The King of Madra

This is the tale of Shalya, the mighty king of Madra, who fought and fell on the last day of the war - a good man bound by obligation to the side his heart opposed, and the embodiment of the war's tragedy of divided loyalty. Shalya was the brother of Madri, the second wife of Pandu, and so he was uncle to the youngest Pandavas, Nakula and Sahadeva; and his sympathy and his love were with the sons of Pandu, his own kin, whom he wished to support in the coming war.

But Shalya was tricked into the Kaurava cause. As he marched with his army toward the Pandavas to join them, Duryodhana, learning of his coming, arranged lavish rest-houses and feasts all along his road, hosting Shalya's whole army in royal splendor, and concealing that it was he, Duryodhana, who was the host. Shalya, delighted with the hospitality and supposing it came from the Pandavas, declared that he would grant the giver of such hospitality any boon he wished. Then Duryodhana revealed himself as the host and claimed his boon: that Shalya fight on the Kaurava side. Shalya, bound now by his own rash promise and the sacred debt of hospitality accepted, was forced to grant it, though it broke his heart; and so the uncle of the Pandavas was bound to fight against his own beloved nephews.

Before he went to take up his unwilling place in the Kaurava army, Shalya went to the Pandavas, grieving that he was bound to fight against them, and asked whether there was any way he might yet serve their cause even from the enemy's side. And Yudhishthira asked of him a secret service. For Yudhishthira foresaw that, in the great duel to come between Karna and Arjuna, Karna would demand a charioteer the equal of Krishna, and that none but Shalya, a king and a master of horses, would do; and so Shalya would likely be made to drive Karna's chariot.

'When that hour comes,' Yudhishthira asked of him, 'and you hold Karna's reins in the decisive duel, work to sap his spirit; demoralize him with words, praise his enemy, undermine his confidence at the crucial moment, that Arjuna may prevail.' And Shalya, glad to serve his nephews even by such a means, secretly agreed. So Shalya went to the Kaurava host bound to fight for them, yet pledged in secret to betray their greatest hope at the decisive hour - a man of divided loyalty indeed, fighting with his hands for one side and with his heart and his secret promise for the other. And in time, as Yudhishthira had foreseen, Shalya was made Karna's charioteer, and kept his secret promise, demoralizing Karna with bitter words in the duel that brought him down.

The war ground on through its terrible course, and the great commanders of the Kaurava host fell one by one: Bhishma upon his bed of arrows, Drona slain by deceit and grief, and at last Karna, the sun of the Kaurava cause, brought down on the seventeenth day - in part by the very demoralizing words of Shalya, his own charioteer, who had kept his secret promise. With Karna dead, the Kaurava army was all but broken, and Duryodhana, desperate, needed a new commander for the eighteenth and final day.

And so, by a strange turn of the war's tragedy, it was Shalya himself - the reluctant ally, the secret friend of the Pandavas, the man who had helped bring down Karna - who was now made the fourth and last commander-in-chief of the Kaurava army, to lead its shattered remnant on the final day. The uncle of the Pandavas, bound by his old rash promise, now stood at the head of the host arrayed against his own nephews, a great king and a mighty warrior leading a doomed and dwindling army into the last day of the war, his heart with the foe he was sworn to fight. So he took up the command, to do his duty by the side he was bound to, however his heart misgave him.

On the eighteenth and last day of the war, Shalya led the Kaurava host with great valor, fighting mightily at their head, a king and a master warrior selling the lost cause as dearly as he could. And it was ordained that he should be met in single combat by Yudhishthira himself, the eldest Pandava and the rightful king - for it was fitting that the king should face the king, and that Yudhishthira, who seldom took the center of the battle, should on this last day meet and overcome the great commander of the foe.

So the two kings came against one another, Shalya and Yudhishthira, uncle and nephew by marriage, the reluctant commander of the Kauravas and the righteous king of the Pandavas. It was a duel of kings, fierce and worthy, each a mighty warrior; and Yudhishthira, usually so mild and so little given to the forefront of battle, was filled now with a resolve and a strength beyond his wont, for this was his appointed task and his hour. The two fought, evenly matched and terrible, while the last remnants of both armies clashed around them; and the whole final day of the war seemed to gather to its point in this combat of the two kings.

