People of the epic · Mahabharata questions
Who were the Kauravas?
The Kauravas are the hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, led by Duryodhana and Dushasana. Strictly, Kaurava means any descendant of Kuru, so the Pandavas are Kauravas too, but the epic uses the name for Dhritarashtra sons and their party.
Gandhari bore a mass of flesh after a pregnancy of two years, and Vyasa divided it into a hundred and one parts kept in jars of ghee, from which came a hundred sons and one daughter, Dussala. Duryodhana was born first, to the sound of jackals howling, and Vidura advised the king to abandon him for the sake of the family. Dhritarashtra could not do it, and that refusal is where the epic locates the beginning of the ruin.
Only a few of the hundred are individuals. Duryodhana, the eldest, is proud, generous to his friends, a fine mace fighter, and incapable of accepting that the kingdom might not be his. Dushasana is his instrument, the one who drags Draupadi into the hall. Vikarna is the single brother who speaks against that act and is shouted down. Yuyutsu, a son of Dhritarashtra by a woman of the household and therefore not counted among the hundred, crosses to the Pandavas on the first morning of the war and is the only son of the blind king to survive it.
Their strength is not numbers but alliance. Duryodhana holds the loyalty of Bhishma and Drona through their oaths to the throne, of Karna through gratitude, of Shakuni through kinship, and of dozens of kings through obligation, and he commands eleven of the eighteen armies at Kurukshetra.
It is worth noting the name. Kuru was a common ancestor, so both sets of cousins are Kauravas, and the epic occasionally uses the word that way. In ordinary usage it means Duryodhana and his brothers.