Arjuna

Arjuna asked Krishna to drive their chariot into the space between the two armies gathered at Kurukshetra, so that he could see who had come to fight for Duryodhana. Krishna brought the chariot forward and stopped it facing Bhishma, Drona and the massed ranks behind them. Looking across the field, Arjuna picked out his own grandfathers, his teachers, his uncles, his brothers, his sons and his closest friends, all armed and ready to kill one another. Grief and compassion overwhelmed him where he stood. He felt an awful weakness spread through his body, his mouth went dry, his head swam, and his bow arm would not hold steady. He sank down onto the seat of the chariot, his legs unable to support him any longer.

He turned to Krishna and set out his case against the war. Even supposing the Kauravas were driven only by greed, he said, that gave him no cause to imitate them by killing his own teachers and elders for a kingdom. He would rather be cut down unarmed than raise Gandiva against Bhishma or Drona, men he had been taught since childhood to honour. Not even rule over all three worlds was worth their deaths, he said, let alone a single kingdom on earth. A war that tore a great family apart this way would finish it completely, ending its old rites and turning the whole clan toward ruin, and no victory bought at that price could bring him any happiness. Weeping, he threw down his bow and his arrows, his heart heavy with sorrow, and told Krishna plainly, in front of the assembled armies, that he would not fight.

In Indra's heaven the apsara Urvashi came to Arjuna and asked for his love. He refused her gently, telling her that he honoured the Pandavas' own line as descending from her, so that he could only think of her as an ancestress rather than a lover. No man had ever refused Urvashi before, and her fine eyes flashed with fury at the insult. She cursed him on the spot: proud as he was of his manhood, she said, he would lose it entirely and spend his days as a eunuch, dancing among women for their amusement. Arjuna went to his father Indra in despair. Indra told him that a curse from Urvashi could not simply be undone, since she was already hurt enough by the refusal, but he went to her himself and persuaded her to limit it to a single year. Indra praised his son as the first man who had ever resisted Urvashi, and pointed out that the curse might yet prove useful, since the Pandavas were due to spend their thirteenth year of exile in hiding.

That year came, and Arjuna turned the curse to his advantage. He put on a woman's dress, jewellery and a false hairpiece, and presented himself at the court of King Virata as Brihannala, a eunuch trained in music and dancing by the gandharva Chitrasena. Virata had him examined to confirm he was no threat to the women of the palace, and then appointed him to teach dancing and singing to his daughter, the princess Uttara. Arjuna lived among the court's women for months, protected from any disturbance by Urvashi's own curse, and became a favourite in their company. His powerful shoulders and heavily muscled arms sometimes drew a second look from Virata, who suspected there was more to his daughter's teacher than he let on, but no one in the court ever worked out that the eunuch dance teacher was the Pandava archer Arjuna, hidden among them until the year of exile ran out.

Once his penance was rewarded with the Pashupata, Arjuna was met on the mountain by the four guardians of the directions. Yama gave him his own weapon and told him he had once been the sage Nara, sent back into the world to carry out a great task. Varuna and Kubera each gave him a weapon of their own and blessed him in turn, and then they vanished. Arjuna then saw what looked like a second sun rising in the sky: it was Indra's own chariot descending, drawn by thousands of tawny horses and driven by the charioteer Matali, loaded with every kind of celestial weapon. Matali carried Arjuna up to Indraloka, Indra's own heaven, where his father greeted him and told him the true reason he had been summoned.

A race of demons called the Nivatakavachas lived in a fortress hidden in the depths of the ocean of the heavens, Indra explained. Brahma had granted them a boon that no god could ever kill them, only a mortal man, and their power now reached down to the earth, feeding tyrants such as Duryodhana. Arjuna agreed at once to fight them. He sailed to their underwater city and blew his conch to announce the challenge, and the Nivatakavachas came out to meet him. Their magic and illusions overwhelmed him at first, but he called on the Mohini weapon to strip their power away and force them into open battle. Once they stood before him without their tricks, he aimed Indra's own thunderbolt, the Vajra, and it fell on them like lightning, shattering their armour and leaving the demons broken on the ground like fallen mountains. Arjuna returned to Indra's court in triumph and later came home to tell his brothers everything that had happened to him in heaven.

Following the sacrificial horse of Yudhishthira's Ashvamedha, Arjuna reached the kingdom of Manipura, ruled by his own son Babhruvahana, born years before to the princess Chitrangada. The young king came out to greet his father with gifts of gold and gems and made no move to resist him, but Arjuna was angry rather than pleased, seeing no honour in a son who would not fight for his own kingdom. At the urging of his stepmother Ulupi, a Naga princess and one of Arjuna's other wives, and at his father's own repeated insistence, Babhruvahana finally agreed to meet him in battle. He had his men seize the sacrificial horse to force the issue, and the two began to fight in earnest. Both father and son fought without holding back, and although Arjuna was struck hard in the shoulder and nearly lost his senses, he recovered enough to praise his son's skill before the fighting resumed. In the end an arrow from Babhruvahana's bow found its mark, and Arjuna fell from his chariot and lay dead on the ground.

Seeing what he had done, Babhruvahana collapsed in grief beside his father's body and prepared to starve himself to death rather than live with the killing. Chitrangada, hearing that her husband and son had both fallen, ran to the field and turned on Ulupi in fury for pushing the duel. Ulupi then explained herself. After Bhishma's fall in the great war, the Vasus, the gods to whom Bhishma belonged, had gone to the river goddess Ganga and sworn to curse Arjuna to death for killing her son unfairly. Ulupi's own father, king of the Nagas, had begged the Vasus for mercy on Arjuna's behalf, and they had answered that only one thing could lift the curse: Arjuna's own son striking him down in battle. The duel had been Ulupi's way of paying that price safely. With her mystic power she brought a glowing gem from the Naga kingdom that could restore the dead, laid it on Arjuna's chest, and watched him open his eyes and sit up, his wound already healed. Babhruvahana wept with relief and begged his father's forgiveness. Arjuna told Ulupi that everything she had done was agreeable to him.

While Arjuna fought the Trigarta army elsewhere on the field, the aged king Bhagadatta rode his armoured elephant Supratika through the Pandava ranks and nobody could stop him, not even Bhima. Hearing the elephant's screams from a distance, Arjuna told Krishna that only the two of them knew how to deal with Supratika and its rider, an old friend of his own father Indra grown too sure of himself, and asked to be driven there at once. Bhagadatta and Arjuna traded shot after shot, and Arjuna broke Bhagadatta's bow more than once and cut away the elephant's armour piece by piece while dodging spears and darts thrown by the furious king. At one point Bhagadatta drove Supratika straight at their chariot, and only Krishna's skill at the reins carried them clear of the charge by a hair's breadth.

Maddened at being held off by a man so much younger than himself, Bhagadatta finally chanted a mantra over the ordinary goad he used to drive his elephant and hurled it at Arjuna as the terrible Vaishnava missile, a weapon once belonging to the demon Naraka that could kill any single being it was aimed at. As it flew toward Arjuna certain to kill him, Krishna rose in the chariot and took the blow himself on his chest, where it struck the jewel Kaustubha and did him no harm. Krishna explained that he alone could survive the missile, and that Bhagadatta, having spent it, had lost the power that had made him and his elephant impossible to defeat. Arjuna wasted no time. He killed Supratika first with a single well placed shot, and as the great animal fell dead beneath him, he sent a second arrow into Bhagadatta's chest that killed the old king outright, and both king and elephant lay dead together on the field.