At the height of their duel, Yudhishthira took up a great and shining spear, a mighty dart blessed for this very hour, and, gathering all his strength and resolve, hurled it with deadly force at Shalya. The spear flew straight and true and struck the king of Madra full upon the breast; and Shalya, the great commander, the reluctant ally, fell from his chariot and was slain, brought down at midday on the last day of the war by the spear of the righteous king.

So Shalya met his end, a mighty warrior fallen at the head of a doomed host, slain by the nephew he had loved and been bound to fight. There was a strange fitness and a deep sorrow in his death: that the man whose heart had been with the Pandavas all along, who had secretly served their cause, should die at last by a Pandava's hand, the victim of the rash promise and the cruel obligation that had bound him to the wrong side. Yudhishthira, who had slain him, could take little joy in it; for he had killed a kinsman and a secret friend, brought to be his enemy only by the snares of obligation and the tragedy of the war. The great commander was down; and with him fell the last hope of the Kaurava host.

With the fall of Shalya, their last commander, the Kaurava army broke utterly. The shattered remnant of the host, which had dwindled through eighteen days from a vast ocean of men to a few desperate survivors, lost all heart and order at the death of their leader, and the army collapsed into rout and ruin. Soon after, Sahadeva slew the cunning Shakuni, whose loaded dice had begun the whole tragedy; and the great Kaurava army, that had once filled the field from horizon to horizon, was reduced to almost nothing.

Duryodhana, seeing his last commander dead, his army destroyed, his brothers and his champions all fallen, was left at the end almost alone, the lord of a vanished host. The eighteenth day saw the final dissolution of the Kaurava cause, the death of its last leaders, and the scattering of its last warriors; and the death of Shalya was the blow that broke it. So the great army that pride and injustice had raised was brought, on that last day, to utter ruin; and the war that had consumed the flower of the world neared its desolate end.

There is in the tale of Shalya a deep meditation on divided loyalty, and on the snares of obligation, and on the war's terrible tragedy of kin set against kin. For Shalya was no villain, but a good man and a mighty king, whose heart was with the Pandavas, his own beloved nephews; and yet by a single rash promise, made in gratitude for hospitality, he was bound to fight against them, to lead the army of their enemies, and to die at their hands. He embodies the tragedy of all those in the war who fought against their own loved ones, bound by some obligation of loyalty or duty or promise to a side their hearts opposed.

The tale shows the danger of the rash promise, the boon granted before the asking is known, by which Shalya was snared into the wrong cause; and it shows the cruel conflicts of obligation that the war forced upon good men, where the debt of hospitality or the bond of allegiance compelled them to fight against the very people they loved. And it shows, through Shalya's secret service to the Pandavas even while bound to their foes, how such men sought to keep faith with their hearts even in the midst of fighting against them. The tragedy of Shalya is the tragedy of the whole war in little: good men, bound by tangled loyalties, destroying and destroyed by those they loved, in a conflict that left no one clean and spared no bond of kinship.

The fall of Shalya carries its sober lessons, woven through with the war's deepest sorrows.

See, first, the danger of the rash promise. Shalya, in his gratitude for a lavish hospitality, promised the unknown giver any boon he wished; and by that promise, made before he knew what would be asked, he was snared into fighting for the side his heart opposed, against his own beloved nephews, and to his death. The tale warns against the hasty pledge, the boon granted before the asking is known, the promise made in pleasure or gratitude without weighing what it may demand; for such promises may bind us to deeds we abhor and cannot undo. Be slow, then, to promise blindly; for a rash word can chain you to a cause your heart rejects.

And see the tragedy of divided loyalty, which is the tragedy of the whole war. Shalya was a good man, his heart with the Pandavas, bound by obligation to their foes, who died at the hands of the nephew he loved; and in him is mirrored the grief of all who were forced by tangled bonds of duty and loyalty to fight against their own. The tale teaches the sorrow of a world where the bonds of kinship and the bonds of obligation are torn apart, where good men are compelled to destroy those they love, and where no one in a civil war among kinsmen is left untouched or unstained. Honor, then, the loyalties of the heart above the snares of rash obligation; and grieve, with the tale, for all whom the war set against their own.