Ancient Beginnings

Before there were kings at Hastinapura, before there was a Hastinapura at all, there was the moon. The bards who recite the Mahabharata begin not with men but with light, for they say the great house whose quarrel split the world was descended from the moon itself, and that to understand the war one must first understand the long river of blood that ran down from the sky to the throne.

In the first days the god Brahma brought forth the sage Atri from his mind, and from Atri's eyes there fell a radiance so pure and so cool that the worlds could not contain it. The gods gathered it up, and from that gathered radiance was born Soma, the moon, lord of plants and of the sacred drink, the white wanderer of the night sky. Soma performed a great sacrifice and rose to such glory that pride took him, and his pride led him into the first of the family's many transgressions: he carried off Tara, the wife of Brihaspati, teacher of the gods. A war was fought in heaven over her, gods against gods, until Brahma himself intervened and Tara was returned. But she returned carrying a child, and that child was Budha, and Budha was the seed of the line that would one day be called the Chandravamsha, the dynasty of the moon.

The bards pause here and remind their listeners of a thing that will matter for a hundred thousand verses to come. The house of the moon was radiant, and it was also flawed. From its very first generation it knew desire that overran its bounds, ambition that started wars, and love that crossed every line drawn around it. These were not accidents. These were the inheritance. The deeds of the ancestors, the reciters say, are seeds planted in time, and the descendants are the harvest. What Soma did under the stars, his children's children would do again upon the earth, and the last and greatest reaping would be Kurukshetra.

Budha, the child of the moon and the stolen Tara, came down to the world of men. He took as his wife Ila, a being who had been born a king and become a woman and would shift between the two, and from their union came the first wholly mortal heir of the lunar house. His name was Pururavas, and with him the dynasty of the moon set its foot upon the earth and began the long descent toward the throne where Shantanu would one day sit, and where this story truly begins.

Pururavas built his city at Pratishthana on the banks where the Ganga and the Yamuna draw near, and he ruled as a king of rare beauty and rare generosity. The fame of him climbed even into heaven, and there it reached Urvashi, the loveliest of all the apsaras, the celestial dancers of Indra's court. She had been cursed for a season to dwell among mortals, and of all mortals she chose Pururavas.

She came to him and named her terms, as the women of those tales so often do. "I will be your wife," she told the king, "but you must hold to three conditions. Two young rams are dear to me as children, and you must never let them be taken from beside my bed. You must eat only clarified butter and nothing else, for I will not look upon coarse food. And you must never let me see you unclothed except in the act of love. Keep these, and I am yours. Break any one, and I am gone."

Pururavas swore it, and for years they lived in a happiness so complete that the apsara forgot her heaven and the king forgot that he had a kingdom beyond her chamber. But the gods of Indra's court missed Urvashi's dancing, and the Gandharvas, the celestial musicians who were her kin, plotted to bring her home. One night they stole into the king's palace and carried off the two rams. Urvashi cried out in the dark that her children were being taken and that her husband stood by like a coward. Stung, Pururavas leapt up just as he was, naked, and ran after the thieves into the night, sword in hand. At that very instant the Gandharvas loosed a great flash of lightning across the sky, and by its light Urvashi saw the king unclothed.

The condition was broken. When Pururavas returned with the recovered rams, the chamber was empty. Urvashi was gone, drawn back to heaven by the law she herself had set. The king wandered the world half-mad with grief, searching every lake and grove, until at last he found her among a flock of apsaras swimming in the form of swans on a lotus pool. She would not stay, but she pitied him, and she told him that if he worshipped the Gandharvas with a sacred fire through the turning of a year, he might at last dwell with her among the immortals. Pururavas did as she said. He raised the fire, he held the year, and in the end he was given a place in the world of the Gandharvas and reunited with his beloved. From their union came sons, and through the eldest the line of the moon ran on, carrying always this first lesson of the house: that its loves were bright, and brief, and bought at a terrible price.

Generations passed in the lunar house, kings begetting kings, until there arose Nahusha, a descendant of Pururavas, who climbed higher than any mortal of his line before him and fell further for it. He was a king of such virtue, such strength of arm, and such mastery of sacrifice that his renown spread through all three worlds, and the merit he piled up in his lifetime rivaled the merit of the gods themselves.

