The Kings Who Were Passed Over

Krishna had gone to Hastinapura to ask for peace, and he came back to Upaplavya and sat down among the sons of Pandu and told them what had been said in the Kuru assembly, speech by speech, in the order the speeches had come.

Bhishma had spoken. Drona had spoken, and had reminded Duryodhana that Pandu, who was king by right, had made over the sovereignty to his elder brother and gone to the woods. Vidura had spoken, and had asked the grandsire either to go into the forest and take him and Dhritarashtra with him, or else to bind wicked Duryodhana that very day and rule the kingdom with the sons of Pandu guarding it around. Then Gandhari, the daughter of king Suvala, alarmed at the prospect of the destruction of a whole race, had said from wrath, in the presence of the assembled monarchs, that the kingdom of the Kurus is enjoyable in due order of succession, and that even this had always been the custom of their race.

Four voices, and the last of them his mother, and Duryodhana sat through all of it.

"After Gandhari had said this," Krishna told them, "that ruler of men, Dhritarashtra, then said these words to Duryodhana in the midst of the assembled monarchs."

The blind king began the way a man begins when he has decided not to plead.

"O Duryodhana, listen, O son, to what I say, and blessed be thou. Do that if thou hast any respect for thy father."

And then he did not talk about the war, or about the exile, or about the dice, or about the five villages. He went back to the beginning of the family and started walking forward through it, name by name, because the thing he had to prove to his son was not that the war was wrong. It was that the throne his son was arming eleven armies to keep had never been his to hold, and that the family's own records said so, and that they had said so twice before.

"The lord of creatures, Soma, was the original progenitor of the Kuru race," Dhritarashtra said. "Sixth in descent from Soma was Yayati, the son of Nahusha."

Yayati had five sons, and every one of them, Dhritarashtra said, was a royal sage of the best kind. That is the first thing to hold about the story he was telling. It is not a tale about a bad family. It is a tale about a family with five good sons in it, in which the crown still went to the youngest.

Amongst them, the lord Yadu of mighty energy was the eldest born. Younger to Yadu was Puru, and Puru, said Dhritarashtra to the assembled kings, is our progenitor. The Kurus in that hall were sitting there because of the younger son.

The mothers mattered, and the king named them. Yadu was born of Devayani, and was therefore the daughter's son of Sukra, otherwise called Kavya, of immeasurable energy, which is to say that the eldest prince had behind him the preceptor of the asuras, the man who alone in the three worlds knew how to bring the dead back to life. Puru was brought forth by Sarmistha, the daughter of Vrishaparvan, who had come into Yayati's house not as a queen but in Devayani's train.

So the elder brother had the better birth on both sides, and the stronger grandfather, and the prior claim, and he knew it.

Endued with great strength and prowess, that progenitor of the Yadavas was filled with pride and possessed of wicked understanding, and he humiliated all the Kshatriyas. Intoxicated with the pride of strength, he obeyed not the injunctions of his father. Invincible in battle, he insulted his father and his brother.

Read the charges in order, because Dhritarashtra was laying them in order and every one of them had a second address in that hall. Pride. Contempt for the other kings. Disobedience to a father. Insult offered to a father and to a brother.

And then the success. On this earth girt on four sides by the sea, Yadu became all-powerful, and reducing all to subjection he established himself in this city called after the elephant.

In this city. Dhritarashtra was describing a prince who had won everything, in the very room where he had won it, to a prince who was about to try.

His father Yayati, the son of Nahusha, enraged with him, cursed that son of his.

Dhritarashtra said it plainly and then said the rest of it, which is the part that would have been heard by every ally sitting in that assembly with his troops already mustered. Yayati cursed Yadu and expelled him from the kingdom. And angry Yayati also cursed those brothers of Yadu who were obedient to that eldest brother of theirs, who was so proud of his strength.

Not the eldest alone. The ones who had followed him. A man who backs the strongest brother is not thereby innocent of the strongest brother's fault, and the curse went out along the line of obedience and took everybody standing on it.

There were kings in that hall who had come a long way to stand on that line.

Having cursed these sons of his, that best of kings placed on his throne his youngest son, Puru, who was docile and obedient to him.

Then Dhritarashtra stated the rule he had been building toward, in one sentence, without softening it.

"Thus even the eldest son may be passed over and deprived of the kingdom, and younger sons may, in consequence of their respectful behaviour to the aged, obtain the kingdom."

It is a strange sentence for that father to be saying to that son, and it repays a moment's attention, because on its face it is an argument for the younger. Duryodhana might have taken it up gladly if the ages had run the other way. But the rule Dhritarashtra was reading out of his own genealogy was not about birth order at all. It was about who had behaved well toward the old, and who had not.

The Kuru throne, on that reading, does not descend. It is placed. And the hand that places it belongs to the fathers and the elders, and the fathers and the elders in that hall had all just spoken, one after another, and every one of them had named Yudhishthira.

Duryodhana had the eldest son's claim within his own generation. His father had just shown him, out of the family's oldest story, exactly how little that had ever been worth.

Then the blind king came closer to home, out of the ancient world and into the memory of living men.

"So also, conversant with every virtue, there was my father's grandfather, king Pratipa, who was celebrated over the three worlds."

