People of the epic · Mahabharata questions
Why was Gandhari blindfolded?
Gandhari chose it. On learning that the husband arranged for her, Dhritarashtra, was born blind, she bound a cloth over her own eyes and kept it there for life, refusing to enjoy what her husband could not. She removed it only once, to look at Duryodhana.
Gandhari was a princess of Gandhara, given in marriage to the eldest prince of Hastinapur. Dhritarashtra was blind from birth and had been passed over for the throne for that reason. When Gandhari learned what kind of husband she was going to, she took a cloth, folded it many times, and tied it across her eyes, and she did not take it off again.
The epic presents this as an act of extraordinary devotion and never quite says whether it was wise. Gandhari is the one person in the palace with the moral standing to check Duryodhana, and for a hundred sons she stays blindfolded beside a blind king while he refuses to restrain them. Her repeated advice to Duryodhana is the same sentence, that where there is dharma there is victory, and she says it before the war knowing it condemns her own children.
Late in the war, at Duryodhana request, she unbinds her eyes once. Her gaze had accumulated such power from years of austerity that whatever it fell on would be made invulnerable, and she told him to come to her naked so that her look could armour his whole body. Krishna met him on the way and shamed him into covering his waist with a leaf; the thighs stayed unprotected, and it is there that Bhima strikes him in the mace duel.
After the fighting she walks the battlefield among the corpses of her sons, and when Krishna comes to her she curses him: as he watched the Kurus destroy one another and did not stop it, so his own clan will kill each other and he will die alone and unregarded. Thirty-six years later it happens exactly so.