The Kurukshetra War – 3102 BCE

The Kurukshetra War is the great battle at the heart of the Mahabharata, one of the two Sanskrit epics of ancient India. In Wendy Doniger’s account in Britannica, the epic tells of a struggle for sovereignty between two groups of cousins, the Kauravas, sons of the blind Dhritarashtra, and the Pandavas, sons of his brother Pandu. Its authorship is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, and it took its present form about 400 CE.

How the feud began

In Doniger’s account, Dhritarashtra was passed over as king because of his blindness, and his brother Pandu ruled instead. The five Pandavas, Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva, were fathered by gods in Pandu’s name. Enmity between the cousins drove the Pandavas out of the kingdom. After they returned, Yudhishthira lost everything in a game of dice with Duryodhana, the eldest Kaurava, and the brothers were exiled to the forest for 12 years. The feud ended in a series of great battles on the field of Kurukshetra, north of Delhi in Haryana state.

The battle and its cost

Doniger writes that all the Kauravas were annihilated and that, on the winning side, only the five Pandava brothers and Krishna survived. Krishna served as Arjuna’s charioteer, and the Bhagavad Gita, in book 6 of the epic, is his advice to Arjuna as the war is about to begin. The first ten days of battle are told in the Bhishma Parva in Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s translation.

After the war, the blind king asks Yudhishthira how many have died. The answer is the epic’s own number, and it does not fit the epic’s own army totals. In the Adi Parva, eighteen Akshauhinis meet at Kurukshetra, and one Akshauhini has 21,870 chariots, 21,870 elephants, 65,610 horse and 109,350 men on foot. Eighteen such armies come to 1,968,300 men on foot (18 times 109,350), far short of the count Yudhishthira gives.

Yudhishthira gives the toll of the war:

The traditional date: 3102 BCE

The date in this page’s title comes from Hindu cosmology, not from archaeology. In Britannica’s article on the yuga, the present and most degenerate age, the Kali Yuga, began in 3102 BCE and will last 432,000 years. The epic itself places the battle in the interval between the Dwapara and the Kali Yugas, as the Adi Parva puts it. So 3102 BCE is the traditional date, not a historical finding. Doniger notes that the date and even whether the war took place at all are much debated.

Dharma at the center

The war is the Mahabharata’s setting for its teaching on dharma, duty and human nature. In Doniger’s account, the epic is above all an exposition of dharma, the codes of conduct for a king, a warrior, a person in times of calamity and one seeking moksha, and it shows these codes as so subtle that a hero cannot help but break one of them whatever he chooses. The full text is in Ganguli’s translation of the Mahabharata, with the aftermath of the battle in the Stri Parva. Related pages on this site are Vishnu and Rta, the cosmic order.