The Storyteller's Lens

Most of the Mahabharata I first knew came from my grandmother.

I think she studied till grade 5 or 6…I’m not sure. But she was an artist. She could draw beautifully on practically anything with whatever she found…pencil, pen, charcoal, chalk. And she was a fabulous storyteller.

She died when I was in Grade Seven.

I am forty-eight now, and I still remember some of the words and phrases she used while telling me those stories. That probably says enough about her talent.

Later came the television adaptations. Every Sunday, fifteen or twenty of us adults and children would squeeze ourselves into our TV room to watch Mahabharat. One cousin cried so much during Bhishma’s fall, Abhimanyu’s death and Karna’s last rites that I distinctly remember her dupatta getting soaked. I remember looking at her and wondering why she was crying so much. 

Years later, it isn’t Karna’s death that I find myself thinking about. It’s Kunti.

More specifically, a truth she carried for years and when she chose to tell it.

The mother I had always been shown

Most versions I remember portray Kunti’s meeting with Karna before the Kurukshetra war as intensely emotional.

A mother finally stands before the son she abandoned. She tells him the truth. He discovers that the Pandavas are his younger brothers. She asks him to come with her, to take his rightful place among them.

He refuses because his loyalty lies with Duryodhana, but there is pain on both sides. Mother and son are torn apart by circumstances, choices and loyalties made long before that meeting.

It is moving. 

It is also a version I have never been completely comfortable with. Not because I believe Kunti felt no maternal instinct towards Karna. 

How could I possibly know that? 

She carried him. Gave birth to him. Put that newborn into a basket and sent him down a river because she was an unmarried girl terrified of what his existence would mean. Whatever she felt afterwards belongs to her.

My problem lies somewhere else.

Why did she tell only Karna?

She already knew!

Kunti didn’t discover Karna’s identity on the eve of Kurukshetra. She had recognised him years earlier.

When Karna entered the arena after the princes had displayed their skills, she saw the kavacha and kundala and knew who he was. 

Her firstborn was alive.

He was standing there as Radheya, the son of a charioteer, challenging Arjuna.

And Kunti remained silent.

Years passed.

Karna became Duryodhana’s closest friend. The rivalry with Arjuna hardened. Draupadi was humiliated in the Kuru court. The Pandavas went into exile. They returned. War became inevitable.

Still, Kunti did not tell her sons: The man standing opposite you is your elder brother.

Only when Kurukshetra was imminent did she go to Karna.

And when I went back to the epic sequence rather than the versions I had watched on screen, something about that meeting began to look very different to me.

Kunti’s thoughts before approaching Karna are tied to the coming war and the danger facing her sons. Krishna has already told Karna the truth about his birth and tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to join the Pandavas.

Then Kunti goes to him. Not to the five. To him.

Six sons. Only one receives the truth.

This is the part I cannot get past.

If Kunti’s overwhelming desire was to bring all six sons together, why was Karna the only one asked to act on the truth?

Why not tell Yudhishthira? Why not tell Bhima? Why not tell Arjuna?

These were sons famous for obeying their mother’s words…sometimes to an extent that creates an entirely different Mahabharata discussion.

Why not say: He is your elder brother. Go and talk to him.

Perhaps Karna would still have refused. In fact, I think he probably would have. Because discovering Kunti was his biological mother did not erase Radha. It did not erase Adhiratha. It certainly did not erase Duryodhana.

Karna had already lived an entire life by then. He had parents who had raised him, relationships, loyalties, gratitude, wounds and an identity that did not magically disappear because Kunti finally told him how he had been born.

But telling all six would at least have made the knowledge equal.

Instead, Karna entered Kurukshetra knowing exactly who stood opposite him. The Pandavas did not.

And Kunti knew both sides of that inequality. 

Why did she go that morning?

This is where I have begun questioning the maternal interpretation of their meeting. 

Not rejecting it. Questioning it.

Politics was involved. War was imminent. Fear was involved. And Karna was dangerous.

He wasn’t merely the baby Kunti had once placed in a basket anymore. He was one of Duryodhana’s strongest warriors and Arjuna’s great rival.

The son she had abandoned had become a threat to the sons she had raised.

Perhaps Kunti genuinely hoped she could bring him over to their side. Perhaps she believed blood might succeed where Krishna’s arguments had failed. Perhaps she wanted all six sons to survive.

Perhaps she was simply a terrified mother looking at an approaching war and grabbing at the one possibility still available to her.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that Karna refused.

He did not suddenly feel an overwhelming love for five men because he had discovered they shared his blood. He remained loyal to the life he had actually lived.

But he gave Kunti something. A promise.

He would not kill Yudhishthira, Bhima, Nakula or Sahadeva.

Only his conflict with Arjuna would remain.

Either Karna would survive or Arjuna would.

Either way, Kunti would still have five sons.

And there is another detail from Karna’s story that has always stayed with me from my grandmother’s narration.

Karna gave.

After his worship, anyone who approached him asking for something did not leave empty-handed. His reputation as Daana Karna isn’t incidental to who he is.

Kunti meets him around his worship of Surya.

I cannot claim that the epic explicitly tells us she chose that moment because she knew he would not refuse someone who came asking. It doesn’t.

But I cannot entirely ignore the timing either.

He knows why she has come.

She knows that he knows.

And, yes, he probably knows that she knows that he knows.

There is something almost painfully unsentimental about that meeting when I look at it this way. Kunti asks. Karna refuses what she really wants. And then…

Karna gives.

