The Fall of Jarasandha

When Yudhishthira first spoke of performing the Rajasuya, the great sacrifice that would proclaim him emperor among kings, he consulted his counsellors and brothers, and then he sent for Krishna. Krishna came to Indraprastha and listened to the plan in silence, and when Yudhishthira finished, he did not offer congratulations.

"There is one king in Aryavarta who will never bow to your sacrifice while he still draws breath," Krishna said. "Jarasandha of Magadha. He has already conquered and imprisoned eighty-six kings in the hill fortress of Girivraja, and he means to make it a hundred, for he has vowed to sacrifice a hundred captive kings to Rudra. Until he falls, no Rajasuya of yours can be called complete, for the very kings you would summon as witnesses sit in his dungeons."

Yudhishthira's face darkened. "Then tell me of this Jarasandha, so that I might understand the man before I move against him."

"He was not born as other men are born," Krishna said. "His father, King Brihadratha of Magadha, was childless for years despite two wives, until a sage gave him a single mango and told him to share it between his queens. Each queen bore half a child, two half-bodies, and in horror the queens abandoned them, and the midwives left the halves at a crossroads outside the palace. There a rakshasi named Jara, who lived on flesh and blood, came upon them and joined the two halves together so that they would be easier to carry. The moment she brought them together, they became one living child, so strong she could no longer lift him, and his roaring brought the king and queens running. Jara would not carry off the son of the king in whose land she lived, and she gave him to his father. Because she joined him, he is called Jarasandha, the one joined by Jara."

Arjuna, listening, said quietly, "Then he is not merely strong. He is a puzzle wearing the shape of a king."

"He is both," Krishna answered. "And Bhima has the strength to meet him."

Krishna, Bhima and Arjuna set out from Indraprastha without an army, for an army marching on Magadha would only warn Jarasandha and give him cause to slaughter his captives before help could reach them. They crossed the rivers and hills as three snataka brahmins, students who had completed their Vedic studies, carrying no weapons but their bare arms. In this humble guise they came at last to Girivraja, the mountain-girded capital of Magadha, ringed by five great peaks that Jarasandha's ancestors had fortified into an almost unbreakable wall.

At the city's edge rose the ancient Chaityaka peak, worshipped by the people of Magadha, where King Brihadratha had once placed three great drums covered in the hide of a slain man-eater. Instead of entering by the gate, the three of them attacked that sacred peak with their bare arms and broke it down, as if setting their feet on Jarasandha's own head. It was not courtesy. It was a declaration that whoever had done this meant to be noticed, and meant to be feared.

They snatched garlands from the flower-sellers in the streets and walked on into the palace itself, clad in bright robes and smeared with sandal paste. Jarasandha rose and honoured them as guests and bade them sit, but he rebuked them, puzzled by snataka brahmins who wore garlands and bore the marks of the bowstring like warriors. Krishna spoke plainly.

"We are not what we appear. I am Krishna of the Vrishnis, and these are Bhima and Arjuna, sons of Pandu. We have come to free the kings you hold captive in your dungeons, for no dharma permits a king to slaughter other kings like beasts at a sacrifice."

Jarasandha rose from his throne, and there was no fear in his face, only a cold and terrible pride. "I have taken these kings in fair battle, as is the right of any kshatriya. I do not fear three men who come to my own hall to lecture me on dharma. If you have come for war, I will give you war: army against army, or one against one, or against two or all three of you together."

It was, in its way, the strangest offer any tyrant had ever made his enemies. Jarasandha, who had chained eighty-six kings in his dungeons and meant to cut the throats of fourteen more to round the number to a hundred, held to the kshatriya law of combat as fiercely as he held to his ambition. He had his son Sahadeva installed as king, in case he fell, and made ready.

Krishna asked him, "With which of us three have you made up your mind to fight?" Jarasandha looked them over and chose Bhima. "I will fight with you, Bhima," he said. "It is better to be vanquished by a superior one."

Bhima's eyes lit with something close to joy. He had waited his whole life, it seemed, for an opponent worthy of the strength Bhima carried and rarely used to its fullness. "Then let it be so," he said, and stepped forward before Jarasandha's assembled court.

Jarasandha studied him, this thick-armed son of Pandu who matched his own frame almost exactly, and something like respect crossed his proud face. "Come, Bhima of the Kurus. Let us see whether your arms match your brother's confidence."

An open ground was cleared before the city gates, and word spread through Girivraja that its king would wrestle a stranger to the death. The captive kings, chained in their pits beneath the palace, heard the roar of the gathering crowd and did not know whether to hope or despair. Bhima removed his upper garment, tightened the cloth at his waist, and the two men circled each other for the first time, each testing the other's balance, each feeling in his opponent's grip the presence of a match he had never before been given.

The wrestling that followed had no equal in the memory of any who watched it. Bhima and Jarasandha locked arms and drove against each other with the force of two mountains grinding together, and the ground of the arena was churned to dust and then to mud with the struggle. Bhima hurled Jarasandha to the earth with a crash that should have broken any ordinary man's spine, and the crowd cried out, certain the match was over.

But Jarasandha rose, and threw Bhima in turn, for the two were evenly matched, each the strongest of the strong, each seeking some weakness in the other. They dragged and pushed, struck with fists like falling stones and hurled stinging words at each other, and neither could gain the mastery.

The duel began on the first day of the month of Kartika, and day gave way to night, and still the two men wrestled, without rest and without food, through day and night alike. One day passed, then three, then seven, and the people of Girivraja gathered each dawn to watch their king locked in a struggle that seemed as though it might never end. Bhima's arms ached with a weariness he had never known even after his hardest labors, yet he would not yield, for he understood that to stop was to leave eighty-six kings in their chains forever.

They were still locked together on the thirteenth day. But on the night of the fourteenth, Jarasandha drew back, worn out. Krishna saw it, and spoke as if to Bhima, but so that his meaning was a spur: "Kaunteya, one should not press an enemy who is exhausted, for pressed at such a time he may give up his life. So do not press the king too hard; fight him only with your arms, as an equal."

Bhima heard these words, and understanding broke over him like dawn: the king was spent, and the moment had come.

That night of the fourteenth, Bhima and Jarasandha closed for the last time. "This wicked one shall not be spared his life," Bhima told Krishna, and Krishna urged him on: "Show him now the strength you have from the wind god." Bhima fought now not merely to throw his opponent but to end him.

Bhima lifted the mighty Jarasandha high into the air and whirled him around a hundred times. Then he brought him down across his knee and broke his back in two, and trampling him, gave a roar so terrible that the people of Magadha thought the Himalaya itself had split. Jarasandha, king of Magadha, terror of eighty-six captive thrones, did not rise again.

A great cry went up from the city, uncertain at first, then swelling into relief, for many in Girivraja had feared their king's ambitions more than they had loved his crown. Krishna, Bhima and Arjuna went at once to the dungeons and struck the chains from the eighty-six captive kings, men who had given up hope of ever seeing their kingdoms again. They wept before the three who had freed them, and Krishna told each one to return home and prepare, for they would soon be summoned again, not as prisoners but as honored guests at Yudhishthira's Rajasuya.

Jarasandha's son, Sahadeva, came out with his kinsmen and his priest, bowing low with gifts, fearful of his father's killers. Krishna reassured him and installed him as king of Magadha in his father's place, asking only that he rule as a friend to the Pandavas rather than a tyrant to his neighbors. With Magadha's throne secured and its dungeons emptied, the road lay open at last, and Yudhishthira's messengers could go out to every corner of Aryavarta to summon kings to a sacrifice that Jarasandha would no longer stand to prevent.