Pāṇḍu and Dhritarāshtra

Because Dhritarāshtra had been born blind, he was barred by the royal law from inheriting the crown, for a blind man could not perform all the duties of a king; and so it was the younger brother, Pāṇḍu, who ascended the throne of Hastināpura, while Dhritarāshtra remained in the palace, sightless, brooding, and nursing within him a deep and unspoken attachment to the power he had been denied and the world he could not see.

That thwarted attachment, quiet now, would grow across the years into the fatal weakness of his later life: his inability to deny his sons anything, his blindness of heart to match the blindness of his eyes.

Pāṇḍu was a capable and victorious king, who extended the borders of the realm, and he married two wives, Kuntī and Mādrī. But his glorious reign was cut short by a single tragic error, and it was an error of exactly the careless kind that we saw destroy Dasharatha in the other epic. Hunting in the forest, Pāṇḍu shot a pair of deer as they mated, not knowing that they were in truth a sage, Kindama, and his wife, who had taken the form of deer.

And the dying sage, in his agony, pronounced a curse upon the king: that if ever Pāṇḍu should seek intimacy with either of his wives, he would die on that very instant.

It was a curse that struck at the root of a king's life, for it denied him the children who must carry on his line. And Pāṇḍu, stricken with remorse for the careless killing and unable to bear the burden of kingship under such a shadow, abdicated his throne, and retired to the forest with his two wives to live in penance. In his absence, Dhritarāshtra was made caretaker king, ruling Hastināpura under the watchful guidance of Bhīshma and the wise Vidura.

And in the forest, Pāṇḍu grieved over his childlessness, the curse that denied him heirs, until Kuntī revealed to him that she possessed a secret and a power that might yet give them sons: a divine mantra, granted to her long ago, whose story must now be told.