The Pandavas

Two things about the Pandavas needed explaining even to the epic's first audiences, and it explains both at length.

The first is their parentage. Pandu is under a curse that will kill him if he approaches a wife, so Kunti uses a mantra given to her in girlhood by the sage Durvasa, which summons a god who must give her a son. She uses it for Dharma, Vayu and Indra, and teaches it to Madri, who summons the Ashvins and gets twins. The device lets the poem give five brothers five divine fathers without making them illegitimate, and it is the reason Duryodhana can say in council that they are not Pandu's sons at all.

The second is the marriage. Arjuna wins Draupadi at the archery contest, the brothers bring her home, and Kunti, without looking, tells them to share what they have brought. That her word cannot be unsaid is offered as the immediate cause, but the epic clearly does not think it sufficient, because Drupada objects on the spot that a woman with five husbands is against custom, and the poem then supplies three further justifications: the practice of the elders, a previous birth in which Draupadi asked Shiva five times for a husband and was granted five, and a divine origin for the five brothers themselves.

An epic does not argue this hard about something its audience found ordinary. The four defences stacked on top of each other are the clearest evidence that polyandry was already unusual when the text was fixed.

The wager the brothers lost carried precise terms, and the whole middle of the epic is the working out of them. Twelve years in the forest, then a thirteenth lived in disguise; if they were recognised during the thirteenth, the twelve years began again. The Kauravas therefore had a strong interest in finding them, and the search runs underneath the forest books.

The thirteenth year is spent at the court of Virata in Matsya, and it nearly fails at the end. Bhima kills Kichaka, the queen's brother, for pursuing Draupadi, and the manner of the killing tells anyone who thinks about it that a Pandava is in the palace. A cattle raid follows, Arjuna takes up his bow to defend the herds, and he is seen.

Duryodhana then makes a calendrical argument: the year is not complete, the disguise was broken early, and the exile restarts. Bhishma answers him with the reckoning. The lunar year runs short of the solar one, the shortfall is made up by intercalary months, and counted properly the thirteen years were finished before Arjuna was recognised. Duryodhana does not accept the ruling and refuses the kingdom anyway, which removes the last legal obstacle to war.

It is a striking passage to find in an epic. The claim to a kingdom, the deaths of millions and the argument of the entire poem hinge, for one scene, on how a calendar reconciles months to the sun, and the grandsire of the family settles it as a technical question.