Bhishma-Satyavati story

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.... over-riding concern for the welfare of the people instead of

caring for the claims of one's progeny is what sets Bharata apart. It

is precisely the lack of this in his descendants Shantanu and

Dhritarashtra that heralds the doom of the dynasty. The contrast

Shantanu presents to his ancestor Bharata is astonishing. In pursuing

the gratification of his personal desire for the intoxicatingly

fragrant and dark fisher-maiden Kali Shantanu is blind to the

paramount consideration of the welfare of his subjects, who already

have in Devavrata a completely qualified heir-apparent. He eagerly

concurs in Gangadatta-Devavrata's vow to abjure the throne and

marriage. By way of appreciation he confers on his son the boon of

choosing the moment of his death. And this becomes the bane of

Bhishma's life.

Shantanu dies before his sons from Satyavati reach majority. The

eldest, Chitrangada, is killed fighting a Gandharva, with no sign of

his invincible foster-brother fighting at his side. Vichitravirya

becomes king as a minor, makes no mark whatsoever, and is prematurely

provided by Bhishma, at the insistence of queen mother Satyavati,

hungry for progeny, with two voluptuous brides. Vichitravirya dies

without issue, as "driven by passion, (he) became/a victim of his own

lust." These are words which will be echoed by his foster-son, Pandu

who laments:

Noble blood is of little helpDeluded by passions, the bestof men turn wicked, and reap

the evil that they sow.My father was born noble,his father was noble

too.Lust was his ruin, he diedwhile still a youth.And in his lustful

fieldI was sown by Krishna Dvaipayana.And I am a victim of the hunt !

My mind is full of killing,shooting down deer.[8]

Bhisma: Power Unused

It is the death of Vichitravirya that leads to the first exposition of

Bhishma's superhuman qualities. When Satyavati pleads with him to

satisfy the craving of Ambika and Ambalika for sons (a typical case

of desire transference, for it is she who is desperate for

grandsons), and thereby save the dynasty from extinction, this is his

response:

I will give up the three worldsI will give up heaven,I will give up

more than the three worlds and heaven,

But I will not give up my truth.Earth may give up fragrance,Water its

wetness,Light clarity,Wind movement,Sun may give up splendour,fire

its heat,moon coolnesssky either,Indra, Vritra-slayer, may give up

valour,

Yama the just, justice,But I will not break my vow.

Now comes an extremely revealing comment:

Let doom overtake the world !Immortality cannot tempt me,nor lordship

of the three worlds ! I will not break the vow. [9]

This is the essence of Bhishma's dharma. His attachment to the vow of

celibacy takes over-riding precedence over everything else, including

the public weal. He is not bothered about the chaos that will occur in

Hastinapura with no one to inherit the throne. His major concern is

that his vow must remain intact. The motivation is highly complex,

for in it play a number of factors: resentment against his mother

Ganga for depriving him of paternal love from birth and then of

maternal love from the crucial adolescent age onwards; disgust for a

father who dotes on a teenaged fisher-girl oblivious of his

obligations to the people; anger against Satyavati, the cause of the

terrible sacrifice he has had to make. Once more, the end result is

self prized above service.

What is the nature of this famous vow? It is not only the giving-up of

a Crown Prince's right to the throne [which had been done by some of

his ancestors like Yati and his uncle Devapi] but also the incredible

sacrifice of a Kshatriya right to beget progeny in order to subserve a

father's infatuation for a fisher-girl. The futility of it all is that

the vow is adhered to long after its purpose has been served and even

when it becomes dysfunctional to the extent of threatening the very

existing of the dynasty of which Bhishma is the sole remaining

representative.

