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The Ones We Call Good

I recently found out that my ritual name, the one written on my cheena when I was born, begins with ए. Not the name I grew up with, but the one chosen by my nakshatra, the letter the stars supposedly assigned me. I started going through names that begin with that letter, and I stopped at one: Eklavya.

I knew the outline of his story, the way most of us who grew up with the Mahabharata do. A forest boy, a great archer, a thumb. But I had never really sat with it. And the longer I did, the more it opened into a question I couldn’t let go of: what do we do when the wrongdoers in a story are the ones we’ve been taught to call good?

The boy at the edge of the story

Eklavya was the son of Hiranyadhanus, chief of the Nishadas, a forest tribe of hunters living outside the respectable caste order. He was a prince, but a prince of the wrong people.

As a young man, he went to Hastinapur to ask Dronacharya, the greatest teacher of weapons in the land, to train him. Drona refused. The Mahabharata is plain about why: Eklavya was a Nishada, and Drona taught the royal Kuru princes. Drona had also promised his favorite student, Arjuna, that no one would ever surpass him.

Eklavya didn’t argue. He went back to the forest, shaped a clay image of Drona, and practiced in front of it every day as if it were his living teacher. With no instruction but devotion and discipline, he became an archer of almost unbelievable skill.

One day the Kuru princes came hunting in the forest with a dog. The dog found Eklavya and kept barking at him. Without injuring it, Eklavya fired seven arrows into its open mouth in a single moment, sealing it shut. When the stunned princes found him and asked who he was, he said he was the son of Hiranyadhanus and a disciple of Drona.

Arjuna went straight to his teacher and reminded him of his promise.

So Drona came to the forest. Eklavya fell at his feet and offered him anything. Drona asked for guru dakshina, the payment a student owes his teacher, and named it: Eklavya’s right thumb, the thumb an archer needs to draw the bow.

The text says Eklavya cut it off with a cheerful face and handed it over. He could still shoot with his fingers, but never with the same speed. And Arjuna’s jealousy, the text says, was finally at peace.

Eklavya didn’t disappear. He became king of the Nishadas and stayed loyal to Jarasandha of Magadha, the alliance his father had served. Jarasandha was Krishna’s bitterest enemy, partly because Krishna had killed Kamsa, the husband of Jarasandha’s two daughters. So Eklavya fought on the side opposite Krishna and the Pandavas, the very people whose rise had cost him his thumb.

Later, during the Kurukshetra war, Krishna tells Arjuna that, for Arjuna’s sake, he arranged the deaths of great enemies like Jarasandha, Shishupala, and Eklavya. He says that if Eklavya had kept his thumb, no one could have defeated him, not even the gods. Later traditions fill in the rest: Krishna killed him in battle against the Yadavas, in some versions with a hurled rock.

Some later texts even claim Eklavya was born a Yadava, Krishna’s own cousin, abandoned as a baby and raised by the Nishadas. A popular modern belief says he was reborn as Dhrishtadyumna, the prince who killed Drona at Kurukshetra. Neither is in the core epic. But you can see why people want them to be true. The story leaves a wound, and people keep trying to close it.

The wound is still open. Among some Bhil communities in central India, archers traditionally draw the bow without the thumb, using the index and middle fingers, and many say it’s in Eklavya’s honor. And India gives its top coaches an award named after Dronacharya, which many people find deeply ironic for exactly this reason.

The good people

Here is what unsettles me. Nobody in Eklavya’s story is a villain in the usual sense. Drona is the revered teacher. Arjuna is the hero of the epic. Krishna is God. And between the three of them, an innocent, devoted, gifted outsider loses his thumb and then his life.

The same pattern runs through the whole Mahabharata. Take the dice game.