Four sons she raised walk into Kurukshetra protected by a promise they don’t even know exists.

And then Karna dies

Arjuna kills Karna. The war eventually ends. The dead are cremated.

And only afterwards, when the survivors go to the Ganga to offer water to those they have lost, does Kunti finally tell the Pandavas.

Karna was not merely Radheya. He was hers. And therefore…he was theirs.  

Why? This question bothers me almost as much as the first one.

Because now Kunti could have remained silent.

Karna was dead. The war was over. Nothing she said could save him. Nothing she said could change which side he had fought for. Nothing could change the arrow Arjuna had already released.

And the five sons standing before her could have lived the rest of their lives believing Karna had been their enemy.

Instead she gave them the truth.

The burden changed hands.

Before Kurukshetra, Karna had to look across a battlefield knowing those five men were his brothers.

After Kurukshetra, those five men had to look backwards knowing the man they had helped defeat was theirs.

Especially Arjuna.

He could no longer remember the final battle simply as the day he killed Karna. He now had to live with: I killed my elder brother.

Why would Kunti give him that knowledge when there was absolutely nothing he could do with it?

Maybe death changed the question

Perhaps guilt finally became unbearable. Or perhaps guilt isn’t even the right word.

Kunti knew the promise Karna had made her. She knew four of her sons had been spared by him. 

And now she could look around her.

Yudhishthira was alive. Bhima was alive. Arjuna was alive. Nakula was alive. Sahadeva was alive.

Karna was dead.

Objectively, Kunti did not kill Karna. Too many people made too many choices for his death to be placed at one person’s feet.

But did Kunti herself experience it that way?

Did some part of her look at her surviving sons and wonder whether she had killed her firstborn without ever picking up a weapon?

I asked him to spare them. He did. They survived. He didn’t.

I don’t know how a mother carries that arithmetic. Maybe she couldn’t. 

Or perhaps standing at the Ganga changed something else.

The politics were over. The kingdom no longer mattered. Karna could give her nothing now. She could ask him for nothing.

There was simply a dead son whose brothers did not even know they should offer water for him.

Perhaps she could deny him while he lived because acknowledging him had consequences. But she could not allow him to leave this world still unacknowledged by his own blood.

Maybe saying he was my son was the last thing she could give him. 

Too late to give him a childhood. Too late to give him brothers. Too late to give him herself. But not too late to give him his name within her family.

I can understand that.

And yet…I still cannot get past what that truth did to the five men who heard it.

Kunti looked away twice

This is perhaps where I struggle with her most.

Before the war, she knew what knowing would do to Karna. 

Every arrow he subsequently released towards the Pandavas carried the shadow of that knowledge. Every opportunity to kill one of them became different.

Yet she told him. Because, for whatever combination of reasons, she needed him to know.

After the war, she knew…or must at least have understood what knowing would do to the Pandavas.

They could never again remember Karna merely as an enemy.

Yet she told them. Because once again, she needed the truth to be known.

In both cases, someone else had to carry what she released.

That doesn’t make Kunti cruel. It doesn’t make her selfish. It doesn’t make her a bad mother. And it certainly doesn’t mean there was some simple, righteous alternative sitting in front of her that she deliberately ignored.

Every possible choice had consequences. But she did choose.

And that is what I keep returning to.

The secret that couldn’t remain a secret

Yudhishthira’s reaction tells us something too.

He is devastated when he learns the truth. And in his anguish, he curses women: from then onwards, they would not be able to keep a secret completely concealed.

My grandmother told me that part when I was a child. She used that story to teach me something else:

Never speak in anger or anguish. You may say something that cannot be unsaid.

I used to think that lesson belonged to Yudhishthira. Now I wonder whether it belongs just as much to Kunti.

Because Kunti’s story with Karna is filled with things that cannot be unsaid…and things that remained unsaid until saying them caused a different kind of damage.

She could choose when to speak. She could choose whom to tell. But she could not control what the truth became once another person knew it.

I still don’t know where to stand

My Ramayana reflections have been easier for me in one particular way.

Not because those characters are simple. They aren’t. But eventually I can usually find somewhere inside them from which their choices begin to make sense to me.

With Sita. With Kaikeyi. Even with Raavan and the ten different voices I imagined inside his heads.

Those pieces have essentially said: Everyone knows this story. Come stand where I’m standing and perhaps you’ll see this character differently.

Kunti won’t let me do that.

I can stand beside the frightened unmarried girl putting her newborn into a basket.

I can stand beside the mother terrified that war might take the five sons she raised.

I can stand beside the woman approaching the formidable warrior who happens also to be the baby she once abandoned. I can understand why she might ask him to change sides. I can understand why she might accept the promise he gives instead.

I can even stand beside the mother at the Ganga who perhaps finally cannot bear for her dead son to remain unacknowledged.

And then I move one step to the side…and see Karna walking into Kurukshetra carrying a truth his brothers don’t know. 

Move again…and see five brothers walking away from Kurukshetra carrying a truth Karna no longer has to bear.

And Kunti stands somewhere between all of them.

I don’t know whether what drove her was maternal love, fear, political necessity, guilt, grief, self-preservation, regret… or some combination that changed every time circumstances changed.

Perhaps trying to reduce it to one of those things is the mistake.

For the first time while writing one of these reflections, I don’t have an interpretation I want to offer. I have only a woman I have tried repeatedly to understand.

I’ve stood on every side of this woman I can find, and I still don’t know where to stand.