People of the epic · Mahabharata questions
Who was Shakuni?
Shakuni was the prince of Gandhara, brother of Gandhari and uncle of the Kauravas, who lived at Hastinapur and advised Duryodhana. He threw the dice that ruined the Pandavas, never losing a cast, and was killed by Sahadeva on the eighteenth day of the war.
Shakuni comes to Hastinapur with his sister Gandhari when she is married to the blind Dhritarashtra, and never really leaves. He becomes Duryodhana closest adviser, and almost every disaster in the first half of the epic has his hand in it: the plan to burn the Pandavas in the lacquer house, the invitation to the dice game, and the second game whose single throw sends them to the forest.
His skill with dice is presented as unbeatable rather than magical in the main narrative. He plays on Duryodhana behalf because Yudhishthira, challenged, must accept, and a king may put up a substitute; Yudhishthira objects that this is not straight play and is told the rules allow it. Cast after cast Shakuni calls his number and wins, until a kingdom, four brothers, a king and a queen have all been staked and lost.
The popular tradition that Shakuni acted out of revenge, that Bhishma imprisoned and starved the Gandhara royal family and that Shakuni carved his dice from his dying father bones, is later folklore and later television, not the critical text. What the epic gives is simpler and colder: a man who thought his sister had been insulted by marriage to a blind king, and who spent his life inside the household that arranged it.
He dies late. On the eighteenth day, after Duryodhana army has all but disappeared, Sahadeva, who had sworn to kill him, cuts off his head. Sahadeva is the quietest of the Pandavas and the one who knows the future, and the epic gives him that death deliberately.