Panchala, Kingdom of the Fire-Born

Panchala lay in the doab, the broad flat country between the Ganga and the Yamuna and northward to the first rise of the hills, and it was among the richest land in Bharatavarsha: black soil, water everywhere, cattle standing belly-deep in grass. The Panchalas were an old people, a confederation of five clans, which is what the name says, and they had produced kings and grammarians and priests who argued in the assemblies of other kingdoms and were listened to when they spoke.

Then, in a single afternoon, the kingdom was cut in two.

The cause was an old friendship. Drupada and Drona had studied together as boys, and Drupada had promised, in the way boys promise, that what was his would be his friend's. He became a king and forgot it. Drona came to his court poor and hungry and reminded him of it, and Drupada laughed at him in front of the assembly and said that friendship exists only between equals. Drona said nothing, and went away, and taught the princes of the Kurus, and when the time came to name his teacher's fee he asked for Drupada, and the boys went and got him. That reckoning has its own telling.

What matters here is what Drona did with the victory. He did not take the throne and he did not take a ransom in gold. He drew a line along the Ganga. Everything north of it he kept, ruling from Ahichchhatra, and everything south of it he handed back to Drupada, and he said: now we are equals, now we can be friends again.

Drupada went home to Kampilya, king of half a country, with the laughter of two courts behind him. He did not eat well and he did not sleep well, and instead of grieving he began to think.

What Drupada wanted could not be bought, and could not be won with the army he had left. He wanted a son capable of killing Drona, and a weapon of that kind is not begotten by ordinary means. So he went up and down the rivers asking after brahmins, and at last, in a hermitage near Kampilya, he found two brothers, Yaja and Upayaja, who lived on fallen grain and would touch nothing that had been given to them by a king.

The younger, Upayaja, refused him outright. Drupada served him for a year anyway, bringing fruit and flowers and speaking softly and asking nothing, and at the end of the year Upayaja said only that his elder brother was less particular, and sent him on. Yaja agreed, for a fee counted in cattle. Upayaja came to assist at the fire regardless, because a brother is a brother.

They raised the altar and lit it and made the offering, and the queen was summoned to receive the oblation and could not come at once, saying that she was not yet purified and asking them to wait a little. Yaja would not wait. He poured the offering into the flame as it stood, and out of the fire, wearing armor, holding a bow, standing in a chariot, came a young man with a crown on his head; and a voice out of the sky said that he had been born for the destruction of Drona.

After him, out of the middle of the altar, came a girl. She was dark, and her eyes were long, and the fragrance of blue lotuses came off her body and could be smelled at a distance of two miles, and the voice said that she was the first among women and had been born for the destruction of the kshatriyas.

They named the boy Dhrishtadyumna and the girl Krishnaa. The people of Kampilya called her Panchali, the daughter of Panchala, and by that name the world would come to know her.

Drona heard what had come out of the fire, and did the thing that made him formidable and finally destroyed him: he sent for the boy, took him into his own house, and taught him the entire science of arms, knowing exactly what he had been made for. A teacher does not refuse a student, he said. Let it come as it comes.

Kampilya's second gift to the epic was the swayamvara. Drupada wanted Arjuna for his daughter, and the world believed Arjuna burned to ashes in the lacquer house, so the king set a test that no living man but Arjuna could pass: a bow that almost nobody could string, a fish revolving on a pole high overhead, and only its reflection in a basin of water to aim by. Kings came from every quarter of the earth and failed in front of each other. Then a brahmana rose from among the poor guests at the side of the court, strung the bow, and put five arrows through the fish, and the brahmana was Arjuna. That day has its own telling.

What it did to Panchala is the point here. By evening Draupadi was married - to five brothers, by a word of their mother's that could not be taken back - and Panchala was no longer a halved kingdom nursing a grudge in the south. It was the father-in-law of the sons of Pandu.

Drupada had gone looking for a lever against one man and had been handed an alliance instead. He had asked the fire for revenge and the fire had given him a war, though he would not understand the size of it for another generation. Dhrishtadyumna went out into the courtyard that night to see who these five brahmanas really were, and came back and told his father that the arms of the archer were the arms of a kshatriya.

When the summons went out for Kurukshetra, Panchala came entire.

Drupada brought an akshauhini of his own and his sons brought more, and it was in Drupada's hall at Kampilya that the first council of the Pandava alliance was held, and it was Drupada's own priest who was sent to Hastinapura to state their terms before the blind king. When the seven commanders had been chosen and the Pandavas needed one man to stand above them all, Krishna named the one who had been born for it, and Dhrishtadyumna the fire-born took command of eleven armies, against Bhishma first and then against his own teacher.

The Panchalas paid for that position every day of the war. They held the center. They died in numbers no other contingent matched, and on the field they were the men Drona hunted before all others, because he knew where his death was standing and preferred to reach it first.

On the fifteenth day he broke through to the old king. Drupada was past his prime, his chariot was surrounded, and the fight was not long. Drona killed him, and killed Virata beside him within the hour, and Panchala lost the man whose grievance had built everything it had.

It did not outlast him by much. Yudhishthira spoke the half-truth about Ashvatthama, and Drona set his weapons down in the chariot and sat in yoga with his eyes closed, and Dhrishtadyumna climbed up and took the head off the man who had taught him. The army roared. Arjuna turned his face away and could not look. Everything the altar at Kampilya had been lit for was now complete, and there were still three days of war left to fight, and Panchala had nothing further that it needed from the world.

On the eighteenth night the Pandava camp slept where it had won, and Dhrishtadyumna slept in the commander's tent. Ashvatthama came in the dark, with Kripa and Kritavarma holding the gates behind him, and what he did inside took until dawn.

He killed Dhrishtadyumna first. He refused him a weapon and refused him a clean death, and kicked him apart in his own bed as one kills an animal, saying that this was what a man earned for cutting down a teacher who had laid his arms aside. Then he went through the tents in order. Shikhandi died. Yudhamanyu and Uttamaujas died. The five sons of Draupadi, the grandsons of Panchala, died asleep and were carried out at first light to their mother. The princes of Panchala were killed to the last man in that single night.

Draupadi sat down on the ground and would not rise. She had been born out of a fire lit for revenge, and revenge had now been carried to completion in every direction it could run, and at the end of it there was a woman with no father, no brothers and no children, asking for one more killing, and then, when it was actually in front of her, asking that the killer be let go.

The kingdom itself went on. There were still cities and cattle and the black soil between the rivers, and Drupada's line was not entirely extinguished. But Panchala's part in this story had been spent to the last coin. What survived it was a name. To the end of the epic, and in every telling of it since, the woman at the center is called Panchali: the daughter of a country that was cut in half one afternoon and never stopped answering for it.