A story about Karna’s childhood and education in the Mahabharata, including his tutelage under Dronacharya and later Parshuram. Also featuring a budding friendship with Duryodhan, and a budding rivalry with Arjun.
Introduction
Welcome to “Stories From India”. This is a podcast that will take you on a journey through the rich mythology, folklore and history of the Indian subcontinent. I am Narada Muni, the celestial storyteller and the original “time lord”. With my ability to travel through space and time, I can bring you exciting and fascinating stories from the past, the present, and the future. From the epic tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana to the folktales of the Panchatantra to stories of Akbar-Birbal and Tenali Raman, I have a story for every occasion.
The purpose of the stories is neither to pass judgment nor to indoctrinate. My goal is only to share these stories with people who may not have heard them before and to make them more entertaining for those who have.
Today’s Story
In this episode, we’re finally going to talk about Karna. I know many of you have been asking to hear Karna’s story since we first started on the Mahabharata. But now we’ve reached a point where it certainly does make sense to cover it.
The Story So Far
First, I’ll recap the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is of the two greatest epics from India. It started with Bhishma, who was the crown prince of Hastinapur. Bhishma gave everything up – he gave up his right to the throne, his right to marry, his right to have children – all because his father had discovered romance at a time in his life when he should have been thinking of tirth yatras. Teerth yatras in case you don’t know are journeys to some religious sites in India, something that people aim to undertake in their retirement years. Bhishma’s promise meant only the unborn children of Satyavati, his new stepmother, would sit on the throne.
But though they did try to sit on the throne, they couldn’t for very long. Tragedy after tragedy struck the family. Ultimately the situation evolved into too much confusion. Satyavati’s grandchild Dhritarashtra, was born blind, but he became the ruler anyway because his brother Pandu abdicated and later passed away. Dhritarashtra’s was a largely ceremonial role. Bhishma did most of the actual administration, as he had sworn to do in support of whoever sat on the throne. The problem in the dynasty for several generations was a lack of successors. But now it had changed to almost the opposite. Dhritarashtra had over a hundred children. And Pandu had 5 sons. Unbeknownst to them there was one person who was older than all of Dhritarashtra’s and Pandu’s children. And that was Karna. Karna had been born to Kunti, Pandu’s wife. But because that happened before Kunti even married Pandu, she kept it a secret. She thought she was protecting her family honor by secretly casting the baby downriver.
And in Hastinapur all of Dhritarashtra’s and Pandu’s children were physically healthy, and qualified to be emperor. But the real problem was no one bothered to clarify if Pandu’s son Yudhishtir should rule or if Dhritarashtra’s son Duryodhan should rule instead. Yudhishthir was older than Duryodhan, but Duryodhan was the eldest son of the current emperor. This problem was at the heart of the Mahabharata and the reason for a lot of lives lost.
The Pandavas and the Kauravas grew up under the tutelage of first Kripacharya and later Dronacharya. And each child found something to be passionate about. Arjun the Pandava was the expert archer. Bhima, also a Pandava, and Duryodhan were each the strongest amongst their siblings.
In fact, we’ve just overshot the story a bit. So we’re going to rewind slightly and go back to the baby that Kunti sent sailing downriver. We’ll pick up the story right at that moment.
If you want to hear previous episodes, check out the links in the show notes and on the site sfipodcast.com
A tear-less farewell
As she stood by the riverside Kunti gazed at her baby sleeping peacefully in his basket. The boy looked as radiant as the Sun. This was natural. His father was the Sun God. Surya. Even his golden armored chest plate and his earrings shone with almost the brilliance of the Sun itself. And that’s quite expected because Gold gleams and glitters in sunlight.
She hesitated a last time. Not because she was having second thoughts about sending her baby to certain doom. But because she didn’t remember if she removed all the labels identifying her as the mother. She was already taking a huge risk being here. What if someone saw her? It would be worse than if she had been caught taking care of the baby back in the palace. This wasn’t just a mistake anymore. She was now escalating it into a full blown crime. Her punishment would escalate from a metaphoric slap on the wrist to an actual slap on the wrist, neither of which she was looking forward to.
