Theme of the Mahabharata
Strategy
नीति
The war is won by the side that thinks first, and the epic never lets that feel clean.
How the Epic Treats Strategy
The Mahabharata is one of the great books about cunning, and it is deeply uneasy about it. Kurukshetra is not decided by the better army; the Kaurava force is larger and better supplied throughout. It is decided by a series of manoeuvres, most of them designed by Krishna, each of which bends or breaks a rule of war that both sides had agreed to. The epic reports every one of them in detail, allows the Pandavas to win by them, and then spends its last books making sure nobody feels good about it.
The pattern is consistent. Bhishma cannot be beaten, so Arjuna shoots from behind Shikhandi, whom the grandsire will not fight. Drona cannot be beaten while he holds his bow, so Yudhishthira's reputation for truth is spent on a sentence with a lie buried inside it. Jayadratha is guarded by the whole army until sunset, so Krishna covers the sun, lets the man come out to gloat, and uncovers it. Karna asks for the pause the rules allow while he frees his chariot wheel, and Krishna reminds Arjuna of every time Karna stood by while the same rules were broken for him, and tells him to shoot. Each stratagem is a real answer to an impossible problem, and each one costs something that cannot be bought back.
The Kauravas are strategists too, and the epic is scrupulous about it. The house of lac is a well-designed assassination undone only because Vidura got a warning in first. The chakravyuha on the thirteenth day is a genuinely brilliant piece of tactics: a formation only four men alive can enter, deployed on the one day those men can be lured to the far end of the field by an army sworn to die. It works. It kills a sixteen-year-old, and it requires six great warriors to break the rules together to finish him, which is precisely the point at which the war stops being a contest and becomes something else.
What lifts this above a catalogue of tricks is that the epic keeps asking what strategy is for. Barbarika, who could have ended the war in a moment with three arrows and vowed to fight always for the weaker side, is talked out of his own head by a disguised Krishna, because a vow that generous would have destroyed both armies by an infinite regress. Ghatotkacha is fed into the fourteenth night, knowing he will die, so that Karna will be forced to spend the one weapon reserved for Arjuna. The calculation is cold and it saves the war. The epic lets you admire it and then shows you Bhima, whose son it was, and does not soften the arithmetic.
Defining Moments
7 scenes in which the epic decides what it thinks about strategy.
A Tunnel Under the House of Lac
Adi Parva
Duryodhana builds his cousins a palace of lacquer and resin and plans a fire. The counter-move is not force but information: Vidura warns Yudhishthira in a coded sentence, a miner digs an escape passage, and the Pandavas burn the house themselves on their way out. The epic notes the cost of the improvisation without flinching, and sends the brothers into the forest in disguise, presumed dead, which turns out to be the best strategic position they ever hold.
Read the story: The House of Lac and the DemonsA Formation Built Around One Absence
Drona Parva
Drona forms the chakravyuha on the day the samsaptakas have sworn to draw Arjuna to the far end of the field, and the plan works exactly as designed. Only Abhimanyu can pierce the wheel, and he knows the way in but not the way out. Jayadratha seals the gate behind him, and a sixteen-year-old holds off an army until six of the greatest warriors alive break every convention of single combat at once. It is the finest tactical stroke of the war and the moment the war loses its rules.
Read the story: Abhimanyu and the WheelThe Sun That Set Too Early
Drona Parva
Arjuna swears to kill Jayadratha before sunset or walk into fire, and the entire Kaurava army spends a day hiding one man. As the light fails Krishna darkens the sky, the Kauravas celebrate, Jayadratha steps forward to watch his enemy burn, and the sun comes back. Krishna then adds the second half: the head must fall in the father's lap, or Arjuna dies, so the arrow carries it there and the recoiling curse kills the father instead. Two problems solved with one deception.
Read the story: The Sun That SetThe Half-Lie and the Elephant
Drona Parva
Drona with a bow in his hands cannot be killed, and Krishna reasons that only grief will disarm him and only Yudhishthira will be believed. An elephant named Ashwatthama is killed so the sentence will be technically true. The teacher hears his son's name, asks the man who never lies, and hears the qualifier swallowed by drums. He sits down in his chariot and is beheaded. The epic prices the manoeuvre immediately: Yudhishthira's chariot, which had ridden above the ground, touches earth.
Read the story: The Fall of the GuruThe Spear Spent on the Wrong Man
Drona Parva
On the torchlit fourteenth night Ghatotkacha, fighting with rakshasa power that grows after dark, tears the Kaurava army apart until Duryodhana begs Karna to use the one infallible weapon Indra gave him. Karna spends it, and the weapon he had kept for thirteen years to kill Arjuna is gone. Krishna, the epic says, is delighted, and Bhima is not. Sending a son to die in order to draw a weapon is strategy at its most effective and its least forgivable.
Read the story: The Spear Meant for ArjunaShooting from Behind Shikhandi
Bhishma Parva
Bhishma has chosen the day of his own death and cannot be killed before it, and no Pandava can face him honestly. The answer is a person rather than a weapon: Shikhandi, born a woman and remembered by Bhishma as Amba, stands in the chariot, and the grandsire lowers his bow rather than fight her. Arjuna shoots past him. The most revered warrior in the epic is brought down by the exact scruple that made him revered, which is how this poem tends to arrange its victories.
Read the story: The Fall of Bhishma and the EarringsThe Wheel in the Mud
Karna Parva
Karna's chariot wheel sinks on the seventeenth day and he steps down to lift it, calling on the rule that forbids striking an unarmed man. Krishna answers with a list: where was that rule when Draupadi was dragged into the hall, when the dice were loaded, when six warriors surrounded a boy. Then he tells Arjuna to shoot. The epic gives the last word to the man who was wronged and still lets the reader feel that something has been broken that will not mend.
Read the story: The Death of Karna
In the Bhagavad Gita
Chapters 2, 4 and 10
The Gita's contribution to the epic's strategy is that it refuses to let cleverness be the highest value. Krishna tells Arjuna that he has a claim on the action and none at all on its fruit, which is a direct attack on the calculating mind that plans backwards from a desired outcome. He also declares that among schemers he is the statecraft itself, and that the sword of knowledge is what cuts doubt, so the poem is not naive about power. What the teaching insists on is that a manoeuvre performed as duty and offered up is a different act from the same manoeuvre performed to win, even when the two look identical from outside.
Read the Bhagavad GitaQuestions to Sit With
- Every decisive Pandava victory bends a rule both sides accepted. Does winning that way count as winning?
- Krishna answers each appeal to fair play by pointing at an earlier breach by the person appealing. Is that an argument or an excuse?
- Ghatotkacha is spent to draw out a weapon. When is it legitimate to treat a person as a move?