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Chapter 10. The Night-Raid
Themes
and Colors
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
