Subhadraसुभद्रा

Subhadra stands between Jagannath and Balabhadra on the Ratnavedi at Puri, and she is the least known figure in one of the most photographed images in India.

She is the sister of Krishna and Balarama, the wife of Arjuna, and the mother of Abhimanyu — which makes her, after the war kills almost everyone, the ancestress through whom the Kuru line continues. Parikshit, who inherits the empire, is her grandson.

At Puri she is smaller than her brothers, yellow where they are black and white, and — the detail that people notice and rarely have explained — she has no arms at all. Jagannath and Balabhadra have stumps. Subhadra has none.

She has her own chariot at the Ratha Yatra, Darpadalana, the crusher of pride, and it is hers that leads in the return procession.

And there is a serious scholarly question underneath all of this, which the page takes up below: whether the figure in the middle at Puri was originally Subhadra at all, or an older goddess — Ekanamsha, or a local Shakta or tribal deity — into whose place the Mahabharata's princess was later read. The Odia tradition itself identifies her with Ekanamsha, which is a considerable clue.

Two quite separate sources feed her, and keeping them apart is the whole of the historical question.

The epic Subhadra. In the Mahabharata's Adi Parva she is the daughter of Vasudeva — by Rohini in most genealogies, which makes Balarama her full brother and Krishna her half-brother. Arjuna, in exile, sees her at a festival on Raivataka hill and wants her. Krishna advises that a Yadava princess would be given by svayamvara and that Arjuna might not win it, and recommends abduction, which the warrior code permitted. Arjuna takes her; the Yadavas arm; Balarama is furious; and Krishna argues them down by pointing out that she went willingly and that Arjuna is the better match. The marriage holds. Their son is Abhimanyu, killed in the chakravyuha at sixteen; his posthumous son Parikshit inherits.

The Puri Subhadra. The deity of the triad, of an entirely different character: armless, yellow, enshrined, and with a Ratha Yatra of her own. The Odia tradition names her Ekanamsha as often as Subhadra.

Ekanamsha, and why she matters. In the Harivamsha and the Bhagavata, Yogamaya or Ekanamsha is the girl born to Yashoda on the night Krishna is born, exchanged for him, and dashed against the stone by Kamsa — at which she rises out of his hands as a goddess and tells him his killer is already alive. She is a goddess in her own right, not a princess, and eka-anaṃśā means "the one without a portion" or "the undivided one".

Ekanamsha is worshipped between Krishna and Balarama in Kushana and Gupta-period sculpture — a female figure flanked by two male deities in exactly the arrangement Puri has — centuries before the Puri triad's recorded history. That is the strongest single piece of evidence that the middle position is older than the identification.

The scholarly position, stated carefully. A substantial body of work argues that the Puri triad derives from a pre-Vaishnava cult — variously read as Savara or tribal, Shakta, Jain or Buddhist — that was progressively Vaishnavised, with the three figures receiving their present names in the process. Others read the triad as Vaishnava from an early stage. This encyclopedia records the debate and does not settle it. What can be said without controversy is that the wooden, armless, non-anthropomorphic form of all three is unlike anything else in Indian temple imagery, and that such a form is not what a tradition designs from scratch.

Her name. Su-bhadrā — the auspicious one, the excellent one. It is an adjective before it is a name, and that too is characteristic of an identification applied later.

The triad at Puri. Three wooden figures on the Ratnavedi, renewed at intervals from fresh daru wood:

• Balabhadra — white, the largest, on the left as the deity faces out.
• Subhadra — yellow, the smallest, in the middle.
• Jagannath — black, on the right.
• Sudarshana — a plain wooden pillar beside Subhadra, the fourth member that visitors rarely count.

The colours are a scheme, not an accident. White, yellow and black; and in the Odia reading they carry the three gunas and the three-fold division the tradition applies to almost everything.

No arms. Her brothers have stumps projecting forward. Subhadra has none, and no legs either. Explanations differ: that the carving was interrupted before her limbs were begun; that she is ekanamsha, the undivided, and division into limbs would contradict the name; that the form is simply what it is and predates the explanations. The Vishwakarma page tells the interrupted-carving story from the carpenter's side.

