The Five Sons of Draupadi

Five times in the years of the Pandavas' rise, a son was born to Draupadi, and each time the father was a different husband, so that the queen of Indraprastha carried not one line into the next generation but five, bound into a single household by the marriage law the brothers had accepted and by a mother's love that made no distinctions among them.

To Yudhishthira she bore Prativindhya, first of the five, born while the eldest brother was still building the kingdom he would later lose on a throw of dice. To Bhima she bore Sutasoma, who announced himself loudly from his first cry, as if he meant to match his father's roar before he had learned to stand. To Arjuna she bore Shrutakarma, named for the fame of the great deeds his father had done. To Nakula she bore Shatanika, quick and watchful even as an infant, and to Sahadeva she bore Shrutasena, the youngest, loved no less for coming last.

They were still boys when that kingdom was lost. Indraprastha was gone, wagered and lost, and their fathers were exiles in the forest and then in hiding, disguised servants in a stranger's court. The five boys were taken first to Panchala by their uncle Dhrishtadyumna, and later lived at Dvaraka alongside Abhimanyu, where Subhadra taught them conduct as their own mother would have and Krishna's son Pradyumna guided them as he guided his own, so that they knew their famous fathers mostly through the stories other people told about them.

Draupadi, in the forest, had news of them only from visitors. Krishna told her that her sons were devoted to their weapons and that Subhadra watched over them without fail, and Satyabhama assured her that they were brave and skilled, living happily with Abhimanyu in a city they loved, and that Pradyumna's mother loved them with all her soul. It was as near to them as she came for thirteen years.

It was Arjuna who made warriors of them. When they had studied the Vedas, he taught them every weapon, human and divine, in the years before the dice game, as he had taught Abhimanyu. The finest archer of his age brought to his sons and nephews the same unsentimental discipline that Drona had once brought to him. There was no gentleness in the training ground at dawn, only repetition: the draw, the loose, the recovery, a thousand times before breakfast, until the motion belonged to the hand and not to thought.

Prativindhya, eldest and steadiest, had been named for the Vindhya mountains, because the brahmanas foretold he would stand like them against every weapon of his enemies, and he took to strategy the way his father took to law, asking why before he asked how. Sutasoma matched his brothers blow for blow in the mace yard and grinned through the bruises, Bhima's temperament poured into a smaller frame. Shrutakarma had his father's eye for range and angle, dropping arrows into targets Arjuna moved farther back each season. Shatanika learned the chariot faster than any of them, and Shrutasena, youngest, refused to be left behind at anything, which made him reckless and which made him good.

Arjuna did not train them to be praised. He trained them, as Drona had trained him, to be ready when the day came.

Draupadi watched the training from the palace steps more often than she let her sons see. She had married five brothers and borne five sons, and in the arithmetic of that marriage she understood something Arjuna's discipline never had to teach: that love multiplied by five did not divide the grief it would eventually owe. She said nothing of this to the boys. She only watched them longer than she needed to, each evening, before she let them go.

When the armies gathered at Kurukshetra, the five sons of Draupadi rode out with them, not as ornaments of their fathers' chariots but as commanders in their own right, each given men to lead and a place in the array to hold. They fought every one of the eighteen days. No chronicle of the war can say that of Bhishma, or Drona, or Karna, each of whom fell partway through and left the field to others. The five boys who are barely named fought from the first dawn to the last.

On the day of the chakravyuha, when Drona's wheel formation swallowed Abhimanyu and the army broke against it in waves, the five upapandavas were in those waves, cutting toward a brother none of them reached in time.

Their fathers get the songs. Arjuna's grief for Abhimanyu, Bhima's oath against Duryodhana's thigh, Yudhishthira's slow unmaking under the weight of the war fought in his name, all of it is sung in every gathering where the epic is still told. The five sons who held the same lines, took the same wounds, and buried the same friends appear in those songs mostly as a number, five, mentioned when the poet needs to say that Draupadi's family, too, was at war.