Of a piece with this obstinate adherence to his vow is Bhishma's

peculiar attachment to Hastinapura itself. He is the same age as

Satyavati, if not older, but she does not follow her into vanaprastha

in the forest after the death of Pandu, when Vyasa advises his mother

and her two daughters-in-law not to be witnesses to the suicide of

their race. Bhishma is entombed in a perpetual brahmacharya ashrama

, the first of the four stages in a human being's life. He eschews the

stage of a householder, does not retire to the forest, and fails to

become a sanyasi. With this goes an obsession with Hastinapura, so

strong that he can bring himself to support the Pandavas only

verbally, but needs must ally himself physically with the

Dhartarashtras despite knowing them to be in the wrong. And that he

does to the extent of leading their armies against the Pandavas in a

cause which he believes to be wrong! Truly, he is a man divided

against himself. The only rationale he provides for his behaviour is

that he and Drona are borne on the Hastinapura monarch's exchequer

and hence bound to serve him. Yet, Yuyutsut, son of Dhritarashtra,

has no hesitation in rising above loyalty to his brothers to

cross-over to the side he knows to be in the right. It is Gandhari

who points out to her husband at the time of Krishna's peace-mission

that the warriors on whom their son foolishly depends will not lead

him to victory because, although they will fight on his side being

rajapinda bhayat [borne on the state's payroll], their hearts will

not be with him.[10] Bhishma himself echoes this when he tells them

that he, along with Kripa and Drona, are bound to the Kauravas "by

need", that is, they are borne on the Kaurava exchequer.

[11]

It is Bhisma who is instrumental in bringing about the deaths of the

successors to the Hastinapura throne, albeit unwittingly. We have

already seen that his over-eagerness to provide his stepbrother with

a surfeit of brides resulted in Vichitravirya's premature demise.

This was followed his going out of his way to procure a second bride

for Pandu, whose very name indicates the state of his wife. It is

significant that the blind Dhritarashtra was not provided a second

wife by Bhishma. Pandu had gone to a

svayamvara (bridegroom-choice ceremony) on his own. No Kuru king is

found attending any previous to this. Bhishma paid considerable bride

price to procure Madri who becomes the direct cause of Pandu's death.

It is significant that when Pandu leaves Hastinapura on a self-imposed

exile, Bhishma does not protest. Nor does he ever enquire after the

welfare of this scion of the dynasty in the Himalayan wilderness.

Even news of the birth of the sons to Pandu, cursed with death in

intercourse, does not arouse curiously or lead to any embassy from

the capital to the forest to celebrate the birth of hairs to the

sterile throne. The same indifference was displayed during the battle

in which his stepbrother Chitrangada died. It is an though Bhishma

were pleased to have the consumptive Vichitravirya engrossed in his

wives, and then blind Dhritarashtra on the throne, as titular

monarchs with himself as the all-powerful Grey Eminence actually his

alone. Unfortunately, the coming of Shakuni, accompanying his sister

to her life-long immurement in darkness in Hastinapura compelled by

Bhishma, changed the entire completion of the situation. Is it not

symptomatic of Bhishma's insensitivity to human feelings that he

should never have enquired of Gandhari the reason for bandaging her

eyes permanently, or have asked her not to do so? It is as though,

having suppressed his strongest urge and failed to sublimate it,

Bhishma became the ultimate misogynist, automatically stonewalling

against awareness of feelings of others, particularly women. This is

consistent with his indifference to the predicament in which he

places Amba that ends in her suicide. The price has to be paid by

Hastinapura, whose vitals Shakuni worms into, exuding that poison

which corrodes the dynasty. Incredibly, Bhishma yet again remains a

silent spectator to the poisoning of Bhima, the gutting of the House

of Lac, the division of the kingdom, the cheating in the dice-game,

the disrobing of Draupadi, the refusal to restore Indraprastha after

the exile is over. It is the supreme example of the "Witness" stance,

suddenly broken when war begins. Then the Witness unaccountably turns

into the Fighter against those in whose cause he believes, yet whom

he will, perversely, not support.

