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 The role of
fate-10
Fate occasionally touches us all in ways we don't always understand...
--Terry Goodkind, "Temple of the Winds"
X. Adventitious Fate
Many a time an innocent bystander gets swept away by events he/she did not anticipate. They happened to be at the wrong place and wrong time. A riot takes place and some people get killed who did not have any role in the riot. They simply get caught in the melee that developed and even if they wanted to escape there would have been no avenue to do so. They become victims of circumstances. We characterise this situation as adventitious fate - a result of a karma they did not commit. They got dragged into a grand scheme not of their own making. But all the same they get to experience the drama that is enacted which has detrimental consequences for a whole lot of others, besides themselves.
We will not discuss here whether Mahabharatham is history or didactic fiction. We will take it as though the events took place as stated. In the grand scheme of the design of the events it appears everything, including the details of various events, was ordained. Vyasa who wrote (narrated) the epic was himself a participant in the epic and he forecast the end result right at the outset. He told his mother, Satyavati, “Happy days were over long back! Coming days are sadder still. Tomorrow will be worse. This Earth has lost its youth.” In such a case the end was determined and everything else revolved around to fulfil that. The dice game was a crucial event for the war to happen. All others were integrated into that. Let us see how the lives of three women were woven into the scheme and affected by the grand dame Fate.
The miserable mothers (Satyavati, Gandhari, and
Kunti):
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Satyavati and Shantanu |
When king Shantanu fell in love with the fisher maid Satyavati, that started the whole scheme of cascading events leading finally to the war. Bheeshma, who was the rightful heir to the throne until then, was forced by circumstances to take the oath that he will not seek the throne of Hastinapur and also a vow of celibacy in order to preempt his would-be offsprings from laying claim to the throne. Satyavati was caught in the middle, her fate being linked to that of Bheeshma. Even though she had two sons through Shantanu none of them lasted on the throne nor did they produce offsprings to occupy the throne after them. Satyavati’s entreaties to Bheeshma to recant his oath and produce offsprings through Ambika and Ambalika did not materialise. She had to enlist the help of her illegitimate son (Vyasa) to impregnate the queens to get the dynasty to prolong. Technically it was not the continuation of the Kuru dynasty since no Kuru king was involved in the propagation of the race.
Satyavati’s dream of enabling her posterity to rule Hastinapur had a devious turn in that it was her illegitimate son, Vyasa, (and not her sons fathered by Shantanu) who was responsible for the propagation. Fate ordained it that way. Satyavati was also warned by Vyasa of the calamities that were to happen as a result of the growing enmity between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Vyasa took Satyavati and the two widowed queens to the forest in order not to subject her/them to witness the impending destruction of the Kuru dynasty. It was perhaps inevitable that an ambitious beginning for Satyavati ended miserably. It was not her own making but she was trapped into the spider web of adventitious fate.
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Gandhari & friend |
The very first shock that Gandhari experienced was the realisation that she was married to a blind king and that too forcibly in the days when the princesses in several kingdoms had the choice to pick their husbands. She decided to wear a blindfold to deny herself the faculty of sight when her husband was devoid of that. In a sense it was also a protest to demonstrate her displeasure at being cheated. Her prolonged (2-year) pregnancy was the second blow. When the ball of flesh came out at the end it was to be cut into 100 pieces (to suit her boon from Shiva that she would get 100 sons) and then regenerated into 100 babies*. The boon effectively turned into a curse. At the time of Duryodhana’s birth he howled like a jackal which was a bad omen. Vidhura advised destruction of the baby since such an unnatural origin portended the destruction of the Kuru dynasty. Gandhari took a stand against such a measure. Added to all this was the wayward ways of Duryodhana, in conjunction with Shakuni, plotting against the Pandavas. On top of all this, Dhritarashtra was yielding to all the pulls and pushes of Duryodhana. Gandhari went through all this and she had virtually no say in rectifying the situation. Duryodhana was marching steadily according to his fate and Gandhari was dragged along.
* Let us not confuse this with cloning!
When Duryodhana came to seek her blessings for victory in the war she would not accede citing the wrongful path he was taking. On the last day of the war she wanted to bestow the armour of invincibility on Duryodhana and asked him to bathe in the river and come back to her stark naked. Her intention was to open her eyes and give total protection to Duryodhana through the psychic energy she had stored all along. But that was not to be due Krishna’s last minute deceit. In the end when all her sons were killed in the war, she could only curse Krishna for his manipulations. She finally retreated to the forest with her husband and Vidhura to be consumed in the forest fire. A lifelong misery and an example of gruesome fate, indeed!
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Kunti & Karna |
Kunti (as an unwed woman) gave birth to Karna in an act of juvenile indiscretion while trying to test the incantation taught her by the sage Durvasa. The sage was said to have foreseen the inability of Pandu (future husband of Kunti) to father children. She then got terrified about the shame that would accrue to her and cast her baby (in a basket) in the river Ganga. Forces beyond her control caused her to abandon her first-born. She bore that shame for the rest of her life. When Karna was challenged about his ancestry at the skill-testing venue, Kunti could not vouch for him out of the continuing shame and fear she sported. If free will had played its hand she would have disclosed the truth and the course of Mahabharatham would have been different.
Kunti, dragged along in the grand scheme, watched the misfortune of her other sons, Draupadi’s shame in the assembly hall, and the eventual war much to her grief. Despite her shameful act of abandoning her first-born, she was forced to go to Karna, disclose his identity, and ask him to join the Pandavas in the war. While Karna was pleased to hear his birth secret, he politely refused her request to cross over to the Pandavas’ side. Events beyond one’s control appear to shape the fate of individuals being dictated by a macroscopic fate. Kunti led a grievous life from beginning to end.
Sethuraman Subramanian
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