Quickly, Kunti put the basket down in the river. Hopefully the basket would float long enough so that she wouldn’t have to witness the terrible outcome of her actions. She hadn’t bothered packing any food for the baby. Naturally. Or any water. What was the point? Soon enough, the baby would not be complaining about the lack of water.
Quickly, she placed the basket in the water and rushed away from the scene. The baby did not cry. Just before boarding her chariot she turned around to make sure that the basket was definitely out of view. She would look pretty foolish if was stalled by the river bank not two feet from where she had cast it off.
Baby Karna sets sail
The basket had not stalled. It flowed down the Aswa river without incident. It seems like fortune smiled down upon Karna that day. His basket narrowly missed every rock and tree trunk in the river. The river Aswa merged into the river Charmanwati, which some of you may know as the modern day Chambal river. When the Charmanwati merged with the Yamuna, and later the Yamuna with the Ganga, the basket continued on smoothly. Now it might seem remarkable that the basket did go unnoticed all this while. That’s not because there weren’t any people by the riverbank. On the contrary, there were far too many people. There were people washing clothes, there were industrial workers dumping toxic waste in the river, and there were people bathing in the same river, on their teerth yatras praying to the gods for a good thorough cleansing. Obviously, cleansing only of the soul.
All of these people had too many worries on their mind, and none of them bothered to check the basket. The only one who did was a woman. But because she was a recent mother too, who had secretly come to cast away her own baby, she didn’t bother to take in Karna. This lady did get tempted by Karna’s golden chest plate and earrings, but she couldn’t get it off of the baby. Just as well, she thought as she saw both baskets floating away. It would be hard to explain to the pawnbroker where she had gotten the gold from. Especially seeing as the only pawnbroker in her town was her own father.
Radha and Adhiratha
Finally, there was someone who took a genuine interest in the basket. This person was Radha. This is not the same Radha who was the avatar of Lakshmi and Krishna’s chief consort. Instead this is Radha, the ordinary wife of an ordinary charioteer. Adhiratha, her husband, was a charioteer. He’d trained to be driving chariots for royals – at the moment though he was freelancing. Maybe if you were around in Ancient India you might have seen his advertisements posted here and there – Adhiratha’s Chariot Service – with express service to all major ports, river banks, and temples.
The couple were childless. If Radha had been a Queen of Hastinapur, she would doubtless have been able to find a passing rishi to finagle some children out of them, directly or indirectly, as Kunti, Gandhari, and Satyavati had been able to. But being very poor, all they could do was to pray to the gods and hope for the best.
When Radha saw that the basket contained a baby, clearly unwanted by its mother, she dared to hope that this was an answer to her prayers. And when she realized that the baby was a boy, her patriarchal upbringing made her breathe a huge sigh of relief.
After that, Radha and Adhiratha rejoiced with their new baby boy. They tried tracing the origins of the baby of course but didn’t get very far in their search before they decided to give up and focus on educating their new son instead.
Karna Grows up
Karna grew up after that. Radha and Adhirath did have another son, but we can talk about him another time. There were a couple of things about big brother Karna that Radha and Adhiratha thought were a little unusual. The boy had a sort of grace that seemed unusual. Almost as if he was of divine origin. For one thing, the Sun shined on him. Quite literally. If there were clouds, they dispersed as soon as Karna went out to play. This did not get unnoticed by the other villagers. To the point that the panchayat requested Karna be kept indoors otherwise their farms were never getting irrigated with rainwater.
The association with the Sun did not end there. Once, Radha could have sworn the Sun appeared to be waving to the boy, and the boy waved back. She dared not reveal this to anyone. They would think she’d gone crazy. She must have imagined it after all.
Another unusual thing about Karna was his chest shield and his earrings – Kavach and Kundal as they were called in Sanskrit. It seemed impossible for anyone to take those off. Not even at bath time. They were always there and they always protected him. The other day when some older kids at school got a little rough with him, they got the shock of their lives when they tried to punch him in the chest and broke their hands instead.
