The Warrior Who Would Not Fight

The Mahabharata as we have it grew over centuries from a shorter core of war narrative into the vast compilation eventually attributed to the sage Vyasa, and modern textual scholars generally treat Arjuna's central role, along with much of the philosophical material surrounding him including the Bhagavad Gita, as products of that long process of expansion rather than a single original composition. The Gita itself later took on a life independent of the epic that contains it, circulated, translated and commented on as a self-standing scripture; nineteenth-century American writers including Emerson and Thoreau read it in early translation, and in the twentieth century it became the central devotional text of Mohandas Gandhi, who read Arjuna's crisis on the battlefield as an allegory for the moral struggle within every person rather than only a warrior's literal dilemma.

Before the great war, Arjuna wins Draupadi's hand at her svayamvara, a bridegroom-choosing contest, by stringing a heavy bow and shooting an arrow through a revolving mechanism to strike the reflected eye of a fish, a feat no other suitor can manage. During the Pandavas' year of enforced anonymity he also lives disguised as Brihannala, a eunuch dance and music teacher at the court of King Virata, a temporary transformation later commentators have read as one of the epic's clearest instances of the fluid, boundary-crossing capacity heroic identity can take in Sanskrit epic.