Unto that lion among kings, who ruled his kingdom virtuously, were born three sons of great fame and resembling three gods. Devapi was the eldest. Vahlika was the next. Santanu of great intelligence, who, Dhritarashtra said, was my grandfather, was the youngest. Everyone in that hall could count from Santanu forward: Santanu to Vichitravirya, Vichitravirya to himself, himself to the boy he was talking to. The whole Kuru claim ran down from the third son of Pratipa.

And the first son had been a better man.

Devapi, endued with great energy, was virtuous, truthful in speech, and ever engaged in waiting upon his father. He was popular with both the citizens and the subjects of the provinces, respected by the good, dearly loved by the young and the old. He was liberal. He adhered firmly to truth. He was engaged in the good of all creatures, and obedient to the instructions of his father as also of the Brahmanas. He was dearly loved by his brother Vahlika and by the high-souled Santanu, and great, indeed, was the brotherly love that prevailed between him and his high-souled brothers.

That is a list without a single flaw in it, and Dhritarashtra recited the whole of it before he came to the one clause that undid it, and the placing is deliberate. This was not the story of a prince who was set aside because he was unfit to rule. He was fit in every particular that a kingdom cares about, and his brothers loved him, and the people loved him, and he had never once disobeyed his father.

"But that best of kings had a skin-disease."

One line, put down among the virtues like a stone dropped into a bowl of milk, and everything above it stopped mattering.

In course of time the old and best of kings, Pratipa, caused all preparations to be made according to the scriptures for the installation of Devapi on the throne. The lord Pratipa caused every auspicious preparation. Nothing was omitted. The rite was ready.

The installation of Devapi, however, was forbidden by the Brahmanas, and by all aged persons amongst the citizens and the inhabitants of the provinces.

It was not one voice. It was the priests and the elders and the townsmen and the country people together, all of them fond of the prince they were refusing, and the reason they gave was not a reason against him. The gods do not approve of a king that is defective of a limb. Thinking of this, those bulls among Brahmanas forbade king Pratipa to install his eldest son.

Hearing that the installation of his son was forbidden, the voice of the old king became choked with tears, and he began to grieve for his son.

Dhritarashtra did not pass over that detail, and a man who has never seen a face has other ways of knowing what happened in a room. Thus, though Devapi was liberal, virtuous, devoted to truth, and loved by the subjects, yet in consequence of his skin-disease he was excluded from his inheritance.

Then the sons went their ways, and the way each of them went is worth marking.

Devapi, who was defective of one limb, beholding the king his father prevented from installing him, and filled with sorrow on his father's account, retired into the woods. He grieved for the old man, not for the crown. He did not gather a party. He did not call the citizens who loved him. He walked out.

As regards Vahlika, abandoning his paternal kingdom, he dwelt with his maternal uncle, and obtained the highly wealthy kingdom of his maternal grandfather. He took an inheritance that did not have to be taken from anybody.

And with Vahlika's permission, Santanu of world-wide fame, on the death of his father, became king and ruled the kingdom.

The third son. With the second son's leave. Over the head of an elder brother who was the best of the three, and who had gone away rather than make his father choose twice.

Then Dhritarashtra put himself into his own argument, and the hall heard a blind man say aloud the thing he had spent a lifetime not saying.

"In this way also, O Bharata, though I am the eldest, yet being defective of a limb, I was excluded from the kingdom by intelligent Pandu, no doubt after much reflection. And Pandu himself, though younger to me in age, obtained the kingdom and became king. At his death, that kingdom must pass to his sons."

Three cases, and the third was the speaker. Yadu passed over for pride, Devapi for a skin, Dhritarashtra for his eyes. In none of them had being born first been enough, and in the last of them the man who had lost by the rule was the man now reciting it.

Then he turned it on his son.

"When I could not obtain the kingdom, how canst thou covet it? Thou art not the son of a king, and therefore hast no right to this kingdom. Thou, however, desirest to appropriate the property of others."

That is the sentence the whole genealogy had been built to carry. The father was telling his son, before every monarch his son had assembled, that he had never been king in law, that he had held the seat for his brother's line, and that the boy had no inheritance at all, only an occupancy.

"High-souled Yudhishthira is the son of a king. This kingdom is lawfully his. Of magnanimous soul, even he is the ruler and lord of this race of Kuru."

And having said what was lawful, he said why it was also good. Yudhishthira is devoted to truth, of clear perception, obedient to the counsels of friends, honest, loved by the subjects, kind to all well-wishers, master of his passions, and the chastiser of all that are not good. Forgiveness, renunciation, self-control, knowledge of the scriptures, mercy to all creatures, competence to rule according to virtue: of all these attributes of royalty, every one exists in him.

"Thou art not the son of a king, and art always sinfully inclined towards thy relatives. O wretch, how canst thou succeed in appropriating this kingdom that lawfully belongeth to others? Dispelling this delusion, give half the kingdom, with a share of the animals and other possessions. Then, O king, mayest thou hope to live for some time with thy younger brothers."

Krishna let the speech stand a moment before he told the Pandavas what came after it, which was nothing. Duryodhana rose with his eyes red in anger and walked out, and the kings who had come to die for him got up and followed him.