The Mahabharata , dictated by Ved Vyas and written by the elephant-headed Hindu God Ganesha is widely regarded and generally accepted as the story of Bharata and his descendants , which again is believed to be an euphemism for India and India's children. Note that till the Oscar nominated Mother India changed perceptions, India or Bharata was considered to be a man but then again considering that India is a land of duality where every truth is an exception to an existing truth , the term India emanates from the river Indus which is again considered to be a woman.
Keeping in mind this existence of inherent duality and closely going through the epic, one realises that the 18-day War of Kurukshetra that the Pandavas and the Kauravas fought was in reality a fallacy. Considering that this battle is held up in Indian history and mythology (the two freely interchangeable of course in India) as the ultimate Dharmayudh , the conclusion of which symbolises the victory of Dharma and not necessarily good over evil (according to conventional definitions) , my assertion that the very war was a fallacy tends to ruffle a few feathers, if not more and anger a few Bhakts, if not all. Before you break down my house and burn my effigy let me at least justify my statement. The Kurukshetra War was basically a battle between brothers for control over Hastinapur and by default the entire Kuru empire but if we transcend the basics, it was much more. Sticking to the basics for now, like I said, the Kurukshetra War was a battle between brothers for control of an empire to which both believed they had complete stake but the truth was that neither the Pandavas nor the Kauravas had the slightest right to the throne of Hastinapur. To understand this we must crawl back a few generations to the birth of the very teller of this story, Ved Vyas. Ved Vyas, also known as Dwaipayana was born on an island, as his name suggests, out of wedlock, to Satyabati (who would go on to marry Shantanu later and mother the Kuru empire) and a travelling ascetic Parashar. So herein lies that great duality of India again, in a country which looks down on children born out of wedlock, the most revered text was elocuted by an illegitimate child.
The matter gets murkier when the same Satyabati marries Shantanu, great-grandfather of the Pandavas and the Kauravas and the marriage of the king and the fisherman's daughter not only mocks today's Khap panchayats for labelling intercaste marriages as unIndian and unnatural but also becomes the inter-caste fountain from which the Kuru dynasty flows. The marriage of Satyabati and Shantanu would however not have been possible without the sacrifice of Debabrata, Shantanu's only living son from his ill-fated marriage with Ganga and the only pure-blood Kuru son of Shantanu. Debabrata, as we all know , vowed never to marry or father a child and always protect the occupant of Hastinapur's throne. He earned the sobriquet Bhisma and the power to die when be wanted by his immutable vow. In due time Satyabati gave birth to two sons - Chitrangada and Vichitraveerja. Chintrangada, the elder son, died young and the last remaining pure-blood Kuru who could contribute to the progression of his progeny without breaking a terrible oath, Vichitraveerja, in a terrible anti-climax turned out to be impotent. It is here that the story of Mahabharata would have ended had it not been for the guile of Bhisma, who picked up two princesses from their Swayamvara and bought them to Hastinapur as his step-brother's wives. However Vichitraveerja could not stand up to the occasion and the throne of Hastinapur lived in constant fear of loneliness till Satyabati thought of her illegitimate son Ved Vyas and like a true-blue twelfth man Ved Vyas entered the arena in place of the unsuccessful Vichitraveerja and fathered Dhrithrarashtra and Pandu with Amba and Ambalika, the two wives of Vichitraveerja. The progeny luckily continued but at what cost?
The cost of blood. The bloodline of Bharata was lost forever in this scheme to hide the king's disability from the public eye. Consider this, neither Pandu nor Dhritrarashtra had an ounce of royal Kuru blood in them and hence neither did their children. The only true descendant of Bharata remained Bhisma but blinded by his devotion to his past he forgot to look into the future. Bhisma defended the throne of Hastinapur in the battle of Kurukshetra but not the son of Hastinapur because indeed Duryodhana, the king in power at Hastinapur during the war was as much a foreigner as Yudhisthira, the attacker or for that matter also Shishupala. So this brings us back to the statement which I was defending for so long. The Kurukshetra War was a fallacy because the war which was supposedly about brothers fighting to stake their rightful claim to the throne of Hastinapur involved neither brothers, in the truest sense of the term, nor any rightful stakeholders to the royal throne of Hastinapur. Considering that the Kauravas were conceived in earthen pots of Dhritrarashtra and Gandhari and the Pandavas conceived by Kunti and Madri without Pandu's involvement, neither were the Pandavas and Kauravas related from their fathers' side nor from their mothers' hence debunking the accepted theory that they were brothers, I rest my case that the war was a fallacy.
Having said that, let us consider for a tiny moment the fact that if anyone, at all, knew or could have worked out all of this, it would have had to be Bhishma. Having known that the Kurukshetra war was a lie, a fallacy, why did the educated and wise Bhisma allow such a bloody massacre culminating in the death of family and friends and almost the Kuru dynasty? The duality of India is such that, to uphold a promise made to his blood father, Bhisma had to protect a foreigner on the throne of Hastinapur. He made a conscious choice to honour his promise more than his hubris, to honour his word more than his blood.
The battle of Kurukshetra might have been a fallacy but by no means are the lessons learnt from it anything but absolutely essential. The concept of honouring words above blood is observed even today in Indian culture when fathers honour childhood promises and marry off their reluctant daughters to the sons of their childhood friends. It is observed when different members of the same family contest elections representing different political parties. It is observed when mothers and mother-in-laws support brutal rape of daughters and wives by moneylenders in exchange for the money lent. The battle of Kurukshetra might have been a fallacy but it's legacy lives on in every micropore of Indian society. Such is the duality of India and hence it's story, that if the battle of Kurukshetra was indeed a Dharmayudh then whose Dharma was it that won or lost? Was Yudhishthira's Dharma the better Dharma ? That Dharma which convinced him to kill his teacher with his words? That Dharma which convinced him to gamble away his family? That Dharma which taught him to be a silent audience to his wife's public humiliation? Or was Bhisma's Dharma the better Dharma? That Dharma which convinced him to be a silent bystander to an avoidable war? That Dharma which did not touch the righteous soul when a lady was being disrobed in his presence? That Dharma which accepted Satyabati but not Karna ? Or was it Duryodhana's Dharma that won the Dharmayudh? That Dharma which caused him to order the public rape of Draupadi? That Dharma which convinced a young boy to poison his brother? That Dharma which allowed him to trick , trap and kill a teenager? Considering the duality of India, it might just be possible that no-one's Dharma won the Dharmayudh.
The truth is that in a system so complicated that perhaps only we Indians can comprehend it, the concept of 'always' does not exist. No one is always right or always wrong, nothing is forever and truth in itself is relative. The theory of Relativity may have been propounded centuries later but the concept was very much prevalent in both the Mahabharata and the Bhagavada Gita. The Dharma that won the Dharmayudh is not any individual's Dharma but the Dharma of relativity - everyone's Dharma and at the same time no one's. The very fact that a war that was a fallacy provides lessons that shape Indian society and culture even today, is a recognition of the duality of India.
Here is something to blow your mind even further. Years and years after the Kurukshetra War, which led to widespread annihilation and which was fought to justify the Dharma of Bhishma by brothers for an undeserved seat of power, another war ravaged the same subcontinent- a war which left the subcontinent gasping for breath out of trains sent across the border packed with dead bodies and raped bodies, a war which was fought due to the 'moral' silence of a Mahatma by brothers for an undeserved seat of power. The duality of Bharat was established again in 1947 - the duality of two brothers fighting for their own Dharmas - India and Pakistan.
