Theme of the Mahabharata
Friendship
सख्य
Two great friendships run the length of the epic, and they end in opposite places.
How the Epic Treats Friendship
The Mahabharata is built around a pair of friendships that mirror each other with unnerving precision. Krishna and Arjuna, and Duryodhana and Karna: in each, one partner has power and standing and the other is, in the world's eyes, the lesser figure; in each, the bond is closer than any marriage in the poem; in each, the friend's loyalty decides the war. One of them ends in liberation and the other in a corpse on a chariot wheel, and the epic makes us look carefully at the difference.
Duryodhana's gift to Karna is the great act of friendship in the epic, and nothing in the poem takes it back. In a tournament ground where a charioteer's son is being laughed off the field for daring to challenge a prince, Duryodhana makes him a king on the spot so that the duel can proceed. It costs him nothing he values and it gives Karna the one thing nobody else offered, which is standing. Karna repays it for the rest of his life, refuses a kingdom and his own mother rather than break it, and dies for it. What the epic notices, gently and relentlessly, is that Duryodhana never once asks Karna to be better, and Karna never once tells Duryodhana no. Their loyalty is total and it is entirely unaccompanied by correction, so it carries both of them into the dice hall and out the other side.
Krishna's friendship with Arjuna is made of exactly the correction the other pair lacks. When Arjuna collapses on the field, Krishna does not comfort him; he calls the collapse unworthy and spends the whole Gita arguing with him. The friendship is affectionate enough that Arjuna can admit, afterwards, to having called him comrade and made careless jokes, and can ask forgiveness for it. Krishna's most striking self-description is that he teaches this ancient yoga to Arjuna because Arjuna is his devotee and his friend, putting friendship on the same footing as devotion. The relationship works because it can carry disagreement.
Around this central pair the epic sets a whole grammar of friendship. Sudama, so poor his ribs show, walks to Dwaraka with a handful of beaten rice and is met barefoot by a king who washes his feet and eats the rice, and the story's whole force is that nothing is asked for and everything is given. Drona and Drupada, who swore boyhood friendship, show the opposite: a promise made between equals, cashed after one of them has become a king, curdles into two generations of revenge and a war. Draupadi and Satyabhama, sitting together in the forest, give the epic's quietest account of a bond kept by attention and self-command rather than by declarations. And the crane Rajadharma, who feeds and enriches a starving guest and is killed and eaten for it, marks the outer limit: ingratitude, in this poem, is the sin that even the gods will not overlook.
Defining Moments
7 scenes in which the epic decides what it thinks about friendship.
A Kingdom Given on a Tournament Ground
Adi Parva
An unknown archer matches Arjuna feat for feat and is then asked, in front of the whole city, whose son he is. Kripa refuses him a duel on grounds of birth. Duryodhana crowns him king of Anga on the spot, and the fight is legal again. It is the most generous act in the epic performed by its antagonist, and it buys a loyalty that outlasts every argument, every embassy and every appeal Karna will later receive. It also binds Karna to a man who will never ask him to be better.
Read the story: The Tournament of ChampionsThe Charioteer Who Argues Back
Bhishma Parva
Krishna has taken the lowest role on the field, driving instead of fighting, and it puts him exactly where a friend needs to be when Arjuna lowers his bow. He does not console. He tells Arjuna the collapse is unworthy of him and then reasons with him for eighteen chapters, and when the argument is done he asks whether the confusion has actually gone. The epic's model friendship is the one that can hold a hard conversation without either party losing standing.
Read the story: The Bhagavad GitaA Mother Comes Too Late
Udyoga Parva
Kunti finds Karna at his morning prayers and tells him what he has never been told: he is her eldest, born of the sun, and the men he is about to fight are his brothers. She offers him the throne and the world. He gives her the one thing he can - the lives of four of her sons - and refuses the rest, because Duryodhana fed him when nobody else would. The epic sets a blood claim against a chosen one and lets the chosen bond win, at a terrible price.
Read the story: The Secret of the SunThe Friend Who Brought Rice
Bhagavata tradition
Sudama, a brahmin so poor his wife has to push him out of the door, walks to the gates of Dwaraka with three handfuls of flattened rice knotted in a rag. The king of the city runs out barefoot, embraces him, washes his feet, and eats the rice with delight. Sudama is too ashamed to ask for anything and goes home empty-handed to find his hut turned into a palace. The story insists that the asking was never the point and that the friendship was never a transaction.
Read the story: The Friend Who Brought RiceHalf a Kingdom, Promised and Denied
Adi Parva
Two boys at a hermitage promise to share everything. Years later one is a king and the other is a starving teacher who comes to collect, and Drupada tells him from the throne that friendship exists only between equals. Drona takes his revenge through his students, has Drupada dragged in as a prisoner, and hands back half the kingdom to make the point. Drupada answers with a fire sacrifice that produces two children built as weapons. A broken friendship supplies the epic with both the man who kills Drona and the woman over whom the war is fought.
Read the story: Drona and DrupadaDraupadi and Satyabhama in the Forest
Vana Parva
Krishna's queen visits the exiles and asks Draupadi, half teasing, what charm she uses to keep five heroes devoted. Draupadi's answer contains no charms at all: attention, self-command, the refusal of vanity and idleness, service given without servility, and the discipline of never letting resentment be spoken carelessly. It is the epic's most practical passage on how affection is actually maintained, and it is given between two women with no man in the room.
Read the story: Draupadi and SatyabhamaThe Guest Who Ate His Host
Shanti Parva
Rajadharma, a crane beloved of the gods, shelters a destitute brahmin, feeds him, and arranges wealth for his journey home. The guest kills and eats him for the meat. The gods restore the crane and cast the betrayer down, and Bhishma tells the tale to establish that ingratitude to a friend is the one offence for which the epic offers no expiation at all. Friendship, in this poem, is a moral obligation and not merely a warm feeling.
Read the story: The Ungrateful Guest
In the Bhagavad Gita
Chapters 4 and 11
The Gita is spoken between friends and says so. Krishna tells Arjuna that he is entrusting him with this ancient teaching precisely because he is both devotee and friend, which places friendship alongside devotion rather than beneath it. After the cosmic vision Arjuna apologises for every time he addressed Krishna casually, as a comrade, while eating or resting or joking with him, and asks to be forgiven as a friend forgives a friend. Krishna's response is to resume the ordinary form. The chapter quietly argues that the highest relationship the poem knows is not awe but the sort of nearness that can survive knowing exactly who the other is.
Read the Bhagavad GitaQuestions to Sit With
- Duryodhana never asks Karna to be a better man, and Krishna asks Arjuna for almost nothing else. Which of these do your own friendships look like?
- Karna chooses the man who gave him standing over the mother who gave him life. Was he right?
- Drupada tells Drona that friendship is only possible between equals. Is there anything true in that, and what does it cost to believe it?