bhishma commanded the Kaurava army for the first ten days, Drona for the next five, Karna for two and Shalya for the last, on which Duryodhana fell. The night raid that follows belongs to the nineteenth night.
Eighteen days, and the number is deliberate: eighteen parvas, eighteen chapters of the Gita, eighteen armies, eighteen days.
The command changes four times and the war books are named accordingly. Bhishma leads for ten days and falls on the tenth, brought down by Arjuna with Shikhandi before him. Drona takes command for five days, the thirteenth of which sees Abhimanyu trapped and killed inside the chakravyuha and the fourteenth of which runs past nightfall into a rare night battle, ending with Jayadratha dead. Drona falls on the fifteenth day after Yudhishthira half-truth about his son. Karna commands for the sixteenth and seventeenth and is killed by Arjuna on the seventeenth with his chariot wheel sunk in the ground. Shalya leads on the eighteenth and is killed by Yudhishthira; that evening Bhima breaks Duryodhana thighs in the mace duel by the lake.
A day of battle runs from sunrise to sunset, with truce at nightfall, and the epic describes the two camps mingling freely in the evenings, tending the wounded and visiting the enemy. That convention is broken twice: on the fourteenth night, when the pursuit of Jayadratha carries the fighting into darkness, and on the night after the eighteenth day, when Ashwatthama attacks the sleeping Pandava camp. That raid is the Sauptika Parva and is not counted as a nineteenth day of war.
After it, only a handful of men are alive out of eighteen armies. Bhishma remains on his bed of arrows for another fifty-eight nights, waiting for the sun to turn north before he dies.