People of the epic · Mahabharata questions
Who were the Pandavas?
The Pandavas are the five sons of Pandu: Yudhishthira, Bhima and Arjuna by Kunti, and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva by Madri. Each was fathered by a god because Pandu was under a curse, and all five shared one wife, Draupadi.
Pandu, king of Hastinapur, was cursed by a sage he had shot while the sage was in the form of a deer: the moment he embraced a wife he would die. Kunti held a mantra given to her in girlhood by the sage Durvasa, by which she could summon any god and bear a son by him. With Pandu consent she used it three times and taught it once to Madri.
Yudhishthira, the eldest, is the son of Dharma, the god of law, and inherits an almost unbearable commitment to truth and a weakness for dice. Bhima is the son of Vayu, the wind, enormous and strong beyond any other man, the one who makes and keeps the violent oaths. Arjuna is the son of Indra, the greatest archer of the age and the one to whom the Bhagavad Gita is spoken. Nakula and Sahadeva, born to Madri, are the sons of the twin Ashvins: Nakula famous for beauty and horsemanship, Sahadeva for knowledge of cattle and of the future, which he is forbidden to speak.
They are raised in Hastinapur alongside their hundred cousins, escape an attempt to burn them alive in a lacquer house, win Draupadi at her svayamvara and marry her jointly, build the city of Indraprastha, lose everything at dice, spend twelve years in the forest and a thirteenth in disguise at the court of Virata, and finally fight the war that destroys their generation.
The epic distributes its virtues among them deliberately. Yudhishthira has legitimacy, Bhima has force, Arjuna has skill, and the twins have service and silence. None of them alone would be a complete king, and their brother Karna, whom none of them knows to be a brother until he is dead, is the mirror the epic holds up to all five.