Throughout his childhood, Karna’s foster parents were transparent with him about his origin. They freely admitted that they weren’t his birth parents. While they often told him they loved him and he was wanted, Karna never came to peace with the realization that his birth mother had abandoned him. That was an important part of his identity. And because he never really stopped thinking about it, it would influence some of his later decisions.
Karna gets Career Advice
Karna showed immense skills with weapons. The teachers in his village school felt the classroom was too small a place to contain his talent. They recommended higher education. The boy deserved to go to the best school of all – Dronacharya University. They had a program in Weapons Science with advanced archery classes from Dronacharya himself! Radha and Adhiratha were skeptical about being able to afford it all, but the teacher assured them that Dronacharya ran an evening school as well, which was a lot more affordable than being able to study in the company of the Pandava and Kaurav princes during the day. Apparently Dronacharya also offered a full scholarship to interested students.
Karna’s teacher was not wrong. Dronacharya made scholarship decisions based on talent, and not based on who the prospective student’s parents were.
Karna getting accepted into Dronacharya University was a pretty big deal. Even if he did get admitted into the non-royal program it was still a pretty big deal. The syllabus was the same. And the program did not suffer the neglect that you mind in extension programs from modern Universities. So there was no palming off the teaching task to Teaching Assistants, and no watching pre-recorded videos. Karna got a pretty solid education.
Karna at Dronacharya University
He improved his skills immensely under Dronacharya’s half-hearted tutelage. Though scholarship decisions were certainly made irrespective of the parents’ economic status, the way he taught was not, I guess. Karna went toe-to-toe with Arjun on practically everything. They were part of different cohorts, but you know how it is at University. You still hang out with the other students – to share notes, to help with homework, and to criticize the professors. That’s how Karna started to get to know the Pandavas and the Kauravas, from a distance at first. But Duryodhan welcomed him further into their midst. It’s impossible to know exactly what Duryodhan’s motives were. Some say, it was purely friendship. But the more likely explanation is that he needed something to counter the whole teacher’s pet thing that Arjun had got going with Dronacharya. When not a single Kaurav was proving to be competent in Archery, it was natural for the eldest Kaurav to look outside of his sibling.
Though Karna competed heavily with Arjun and even managed to match Arjun’s accomplishments on the training grounds, he never really impressed Dronacharya quite the way Arjun had. Case in point was the crocodile incident.
Dronacharya and the Crocodile
It happened on a regular school morning, where Dronacharya was readying to teach his students the dynamics of an arrow when hitting an underwater target. This wasn’t a theoretical lesson. That is why they were doing this by the riverbank. The Guru was waist-deep in the water explaining the impact of water on the velocity of the arrow. The students all stood by listening patiently. Some of them were bored of course. Naturally when you teach over a hundred children all at once, some of them miss the courtside view.
Just then something happened. Dronacharya’s monotonous drawl took on an interesting turn. “Let’s label the angle of incidence of the arrow on the water surface as theta. Now, ignoring any ripples on the water, like this very big one here… OUCH! HELP, a Crocodile has got my leg. HELP ME!”
Some of the backbencher Kauravs thought it was part of the program and continued being bored. The ones in the front though could clearly see that their guru was right. There was a massive Crocodile and it had indeed grabbed Dronacharya by the thigh. Some of the princes screamed and ran around confused. Some of them were trying to avoid other crocodiles that must surely be around. Others, like Yudhishthir were shocked at seeing their Guru in this position.
Arjun to the rescue
While the bulk of the audience was either frozen or in flight mode, there was one notable exception. Of course that was Arjun. Arjun had grabbed his bow and his arrows. He didn’t have to worry about accidentally hitting Dronacharya instead of the Crocodile. He was confident in his aim. Or maybe he thought that even if he hit Dronacharya it couldn’t put his professor in any worse situation than he already was in. Either way, Arjun fired off 5 arrows and neatly sliced the Crocodile in a way that would have certain modern day PETA activists in an uproar.
