Duryodhana

The Mahabharata gives Duryodhana arguments, and lets him make them at length. His father was the elder brother and was passed over for blindness, so on a strict reading of succession the throne came to the younger line by an accident of eyesight rather than by right. The Pandavas were fathered by gods rather than by Pandu, which he says out loud when it suits him. And they were presumed dead for years, during which he was the heir in fact.

His grievance is also personal and the epic makes that plain. Invited to Indraprastha for Yudhishthira's royal consecration, he walks into a pool of water he takes for a polished floor, falls in, and is laughed at by Draupadi and the servants. The dice game is proposed shortly afterwards. The epic does not offer this as a justification, but it does offer it as a cause, and it declines to make him hate without a reason.

At the end he refuses the peace terms that would have given the Pandavas five villages, saying he will not yield as much land as fits on the point of a needle. Dying of the broken thigh he claims the better position: he has lived as a king, given generously, kept his friends, and dies on the field, while his enemies have won by a series of tricks. The poem then does something startling. When Yudhishthira reaches heaven at the very end, Duryodhana is there, seated in honour, and the sight of him is one of the last tests the eldest Pandava is put through.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

This article records what is reported locally rather than what the atlas can cite from a catalogued study. In villages of the upper Tons valley, in the Uttarkashi district of Garhwal in the Indian Himalaya, residents relate that Duryodhana is their presiding deity and that he has a temple and an annual fair, and that Karna is honoured in the same valley. Visitors are told that the ancestors of these villages sided with the Kauravas, and that the family that lost the war at Kurukshetra was not the family the epic says deserved to lose.

Villagers who explain the practice do not usually contest the events the epic narrates. What they contest is the verdict on them, and they describe Duryodhana in the terms his own speeches in the poem use: a generous lord who kept faith with the friend everyone else refused, and who was killed by a blow that broke the rules of the duel. The god they keep is the one the epic acknowledges and then sets aside.

The atlas holds this as reported tradition. The account reaches the wider world through travellers, journalists and regional writers rather than through any study catalogued here, and the details of which shrines belong to which lineage, how the fair is timed and how the practice relates to the wider Garhwali village deity system are precisely what a secondary account tends to flatten. Nothing in the entry should be read as the atlas asserting the history of the settlements in its own voice.