Arjunaअर्जुन

Arjuna is in a deity encyclopedia for a specific reason, and it is worth giving up front, because otherwise he belongs in the Mahabharata's.

He is Nara.

In the tradition's own account, Nara and Narayana are an eternal pair of sages — two who are one — performing austerity at Badarikashrama in the Himalaya since before the ages began. Narayana is Vishnu. Nara is the human one. And the Mahabharata states, repeatedly and in its own voice, that Krishna and Arjuna are those two, born together again. They are worshipped as a pair at Badrinath, which is a Char Dham site, and the shrine is not a modern courtesy — it is the reason the place is called Badari.

So Arjuna is not merely a hero. He is the human half of a divine pair, and the whole of his story is about what that costs.

His other claim is larger and everybody knows it. At Kurukshetra, with both armies drawn up and the conches already blown, Arjuna looked across at his cousins, his teachers and his grandfather, and put his bow down on the floor of the chariot and said he would not do it. What his charioteer said to him in reply is the Bhagavad Gita.

Everything in that text — seven hundred verses, eighteen chapters, the most widely read Hindu scripture in the world — exists because one man refused to fight. The Gita is not a sermon delivered to an audience; it is an argument with a specific person who has broken down, and its shape is dictated by his objections, which he keeps raising, and which Krishna keeps answering.

He is also the finest archer in the epic, the winner of Draupadi, a year spent living as a woman, the father of Abhimanyu who dies at sixteen, and a man who is killed, late in life, by his own son — and who is on the receiving end of more divine instruction than any other figure in Hindu literature.

Nara and Narayana. The older layer, and the one that makes him a deity. The Mahabharata, the Bhagavata and the Harivamsa all identify the pair: two sages, sons of Dharma, inseparable, in austerity at Badari. They are named as an avatar of Vishnu in the Bhagavata's own list. The epic says of Krishna and Arjuna that they are these two — nara-nārāyaṇau — and does so at the decisive moments, including in the Gita itself.

The theology this encodes is not subtle and is rather beautiful: the divine and the human are a pair who do not separate. One drives; one fights; both are eternal; neither is complete alone.

The epic Arjuna. Third of the Pandavas, son of Kunti by Indra, taught by Drona, and from the beginning the best. The Mahabharata is not shy about it — the bird's eye, the tests, the contest for Draupadi.

The five years in heaven. Uniquely among mortals in the epic, Arjuna goes to his father's house. Indra brings him to Amaravati for five years, where he receives celestial weapons and learns music and dance from the gandharva Chitrasena — an education that becomes, later, the thing that saves the Pandavas' exile.

The curse that is a boon. The apsara Urvashi approaches him and he refuses her, addressing her as a mother of his line. She curses him to be a eunuch, or to lose his manhood; Indra softens it to one year, of his choosing. He spends the thirteenth year of exile at Virata's court as Brihannala, teaching dance and music to the princess, wearing bangles, his hair braided.

That episode is treated in the epic without mockery and with some tenderness, and it is worth noting in a tradition often described as having no room for such a thing. The Bahuchara Mata page carries India's modern legal position on gender; Arjuna's year is a story, not a template, and the encyclopedia does not conflate the two.

The Gita. Composed as part of the Bhishma Parva, generally dated to somewhere in the range of the second century BCE to the second century CE, and the single most translated and commented text of the tradition — Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Jnaneshwar, Tilak, Gandhi and Aurobindo all wrote on it, and disagreed.

And the Gita's problem, stated honestly. It is a text in which God persuades a man to fight a war. It has been read as allegory — the battlefield as the self, the enemies as the passions — by an enormous devotional tradition, and read literally by others, including, in the twentieth century, by people who wanted a warrant for violence. Gandhi, who called it his dictionary of daily reference, insisted on the allegorical reading and built a doctrine of nonviolence on the book. That disagreement is inside Hinduism, not between Hinduism and its critics, and this page does not settle it.

A bow, a chariot, and a charioteer who is God.

The chariot group. The image most Indians can draw from memory: four white horses, Krishna at the reins turned back to speak, Arjuna behind him — and, crucially, in most renderings Arjuna's bow is down, not drawn. The composition depicts the conversation, not the battle. Hanuman is on the banner.

The Gandiva. An enormous bow; two inexhaustible quivers on his back.

Fair-skinned. Arjuna means white, clear, bright — like arjuna the tree and the silver of the same root. Where colour is used, he is pale and Krishna is dark, deliberately paired.

