The Fall of Jarasandha

When Yudhishthira first spoke of performing the Rajasuya, the great sacrifice that would proclaim him emperor among kings, he sent for Krishna before he sent for anyone else. 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 lifeless pieces of flesh, and in sorrow the attendants cast the halves into the forest. There a rakshasi named Jara, wandering for food, came upon them and out of curiosity joined the two halves together in her hands to see how they had once fit. The moment she brought them together, the child came alive, whole and crying, and in wonder Jara carried him to the king rather than devour him. Because she joined him, he is called Jarasandha, the one joined by Jara. And because he was made whole by joining, he can be unmade only the same way he was made: split apart, and never let the two halves touch again."

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 only Bhima has the strength to hold him long enough for the puzzle to be solved."

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, their bows and maces hidden, their hair matted, their bodies wrapped in deer skin and bark. 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 stood a great drum, kept always ready for festival days, on which no ordinary man laid a hand uninvited. Krishna led his brothers to it and, without asking leave of anyone, the three of them struck it and split its hide, the sound cracking out over the city like a challenge flung into every household. It was not courtesy. It was a declaration that whoever had done this meant to be noticed, and meant to be feared.

They walked on into the palace itself, refusing the seats of honor offered to ordinary guests, choosing instead to stand upon a scattering of sacred kusha grass as though they were performing a rite rather than paying a visit. When Jarasandha received them, puzzled by brahmins who behaved 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. But I do not fight thieves who sneak in the dark. Name which of you will meet me, and I will meet him honorably, in the open, before my people."

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, would not raise a weapon against an unwilling opponent or strike from behind. He held to the old law of single combat as fiercely as he held to his ambition, and he gave Krishna the choice of which of the three would face him.

Krishna considered the offer in silence. Arjuna was too young in years for a match of pure strength against a king of Jarasandha's build, and Krishna himself, though he could have ended the contest with a gesture, had reasons of his own for staying his hand; the killing of Jarasandha could not be laid at a god's door if it was to teach Bhima and the Pandavas what raw dharma-bound strength could accomplish. He turned to Bhima.

"You are the one who must fight him," Krishna said. "Not because I doubt what I could do, but because this victory belongs to you and to your brother's throne. A king's title is not proven by another's hand."

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. "Very well, 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 lifted Jarasandha and hurled him 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. He shook the dust from his shoulders and stood again, whole and unhurt, ready to renew the contest as though the fall had cost him nothing. Bhima, astonished, threw him a second time, and a third, and each time the king of Magadha climbed back to his feet with the same terrible ease. Only Krishna, watching from the edge of the ground, understood why: Jarasandha's body, once joined by Jara's hands, healed itself of any parting the same way it had first been made whole, snapping back together wherever it was broken apart.

Day gave way to night, and still the two men wrestled, pausing only when darkness made the grip and throw too dangerous to continue, resting through the hours of sleep and returning to the ground each morning to begin again. 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.

By the thirteenth day, Krishna saw the strain telling on Bhima, whose great strength was being spent again and again against a wound that would not stay closed. That night, as the two men rested, Krishna sat near Bhima without speaking of the fight directly. He reached down, took up a single blade of grass, and slowly, in full view of Bhima but as though absentmindedly, split the blade lengthwise down its center. Then he cast the two thin halves apart from each other, one to his left hand and one to his right, so that they lay far from any chance of touching again.

Bhima watched this small, wordless act, and understanding broke over him like dawn.

On the fourteenth day, Bhima and Jarasandha rose for what would be the last time. The two men, both nearing the end of their strength, gripped each other once more before the whole city of Girivraja, and the crowd had grown quiet, sensing that something in the rhythm of the match had changed. Bhima fought now not merely to throw his opponent but to end him, and when at last he wrestled Jarasandha to the ground and pinned him, he did not simply cast him aside as he had thirteen times before.

Bhima seized Jarasandha by the legs and tore his body in two, from the groin upward, exactly as the king had first come into the world in two lifeless halves. Then, remembering Krishna's silent lesson, Bhima did not let the two halves fall together. He turned one half to face one way and flung it, and turned the other half to face the opposite way and flung it aside, so that even if some fragment of the old magic remained in his flesh, the two halves lay facing away from each other and could never rejoin as Jara's hands had once joined them. Jarasandha, king of Magadha, terror of eighty-six captive thrones, did not rise a fifteenth time.

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, was found trembling in the palace, expecting death at the hands of his father's killers. Instead Krishna raised him up and crowned him 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.