Ambā's Retribution

Satyavatī bore Shantanu two sons, Chitrāngada and Vichitravīrya. The elder, Chitrāngada, a proud and powerful warrior, was killed in a long combat with a Gandharva; and so the younger, Vichitravīrya, still only a youth, came to the throne. And when the time came for Vichitravīrya to marry, Bhīshma, acting as ever for the house he had bound himself to serve, heard of the svayamvara, the bride-choosing, of the three princesses of Kāshī: Ambā, Ambikā, and Ambālikā.

And Bhīshma went to Kāshī, challenged all the assembled princes, defeated them, and carried the three sisters away in his chariot to Hastināpura, to be wed to Vichitravīrya. And from this forceful carrying-off came a tragedy, and a hatred that would reach all the way to the great war.

For the eldest sister, Ambā, had already given her heart to another: to King Sālva, whom she loved, and who she had hoped would win her at the svayamvara. And as they journeyed, Sālva had opposed Bhīshma to try to reclaim her, and Bhīshma had defeated him but spared his life. And now, arriving at Hastināpura, as the wedding was being prepared, Ambā came to Bhīshma and told him the truth: that she had already chosen Sālva in her heart, that Bhīshma had carried her off by force in ignorance of this, and that he should now do what was righteous.

And Bhīshma, acknowledging the justice of her plea, sent her with an honourable escort back to Sālva.

But Sālva rejected her. Bhīshma defeated me before all and carried you away, he said; I have been disgraced; I cannot now take you as my wife; go back to him. And so Ambā, sent back to Hastināpura, found that Vichitravīrya too would not have her, for her heart had been given to another; and she was refused by both, wanted by neither, ruined, as she saw it, through no fault of her own.

And her grief hardened into a burning hatred, and she fixed upon the one she held responsible for her whole ruin: Bhīshma, who had carried her off in the first place and set the whole disaster in motion.

She sought vengeance. She went first to Parashurāma, Bhīshma's own teacher, and moved by her anguish he took up her cause and fought Bhīshma, his own pupil, in a long and terrible combat; but the two were so equally matched that in the end even Parashurāma had to acknowledge that he could not defeat Bhīshma, and he advised Ambā to give up and throw herself on Bhīshma's mercy. But Ambā would not.

Her hatred had become the whole purpose of her existence, and she retired to the forest and undertook the most extreme austerities to win a boon from Lord Shiva, that she might herself become the instrument of Bhīshma's death. And Shiva granted it, giving her a garland of ever-fresh lotuses, and promising that whoever wore that garland would be the cause of Bhīshma's fall.

She hung the garland on the palace gate of King Drupada, and then, unwilling to wait a whole lifetime, she threw herself into a sacrificial fire, and was reborn as Drupada's child, Shikhaṇḍī, who would in time become a warrior and stand, at Kurukshetra, as the shield behind which Arjuna would at last bring down the mighty Bhīshma.

There is a sobering lesson threaded through Ambā's terrible story, and it is a warning about what a wholly justified grievance can become when it is nursed into hatred. Ambā was genuinely wronged; no one denies it; she was carried off, then rejected, then rejected again, her life ruined through the pride and the rigidity of men, and her anger was just.

And yet she let that just anger consume her so entirely that it became the single purpose not only of her life but of her death and her very rebirth; she gave herself wholly, across the boundary of death itself, to the one aim of vengeance. And the story lets us feel both the justice of her wrong and the terrible waste of a soul poured out entirely into hatred, so that a woman who deserved our pity becomes, in the end, an instrument of destruction, her whole being narrowed to a single vengeful point.

A wrong suffered is one thing; a life surrendered to avenging it is another; and Ambā's fate stands as a warning of what even a righteous grievance can make of us, if we let it become the whole of who we are.