The eyes. All three have enormous circular eyes, and Jagannath's especially. The unblinking round eye is the single most recognisable feature of the Puri style and is reproduced on every Pattachitra, every roadside painting and every Odia shop sign.

Her chariot. Darpadalana — also called Devadalana or Padmadhwaja — red and black, with twelve wheels, a lotus flag, and a charioteer named Arjuna. Balabhadra's Taladhwaja is red and green with fourteen wheels; Jagannath's Nandighosha is red and yellow with sixteen.

Elsewhere. Subhadra appears in Mahabharata narrative art — the abduction, Abhimanyu's departure, her grief — in Pahari and Rajasthani painting, and in the Odia Pattachitra tradition, where the triad is the standard subject.

Subhadra of the Mahabharata. Arjuna's wife; Abhimanyu's mother.

Subhadra of the triad. The Puri deity.

Ekanamsha / Yogamaya. The goddess born to Yashoda and exchanged for Krishna; identified with the middle figure in Odia tradition and depicted between the two brothers in early sculpture. Discussed above.

Bhadrakali, Durga, Katyayani. Odia and Shakta readings that identify the middle figure with the Goddess outright. In the Snana Yatra and in some Tantric readings of the temple, the triad is given a Shakta interpretation with Subhadra as the central power rather than the sibling in the middle.

Chitralekha's friend, and other confusions. Several unrelated women in the Puranas are named Subhadra; so is a river, and so is one of the matrikas in some lists.

The fourth member. Sudarshana — Vishnu's discus as a deity, present at Puri as a wooden pillar beside her. Worshipped, carried in her chariot, and routinely left out of the count, which is why the "triad" is really a group of four.

Not Draupadi, and not Rukmini. Arjuna's other wife and Krishna's chief queen respectively; both are frequently confused with her in popular retellings.

The abduction at Raivataka. Arjuna, travelling in exile as a mendicant, sees Subhadra at the Yadava festival. Krishna — her own brother — advises that he take her, and she is willing. Arjuna seizes her and drives; she takes the reins herself in several tellings. The Yadavas arm and Balarama is enraged, both at the theft and at the guest who abused hospitality. Krishna calms him: nothing was taken that was not willingly given, and the alliance is a good one.

It is a difficult story to present well and this page does not tidy it. The epic takes for granted a form of marriage by capture that its own law books class among the acceptable kinds for a kshatriya, and it also takes care to establish that Subhadra consented — a detail the text did not have to include and did. Both facts belong on the record.

Abhimanyu. Her son, who learned the entry to the chakravyuha while in her womb, listening to Krishna explain it — and who never heard the way out, because she fell asleep. On the thirteenth day of the war he breaks into the formation, cannot leave it, and is killed at sixteen by a circle of the greatest warriors on the field, none of whom faces him alone.

The detail that his mother fell asleep is the most quietly devastating thing in the Mahabharata's treatment of her, and it is why she remains, in Indian domestic storytelling, the type of the bereaved mother.

Parikshit. Abhimanyu's son, in the womb when his father died and struck by Ashvatthama's weapon before birth, is revived by Krishna. Everything after the war — the kingdom, the Bhagavata's frame narrative, the snake sacrifice, the entire dynastic future — runs through Subhadra's line.

How she came to Puri. The Purushottama Kshetra Mahatmya and Odia tradition tell it as the daru story: King Indradyumna finds the sacred wood, an old carpenter agrees to carve on condition of privacy, the door is opened early, and three unfinished figures are left. The Vishwakarma and Jagannath pages carry it.

The Ratha Yatra, and why she goes first. In the Bahuda Yatra, the return journey, Subhadra's chariot leads. The Odia explanation is domestic and is the reason people repeat it: the sister is going home, and the brothers follow her.

At Puri, as one of three. Subhadra receives the temple's full daily sequence along with her brothers — the bhoga offerings, the arati, the dressing (besha) — and is not worshipped separately. The Mahaprasad of Puri, cooked in the temple kitchen and eaten without distinction of caste in the Ananda Bazar, is offered to the three together.

