Kurukshetra Before the War

North and west of where the Yamuna runs, there is a level country that the old books treat with a particular carefulness. It lies between two rivers: the Saraswati coming down out of the hills on one side, and the Drishadvati on the other, and the plain between them was reckoned the most auspicious ground in the world, the place where the gods had performed their own sacrifices before there were men to perform any.

It had several names, and each name carries a different age of its history. Brahmavarta, the country made by Brahma, is the oldest. Samanta-panchaka, the region of the five lakes, comes from a thing done there in the age before this one. Kurukshetra, the field of Kuru, is the name a king left on it. And Dharmakshetra, the field of dharma, is what it is called in the first line of the greatest sermon ever preached on it.

The ground itself is unremarkable to look at, and that is worth saying plainly. It is flat, open, dry in the hot months, with thin soil and scattered thorn and a horizon you can see all the way around. There is no mountain on it and no gorge and no defensible position. What it has is water at the edges, room enough for any number of men to stand, and a reputation older than the memory of anyone standing there.

That reputation is not decoration. It is the reason for everything that happens on this plain later. Two armies did not meet here because the terrain suited cavalry. They met here because for age upon age men had been told that dust from this ground carried a sinner to the highest state, and that whoever left his body between these two rivers did not come back to be born again.

Before a single conch was blown at Kurukshetra, three things had already made it holy: an axe, a plough, and a great many gleaners.

The axe came first. In the interval between the treta and the dvapara ages, a brahmana's son named Rama, of the line of Bhrigu, took up arms because a king's sons had stolen his father's calf and then cut his father down in his own hermitage while his mother beat her breast twenty-one times.

He counted the blows. Then he went out and destroyed the kshatriya order of the earth twenty-one times over, and each time it grew back through the wives of the dead he came again and cut it down again, and the world learned to call him Parashurama, Rama of the axe.

On this plain he made his ending. He dug five pools on the ground between the rivers and filled them with the blood of the kings he had killed, and standing in that red water he made the offering to his fathers that a son owes them, taking up the blood in his cupped hands as another man takes up water.

And the fathers came. Richika his grandfather stood in the air above the pools with the ancestors of his house, and what they said to him was not praise.

'Enough, Rama. You have honoured us. Now stop. Anger is not endless, and the kshatriyas you are killing are not the men who killed your father. Let go of the axe.'

He let it go. He asked them for one thing before he did: that the deed be forgiven him, and that these five pools of his making become tirthas, sacred fords, so that the blood standing in them might turn into something other than blood. It was granted. The region took the name Samanta-panchaka, the place of the five lakes, and thereafter men bathed where a man had once stood washing his hands in slaughter.

So the first thing that consecrated this field was an extermination. That is not a comfortable fact and the epic does not smooth it. The place was made holy by a killing so complete that its author had to be talked out of continuing, and it was made holy specifically by his stopping.

The plough came after the axe. Kuru was a king of the lunar line, the ancestor whose name the whole family carries afterward, and he came to this plain not to fight over it but to farm it.

He brought a plough of gold, tradition says, and yoked to it the bull of Shiva and the buffalo of Yama, and he began to turn the soil between the two rivers with his own hands. He did not stop. He ploughed through seasons. Indra came down to ask him what he thought he was doing.

'I am making a field,' Kuru said, 'in which eight virtues will be sown: truth, austerity, forgiveness, kindness, purity, charity, yoga and continence.'

'And where is your seed?' asked Indra, who was amused.

'Here,' said the king, and offered his own body, limb by limb, to be cut and sown in the furrow he had opened.

He was serious, and the gods discovered that he would not be argued out of it. Vishnu came, and Indra with him, and they stopped his hand before he had unmade himself entirely, and asked him to name what he wanted for the labour he had already spent.

Kuru asked for two boons and neither was for himself. Let this field be holy for as long as the world lasts, and let it bear my name. And let whoever dies upon it, whether wasted to nothing by austerity or cut down in battle, go to heaven, whatever he has done before.

Both were granted, and Indra confirmed the second aloud so that there could be no argument about it later: men who leave the body on this plain, fighting or fasting, do not go to the lower worlds.

Read that boon again with the eighteen days in mind. A king ploughed himself into this ground to buy heaven for anyone who would die on it, ages before his own descendants filled it end to end with corpses. He asked for it out of pure generosity. It was collected on by seven armies at once.

Between the ploughing and the war, the field belonged to sages, and one of them is worth naming because his life measures what the place was for.

Mudgala lived at Kurukshetra on unchha vritti, the gleaner's vow: he took nothing but the grain the harvesters had dropped and left behind, gathering enough in a fortnight to keep his wife and son alive for a fortnight, and out of that little he fed guests before he fed himself. Durvasa came to test him, six times, filthy and raving, and ate everything in the house and smeared the rest on his body and abused the household in language no one should have borne. Mudgala bore it six times without one hard word, and the sage blessed him, and a celestial chariot came down onto the field to carry him bodily to heaven.

Mudgala asked the messenger to describe heaven first. The messenger described it honestly and mentioned, among its glories, that its rewards run out, and that those whose merit is exhausted fall from it. 'Then take the chariot away,' said the gleaner. 'I do not want a station I can be evicted from.' He gave up the heaven that this very field had been consecrated to grant, and went after the thing that does not end.

That is the kind of person the plain was full of, and it is why the fords along the Saraswati were worn smooth by pilgrims. Every pool and bend had a story and a virtue attached to it, and men walked the circuit of them the way other men walk to a shrine.

One such pilgrim was walking it while the war was actually being fought. Balarama would not take a side between his two pupils and would not watch them club each other, so he took the vow of a tirtha-yatra and went up the Saraswati bathing at ford after ford, hearing at every one the story of who had done what there in the old ages. He came back on the eighteenth day, in time to see the mace fight end badly and to say so, and the extraordinary thing is that his pilgrimage never left the district. The whole holy circuit lay within a few days' walk of the killing.

When the embassy failed and there was nothing left but the war, the two sides had to agree on ground, and it took no argument at all. Duryodhana named Kurukshetra. Yudhishthira accepted it. Eleven armies came down from the east and seven from the west and camped on the same plain, and neither side felt it had been outmanoeuvred in the choosing.

Bhishma, who had been alive longer than anyone in either camp and had heard the old accounts from men who heard them from Parashurama's own generation, knew exactly what field he was pitching his tents on. He had been trained by the axe-bearer himself and had fought him to a standstill on this very ground in the matter of Amba, years before. He knew that Kuru's boon was standing over the whole plain like a roof: that no man who fell here would fall further, whatever side he had chosen, whatever he had done.

That is the practical reason kshatriyas wanted it. A field where death in battle is heaven regardless is the only field on which you can ask a hundred thousand men to die for a quarrel between cousins. The armies did not sanctify Kurukshetra. Kurukshetra made the armies possible.

So the ground under those camps had already drunk the blood of every kshatriya on earth once, in Parashurama's twenty-one campaigns, and had already been ploughed into a field of merit by the ancestor whose name both armies bore, and had already sent Mudgala's chariot back empty. It had been Samanta-panchaka and Brahmavarta and Kurukshetra by turns, and it was about to receive its last name.

When a blind king in Hastinapura asked his charioteer what was happening far away, the question he framed carried that whole history in its first two words. On the field of dharma, on the field of Kuru, gathered together and eager for battle, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do?

He called it the field of dharma before a single arrow was loosed. Everyone listening already knew why.