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Gandhari was the daughter of Subala , the king of Gandhara- the land from river Sindhu to Kabul. She was a devotee of Lord Shiva , and from him had got the boon for a hundred sons. Having heard of her pious nature and the boon, Bhishma – the karta of the Kuru dynasty sent a marriage proposal for her with Prince Dhritarashtra of Hastinapur who was blind.

King Subala knew about the handicap of the prince , but was honored by the proposal from the illustrious Kurus and agreed to the alliance. He sent Gandhari along with her brother Shakuni ; with appropriate dowry and servants to Hastinapur to solemnize the marriage. That Dhritarashtra was blind was something that Gandhari got to know only when she reached Hastinapur.

What she must have gone through as a young girl about to be married to a blind prince is less known in the Mahabharata. What is well known is that when the marriage was to be solemnized, Gandhari decided that she should in no way be superior to her husband , and bound her eyes with a silk scarf.

She had decided that if her husband could not see, she too would not see. She was hailed as a sati for her sacrifice and very little is known about Dhritrashtra’s deeper feelings regarding his wife’s decision .Only in their last journey when Dhritrashtra and Gandhari were living in Sanyasa in the forest along with Kunti and Vidura did he bare his heart on this matter.

Gandhari was a pious queen, but do her actions in Mahabharata reflect this fact . When Kunti - wife of Pandu, the reigning King of Hastinapur, gave birth to Yudhhister -the first grandchild of the Kurus ,Gandhari was also already pregnant for two years at that time . Impatient that Kunti already had a son she forced her delivery and gave birth to a mass of flesh, which, with the help of Rishi Vyasa became her hundred sons and one daughter. Duryodhana was the born first from this mass. As early as this, Gandhari was competing with her sister in law Kunti , and it is not surprising that later her sons always competed with Kunti’s sons – The Pandavas.

The Kauravas, as the sons of Dhritrashtra and Gandhari were called were all the time scheming to kill their cousins – the five Pandavas ,who were sons of Kunti and Madri ( second wife of King Pandu). Both Gandhari and Dhritarastra knew about this. When Duryodhana and Shakuni hatched the plot to kill the Pandavas by burning them in the lac palace which was specially constructed for them in Varnavata ; it was Dhritarashra who ordered his young nephews to go and live there. Gandhari could have prevailed on her husband to stop this but did not. She also never asked her brother Shakuni- mentor to Duryodhana to leave Hastinapur and go back to Gandhara.

By the time the battle of Kurukhshetra ( which had lasted for eighteen days) ended, Gandhari had lost all her sons . Her hatred towards the Pandava was far greater than her grief for loss of her sons. After the war, when the five Pandava brothers came to grieve and take her blessings she wanted to curse Yuddhister , but Rishi Vyasa’s exhortation to her on the meaning of dharma made her control her anger. Yet when Yuddhsiter prostrated before her , she saw his nails from beneath the veil and the look made his nails turn blue. They remained blue thereafter always.

But Gandhari did curse Krishna ,for she held him responsible for the war which killed so many. According to her, since Krishna was divine he could have stopped the war, had he wanted to do so. She cursed Krishna that 36 years later his own Vrishni clan would all be annihilated because they would all kill each other. Krishna told Gandhari that he had tried his best to stop the war and he could not .

He explained that though he was morally on the side of Pandavas because of their righteousness; he had blessed Duryodhana also ( which was one of the reasons he had gone to heaven despite his wickedness). He reminded Gandhari that her own indifference to dharma was far greater than that of her blind husband , specially because she being pious lady was well versed in the matters of right and wrong .

From the narrative of Mahabharata it appears that when Gandhari bound her eyes to the outside world she also had have put a veil on her inner eyes. Despite her piety , she never took strong steps against acts of injustice committed by her sons. On the other hand Dhritrashtra had many complexes. Because of his blindness, despite being the elder son, he was not made the King of Hastinapur and Pandu his younger brother became the king .However Pandu never really ruled and died an early death and so Dhritrashtra was the de facto King in Hastinapur. But the denial of kingship always gnawed his heart and he believed that Duryodhana his son , more than Yudhhister his nephew , was the rightful heir of Hastinapur. In this context it is easier to understand Dhritrashtra’s cunning and connivance in the schemes against the Pandavas.

There is no doubt that Gandhari did an extremely difficult thing, an ordinary person could never have done ,by choosing to not see the world when she could have. Dhristrastra was born blind and by adulthood his body and senses would have been accustomed to not seeing. Rather his other senses would have become sharper to compensate for the visual handicap, as it usually happens with such people. But this was not the case with Gandhari – she must gone through unimaginable difficulties when she went about blindfolded. In the entire story Gandhari could “ see” but chose “not to see” both literally and figuratively.

Question:

What kind of role do you think Gandhari would have played in Mahabharata if she had not bound her eyes? Would the fate of Hastinapur have been any different if she could “see “ ?

Is there a noble lesson we can draw from the self imposed blindness of Gandhari?Leave your views along with your email id below.

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