Kurukshetra

← Encyclopedia

The plain is almost without feature. It runs flat to the horizon north of Delhi, a sheet of wheat and mustard broken by canal banks and the dome of a tank, and a traveler crossing it by road would see nothing to mark it from any other stretch of the Haryana lowland. The tradition reads it otherwise. Here, between two rivers that the law-books call divine, the gods were held to have laid out the first pure country; here the great war that ends an age was fought; and here, in the gap of silence between the drawing-up of the armies and the first flight of arrows, the charioteer turned to the warrior beside him and began to speak. The flatness is not incidental. A field of judgment wants level ground.

The field between two rivers

The name is old and double. Kurukshetra means the field — kshetra — of the Kurus, the ruling people whose kingdom rose in the Middle Vedic period through the merger of the Bharata and Puru tribes, and whose name the Mahabharata carries in its title, the great tale of the descendants of Bharata. The Kuru realm is among the best-attested polities of early India: it centered on this region of the upper Doab and the Haryana plain, took Hastinapura and later Indraprastha for its seats, and corresponds in the material record to the Painted Grey Ware culture of roughly the early first millennium BCE. Where the texts hold a king named Kuru who plowed the field with a golden plowshare to make it holy, the spade finds the gray potsherds of a settled, iron-using people who were, by the reckoning of historians, the first state-level society of the subcontinent. The two accounts do not contradict so much as run on different clocks. One dates; the other consecrates.

Before the name belonged to a war it belonged to a geography of purity. The plain lay between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, the two rivers the Rigveda praises and the later law-code makes the boundary of the holiest land. The Manusmriti, the great code of conduct compiled in the centuries around the turn of the era, fixes the hierarchy precisely. The country the gods fashioned, lying between the divine Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, the sages name Brahmavarta — the abode of holiness (Manu 2.17). The custom handed down there among the orders of society is the very measure of right conduct, sadachara, the conduct of the virtuous (Manu 2.18). And then, in the next breath, the code names the second circle: the plain of the Kurus, with the lands of the Matsyas, the Panchalas, and the Surasenakas, is the country of the brahmarshis, the seer-sages, ranked immediately below Brahmavarta itself (Manu 2.19). To the codifiers this was not metaphor. It was a map of where the rite was kept at its truest and the speech of the seers ran purest, a heartland from which the dharma of the priesthood and the settled peoples of the early Indo-Aryan world was held to radiate outward, growing thinner as it went.

That a code of law should locate righteousness on a particular floor of earth tells something about how the tradition reads land. The plain is not merely the scene of holy acts; it is itself a graded substance, holier here than there, and Kurukshetra sits near the top of the scale. The geography is exact even where the dating of the war is not. The plain has carried the name of the dharma-field for as long as the texts can be read.

Two of the threads that knot through this geography are contested, and both are presented here without taking a side. The first is the river itself. The Rigveda’s Sarasvati is praised as a mighty stream; the Manusmriti makes it the western bound of the holy land; and a strand of scholarship identifies it with the now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra channel that ran south of the Sutlej before it failed. Others doubt the identification, reading the Vedic river as the Helmand of the northwest or as a partly mythic stream, and the matter remains argued among geologists and philologists alike. The second thread is larger and more charged: the question of how the people who composed the Veda came to the plain. The long-dominant model holds a migration of Indo-Aryan speakers into the northwest in the second millennium BCE; an indigenist counter-reading argues for a far older presence and against any migration at all. The debate is scholarly and political at once. It is worth marking that the word arya in the texts is a term of self-designation, a marker of those who keep the rite and the speech, not a race — the racial theories built on it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the use the Nazis made of them, were a later and disastrous distortion. On both questions the plain keeps its silence; only the securely known texts are followed here.