With the corpse of the Crocodile floating in pieces, the other princes finally calmed down. One Kaurav prince ventured so far as to suggest that the crocodile was large enough that they could all have new shoes made for the entire class. Even the Pandavas, why not?
The Princes were bursting with questions but no one dared to ask him. Why hadn’t he tackled the Crocodile himself? He could pierce a twig with another twig as we saw in Episode 127. Couldn’t he have turned a handful of water into a diamond sword or something? Or shoot a lightning bolt at the Crocodile? Or failing all that, couldn’t he have just given the crocodile a lesson in angle of incidences and density of the water and aerodynamic coefficients? That would make it yawn for sure, and then he could have escaped.
Dronacharya answered the unspoken questions himself. Of course he could have done all that. He could have wrestled the Crocodile with his bare hands. But the moment he saw that the Crocodile was attacking he decided to test his students. And guess what, only one student had passed. Just like the last time with that Bird’s eye in Episode 150. Arjun had not panicked and he had done the most expedient thing – which was to defend his teacher.
Dronacharya hands Arjun a prize
And for that, Arjun would be receiving a prize. The prize was that Dronacharya would teach Arjun how to withdraw a Brahmastra. We’ve done a description of Brahmastras recently on another episode, and we’ll cover that again in the show notes. But the tl;dr is that these are projectile weapons that can cause immeasurable destruction.
“You mean how to launch Brahmastras?” asked Bheem in clarification.
But no. Dronacharya meant how to withdraw them. He had already made up his mind previously to teach Arjun how to launch them. Today he decided he would teach him how to withdraw them.
That didn’t make much sense. You’d expect to have to learn how to withdraw them even before you learned how to launch them. If you couldn’t it opens the room for a lot of embarrassing training accidents. But Dronacharya had his reasons. In fact later, Ashwatthama, his son would possess the knowledge to launch a Brahmastra but not to withdraw it. Something that will play an important role later in the Mahabharata. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves.
Karna’s objection
Karna said that he had not fled or frozen up. He had readied his bow and arrows too. Arjun just beat him by a second. In his mind, he deserved to learn about launching a brahmastra too. He was totally cool with it if Dronacharya skipped the withdrawal lesson.
But because he wasn’t a prince no one paid him any attention. Except Duryodhan. But then Duryodhan didn’t have the courage to speak up. He was worried that if he said anything, it might only recall to everyone’s mind his mad, almost comic, dash away from the crocodile.
Karna looks for a new teacher
Karna did what any student would do if they felt other students were getting preferential treatment. He sought out another teacher. And this time he picked none other than Parshuram himself.
Parshuram is an avatar of Vishnu as well. If you’re wondering why I’m referring to him in the present tense – it’s because he’s alive and well. I met him for lunch recently. He was telling me he was getting a little annoyed with humankind in general and couldn’t wait for Vishnu’s next avatar, Kalki, to appear on the scene. So that Parshuram could train him and be done with this Yuga.
Karna learns from Parshuram
Anyway, Parshuram had a different criteria than Dronacharya. He refused to train any person who was a warrior, you know if they were descended from a King or a Queen. Karna didn’t know that he was descended from a royal family. But he didn’t disclose that he wasn’t sure. He went to Parshuram in the clothes of a scholar. He didn’t want to face the same bias he had from Dronacharya. Just keep in mind that anytime anyone tries to be less than transparent with an avatar of Vishnu, bad things happen. You’ll see soon enough why that is.
Parshuram accepted Karna and taught him a lot. Including the Brahmastra. And Karna did really well. Parshuram and Karna never got to the Dronacharya and Arjun level of a student-teacher relationship, but they did much better than average.
A bee in Karna’s bonnet was actually a wasp!
One day, Parshuram decided to take a power nap in the forest after a long lesson. Seeing as they didn’t have any soft pillows for his Guru to rest his head on – the generous Karna offered his thigh as a headrest. Parshuram accepted and was snoring within seconds. Karna sat there motionless, not even daring to breathe too much in case he disturbed his master.