Ratha Yatra. On the second day of the bright fortnight of Ashadha, the three are brought out and drawn on three chariots to the Gundicha temple, some three kilometres, by hundreds of thousands of people. They stay nine days and return in the Bahuda Yatra, with Subhadra's chariot leading.

Snana Yatra and Anasara. On the full moon of Jyeshtha the deities are bathed with a hundred and eight pots of water and then fall ill, and are kept out of sight for a fortnight while they recover. A deity who catches a fever from a bath, and is nursed, is not a common arrangement; Puri's is the best-known instance.

Nabakalebara. At long intervals — when a month of Ashadha repeats, roughly every twelve to nineteen years — the wooden bodies are renewed from newly found daru trees, and the Brahma padartha, whose nature is undisclosed, is transferred at night by blindfolded priests. Subhadra's tree is identified by its own marks.

Outside Puri. Ratha Yatras are held across Odisha, in Bengal, Gujarat (Ahmedabad's is very large), and worldwide through the ISKCON movement, which has carried the triad to hundreds of cities.

In the Mahabharata's recitation, and in the Odia Dandi and Pala performance traditions.

DharmSetu records these observances as practised and makes no claim about outcomes.

Jagannath Temple, Puri (Odisha) — the temple, and effectively her only one. Twelfth century in its present form under the Eastern Ganga king Anantavarman Chodaganga, on a much older site; one of the four Char Dham. She is on the Ratnavedi with her brothers and Sudarshana.

Gundicha Temple, Puri — the destination of the Ratha Yatra, where the three stay nine days.

Jagannath temples across Odisha — Baripada, Keonjhar, Cuttack and hundreds of village foundations, all with the triad.

Jagannath Temple, Ahmedabad (Gujarat) — the site of one of the largest Ratha Yatras outside Odisha.

Mahesh, Serampore (Hooghly district, West Bengal) — the second-oldest Ratha Yatra in India, running since the fifteenth century.

ISKCON temples worldwide, where the triad is standard and the Ratha Yatra has been carried to London, New York, Durban and beyond.

Subhadra as an independent deity has no temple. She is worshipped where her brothers are, which is the condition of her whole cult and is part of what makes the question of her origin interesting: the figure in the middle has never been separable from the arrangement.

The one nobody can name. The Puri triad is among the most reproduced images in India, and in most of the country the middle figure is simply "Jagannath's sister". That she is also Arjuna's wife, Abhimanyu's mother and the ancestress of the surviving Kuru line is known to people who know the Mahabharata and to very few others. Recovering that is most of what this page is for.

A form with no arms. Whatever the historical explanation, the result is a major Indian deity whose image has no hands to hold anything, no gesture to make and no weapon. Every other figure in this encyclopedia is legible through what it carries. Subhadra is legible only through where she stands, and the tradition has been content with that for as long as there are records.

The dynastic line runs through her. The Mahabharata kills almost everyone. What survives is a child in the womb, revived — Subhadra's grandson. The Bhagavata Purana is narrated to him. Every subsequent king in the tradition's reckoning descends from him. For a figure so lightly drawn, she carries an extraordinary structural weight, and the epic seems barely to notice.

Consent, recorded. The abduction is a marriage by capture, and the epic's own legal literature classes that among the permitted forms for a kshatriya. It is not a story to be presented as romantic. But the text also goes out of its way to establish that Subhadra was willing and that she drove the chariot, and that detail was not required. This encyclopedia notes both rather than choosing.

A middle place older than its occupant. The strongest thing that can be said about her origin is the arrangement itself: a female figure flanked by Krishna and Balarama appears in sculpture centuries before Puri's recorded triad, under the name Ekanamsha, as a goddess and not a sister. Whether Puri's middle figure was always Subhadra, or a goddess whom the epic's princess was later read into, is not settled and this page does not settle it. What the possibility should do is change how the triad is looked at: not as two gods with a relative between them, but as an arrangement in which the centre may be the oldest part.