After Yudhishthira’s grand Rajasuya ceremony, Duryodhana was eaten up by jealousy. With his uncle Shakuni, a master of dice whose dice many retellings say were rigged, he planned a game to strip the Pandavas of everything. Gambling wasn’t a crime then. Dice was a royal pastime, and Kshatriya code said a king couldn’t refuse a challenge. That’s Yudhishthira’s excuse.

But the epic also says plainly that dice was his weakness. He lost his wealth, his kingdom, his brothers, and himself. Then he bet Draupadi.

The court fell silent. Bhima was so furious he wanted to burn Yudhishthira’s hands. And Draupadi asked the question nobody could answer: had Yudhishthira already lost himself before he bet her, and if so, what right did a slave have to stake his wife? Not Bhishma, not Drona, not one of the great elders could reply. That silence is the epic’s own verdict.

I’ll say what I honestly think: I blame the Pandavas even more than the Kauravas. The Kauravas showed you who they were, right in your face. Yudhishthira was called Dharmaraja, the king of righteousness. He had the best teachers, the best education, every resource a human being could ask for. And he still sat at that table and kept playing long after anyone with self control would have stood up.

The Kauravas set the trap. But a trap only works on someone with a weakness. Being trapped explains it. It doesn’t excuse it.

Even the exile proves the point. The Pandavas served 13 years, as agreed, and when they returned, Duryodhana refused to give back their kingdom. Krishna went himself to ask for peace, for just five villages. Duryodhana refused to give even as much land as fits on the point of a needle. Of course he did. These were the men who had tried to burn the Pandavas alive in a house of lac and poisoned Bhima as a boy. Expecting them to return a kingdom honorably was its own kind of blindness.

And Yudhishthira’s righteousness had cracks right to the end. At Kurukshetra, he told the half lie that Ashwatthama was dead, knowing it would break Drona. The text says his chariot, which had always floated slightly above the ground because of his truthfulness, sank to the earth at that moment. When he finally reached heaven, he was first shown a vision of hell, payment for that lie.

The same pattern, today

I recently thought of a Hindi film, Badlapur, directed by Sriram Raghavan. Varun Dhawan plays Raghu, whose wife and son are killed when two bank robbers hijack their car. One of them, Liak, played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, goes to prison, and Raghu spends years planning revenge.

The film is designed to make you root for Raghu, then slowly realize the man you were cheering for has become worse than the man he hates. Raghu kills Liak’s partner Harman and also Harman’s wife Kanchan, who had nothing to do with his loss. He cruelly exploits Jhimli, Liak’s girlfriend, simply because she’s connected to him.

When they finally face each other, Liak says something I haven’t been able to forget, in his own words, but the meaning is this: I was an uneducated man, panicking in a car with a screaming woman and nowhere to run. You’re educated, respectable, in your right mind, and you killed innocent people in cold blood. Maybe you’re the one who needs help.

Liak isn’t innocent. His guilt starts earlier than that car. It starts the moment he picked up a gun to rob a bank. The panic didn’t come from nowhere. He created the moment in which an innocent woman was almost certain to get hurt. Every choice we make leads to something. That, by the way, is the original meaning of karma: before it meant cosmic reward and punishment, it simply meant action, and the chain of consequences each action sets moving.

But there’s a difference between the two men, and it’s the same difference I see between the Kauravas and Yudhishthira. Liak never pretends to be good. Raghu does, and society agrees with him, because he’s educated, respectable, and the victim.

This is an old moral idea. Aristotle argued that people who act knowingly and deliberately deserve more blame than those who act in ignorance or panic. The law agrees: a planned killing is murder, while a killing in a moment of panic is judged differently. The Bible puts it simply: to whom much is given, much will be required.

Education, birth, wealth, and power don’t excuse wrongdoing. They raise the standard.

And then there is Krishna

This is the hardest part for me.

If Krishna were simply a man, born on earth with no idea of who he really was, I could forgive his choices the way I forgive any human being caught in politics, loyalty, and war. The tradition actually has that kind of god. In the Ramayana, when the gods tell Rama he is Vishnu, his answer is, roughly, that he considers himself a man, the son of Dasharatha. Rama lives as a human.