Yet the epic does give them one fight of their own. On the fourteenth day, while Arjuna drove toward Jayadratha, Somadatta's son fell on the five and pierced each of them again and again until, for a while, they were too stunned to know what to do. Then they closed around him together. Shatanika struck first and roared. Arjuna's son killed his horses, Bhima's son cut his bow, Yudhishthira's son brought down his standard, Nakula's son threw his charioteer from the seat, and Sahadeva's son, seeing the man cornered by his brothers, took off his head with a razor-edged arrow. The Kaurava troops who saw it fled. It was Arjuna's old lesson returning, five sons fighting as one.

The war ended on the eighteenth day with the Kaurava line broken and the Pandavas' camp filled with the exhausted relief of men who had finally stopped counting how many more mornings they would have to survive. The five sons of Draupadi, who had fought every one of those mornings, slept that night in the tents at the heart of the victorious camp, certain for the first time in eighteen days that tomorrow required nothing more of them than to wake. Their fathers were not there. Krishna had said that for the sake of good fortune the victors should spend that night outside the camp, and the five Pandavas had gone with him to the bank of the sacred river Oghavati.

What happened after they slept belongs to another telling, the story of Ashwatthama's rage and the vow he carried into the dark, and it does not need repeating here in full. What belongs here is only this: that among the sleepers in that camp were the five boys who had held their lines through every one of the war's eighteen days without once breaking, and that the man who came through the tents that night did not stop to ask which sleepers had earned a longer life by their conduct in the field. He was not choosing among the deserving. He had come to avenge his father on the Panchalas and on all who fought beside them, and the five sons of Draupadi lay in his path.

They woke to the noise and died in the dark, one after another, snatching up whatever lay nearest, bows, a javelin, a chariot wheel, a club, against a man who had come among them with a sword and shield while the camp slept. Whatever is owed to a warrior for meeting his death ready and armed in open battle was denied to all five of them by an act that chose the hour precisely because they would not be. It was not a battle. It has never been called one.

By morning the camp that had been celebrating victory the night before held five bodies where five young commanders had slept, and the war that had ended the previous afternoon exacted, in its final hours, a price from the one household that had already given the war everything else it had.

Draupadi was not in the camp that night. She had gone to Upaplavya, and the news reached her there. In the morning Nakula brought her back on his chariot, trembling like a plantain tree in the wind, to where Yudhishthira had fallen senseless among the dead, and what she found was the arithmetic she had refused to do aloud on the palace steps years earlier, finally and completely worked out. Five sons, one to each husband, and all five gone in a single night after eighteen days in which none of them had fallen. She fell to the ground before the king, and it was Bhima who caught her in his arms.

"It is your good fortune, king," she said to Yudhishthira, and every word was bitter, "that you will now enjoy the whole earth, having offered your sons to Yama as a kshatriya's duty requires." If Ashwatthama was not hunted down and killed that very day, she told him, she would sit where she was and fast until she died. Yudhishthira answered that her sons had died in keeping with dharma, and asked how a man already fled to a distant forest could be brought down. She named her price: the jewel Ashwatthama wore on his head, brought to her and set on the king's head. Then she turned to Bhima, who had been her refuge at Varanavata and against Kichaka, and Bhima took up his bow and went after the killer, with Nakula driving his chariot.

The line did not end there, though it came close. Abhimanyu's son Parikshit, born after the war to Uttara and brought back to life by Krishna after Ashwatthama's weapon struck him in the womb, survived to inherit the throne the five upapandavas had spent their whole short lives training to help defend. He would grow up knowing his father and his father's five brothers only as names attached to a debt he had not chosen and could never fully repay, a single boy carrying forward what six young men had died clearing the way for.

History, when it is told in songs, tends to follow the hero whose grief is loudest or whose name opens the widest door. Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Abhimanyu: these are remembered because the epic needed their deaths to move its story forward. Prativindhya, Sutasoma, Shrutakarma, Shatanika, and Shrutasena are remembered, when they are remembered at all, as the five sons Draupadi lost on the last night, after the winning. It is worth pausing, each time the story is told, to say their names in full and to understand that history is fought mostly by those it barely names.