The Kurukshetra War -- What Happened in Eighteen Days

The war of the Mahabharata lasted eighteen days. On the plain of Kurukshetra, north of present-day Delhi, eighteen akshauhinis -- the epic's largest unit of army, each a fixed combination of chariots, elephants, horses and foot soldiers -- met in battle: eleven on the side of Duryodhana and the Kauravas, seven with the Pandavas. Almost every king of the land fought on one side or the other.

Before the fighting began, the two sides agreed on rules: warriors would fight only their equals, no one would strike a man who had surrendered, fled or lost his weapon, and charioteers, messengers and drummers would be spared. Then, as the armies stood ready, Arjuna asked Krishna to drive his chariot between the lines, and the Bhagavad Gita was spoken. The rest of the war can be read as the slow failure of those first-morning rules.

For ten days Bhishma, the grandsire of both families, held the Kaurava army together. He had promised to fight for Hastinapura but would not kill the Pandavas, and he could only be overcome if he chose to be. On the ninth night the Pandavas went to his tent and asked him how. He told them: he would not raise his bow against Shikhandi, who had been born a woman. On the tenth day Arjuna shot from behind Shikhandi until Bhishma fell, so pierced with arrows that his body did not touch the ground.

Under Drona the war grew harder. On the thirteenth day the Kauravas formed the chakravyuha, the circular formation, and Arjuna's sixteen-year-old son Abhimanyu, who knew how to break into it but not how to get out, was surrounded and killed by several warriors at once -- against the rules. On the fourteenth Arjuna kept his vow to kill Jayadratha before sunset, and that night Karna spent his one unfailing weapon, the Vasavi shakti, on Bhima's son Ghatotkacha. On the fifteenth, Drona was undone by a half-truth spoken by Yudhishthira, the one man whose word he trusted.

Karna led for two days. On the sixteenth and seventeenth, the war came to its most painful encounters: Bhima fulfilled his vow against Duhshasana, who had dragged Draupadi into the dice hall, and Karna and Arjuna -- brothers, though only Karna knew it -- finally met. When Karna's chariot wheel stuck in the earth, he asked for time under the rules of war; Krishna reminded him of every rule broken against Draupadi and Abhimanyu, and Arjuna shot.

The eighteenth day was the end. Shalya fell to Yudhishthira, the Kaurava army broke, and Duryodhana hid in a lake. Drawn out, he chose Bhima for a mace duel, and Bhima, on Krishna's signal, struck his thigh -- a blow below the waist, forbidden in mace combat, that fulfilled another vow made in the dice hall. That night, Ashvatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma attacked the sleeping Pandava camp, killing Dhrishtadyumna and Draupadi's five sons. Of the vast hosts, the epic says, only a handful of warriors on each side survived.

Why does the Mahabharata dwell so much on broken rules? Partly because the epic is honest that the righteous side won by bending them too -- Bhishma through Shikhandi, Drona through a half-truth, Karna while he was helpless, Duryodhana with a forbidden blow. Krishna's defence, given in the epic itself, is that against an enemy who had already broken every rule, there was no other way to end a war that was destroying the world. The epic lets that answer stand but never makes it comfortable. The Stri Parva that follows, in which the widows of both sides walk among the dead, is its real verdict on the eighteen days.