Drona Parva

Kannada translation

07_DronaParva_19 May 2021

Structure

The Drona Parva (Sanskrit: द्रोण पर्व), or the Book of Drona, is the 7th of the 18 Maha Parvas (Books) of Mahabharata. It describes the five days (11th to 15th day, including the night battle of the 14th war day) of Mahabharata war, after the fall of Bhishma.

According to the Critical Edition, this Parva (Book) has a total of 8152 Shlokas (Verses) organized into 173 Adhyayas (Chapters) rolled into 8 Upa Parvas (Sections). The Upa Parvas are:

Dronabhisheka Parva (15 Adhyayas 1-15; 634 Shlokas)
Samshaptakavadha Parva (16 Adhyayas 16-31; 717 Shlokas)
Abhimanyuvadha Parva (20 Adhyayas 32-51; 643 Shlokas)
Pratigna Parva (9 Adhyayas 52-60; 365 Shlokas)
Jayadrathavadha Parva (67 Adhyayas 61-127; 3174 Shlokas)
Ghatotkachavadha Parva (31 Adhyayas 128-158; 1554 Shlokas)
Dronavadha Parva (7 Adhyayas 159-165; 523 Shlokas)
Narayanastramoksha Parva (8 Adhyayas 166-173; 542 Shlokas)

Summary

At the beginning of Drona Parva, we join the action during an uneasy hiatus after ten days of fighting. The warring cousins stand face to face on the battlefield, awestruck by the fall of Bhishma, symbolic patriarch to Kauravas and Pandavas alike. He will spend the rest of the battle a mere spectator, his life ebbing slowly as each day passes. Now it is Drona’s turn to take his place as the leader of Duryodhana’s armies. Though a brahmin by birth, Drona was once an instructor in the arts of war to both the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and like Bhishma he accepts his post only with a certain reluctance. The fighting begins once more. However, Duryodhana is so desperate to gain ground against the Pandavas that it is not long before he angrily accuses Drona of fighting halfheartedly against his former students. Drona replies that only if the great Pandava warrior Arjuna is removed from the battlefield can he stand any chance of defeating his opponents. The kings of Trigarta step forward and challenge Arjuna to a duel he cannot refuse, and Drona sets about destroying the army that Arjuna leaves behind him. In response, Yudhishthira decides to send his nephew Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son, to counter Drona’s advance. Eager to please his uncle, Abhimanyu sets off for the Kaurava line and, breaking through it, causes havoc among Duryodhana’s troops. But Abhimanyu’s achievements take him too far. After a sequence of battles, he finds himself cut off from the rest of the Pandavas, and despite his ferocious determination he is finally overwhelmed by a group of his enemies and killed. Yudhishthira realizes too late that he has sent his nephew to an inevitable doom. He is plunged into despair, and the sun sets on a scene of mourning in the Pandava camp.

And as the war draws on, it is darkness that predominates. Just as the fratricide that their rivalry has triggered will now build towards the bizarre closing passages of ‘Drona,’ when the fighting explodes into a nocturnal massacre where it no longer seems to matter who kills whom.

‘Drona’ is in itself a huge text. At first glance, we find scene after scene that seem to blend into one. But there is a definite sequence of events in the book, extending from Drona’s accession to the post of commander of the Kaurava forces, through Abhimanyu’s tragic death and the demise of Jayadratha and Ghatotkacha, to the cruel deception and beheading of Drona.

Concision is not the point; the epic is as much a cultural force as a literary work, and is unencumbered by the niceties of compositional convention that we might expect of it. Yet wound about its events is the undulating texture of the epic’s poetry. The reader will find that a certain synesthesia is the inevitable consequence of close association with it—the text can fruitfully be approached like a piece of music, but one in form much closer to the gathering swell of a raga than to the frozen arc of a symphony. The deeper we delve into the detail of what happens, the more is revealed to our eyes and ears. Verses are never repeated precisely but are inflected, recast or transformed, and all the time, line by line, the tale moves on, riverine and enveloping, occasionally meandering gently, at other times twisting suddenly, like the haunted streams of blood that crisscross the plain of Kurukshetra.

I see it now: this world is swiftly passing.‘Drona’ 2.4

Episodes/Stories/Spiritual Discussions

Resources

Drona Parva

Drona Parva

Kannada translation

Structure

Summary

Episodes/Stories/Spiritual Discussions

The other Maha Parvas