In Indraprastha, things seem too good to be true — governance is sound, commerce is burgeoning, Arjuna has returned from self-imposed exile, and, to complete the happy picture, princes are being born. Krishna has stayed back after bringing in Subhadra’s dowry.
The effect of this kingdom-wide happiness (persistent for more than a decade) on the neighbouring kingdom of Hastinapura is never talked about in the epic. In fact, action rarely proceeds on two parallel strands. If we are following Arjuna’s exile, then it is not possible to cut back to the goings-on in Indraprastha or Hastinapura. In other words, we don’t know what happened with Duryodhana and his brothers during the years of Arjuna’s exile. The inference, of course, is that everything was fine.
Which brings us to the suggestion that things — governance, commerce, the birth of princes — were quite alright in Hastinapura as well. It would have been interesting, nevertheless, to know how the prominent Kouravas got married, the names of their children, how they saw the business of running a kingdom, and so on. With the intrigue-loving modern mindset, one can imagine these two neighbouring countries in a sort of cold war, spying on each other, with Vidura, siding with the Pandavas, being a mole in Hastinapura and running counter espionage networks. The possibilities for mythology-inspired fiction writers are enormous here.
Coming back from speculation to the action at hand, we have Arjuna and Krishna on a hot summer’s day, deciding to ‘sport’ in a garden near the banks of Yamuna. Draupadi and Subhadra accompany them, and there is a lot of dance, music, intoxication — general royal behaviour — that the four, and their friends and followers, indulge in.
The party is interrupted by a brahman who walks up to Krishna and Arjuna and makes a rather simple demand — of being fed. But his appetite is enormous, and requires an entire forest-worth of resources to be satiated!
The forest that Krishna and Arjuna are thus asked to burn down is the Khandava forest, whose feral, untameable nature had years ago compelled a scheming Dhritarashtra to give the Pandavas this particular part of the unified kingdom.
The duo set about to destroy the forest by plunging everything in a great fire. The fire’s intensity is compared to the fires at the end of yugas. This great, apocalyptic conflagration is notable in its senselessness, and the extraordinary loss of animal and plant life that ensues is not even satisfactorily explained as having been in the service of a greater good.
As if driven by the need for some sort of civilisation-spreading mission, of which the brahmana is the original champion, the two kshatriyas flatten an entire forest against the wishes of the gods, who do in fact descend to fight with them, only to get thoroughly spanked and having to transform their embarrassment into genuine wonder at the strength and valour of the destructive duo. In myths, too, the gods can’t stop man from ecological disasters.
(The writer is reading the unabridged Mahabharata)