So imagine his plight then, when a wasp came and landed on Karna’s other leg. It stung him several times and even tried to bore a hole for its future home. But Karna still dared not move to avoid disturbing the sleeping Parshuram.
Parshuram curses Karna
When Parshuram finally woke up, he was disturbed by the sight of all that blood and Karna’s badly swollen leg. Hearing the story, Parshuram concluded that Karna was not who he said he was. A scholar, like Karna had claimed to be, could not have tolerated so much pain. He must be a warrior. This was news to Karna too. Maybe that’s why he did so well in archery. It must have been in his DNA.
Regardless of what Karna had done for his guru, Parshuram realized that Karna had been deceiving him. Even if Karna did not know about his warrior origin, he definitely tried to pass himself off as a scholar, a brahmin. That was not okay. So Parshuram cursed Karna that though he had acquired all this knowledge from Parshuram, he was going to forget all of this in a moment of his life when it would be most likely to help him. And because that moment involved Krishna, another avatar of Vishnu, you have to wonder if this was a secret agreement between Parshuram and Krishna. Being contemporaneous avatars of Vishnu, they must have some secret communication thing going. I tried asking Vishnu, but he refused to say.
That’s all for now
Some notes on the show
I’ll add my usual reminder about the Mahabharata. There are no heroes and villains in this great epic. There are just people acting in certain ways. Sometimes those actions have terrible consequences, and sometimes they have pleasant results.
An astra is a projectile weapon, like an Arrow. As I explained earlier in Episode 182, a Brahmastra is a special kind of projectile weapon that has extreme superpowers. Think of it as a missile that is capable of destroying everything, potentially even the entire Universe. Once it locks on a target, it will pursue the target across space and time and escape is impossible except if the person launching it knows how to withdraw it and chooses to do so.
No prizes for guessing who created this incredibly destructive weapon. Who else but my dad, Brahma the creator of the Universe? That should not be a surprise given Brahma created everything else in the Universe. You have to take the good with the bad.
Previous Mahabharata episodes are linked in the show notes on the site sfipodcast.com, check them out
Other Mahabharat episodes we have covered before:
Episode 59 – River of Dreams
Episode 60 – Down By The River
Episode 68 – Waiting
Episode 69 – Father and Son
Episode 70 – The Art of the Deal
Episode 83 – Mahabharata – The Groom Reveal Party
Episode 84 – Mahabharata – A Princess Scorned
Episode 91 – Mahabharata – Amba
Episode 96 – Mahabharata – Vyas Ex Machina
Episode 105 – Mahabharata – Four Weddings and a Birth
Episode 108 – Mahabharata – Oh, deer!
Episode 115 – Mahabharata – How to raise a family
Episode 127 – Mahabharata – Kripacharya University
Episode 139 – Mahabharata – Duryodhan poisons Bhima
Episode 150 – Mahabharata – Arjun and Dronacharya
Episode 161 – Mahabharata – Ekalavya
Episode 181 – Mahabharata – Crown Prince
Check out these other Mahabharat Episodes too, some of which are peripherally linked to the main storyline, including
Episode 27 – The Rise of Shukra
Episode 28 – His Girl Friday
Episode 31 – Death Cheater
Episode 37 – A Fishy Engagement
Episode 120 – Mahabharata – Nala and Damayanti
Episode 175 – Mahabharata – Shibi
Episode 176 – Mahabharata – Tilottama
That’s all for now.
Next Time
A couple of you listeners asked for a story about Brahma. So we’ll do one but interestingly this one isn’t from India. Yes, you heard that right. This story is from Indonesia, and it explains some of the geography of that country. Now I know this podcast isn’t “Stories from Indonesia”, but seeing as how Brahma and all the characters are central figures in this story, I think it makes sense to cover it on this show.
Feedback
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A big thank you to each of you for your continued support and your feedback.
The music is from Purple Planet.
Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time!