Kirata-Arjuna. The great sculptural subject: Arjuna in austerity, one leg raised, emaciated, and Shiva as a tribal hunter with a bow, disputing a boar. The Arjuna's Penance relief at Mamallapuram — a whole cliff face, thirty metres of it, with elephants and ascetics and a descending river — is one of the largest bas-reliefs in the world and is named for him, though whether it depicts his penance or Bhagiratha's has been argued for a century.

As Brihannala. In Kerala's Kathakali and in temple sculpture: braided, bangled, in a dancer's costume.

As Nara. At Badrinath and in Nara-Narayana images: two sages together, deerskin and matted hair, indistinguishable but for the colour.

Distinguishing him. With a charioteer, it is Arjuna. In penance with a hunter, it is Kiratarjuniya. Two identical sages in the Himalaya, one dark, are Nara and Narayana.

Arjuna. White, bright, clear.

Nara. The eternal sage; the human half of Nara-Narayana; worshipped at Badrinath. This is the form that puts him in this encyclopedia.

Partha. Son of Pritha, which is Kunti's other name — the name the Gita uses most.

Dhananjaya (winner of wealth), Savyasachi (ambidextrous — he draws with either hand), Gudakesha (conqueror of sleep), Kiriti (crowned, by Indra), Jishnu, Phalguna, Vijaya, Bibhatsu. The Mahabharata has him recite his own ten names at Virata, which is the epic's own list.

Brihannala. The year at Virata's court.

Nara-Narayana. The pair, counted among Vishnu's avatars in the Bhagavata's enumeration. The Dashavatara page carries the longer lists.

Not Arjuna Kartavirya — Kartavirya Arjuna, the thousand-armed Haihaya king killed by Parashurama, is a completely different person, and the confusion is common enough that the Parashurama page flags it too.

Not the arjuna tree, Terminalia arjuna, though it shares the root and is named for the same whiteness of its bark.

Putting the bow down. Both armies are drawn up. Arjuna asks his charioteer to take him into the space between them so that he can see who he is about to fight, and what he sees is his family: Bhishma who raised him, Drona who taught him, cousins, uncles, the boys he grew up with. His limbs give way, his mouth dries, the Gandiva slips from his hand, and he says he will not do it — and then, being Arjuna, he argues the case: that the war will destroy the lineage, that destroying the lineage destroys its rites, that the women will be corrupted and the ancestors fall.

What follows is not consolation. Krishna takes each objection seriously and answers it, and the conversation moves from duty to the self to action to devotion to the Vishvarupa, where Arjuna asks to see and then, having seen, asks him to stop — one of the very few passages in world literature in which a man is given exactly what he requested and cannot bear it.

At the end Krishna does not command. He says: I have told you what I know; reflect on it fully; and then do as you choose. And Arjuna picks up the bow.

Khandava. Early, and much less comfortable. Agni, needing to consume the Khandava forest, is prevented by Indra's rain; Krishna and Arjuna undertake to hold Indra off, and do, and the forest and everything living in it burns while the two of them shoot down what tries to escape. Arjuna receives the Gandiva for it. The epic does not present this as heroism unmixed, and the Agni page carries the other side.

Kiratarjuniya. In austerity for the Pashupatastra, Arjuna quarrels with a tribal hunter over which of them shot a boar, fights him, and is beaten — and the hunter is Shiva, who gives him the weapon. Bharavi's sixth-century poem on the episode is one of the five mahakavyas of Sanskrit.

Ulupi, Chitrangada, Subhadra. His marriages during exile and after: the naga princess, the Manipuri princess who is a warrior and rules in her own right, and Krishna's sister, whom he carries off from Dwarka — with Krishna's approval and, in a number of tellings, at Subhadra's own suggestion. She has her own page here, and rides between her brothers at Puri.

Abhimanyu. His son, who learns to enter the chakravyuha in the womb and not to leave it, and dies inside it at sixteen, surrounded, alone. It is the most upsetting thing in the epic and it is the reason Arjuna kills Jayadratha.

Killed by his own son. Late, at the Ashvamedha, Arjuna fights Babruvahana, his son by Chitrangada, who does not know him — and loses, and dies, and is revived by Ulupi with a naga jewel. Of all the humiliations the epic arranges for its greatest archer, this is the one it gives him last.

And the end. After the war, after Krishna's death, the Gandiva will not draw for him and common cattle-raiders carry off the Yadava women while he watches, unable to stop them. The bow does not work any more. He walks north with his brothers and falls on the way.

As Nara, at Badrinath. The Badrinath temple — a Char Dham and Chota Char Dham site in Chamoli district, Uttarakhand — enshrines Badrinarayan, and the Nara and Narayana peaks stand on either side of the valley. The pair is the reason for the place, and Arjuna as Nara receives worship there in that identity rather than as a hero.