Krishna is different. He knows. He reveals his universal form to Arjuna in the Gita, and earlier in the Kuru court when Duryodhana tries to arrest him. In the Gita, he tells Arjuna that he has already destroyed the warriors on the battlefield, and Arjuna is only his instrument.

And Krishna’s methods aren’t clean. Bhishma falls because Arjuna shoots from behind Shikhandi, knowing Bhishma won’t fight him. Drona dies after the lie about his son. Karna is killed while trying to free his stuck chariot wheel, unarmed. Duryodhana is struck below the waist, against the rules of mace combat, and Krishna’s own brother Balarama is furious about it.

To be fair, believers have answers. In the Gita, Krishna says he comes whenever dharma declines, to protect the good and destroy the wicked. He never claims to be neutral. Taking sides is the whole point. The Mahabharata also says the truth of dharma is hidden, as if in a cave: the rules exist for an ordinary world, and God acts for a larger order the rules can’t see. And the Kauravas broke every rule first.

Even on caste, Krishna’s record is mixed. He grew up among cowherds, and he refused Duryodhana’s royal feast to eat simply at the home of Vidura, the son of a maidservant. Yet in the Gita, he says he created the four varnas. People have argued for centuries over whether he meant birth or qualities and actions.

But none of these answers touches Eklavya. Eklavya didn’t cheat at dice. He didn’t humiliate Draupadi. He didn’t try to burn anyone alive. He was innocent, and his loss was simply convenient for the winning side. And Krishna, who knew everything, said so himself.

There’s an ancient question, first asked by Plato: is something good because God does it, or does God do it because it is good? If whatever Krishna does is good simply because he’s God, then the word “good” stops meaning anything. Anything he did would count. But if goodness is a standard outside God, then we can judge him by it. And by that standard, what happened to Eklavya fails.

Maybe the answer is that the Mahabharata never claimed God was a moral role model in every act. In the Gita’s eleventh chapter, Krishna reveals himself as Time itself, the destroyer of worlds, devouring warriors on both sides. That isn’t a kind, fair person. It’s the whole of reality, creation and destruction together. Some traditions call his actions lila, divine play, beyond our ideas of right and wrong.

But the epic doesn’t let Krishna off either. After the war, Gandhari, who lost all hundred of her sons, curses him for letting the slaughter happen when he could have stopped it. Krishna accepts the curse. Decades later, his whole clan destroys itself, and Krishna dies alone in the forest, struck by the arrow of a hunter named Jara.

A forest hunter’s arrow kills the god who arranged the fall of the forest archer. I don’t think that’s an accident.

Unlearning

I don’t know how to end this with a verdict, and maybe I shouldn’t.

Jain philosophy has an idea called anekantavada: truth has many sides, and no single viewpoint holds all of it. It’s the old image of the blind men and the elephant, each one touching a different part and each one certain he knows the whole animal. When I look at Eklavya, Yudhishthira, Raghu, and Krishna, I’m touching one part of the elephant.

So I don’t think wisdom means refusing to judge. I’ve judged plenty in this essay. What happened to Eklavya was wrong. Yudhishthira was more responsible because he knew better. Deliberate cruelty is worse than panic. But wisdom means judging carefully, and staying willing to be wrong. Sometimes we conclude things out of emotion or ego, in the heat of the moment. That’s human. What matters is being able to unlearn, and relearn, when we see a side we missed.

Maybe that’s why Eklavya’s story has survived thousands of years. The Mahabharata could have quietly left him out. It didn’t. It kept the injustice right there, for every generation to see and feel uneasy about. The epic doesn’t protect its heroes, its teachers, or even its God from that unease.

And that might be its deepest lesson. The ones we call good are not always good. Sometimes the person paying the price is the one standing quietly at the edge of the story, holding a bow he can no longer fully draw.