The Kauravas

The epic supplies a list of all hundred names and then uses almost none of them. Duryodhana is the eldest and the leader. Duhshasana is the hand that carries out what Duryodhana decides, and he is the one who drags Draupadi by the hair. Beyond those two the poem individuates only a handful, and the hundred function as a quantity: a body of brothers who ride out, are counted, and are killed by Bhima, who has vowed to kill every one of them.

The exception is worth naming. In the dice hall, when Draupadi puts her question and the elders will not answer it, the man who does answer, and answers in her favour, is Vikarna, one of Duryodhana's own brothers. He argues that a wife staked by a man who had already lost himself was not lawfully staked, and he is shouted down by Karna and by his own family. He fights and dies on the Kaurava side regardless. A single dissenting voice inside the hundred is more useful to the poem than ninety nine more names.

There is also a sister, Duhshala, married to Jayadratha of Sindhu, whose killing by Arjuna in revenge for Abhimanyu is one of the pivots of the war, so that the marriage alliance the hundred made becomes another line of the same slaughter.

And there is Yuyutsu, a son of Dhritarashtra by a woman of the household rather than by Gandhari, who crosses to the Pandava side before the fighting begins and survives it. He is the only member of that generation on the Kaurava side to outlive the war.

The book that follows the fighting, the Stri Parva, is the book of the women, and it is the strongest answer the Mahabharata gives to its own war. Gandhari, who has worn a blindfold since her marriage so as not to see more than her blind husband could, is led out over the battlefield and describes what is on it: the wives and mothers of the dead going from body to body, jackals, the sons she bore identified one by one where they lie.

She then turns on Krishna. He had the power to prevent the war, she says, and he had the standing with both sides to be heard, and he let it happen. She curses him: as her hundred sons destroyed each other, so his own people, the Yadavas, will kill one another, and he will die alone in a wood. Krishna accepts the curse without protest.

It is fulfilled. In the Mausala Parva, thirty six years later, the Yadavas fall into a drunken quarrel at a festival, kill each other with reeds that turn into iron clubs, and Krishna is shot in the foot by a hunter who mistakes him for a deer. Dvaraka goes under the sea.

The hundred sons are therefore not finished when the last of them dies. Their mother's grief is made the cause of the destruction of the winning side's own people, which is how the epic refuses to let the victory stand as a victory, and why the last books read as an unwinding rather than as a settlement.