It happened in that age that Indra, king of the gods, had slain the demon Vritra, and Vritra had been by certain reckonings a Brahmin. The sin of killing a Brahmin clung to Indra like soot, and unable to bear it he fled the throne of heaven and hid himself, shrinking into the fibres of a lotus stalk in a far lake, leaving the seat of the lord of gods empty. The gods and sages, fearing the worlds would fall into ruin without a ruler in heaven, looked down upon the earth for a man worthy to be raised up, and their eyes fell upon Nahusha. They lifted the mortal king to heaven and set him upon Indra's throne, and they gave him Indra's power and Indra's splendour for as long as he should hold to dharma.

But heaven is a poison to a man not ready for it. Seated where Indra had sat, possessed of Indra's might, Nahusha grew swollen with arrogance. He demanded the worship that had been Indra's. He demanded Indra's pleasures. And at last he demanded Indra's wife, the goddess Shachi, who had no wish for him at all. Shachi, advised by the wise, played for time. She told Nahusha she would come to him only if he came to her in a manner no being had ever traveled before, carried in a palanquin borne upon the shoulders of the seven great sages themselves.

Nahusha, drunk on his station, ordered the holy sages to bear his litter. They came, those ancient ones, and stooped beneath the poles. But the king's lust made him impatient, and he prodded them to go faster, and in his haste he kicked the sage Agastya, who was carrying his corner, and cried out the word "sarpa, sarpa" - move, serpent, move. Agastya straightened beneath the litter, his eyes blazing, and pronounced the curse that the whole house of the moon would remember. "Since you have called a sage a serpent, become a serpent. Fall from heaven and crawl the earth as a snake until the day a descendant of your own blood shall come and free you." Nahusha fell from the sky in the body of an enormous serpent, and Indra in time returned to his cleansed throne. So the bards mark it: the lunar house had risen all the way to the seat of the king of the gods, and the same flaw that had been in Soma cast it back down to the dust. The pattern held. The ancestors fell by pride, and the sons inherited the falling.

Nahusha left a son named Yayati, and Yayati became one of the greatest emperors the lunar line ever produced, a conqueror who ruled the whole earth to its four oceans and offered sacrifices that made the gods themselves take notice. But like his fathers before him, his glory was woven through with a single, fatal weakness, and his weakness was women.

Yayati married Devayani, the proud daughter of Shukracharya, the preceptor of the demons and the one being in creation who held the secret of bringing the dead back to life. With Devayani as part of the marriage came Sharmishtha, a demon princess who had quarreled with Devayani and been reduced to serving her as a maid. Yayati swore to Shukracharya at the wedding that he would honour Devayani as his queen and never take Sharmishtha to his bed. He meant the oath. He did not keep it. In time Sharmishtha came to him in secret and begged him for children, and the king, soft as all his line, yielded. He fathered sons by both women, and for a while the deceit held in the shadows of the palace.

When Devayani at last discovered the truth, she fled in fury to her father, and Shukracharya, whose curses were as terrible as his power to revive the dead, laid his hand upon the king. "Since you have betrayed my daughter and given yourself to lust, let lust be answered. From this hour you shall be old. The decay of years shall fall upon you at once, and you shall be a withered ancient, done with all the pleasures you could not master." In an instant the strong young emperor became a trembling old man, white-haired, dim-eyed, his vigour gone.

Yayati pleaded. He had drunk so little of life, he said, and there was so much desire still alive in his heart. Shukracharya, who could not unsay a curse but could soften it, granted him this: if any of his sons would willingly take his father's old age upon his own young body, and give the king his youth in exchange, Yayati might be young again for as long as that son would bear the burden. The king went to his sons. To the eldest, Yadu, born of Devayani, he offered the trade, and Yadu refused, saying old age was no light thing and he would not give up his youth even for his father. One by one the elder sons refused, and one by one Yayati cursed them, declaring that none of their descendants should ever wear the crown of the dynasty.

At the last Yayati came to his youngest son, Puru, the child of Sharmishtha, and laid the same plea before him. "My son, my desires are not yet spent, and the curse has made me old before my time. Take my age upon you, give me your youth, and let me drink a while longer of the world. When I am content, I will return your years to you."

Puru did not weigh the cost as his brothers had. He bowed and said, "Father, it is yours. Take my youth, and let me carry your age. There is no debt a son owes that is greater than the one he owes the life that made him." And so the exchange was made. The withered ancient straightened into a young man again, his hair darkening, his eyes clearing, the fire returning to his limbs, while the boy Puru bent under the sudden weight of a thousand aches and the grey of years he had never lived.