"In tragic life, God wot, no villain need be;Passion spin the plot. We are betrayed

By what is false within." [12]

It is supremely ironic that the prince who earned the sobriquet of

"Bhishma" and came to be renowned as the greatest of renouncers

should be so hopelessly bound to his father's throne as not only to

preside over the suicide of the dynasty, but to actually participate

in it on the side he knows to be in the wrong! Indeed,

Devavrata-Gangadatta-Bhishma is another Prometheus, bound in

adamantine chains to the icy Caucasian peaks of the Hastinapura

throne, wracked in immortal agony as the Dhartarashtra-Pandava

fratricidal strife eats into his vitals endlessly. For, perversely,

he cannot, or will not, die till liberation comes in the form of

mortal arrows showered by a grandchild who loves him.

It speaks volumes for the much-vaunted wisdom of Bhishma that he never

cast a glance eastward of Hastinapura towards the alarming

imperialistic ambitions of Magadha's Jarasandha despite the

phenomenon of nearly a hundred kings having been captured and nearby

Mathura attacked repeatedly. A contingent from Hastinapura even

accompanied the Magadhan army's onslaught on Mathura. One gets a

sense of Bhishma presiding over a small and weak kingdom, worried

only about the traditional enemies, the Panchalas [which is why

Drupada's sworn enemy Drona is immediately taken into employment in

Hastinapura], and blind to the growing threat of the

Jarasandha-Shishupala-Dantavakra-Kashi-Paundraka-Naraka-Kalayavana

combine gathering forces to the south, the east and the west. Bhishma

merely made sure of the north-western border through marital alliances

with Madra and Gandhara, and the west by marrying Dhritarashtra's

daughter Duhshala to Jayadratha, the Sindhu King. He was unaware that

the tenuous link down the Ganga with Kashi, whose princesses were the

Queen-mothers of Hastinapura, was already snapped by Magadha. It is

young

Krishna who puts paid to these imperialistic designs by killing each

of the tyrants separately, without any assistance from Bhishma,

renowned as the greatest statesman of the age.

This failed statesman, and this misogynist par excellence who abuses

his Kshatriya prowess to ruin the lives of Amba, Ambika, Ambalika,

Kunti, and watches, without protest, the attempted disrobing of

Draupadi, is also a Commander-in-Chief who deprives his army of its

best warrior, Karna, by insulting him so grossly that he withdraws

from battle. Further, he announces that he will not slay any of the

Pandavas and will befriend them in his thoughts at night, although he

will fight against them during the day. What a splendid morale booster

for his army! Over a period of ten days he kills thousands of innocent

soldiers but not a single Pandava. Unlike Drona, Bhishma does not even

think of capturing Yudhishthira as a way to end the war. It is as

though he were trying to tire out Duryodhana till he agrees to a

truce. Repeatedly Duryodhana voices his anguish over Bhishma's

half-hearted leadership, which he will not relinquish. A peculiar

dharma indeed!

It is a fact that Bhishma bestrides the epic like a colossus and it is

because of this that he has been celebrated over millennia as the

repository of statecraft and the embodiment of the warrior code,

dharma-dharma, to be looked up to by all succeeding generations. This

aura is like the upanishadic golden lid veiling the face of truth.

What Vyasa shows us is Bhishma standing as the last bulwark of the

ancient dharma in which loyalty to the clan over-rode all other

claims; in which fidelity to one's word was the be-all and end-all;

into which considerations of the larger public weal did not enter.

The deceptive aura of perfection is ruthlessly dispelled in the

Draupadi-vastraharana episode. Never have the limitations of

Bhishma's way of life been exposed so mercilessly as when Draupadi

challenges him to stand by those very tenets of nobility which the

Kuru court supposed to uphold.

Let us listen to that traumatic exchange of words:

Draupadi said:

"It is most wrong, most wrongto drag me in my periodbefore the Kuru heroes. But none

here finds it wrong.Oh the shame of it! If allthese great Kuru

heroesFind nothing wrong here, then the dharma of the BharatasIs

dead, the dharma of the Kshatriyas is dead.Drona, Bhishma, Vidura,

and the great monarchHave lost their greatness—elsewhy are they

silent?…There is no sabha without elders,no elders without dharma

there is no dharma without truth,no truth without honesty."

