Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mahabharata, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dharma
Pursuing Enlightenment
Heroism and Warfare
Grief, Loss, and Mourning
Stories and Storytelling
Summary
Analysis
THE END OF GRIEF. Vaiśampayana tells Janamejaya what the Kauravas did after the death of Duryodhana. Dhritarashtra is full of grief, but Vidura tells him that the wise don’t grieve for too long because life is short and death is inevitable. Although it’s difficult for him, at last Dhritarashtra promises not to grieve anymore.
Vidura serves a similar role to Dhritarashtra that Krishna does to the Pandavas. Both Krishna and Vidura give the advice that a person shouldn’t grieve because death is inevitable, insisting that it’s better to try to make the most of life instead of regretting the past. And so, while the poem conveys the horrors of war in great detail, in the end, the wisest figures in the poem accept these horrors and move on rather than dwelling on them.
Themes
THE WOMEN. Dhritarashtra has Gandhari and the other women come to him. He tells them about the massacre of the Pandavas. Yudhishthira with some of the other surviving Pandavas comes to see Dhritarashtra, and the women wail at him, demanding to know why, if he’s such a lord of dharma, he ordered the deaths of so many of his relatives.
The end of the war recalls the beginning, although now that Bhishma is dead, Yudhishthira instead crosses the battle lines to see Dhritarashtra. Although the image of the shouting mourning women is striking, Vidura’s advice in the previous passage makes it clear that these women would be wiser to put aside their grief than to yell at Yudhishthira.
Themes
When Dhritarashtra sees the Pandavas, he greets Yudhishthira with a hug, but Krishna anticipates that Dhritarashtra is scheming against Bhima. Krishna sends an iron effigy of Bhima to him. As predicted, Dhritarashtra crushes the fake Bhima in his hands, then regrets it—Krishna tells him it was a trick, because Dhritarashtra was not in his right mind due to grief. At last, Dhritarashtra embraces the other Pandava brothers.
Dhritarashtra’s killing of the Bhima effigy allows him to act out his grief and consider the consequences, all before learning that the whole thing was a ruse by Krishna. This passage provides further evidence of the illogical nature of grief, showing how it causes Dhritarashtra to do something he’ll later regret, and so once again the poem argues for overcoming grief instead of indulging it.
Themes
The Pandava brothers then go to Gandhari. Yudhishthira apologizes to Gandhari for all the destruction, but she says everything happened according to fate. They all go down to the battlefield with the grieving women and see the bodies being eaten by scavenging animals and demons. Gandhari gives a speech about how many of the dead, while noble, were too wrapped up in pride and anger and were ultimately misled by Duryodhana. After the shock of seeing her son Duryodhana’s corpse, Gandhari describes her grief to Krishna, getting angry and cursing him.
Gandhari is able to follow the advice of Vidura and Krishna, rising above grief, when she sees the many dead on the battlefield that she has little connection to. But when she actually sees her son Duryodhana lying dead, her grief overcomes her. This passage captures the personal nature of grief, acknowledging how grief can be natural and how a particularly close death like that of a child can affect even someone as wise as Gandhari.
Themes
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THE OFFERINGS TO THE DEAD. Krishna advises Gandhari not to give in to grief. Dhritarashtra asks Yudhishthira to calculate the casualties, and Yudhishthira reports there are 1,660,020,000 dead and 24,165 missing. Yudhishthira promises to perform all the necessary burial rites on the bodies. They burn them all in order of seniority.
Yudhishthira’s tally of the dead is almost unimaginably large—several orders of magnitude larger than the entire population of the earth today. It confirms the poem’s epic scale, once again evoking a past time that was more glorious than the narrative present—although perhaps also more deadly and more brutal.
Themes
THE WATER OFFERINGS. Dhritarashtra, Yudhishthira, and the others go to the banks of the Ganga. There, the many grieving women perform water rites for the dead men. The Pandavas learn that Karna was in fact Kunti’s biological son all along. Yudhishthira makes a water offering to his dead brother Karna, including Karna’s mourning female relatives in the ritual.
Water once again plays a spiritual role in the poem, offering a symbolic cleanse after all the death and destruction of the Kurukshetra War. When the Pandavas learn that Karna was their brother, it makes the victory even more bittersweet, emphasizing the necessity of showing honor to strangers in battle—because you never know who that stranger might really be.
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