Yayati took back his youth and went out into the world to drink it dry. For long ages he indulged every pleasure he had hungered for, ruling, feasting, loving, sacrificing, chasing the horizon of his own desire. And at the end of all of it he came to the discovery that the wisest of his house would pass down forever after. He found that desire is not a vessel that can be filled but a fire that grows with feeding, and that no amount of indulgence had brought him an hour nearer to peace. "Desire," he said, "is never quenched by enjoyment. It only blazes higher, as fire blazes when butter is poured upon it. All the grain and gold and women of the earth could not satisfy one man. Knowing this, a wise person turns away and finds rest."

So Yayati went back to Puru and returned the boy's youth to him, and took back his own old age willingly this time, no longer fleeing it. And then, for the great wisdom Puru had shown in his sacrifice and the great wisdom Yayati had at last won through his folly, the emperor passed over all his elder sons and named Puru his heir. The crown of the lunar dynasty went not to the firstborn Yadu, from whose line would one day come Krishna and the Yadavas of Dwaraka, but to the youngest and most dutiful, Puru, founder of the Pauravas. From Puru the main stem of the family ran on, and it is the Paurava line, the line of the boy who gave his father his youth, that leads straight down to the kings of Hastinapura and to the war.

Down the Paurava line, generation upon generation, the dynasty came at last to King Dushyanta, a sovereign of vast empire and of a hunter's restless heart. One day he rode out with his army on a great hunt, and the chase carried him deep into the forest until he came upon a hermitage of surpassing peace on the banks of the river Malini, the ashram of the sage Kanva. Leaving his soldiers behind out of reverence, the king entered the grove alone, and there he beheld a young woman of such beauty that he stood rooted, for she seemed to him not a forest-dweller but a goddess hidden among the leaves.

Her name was Shakuntala. She was the daughter, she told him, of the celestial nymph Menaka and the great sage Vishwamitra, abandoned at birth in the wild and sheltered by birds, the shakunta, from which her name was drawn, until Kanva found her and raised her as his own. Kanva was away on a pilgrimage, and Shakuntala received the king with the hospitality of the hermitage. Between the two there grew in those hours a love sudden and total, and Dushyanta, ardent and unwilling to wait, proposed to her a Gandharva marriage, the union of mutual consent that needs no rite and no witness but the two who make it and the gods who see all.

Shakuntala, wise beyond the forest, set one condition before she would consent. "If a son is born of our love," she said, "let him be your heir, and let him be installed as the prince of your house." Dushyanta swore it gladly, and they were wed there in the green silence, and for a time the king lingered in the grove. But a kingdom waits for no man's love. Dushyanta had to return to his capital, and he left her with a ring as a token and a promise that he would send a fitting escort to bring his bride to the throne. He rode away through the forest, and Shakuntala stood at the edge of the trees and watched the dust of his army settle, and waited.

The months passed in the hermitage, and Shakuntala bore a son, and from his first breath the boy was clearly no ordinary child. He grew with the speed and strength of the divine blood in him. By the time he was six years old he had a strength that the strongest men could not match, and a fearlessness that knew no creature in the forest as its master. He would seize the lion cubs and the tiger cubs as they played and bind them and count their teeth, and he would harness the great cats and ride upon them through Kanva's grove as another child might ride a calf. The sages who watched him gave him a name for this: Sarvadamana, the tamer of all, the boy whom nothing could subdue.

But the king did not send the escort he had promised. Dushyanta, far away upon his throne, had forgotten. The standard telling holds that a sage's curse fell upon the forgetful or that the token was lost, but by every account, when Shakuntala at last journeyed to Hastinapura with her son to claim his birthright, Dushyanta in his open court denied that he knew her at all. He looked upon the wife he had wed in the forest and the son who carried his blood, and out of doubt and the fear of his court's opinion he turned them away and called her a liar.

Shakuntala did not weep and crawl. She drew herself up before the whole assembly and spoke to the king of dharma, of truth, of what a man owes the wife of his own choosing and the son of his own making. "A man's self is born again in his son," she told him. "To deny your child is to deny yourself. The truth is the highest dharma there is, higher than a thousand sacrifices, and you, who know this, are forsaking it before your court for shame." And then, when the king still hesitated, a voice spoke out of the heavens above the hall, heard by all, declaring that the child was indeed Dushyanta's true son and commanding the king to cherish him and to give him the name Bharata, the cherished one, the sustained. Dushyanta, his doubt resolved by the gods and his heart at last set free, embraced his wife and his son before the court and named the boy his heir.