Gita Jayanti, Margashirsha Shukla Ekadashi, marks the day the teaching was given to him. It is observed with recitation of the whole Gita, at Kurukshetra especially, where the state holds a large annual Gita Mahotsav.

The Gita itself is his largest presence by an enormous margin. It is recited daily in households and temples, taught in pathshalas, used for oaths in Indian courts by those who choose it, and read by people with no connection to Hinduism at all. Every one of its seven hundred verses is addressed to Arjuna by name or by epithet.

At Koovagam (Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu), his son Aravan — by Ulupi in the Tamil tradition — is the deity of the festival that draws the largest transgender gathering in Asia. The Bahuchara Mata page names it. That is a cult of the son, not the father.

In Manipur, the Chitrangada and Babruvahana connection is part of the state's own account of itself, and appears in Manipuri dance and in local tradition.

In performance. The Gita's delivery, the Kiratarjuniya, Brihannala at Virata and Abhimanyu's death are staples of Kathakali, Yakshagana, Kutiyattam and the Ramlila-adjacent Mahabharata cycles.

He has almost no temple of his own, and that is the expected pattern for this class of figure — the Vyasa, Markandeya and Prahlada pages describe the same thing. What is worshipped is not the archer. It is Nara, and the conversation.

Badrinath Temple (Chamoli district, Uttarakhand) — the principal site, and the only one where he is a deity rather than a character. Nara and Narayana peaks; Badarikashrama; a Char Dham site, open roughly late April to early November. Vyasa's cave at Mana, the last village, is an hour's walk further and his page carries it.

Kurukshetra (Haryana) — Jyotisar, the spot traditionally identified as where the chariot stood and the Gita was spoken, with the banyan and a large annual Gita Mahotsav; Brahma Sarovar; the battlefield sites.

Arjuna's Penance, Mamallapuram (Chengalpattu district, Tamil Nadu) — the cliff relief, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and one of the largest bas-reliefs anywhere. Whether it is his penance or Bhagiratha's is genuinely disputed.

Nara-Narayana shrines across Gujarat and Rajasthan, particularly in the Swaminarayan tradition, which takes the pair seriously and depicts them widely.

Koovagam (Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu) — Aravan's, not his.

Moirang and the Manipur sites associated with Chitrangada and Babruvahana.

Indraprastha — the Pandavas' city, identified with the Purana Qila area of Delhi; the archaeology is real, the identification traditional.

Puri (Odisha) — where Subhadra rides between Jagannath and Balabhadra; her page and theirs carry it.

The scripture exists because he refused. This is the fact worth carrying away, and it is easy to miss because the Gita is usually met as a free-standing book. It is not. It is a transcript of an argument with one man who had a breakdown at the worst possible moment, and every turn in it is a response to something he said. Hinduism's most widely read text was occasioned not by a sage's question, a king's request or a priest's rite, but by a soldier sitting down and saying no.

And the objection was a good one. Arjuna's case against the war — that it will destroy his family, unravel the rites that hold a society together, and leave nothing worth having — is not cowardice and the text never says it is. He is answered at enormous length precisely because he is not easy to answer.

Do as you choose. The Gita's last instruction before Arjuna takes up the bow is yathecchasi tathā kuru — do as you wish. God, having spoken for seven hundred verses and having shown him the form of everything, leaves the decision with him. For a text often described as a call to duty, the closing move is to hand the matter back, and that is the most surprising thing in it.

The human half of the pair. Nara and Narayana do not separate. One drives and one fights; one is God and one is not; both are eternal. Set against traditions in which the divine and the human are divided by an unbridgeable distance, Hinduism's answer here is that they are a pair of friends who have been together since before the ages, and who keep being born together. That is what is worshipped at Badrinath, and it is a more interesting doctrine than most of what is written about the Gita.

A hero who loses almost everything. He is cursed and spends a year in bangles; his son dies at sixteen in a trap he cannot reach; he is killed by another son who does not recognise him; and at the very end the Gandiva will not draw, and he stands and watches women he is supposed to protect carried off by ordinary bandits. The Mahabharata gives its best archer a long, comprehensive lesson in insufficiency, and it is impossible to read the ending as anything but deliberate.

And what the book has been used for. A text in which God argues a man into fighting has, unavoidably, been cited by people wanting a warrant for violence — and has, just as genuinely, been the daily reading of Gandhi, who took the battlefield for the self and built nonviolence on it. Both readings are internal to the tradition and have been argued for centuries. The encyclopedia's position is that a reader should know the dispute exists, know it is not settled, and go to the text.