Bhishma said:

"Noble lady…. What can I say?It's all very puzzling.Dharma is very subtle…

Very confusing.I don't know what to say." [13]

Here is Bhishma prefiguring Hamlet in mulling over a philosophical

dilemma while a queen's honour is at stake! Within Bhishma plays,

subconsciously, that deep seated grievance against mother and

stepmother because of which he treats women as chattel. He is wholly

oblivious of his obligation, as the patriarch in society, to set an

example for others to follow. That is why, pointing to his silence,

Karna argues that Draupadi must have been duly won and orders watch

in a silence that is stupefying for its callousness. As she is about

to be dragged away to the servants' quarters, Panchali makes a last

attempt to arouse the sopoforic manhood of the Kuru Court whose

guardian Bhishma is supposed to be:

Never before have we heard of a wife forced to standBefore a sabha. The Kurus have broken

that ancient rule…Something must be very wrongif the Kurus let

theirInnocent daughter-in-law suffer in this way!Where is your sense

of dharma ?

Bhishma said, "Shining lady,I have already saidthat Dharma is subtle

..[14]

What Bhishma says now is of very great importance, for it speaks of

the breakdown of a system of values, of dharma having become an empty

shell:

 

"What a strong man says often becomes the only dharma;A weak man may have dharma on his side

but who listens to him ?To tell you the truthI don't know what to say."[15]

The face of Truth is hidden by not a golden lid but a sadly tarnished

one. Here is the greatest of patriarchs enmeshing himself in the

dialectics of reason: whether Draupadi has been won or not. As if

that issue is of more importance than protecting her modesty and

saving the reputation of the Kuru Court whose code enshrines

protecting the weak as a central tenet. The confusion in Bhishma

becomes evident as he abruptly swings to asserting that the family

which has taken Draupadi as daughter-in-law will not stray from the

path of dharma. Yet he does not lift a finger to free her from brutal

Duhshasana's clutches. Instead, he voices a meaningless approval of

her stance:

"Your conduct now, O Panchali,is worthy of you—Though you suffer, you

appeal to the truths of Dharma.Our elders, learned-in-dharmaDrona and

others, sit Here with lowered eyes like dead men with life-breaths

gone."[16]

Indeed, the life-breath of this dharma is gone. What exists is a

putrefying corpse kept artificially alive, shown ultimately in

Bhishma's death-in-life on the bed-of-arrows. It is revealing that

explicit prohibition, disgust at the proceedings and warning is

voiced finally not by the Kshatriya Bhishma, protector of

Hastinapura, but by the son of a mixed-caste sage and a maid servant,

Vidura:

"Now they insult a womanNobility is dead.The Kauravas conspire sinfully…

Dharma violated in a sabha, destroys the sabha…Kurus, do not abandon dharma."[17]

The problem is that Vidura is powerless. He can merely advise, exhort,

and plead with the blind Dhritarashtra who, obsessed by his desire

that the throne must be his son Duryodhana's, is deaf to all appeals.

In the very beginning of the epic we are told that the Kauravas are a

giant tree of passion whose root is the weak-minded Dhritarashtra.

Its seed is infatuation, its branches are anger and pride rooted in

ignorance.

[18] The state power remains reined in, for

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of a passionate intensity."

Bhishma's failure as a leader of the polity lies in his never having

practiced the raja-dharma he speaks of at length to Yudhishthira on

his bed-of-arrows which seems to become his penance for inaction. In

a Kshatriya the "witness" stance only brings about the destruction of

the policy. The Kshatriya must use power to protect the rights of the

weak, for that is his dharma, the truth of his nature. To abjure this

because of a self-imposed vow and turn into the Egotistical Sublime of

the age brings destruction and misery in its wake not only for

oneself, but also for the entire society of which such a person is

the corner stone, the pillar of strength. Withdrawal from the

rightful use of danda

and exercising state power for lokasamgraha, holding together the

people in the way of dharma, is abdication that betrays the Kshatriya

code. Indeed, in Bhishma, between the ideal and the reality falls the

shadow. Here is a leader fallen by the way.