The story

The dead were too many to burn one by one, and some of them had no one left to burn them.

Dhritarashtra asked Yudhishthira how many had fallen. Yudhishthira gave him a number that ran past a billion and a half, and then told him where they had gone. Those who gave up their bodies gladly in battle had reached worlds like Indra's. Those who fought on, believing they had to die, went to the gandharvas. Those who fell facing the enemy without weapons went to the world of Brahma. The old king asked how he could know this. Yudhishthira said that during the exile, on pilgrimage, the sage Lomasha had given him the power to see it.

Then Dhritarashtra asked about the bodies nobody would claim, the men whose families were dead or far away, whom the vultures were dragging about. Yudhishthira put Vidura, Sanjaya, his priest Dhaumya, Dhritarashtra's son Yuyutsu and the household servants to the work. They brought sandalwood and aloe wood, ghee and oil, linen and fragrant things, and they gathered the smashed chariots for fuel. They burned the kings with full rites: Duryodhana and his brothers, Abhimanyu, Drupada and Virata, Dhrishtadyumna and Shikhandi, the sons of Draupadi, Shakuni, Ghatotkacha, and Karna with his sons. For the unclaimed, Vidura had the bodies gathered into great heaps from every land and burned them by the thousand. All that night the chanting of the Vedas mixed with the crying of women, and the fires showed through the smoke like planets behind thin cloud.

In the morning they went down to the Ganga. The women took off their ornaments and upper cloths, and every family offered water to its dead, to fathers and grandsons, brothers, sons and husbands. The banks were crowded with widows, and the text says the river itself seemed to spread wider.

Then Kunti spoke, crying, in a low voice. The great warrior Arjuna had killed, she said, the one they had all taken for the son of a charioteer, the son of Radha, who had shone in the battle line like the sun: they must offer water to him too. He was their elder brother. She had borne him to the Sun, with his earrings and his armour.

The brothers heard it and began to grieve for Karna. Yudhishthira hissed like a snake. How could this man have been her son, he asked, and how could she have kept him covered, like a fire wrapped in cloth? By keeping her secret she had destroyed them. The deaths of Abhimanyu and Draupadi's sons, the fall of the Panchalas and the Kurus, all of it hurt him now a hundred times more, because of Karna. With Karna on their side, nothing even in heaven would have been out of reach, and this slaughter would never have happened. Then he poured the water for his brother himself, and sent for Karna's wives and household so that the rites could be done properly.

The family spent a month outside the city, and the account of Karna is finished at the start of the next book. The sage Narada came to the riverbank and asked Yudhishthira whether victory had made him happy. Yudhishthira said that this victory looked to him like defeat. He had learned that Kunti had gone to Karna before the war and that Karna had refused to change sides, promising only to spare four of her sons. He told Narada something else. In the dice hall, when Karna's harsh words had made him furious, his anger would fade whenever he looked at Karna's feet, because they were like his mother's. He had never been able to work out why.

Narada told him how his brother had been cursed. As a young man Karna had gone to Parashurama and claimed to be a brahmin of Bhrigu's line, to learn the brahmastra and so equal Arjuna. One day his teacher slept with his head in Karna's lap, and an insect bored into Karna's thigh. Karna bore the pain without moving, so as not to wake him. When Parashurama woke in the blood, he said no brahmin could have borne that pain. Karna confessed that he was a charioteer's son, and Parashurama cursed him: the weapon would desert him at the hour of his death, when he faced an equal. Another brahmin, whose sacrificial cow Karna had killed by accident, cursed him that the earth would swallow his chariot wheel in battle. Indra took his armour. Kunti took his promise. Bhishma belittled him, Shalya wore down his spirit, and Krishna's strategy did the rest. Your brother was cursed and cheated many times, Narada said. He died in battle. Do not grieve.

Kunti tried too. She had tried to tell Karna he was a Pandava, she said, and the Sun had told him in a dream, and he would not listen. Yudhishthira's answer is one line in the text. Your keeping of this secret has wounded me, he told her. Then, overcome by grief, he cursed women everywhere: from that day they would not be able to keep a secret.

The text does not defend the curse and does not dwell on it. It moves straight on to Yudhishthira's despair and his wish to give up the kingdom he has just won. But the water offering is the true end of Karna's story. He had been an enemy for the whole length of the war, and the man who killed him was his own brother. Now his brothers stood at the river and learned that their victory had been bought with his life. The last secret of the war came out only when nothing could be done with it, and that is why Yudhishthira's grief turns so quickly from Karna to the whole war.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Kunti — Mother of three Pandavas and, before any of them, of the son she set adrift on a river and had to watch her other children fight.
• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• 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.
• Dhritarashtra — The blind elder brother passed over for the throne and left holding it anyway, who can always see what his son is doing and never stops him.
• Vidura — The half-brother kept from the throne by his mother's rank, who gives the correct advice at every turn and is overruled at every turn.
• 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.
• Theme: Kinship and enmity
• Theme: Birth and worth
• Theme: Curse and consequence

Elsewhere in this parva

• The women on the field — Dhritarashtra crushes an iron Bhima, Gandhari's glance scars Yudhishthira, and her grief ends in a curse on Krishna's whole clan.

Questions to explore

• Why did Kunti wait until the water offerings to tell her sons about Karna?
• What curses did Narada say shaped Karna's death?
• Is Yudhishthira's curse on women really in the Mahabharata?