Gāndhāra's Relationship with Hastināpura

To strengthen the alliances of Hastināpura, Bhīshma arranged the marriage of the blind Dhritarāshtra to Gāndhārī, the princess of Gāndhāra; and Gāndhārī, when she learned that the husband chosen for her had been born blind, made a vow of extraordinary devotion. She would not enjoy a sight that her husband was denied; and so she bound a cloth over her own eyes, blindfolding herself for life, choosing to share her husband's darkness rather than to see what he could not.

It was an act of remarkable dedication, and the story honours it; and yet there is a shadow in it too, for a queen who blindfolds herself cannot watch over her children, cannot see them going astray, cannot use a mother's sight to check their course; and Gāndhārī's chosen blindness, noble as it was, would leave her as unable as her blind husband to see and restrain the sons who would ruin them all.

But this marriage carried within it a deeper and more dangerous seed, a seed of hatred that would grow into the poison of the whole tragedy. For Gāndhārī had a brother, Shakuni, and Shakuni nursed a silent, unyielding hatred toward Bhīshma and the whole Kuru house. The reason lay in an old cruelty. The Kurus, it was said, had conquered Gāndhāra, and imprisoned its king, Subala, and all his sons, and set out to destroy them by slow starvation, giving the whole family only a single grain of rice each day.

Understanding that they were all meant to die, Subala chose his youngest and cleverest son, Shakuni, to survive and to carry out the family's revenge; and he made all his other sons give up their single grains to Shakuni, so that they starved the faster and Shakuni lived. And before he died, the old king broke Shakuni's ankle, crippling him for life, so that with every step he took, every day, Shakuni would feel the pain and remember the cruelty of Hastināpura and never let his hatred cool.

And from the bones of his dead father, the story says, Shakuni made a set of dice that obeyed his every command, always falling as he willed; and carrying these dice and his lifelong limp and his undying hatred, he came to the court of Hastināpura, where his sister was queen, and made himself the closest companion and the evil genius of her eldest son, Duryodhana, dedicating his whole cunning life to a single secret purpose: the absolute destruction, from within, of the Bharata race that had destroyed his own.

So the alliance that Bhīshma made to strengthen Hastināpura brought into its very heart the instrument of its ruin, a crippled schemer with a grievance that would never die, waiting patiently for the generation through whom he could work the vengeance of Gāndhāra.