Arjuna — Arjuna, “the bright one” — is the supreme archer-hero of the Mahabharata, the third of the five Pandava brothers, and the warrior to whom Krishna sang the Bhagavad Gita on the field of Kurukshetra. Son of the god Indra, friend and disciple of God himself, he is the very ideal of the Hindu hero: peerless in arms, noble in spirit, yet plunged into the deepest moral crisis of the entire tradition.
Son of Indra, Pupil of Drona
Arjuna was born to Kunti by the boon-mantra that summoned Indra, king of the gods, making him a demigod of war. Under the guru Drona he became the greatest archer of his generation — the favourite pupil whose dedication was such that he practised in the dark to shoot by sound alone. He won Draupadi at her bride-choice by stringing the impossible bow and piercing a spinning target’s eye reflected in water, and he gathered an unmatched armoury of divine weapons through penance and adventure: from Shiva, whom he fought in disguise as a mountain hunter (the Kirata), he won the dreaded Pashupatastra; he ascended to his father’s heaven and gathered celestial arms from the gods; and he received the great bow Gandiva and an inexhaustible quiver from Agni.
The Doubt on the Battlefield
Arjuna’s defining moment is not a feat of arms but a collapse of will. As the two armies face each other at Kurukshetra, he looks across the field and sees his kinsmen, teachers, and friends arrayed to be killed — his grandfather Bhishma, his guru Drona, his cousins — and his bow Gandiva slips from his hand. He will not fight; he would rather die than slaughter his own family for a kingdom. It is to this despairing hero that his charioteer Krishna delivers the Bhagavad Gita, the song of God: a discourse on duty, the deathless soul, selfless action, and devotion that culminates in Krishna revealing his cosmic universal form (Vishvarupa), all the worlds and all of time blazing within the friend who had stood beside Arjuna’s chariot. Steadied, Arjuna takes up his bow and fights.
The Deeds of the War
In the eighteen-day war Arjuna is the Pandavas’ greatest weapon. He brings down Bhishma (with the warrior Shikhandi before him); he avenges the murder of his son Abhimanyu, vowing to kill the warrior Jayadratha by sunset and accomplishing it through Krishna’s contrived eclipse; and at the climax he faces his greatest rival, his secret eldest brother Karna, slaying him as his chariot wheel sinks in the mud — the war’s most tragic single combat. Earlier, during the year the Pandavas spent in disguise, Arjuna lived as the eunuch dance-teacher Brihannala — the fruit of a curse from the nymph Urvashi, whose advances he had refused — a striking interval in which the supreme warrior set down his manhood and his bow.
The Friend of God
What sets Arjuna apart from every other hero is his intimacy with the divine: he is Nara to Krishna’s Narayana, the eternal companion of God, the sage-warrior pair reborn in every age. He is the listener to whom the central scripture of Hinduism is addressed, and so every reader of the Gita stands, in a sense, in Arjuna’s chariot. Brave, doubting, devoted, and beloved of God, Arjuna is the human soul itself — called to act, paralysed by the weight of the world, and lifted by the word of the divine.