The field of dharma

What made Kurukshetra the holiest of grounds was not its priestly geography but a single morning. The Mahabharata tells of two branches of one house — the hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas, and their five cousins the Pandavas — and of a kingdom that the elder branch would not divide. When every embassy failed, the quarrel was given to the arbitrament of arms, and the hostile armies met on the level field. The war ran eighteen days. It is the war that closes the third age and opens the fourth, the Kali Yuga, the worst of the four; and the poem refuses to let the winning side stand clean, for the Pandavas prevail only through a sequence of broken rules and killings done out of turn, so that victory and ruin arrive together. The grandsire Bhishma is brought down on a bed of arrows; the boy Abhimanyu is cut off and overwhelmed; the teacher Drona is felled by a half-truth spoken in his hearing. When the dust settles, eighteen armies have all but destroyed themselves, the victorious house rules over a graveyard, and the plain that the law-books made the measure of purity has become the measure of how a righteous cause is muddied in the winning. The tradition does not flinch from the cost. It is part of why the field is held as the ground where an age turns over.

The teaching for which the place is most beloved happens before any of this. It is set down in the sixth book of the epic, the Bhishma Parva, on the morning the lines are drawn. The blind king asks his charioteer-narrator what unfolded, and the Bhagavad Gita — the Song of the Lord — opens with the king’s own words. In the oldest English rendering from the Sanskrit, the line reads: “What did my (people) and the Pândavas do, O Sañjaya! when they assembled together on the holy field of Kurukshetra, desirous to do battle?” The Sanskrit names the place twice over in two compounds — dharmakshetre kurukshetre, on the field of dharma, on the field of the Kurus — and the doubling is the whole hinge of the poem’s reception. The very first word the scripture utters is dharma. The ground is read at once as the field of the Kurus and the field of moral law.

In the gap before the fighting, the warrior-prince Arjuna asks his charioteer to draw the car into the space between the armies, and seeing arrayed against him his teachers, his elders, his cousins and friends, he lowers his bow and sinks down on the seat, unwilling to win a kingdom by killing his own. The charioteer is Krishna, the lord in human form, and what he speaks in answer over eighteen chapters is the most beloved scripture of the land. He teaches that the self within — the atman — is deathless, neither slayer nor slain, putting off worn bodies as a man puts off worn clothes; that duty proper to one’s station, svadharma, must be done; and, at the heart of it, that action itself is not the bondage, only the craving for its fruit — that one may act, must act, while surrendering all claim on the outcome. To the reader who seeks release, this is the road that runs through the world rather than away from it. The hesitation on the field becomes the occasion for the teaching that the field is everywhere.

Krishna driving Arjuna’s chariot, North Indian painting, 18th–19th century (Freer/Sackler collection). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The poem itself folds the place into a figure that the later commentators never tired of. In the thirteenth chapter the lord names the body kshetra, the field, and the soul that knows it the kshetragna, the knower-of-the-field; he calls himself the knower in all fields, and the discernment of field from knower he calls real knowledge. So the word that names the ground of the war names also the body in which every person stands, with the deathless self looking out from within it. Kurukshetra, the field of the Kurus, is by this reading a figure for the field each person is. The battlefield where one must act without grasping, the body the soul must hold without mistaking for the self — the tradition lets the two senses rest in the one word. It is why the song could be carried far from any battle and recited wherever the question of right action is asked.

The frame matters to how the place is held. Within the tradition’s own grammar this is not a parable laid over a plain but a thing that happened on it: the armies stood here, the lord spoke here, and the speech was true. The two registers stay separate where they part. The Kuru kingdom and its plain are datable; the eighteen-day war and the song between the armies belong to the epic’s own time, neither confirmed nor disproved by the spade, and the tradition holds them as real in a register the documentary record neither shares nor refutes.

The waters that wash away the stain

If the song made Kurukshetra famous, the water made it a destination. The plain is studded with tanks and pools — tirthas, fords or crossing-places, the standing term for a site where the pilgrim may pass between worlds — and bathing in them is held to carry the gravest weight. Chief among them is the Brahma Sarovar, one of the largest sacred reservoirs in the subcontinent, a vast rectangular tank ringed by bathing steps; tradition counts it among the places the creator was held to have made, and the pilgrim who bathes there is held to be freed of accumulated wrong and of the round of birth and death. Nearby lies the Sannihit Sarovar, said to be the meeting of seven streams that all bear the name of the Sarasvati, where a bath at the dark of the moon or under an eclipse is reckoned equal in merit to the performance of the great horse-sacrifice.

