The Trouble With Dharma

She was dragged into the hall by her hair, in a single cloth, and instead of weeping she asked a question. Draupadi, queen of the Pandavas, had just been wagered and lost at dice by her own husband, and the men of the most powerful family in the land sat waiting to see her shamed. She turned the moment into a trial of them. Her husband, she pointed out, had staked himself and lost before he staked her. A man who has gambled away his own freedom is a slave, and a slave owns nothing. So by what right, she asked, did a man who no longer owned himself wager her?

The assembly could not answer. In Ganguli’s translation, the elders “sat with faces downwards, uttering not a word.” The most learned men of the age, the grandsire Bhishma among them, had no reply to a woman in a torn cloth. That silence is the Mahabharata at its most characteristic, and it is the subject of this chapter: the epics are loved as the tradition’s great teachers of dharma, and their deepest scenes are the ones where dharma comes apart in the hands of the people trying to hold it.

The silence of the elders

Pressed directly to rule on Draupadi’s case, Bhishma gives the answer that has echoed for two thousand years, which is that he has no answer. In Ganguli’s rendering: “Morality is subtle. I therefore am unable to duly decide this point.” He lays out the dilemma honestly, that a man with no wealth cannot stake the wealth of others, yet a wife is held to be under her husband’s authority, and confesses that between these he cannot choose. The Sanskrit phrase is sukshma gatir dharmasya, the course of dharma is subtle, fine, hard to trace.

This is a remarkable thing for a scripture to put in the mouth of its most venerable figure. The epic could have had Bhishma deliver a ruling. Instead it has him fail, in public, and names the failure as the truth about dharma itself. One young Kaurava, Vikarna, dares to say plainly that Draupadi was not lawfully won; he is shouted down, and Karna orders her stripped. What saves her, in the older text, is not any man’s justice but a miracle: as her single garment is pulled, more cloth appears without end, and the tradition attributes the rescue to the god of dharma himself, intervening where the keepers of dharma would not. The point is hard to miss. The human court has abdicated. Only the principle, personified, acts.

The lie that touched the ground

The Mahabharata tells us, again and again, that Yudhishthira is the most truthful man alive, the son of the god of dharma, so honest that his chariot rides a few inches above the earth, untouched by the dust that ordinary mortals raise. And then it makes him lie.

At the height of the war, the Pandavas cannot defeat their teacher Drona while he holds his weapons. The only way to stop him is to break his will, and the way to break his will is to make him believe his son Ashvatthama is dead. So an elephant named Ashvatthama is killed, and Yudhishthira is asked to confirm the death. He cannot quite bring himself to a clean lie. In Ganguli’s account he says that Ashvatthama is dead, and adds, indistinctly, the word “elephant,” so that the true thing and the false thing are spoken in one breath. Drona, hearing the name and not the qualifier, lays down his arms and is killed. And the chariot that had floated above the ground for a lifetime of honesty settles, in that instant, onto the earth. The epic exacts the price in the same sentence in which it grants the victory. Even the half-truth of the most truthful man is still a fall.

The greatest wonder

Not all the moral weight of the Mahabharata lands as failure. Sometimes it lands as a question with an answer, and the most famous of these comes in the forest, when Yudhishthira’s four brothers lie dead beside a lake and a yaksha, a spirit guarding the water, will revive them only if the king answers his riddles.

The riddles are a catechism on right living, and one of them has outlived the rest. What, the yaksha asks, is the greatest wonder in the world? Yudhishthira’s reply, in Ganguli’s translation: “Day after day countless creatures are going to the abode of Yama, yet those that remain behind believe themselves to be immortal. What can be more wonderful than this?” Everyone watches others die, and no one believes they will. That, the epic says, is the strangest fact about human beings. The yaksha, satisfied, restores the brothers and reveals himself, as the rescuing presence so often does in these poems, to be the god of dharma in disguise, testing his own son.

The same Yudhishthira, at the very end of the epic, refuses to enter heaven without a stray dog that has followed him faithfully, declaring that to abandon one who is devoted is a sin as great as killing a Brahmin. The dog, too, turns out to be dharma in disguise. The epic that shows dharma breaking down in the dice-hall also shows it holding, quietly, in a man who will not leave a dog behind.

The cost, and the ideal that cuts

The Mahabharata never lets the reader feel clean about the war. Karna, the great warrior who turns out to be the Pandavas’ own abandoned eldest brother, is killed by Arjuna while his chariot wheel is stuck in the mud and he is unarmed, and Krishna, who urges the killing, justifies it by listing the wrongs Karna helped do to Draupadi. The boy Abhimanyu is surrounded and cut down by six warriors at once, and even the watching gods, the text says, call the act unrighteous. Victory in this epic is always also a stain.

The Ramayana, gentler on its surface, carries its own hard cases, and they cluster around its hero, the very model of dharma. Rama kills the monkey-king Vali by shooting him from concealment while he fights another, and when the dying Vali reproaches him for the dishonour of it, Rama offers a chain of justifications that has satisfied some readers and troubled others for centuries; even Griffith, the Victorian translator, adds a disapproving footnote. More wrenching still is Sita. After the war, the rescued Sita is made to enter fire to prove she was untouched in captivity, and though the flames give her back unharmed, the demand itself is cruel. And in the later seventh book, Rama, hearing that his subjects doubt the queen’s purity, banishes the pregnant Sita to the forest for the sake of his reputation as king, choosing his public honour over the wife who had followed him into exile and captivity. In the same late book he beheads Shambuka, a shudra performing the austerities said in that age to be forbidden to his class.

The tradition has never been at ease with these scenes, and it should be said clearly that two of the harshest, the banishment and Shambuka, belong to the Uttarakanda, the seventh book that the previous chapter noted is widely held to be a later addition. Across the centuries some have defended Rama’s acts as the tragic burden of a king bound by the customs of his age, and others have condemned them outright. B. R. Ambedkar turned the Shambuka episode into an indictment of caste, and the Dravidian movement under Periyar read the whole poem against its grain, taking Ravana’s side. This treatise does not adjudicate. It reports the scenes, and it reports that they have been fought over for as long as the poems have been read, which is itself the point.

Why the trouble is the teaching

It would be easy to treat these episodes as flaws, places where great poems stumble. The better reading, and the one truer to the epics themselves, is that the trouble is deliberate. The Mahabharata says plainly, through Bhishma, that dharma is subtle. It then proves the claim by putting its best people in situations where every available choice violates some duty, and letting them pay. The epics are not rulebooks that occasionally fail. They are long, unflinching demonstrations that living rightly is genuinely hard, that the same act can be duty from one angle and crime from another, and that even gods in human form do not escape the cost.

That is why, perhaps, a civilization that had the serene certainties of the Veda still needed these poems. The Veda gives the order. The epics give the difficulty of living in it.

The elders in the hall had no answer for Draupadi.

Neither, the epic seems to know, do we.