The story

The man who taught both branches of the Kuru family came to Hastinapura carrying a grudge.

Drona was a brahmana, son of the sage Bharadvaja, and as a boy he had studied in his father's hermitage beside a prince of Panchala named Drupada. Later Drona married Kripi, had a son called Ashvatthama, and stayed poor. He obtained the whole science of weapons from Parashurama, and then went to see his old friend, now a king. Drupada laughed at him. Friendship, he said, is only possible between equals: a pauper is no friend of a rich man, nor a man without a chariot of a man who rides one, nor a commoner of a king. Whatever we had as boys has worn out.

Drona left in a cold fury and went to Hastinapura. There he found the Kuru princes standing around a well into which their ball had fallen. He mocked them gently, then fished the ball out with a chain of grass blades, each one shot into the end of the last. Bhishma heard of it and made him the princes' teacher. Before he began, Drona took his new pupils aside and said there was something he would ask of them once they were trained. The others fell silent. Arjuna alone promised to do it, and Drona held him and wept.

Arjuna became the pupil every teacher hopes for. When the wind blew out the lamp at supper and his hand still found his mouth, he began practising archery in the dark. Drona heard the bowstring, embraced him, and promised that no archer in the world would equal him.

Then a young man named Ekalavya arrived, son of Hiranyadhanus, king of the Nishadas, a forest people, and asked to be taught. Drona refused. The text gives the reason in two parts: Drona was thinking that the boy was a Nishada, and he was thinking of his princely pupils. Ekalavya touched the teacher's feet anyway, went into the forest, made an image of Drona out of clay, and trained before it with such devotion that he became an extraordinary archer.

One day the princes went hunting with a dog. The dog barked at a dark, mud-streaked figure in black deerskin, and Ekalavya put seven arrows into its open mouth at once. Asked who he was, he said he was a pupil of Drona's. Arjuna went privately to his teacher and reminded him of his promise. Drona went with him to the forest. Ekalavya bowed to the ground and declared himself Drona's pupil. Then give me my fee, said Drona: your right thumb. Ekalavya, the text says, cut it off cheerfully, without hesitation, to keep his word. Afterwards he drew the bow with his fingers and was never as quick again. Arjuna's anxiety left him, and the text adds that Drona's promise had come true.

That is the classical text. It calls Drona's demand harsh, praises Ekalavya's truthfulness, and says nothing more. Modern readers often take the episode as a lasting indictment of exclusion by birth, a reading that belongs to our time rather than to the epic's narration.

Drona tested his pupils with an artificial bird, made by craftsmen and set in a treetop. He asked each prince to aim and say what he saw. Yudhishthira saw the tree, the bird, his teacher and his brothers, and Drona sent him away; the others did no better. Arjuna said he saw only the bird. Then describe it, said Drona. I see its head, said Arjuna, not its body. Shoot, said Drona, and the head fell. Later tellings make the target the bird's eye; in the constituted text it is the head.

When the princes were trained, Drona asked Dhritarashtra for a public display, and an arena was laid out with stands for the king, the queens and the people. Bhima and Duryodhana, maces raised, began to turn the show into a real fight, and Ashvatthama had to separate them. Then Drona called for Arjuna, who called up fire, water, wind and mountains with his weapons, while Kunti wept for joy in the stands.

At the gate there was a sound like thunder. Karna walked in, born, the text tells us, of Kunti and the Sun, with armour and earrings that grew on his body. He did everything Arjuna had done and then challenged him to single combat. Clouds gathered over Arjuna; sunlight broke over Karna. Kunti recognised her son and fainted. Kripa then asked the newcomer to name his parents and his lineage, so that Arjuna could decide whether to fight him, and Karna's head dropped. Duryodhana answered for him. A king is made by birth, by courage or by leading an army, he said, and if Arjuna will not fight a man who is not a king, I make him king of Anga. Karna was crowned on the spot and asked what he could give in return. Lasting friendship, said Duryodhana.

Then Adhiratha, the charioteer who had raised Karna, hurried in, trembling, and Karna, his hair still wet from the coronation, bowed his head to him. Bhima laughed. Pick up a driver's goad, as your family does, he told Karna; you deserve Anga no more than a dog deserves the offering at a sacrifice. Duryodhana flared: the sources of heroes, like the sources of rivers, are hard to know. The sun set on the quarrel.

Drona's fee was the capture of Drupada. The pupils rode on Panchala and brought Drupada to him captive, and the text credits Arjuna with the victory. Drona returned half his kingdom and asked again for his friendship, as one king to another. Drupada accepted, and never forgave him. Knowing he could not beat Drona by force, he set his heart on a son who could. So the arena sets the whole quarrel in place: a teacher's grudge, a rival declared Arjuna's equal by everyone except the rules of birth, and a friendship bought with a crown.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Drona — The brahmin teacher of both sets of princes, who takes his fee in a king's humiliation and a hunter's thumb, then commands the Kaurava army.
• Arjuna — The archer the whole war is arranged around, who arrives at its opening unable to lift his bow because of who is standing on the other side.
• Ekalavya — A hunter's son who taught himself archery before a clay image of Drona, and gave his right thumb when Drona asked for it as his fee.
• Karna — Kunti's first son, given away at birth and raised by a charioteer, who spends his life being told his skill does not outrank his upbringing.
• Duryodhana — The eldest Kaurava, who never disputes that the kingdom is contested and never concedes that this makes the Pandavas' claim equal to his.
• Theme: Birth and worth
• Theme: Kinship and enmity

Elsewhere in this parva

• The serpent sacrifice — The Mahabharata is first recited at a king's rite of revenge, while snakes fall into the fire for his father's death.
• Shakuntala and Dushyanta — A king who remembers his forest marriage perfectly well says he does not, until a voice from the sky names his son Bharata.
• The birth of the Kuru princes — A blind heir, a pale one and a renunciant's vow leave the succession contested before any of the cousins can walk.
• The house of lac — A guest house built to burn: the first attempt on the Pandavas' lives, and the escape that lets them be thought dead.
• Hidimba and Baka — Bhima kills two man-eaters and wins a rakshasi wife, and Kunti offers her own son to a demon to repay a host's kindness.
• Draupadi's svayamvara — An archery test won by a supposed dead man in disguise, and a mother's careless word that binds five brothers to one wife.
• The burning of Khandava — Arjuna and Krishna help Agni devour a whole forest, drive off Indra and the gods, and let only six creatures escape.

Questions to explore

• Why did Drona ask Ekalavya for his thumb?
• Why did Duryodhana make Karna king of Anga?
• What happened between Drona and Drupada?