Brahma Sarovar, the great reservoir at Kurukshetra, ringed by bathing ghats. Photo Ashish Bhatnagar, 2018, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The most charged of the pilgrimages comes with the darkening of the sun. A solar eclipse draws hundreds of thousands to the tanks, the eclipse-water held to carry a power that a bath on an ordinary day does not — the moment when the sun is swallowed read as the moment the water most surely washes away the deepest stain. The crowd at the eclipse, the lamps set afloat at dusk, the long lines of bathers on the steps: the plain that the law-books made a measure of purity keeps that office still, now in the body of a festival rather than a code. The merit-language is exact and unembarrassed within the frame — the bath does what it is said to do — and it is the same logic the Gita complicates from the inside, for the lord’s teaching turns the seeker away from acting for reward even as the tank promises the surest reward of all. The tradition holds both, the easy water and the hard teaching, on the one plain.

The traditional spot of the song has its own shrine. At Jyotisar — the name carries the sense of the essence of light — stands the place where the lord is held to have delivered the Gita to Arjuna beneath a banyan, a tree shown to pilgrims as the witness that stood through the speech. The site has been built up over centuries with platform and tank and, in recent years, a towering metal image of the charioteer-lord; the banyan, the chariot in bronze at the Brahma Sarovar, the bathing steps all gather the dispersed plain to a few fixable points where memory can be touched.

The afterlife of a plain

Kurukshetra’s long reception is layered like the plain itself. The Vedic geography of purity gave way to the epic’s battlefield, and the battlefield to a network of war-memorials and shrines scattered across the level country — tanks named for the fallen, mounds read as the graves of heroes, spots pointed out as where this or that combat turned. Over them all was laid the pilgrimage, and over that, in time, the modern apparatus of the sacred-historical site, with its museums of the war and its panoramas of the song. The plain became a palimpsest in which no layer quite effaced the one beneath: the law-book’s heartland, the epic’s killing-ground, the bather’s ford, the pilgrim’s memorial all legible at once.

The deepest part of the afterlife happened off the plain entirely. The song that took its name from the field — the field of dharma, the field of the Kurus — outgrew the place of its setting until it could be recited anywhere a person faced a hard duty without flinching. It traveled into the philosophical schools, where the masters of Vedanta made it one of the three foundations of their teaching and wrote their commentaries upon it. It traveled into the modern world, into the hands of reformers and nationalists who read Arjuna’s reluctant duty as a charge to act in the world, and into the libraries of the West, where it was the first Sanskrit work rendered whole into a European tongue. The opening compound followed it everywhere it went, so that a reader who has never crossed the Haryana plain still begins the scripture on the field of dharma, on the field of the Kurus — and is told, a few chapters in, that the field is the body he reads in, and the knower of the field the self that reads.

There is a quiet symmetry in this. A flat plain between two rivers, holy because the law-books said so and the war was fought there, gave its name to a teaching whose whole burden is that the battlefield is interior, that the duty to act without grasping does not wait for a war, that the field of dharma is the ground each person already stands on. The geography is fixed at 29.97 north, 76.88 east, in the wheat country of Haryana. The field of dharma is wherever the question of right action is put.

→ In the library: The Bhagavad-Gita, The Song Celestial (Arnold, 1885) · The Bhagavadgita (Telang, Sacred Books of the East VIII, 1882)

→ Related: Mahabharata · Bhagavad Gita · The Sarasvati River · The Indo Aryans · The Rishis · Brahmins Priesthood · Prayag · Pushkar · Varanasi · Rigveda · Historical Vedic Religion · Hinduism · Vishnu · Shiva · Karma · Moksha · Atman · Brahman · Yajna · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Indus Valley Civilization · Hanuman