That boy grew into the emperor Bharata, the mightiest sovereign the line had yet produced, a chakravartin who ruled the whole of the known world from sea to sea and offered sacrifices on the banks of every sacred river. So great and so just was his reign that the land itself took his name. From Bharata the country was called Bharatavarsha, and its people the Bharatas, the descendants of Bharata, and so they are named to this day. Every king who came after in this house, the Kauravas and the Pandavas alike, were called the Bharatas because they were the children of this forest-born tamer of lions.

From Bharata the line ran on through emperors whose names the bards still chant, and among them, after many generations, there arose a king named Kuru, and it is from him that the whole house took the name by which the war would forever be known. The Kuru dynasty, the Kauravas, the field of Kurukshetra itself, all carry his name, and the story the reciters tell of him explains why that field above all others became the place where dharma would one day be decided in blood.

Kuru was a king of immense piety, and his great act was not a conquest but a labour of devotion. He came to a wide plain in the land that would later be called Kurukshetra, watered by the sacred Saraswati, and he resolved to consecrate it as a place of supreme holiness, a field where any creature that died would attain heaven, and where the merit of austerity and sacrifice would be magnified beyond all other ground. He took a golden plough, the bards say, and yoked to it Yama the lord of death and other powers, and with his own hands the emperor ploughed that plain himself, day after day, season after season, sowing it not with grain but with virtue. When Indra and the gods asked him what he sought, Kuru told them he wished that whoever should leave the body upon this field, whether by penance or in war, should go straight to the highest worlds, freed of all sin.

The gods granted him his wish. They declared that the plain he had ploughed should be holy forever, that it should be called Kurukshetra, the field of Kuru, and that any being who died there, fighting or fasting, would attain heaven. The bards never let their listeners forget this when they come to the great war, for it gives the slaughter its terrible double face. The very field on which the sons of this house would one day destroy one another had been made holy by their own ancestor precisely so that those who died upon it should be saved. Kuru ploughed the field of righteousness, dharmakshetra, the field of dharma, and centuries later his descendants would water his furrows with their blood and find, in the dying, the heaven he had prepared for them. From Kuru the dynasty took its name, and toward Kuru's field the whole long river of the moon had been flowing all along.

After Kuru the line of the moon settled at last into the city that would be the heart of the whole epic. Hastinapura, the city of the elephant, rose on the banks of the Ganga, and there the Kuru kings held their court, and the throne passed down from father to son through the generations that lead directly into the story the reciters have been climbing toward all this while. Pratipa ruled there, a king beloved of his people, and to Pratipa was born the son who would carry the whole weight of the coming age upon his shoulders. His name was Shantanu.

Shantanu was a king in whom the long inheritance of the lunar house seemed to come to a quiet flower. He had the conquering strength of Yayati and Bharata without their excess, the piety of Kuru, and a peculiar grace of his own: it was said that any aged person whom Shantanu touched with his hands was soothed and given ease, and so he was named Shantanu, the one who brings peace, the giver of calm. He was just, he was generous, he was devoted to truth and to the hunt and to his people, and under him Hastinapura prospered.

And yet the old pattern of the house had not finished with the dynasty, for the deeds of the ancestors are seeds, and the harvest was not yet fully come. Shantanu, walking one day by the Ganga, would meet a woman of unearthly beauty rising from the river, and would lose his heart as Pururavas had lost his to Urvashi and Dushyanta to Shakuntala, and would bind himself by a vow he could not see the end of. From that meeting would come the births and the bargains, the terrible promise of the son who renounced the throne, the second marriage to a fisher-king's daughter, the tangled succession of blind and broken heirs, and at the last the cousins whose quarrel would lead the whole house of the moon down at last to the field that Kuru ploughed.

So the bards finish the long genealogy and draw breath, for here the river of the moon at last reaches the sea. From Soma's stolen love to Pururavas and the apsara, from Nahusha's fall to Yayati's unquenchable desire, from Puru's sacrifice to Bharata's truth in the open court, from Kuru's golden plough to the peace-giving king upon the throne of Hastinapura, the whole vast lineage was a single unbroken thread, and every glory and every flaw along it had been gathering toward this moment. The deeds of the ancestors had shaped the destiny of the sons. The stage was set. The river had reached the throne. And it is here, at Hastinapura, with King Shantanu walking by the Ganga, that the great story of the Mahabharata truly begins.