A Game of Dice

At a Glance

Central figures: Yudhishthira, eldest of the Pandavas and king of Indraprastha; Duryodhana, eldest of the Kauravas; Shakuni, Duryodhana’s uncle and the dice-player; and Draupadi, wife of the five Pandava brothers.
Setting: Hastinapura, the seat of the Kuru dynasty, during the age when Yudhishthira ruled Indraprastha as emperor; from the Mahabharata.
The turn: Shakuni plays dice on Duryodhana’s behalf with loaded dice, winning from Yudhishthira his kingdom, his brothers, and finally Draupadi herself.
The outcome: Draupadi is dragged into the court by her hair and Dushasana attempts to disrobe her; Krishna’s intervention keeps her clothed. Dhritarashtra briefly restores the Pandavas’ losses, but a second game sends them into thirteen years of exile.
The legacy: The game of dice set in motion the enmity that ended in the Kurukshetra War and the ruin of the Kuru dynasty; Draupadi’s vow - that she would not bind her hair until she had washed it in Dushasana’s blood - remained unfulfilled until the eighteenth day of that war.

Yudhishthira knew gambling was a vice. He knew it the way a man knows a wound is dangerous when he presses his thumb to it and feels it pulse. Yet when the invitation came from Hastinapura - from Dhritarashtra, blind king and elder of the family, speaking with the full weight of kinship and ceremony - Yudhishthira could not refuse. Dharma demanded that a king accept a royal invitation. And so the Pandavas rode north, to a court that had already decided how the game would end.

It had begun earlier, in Indraprastha. Duryodhana had attended Yudhishthira’s Rajasuya Yagna, the great ceremony of imperial consecration, and had walked through halls that outshone anything in Hastinapura - floors so polished they appeared to be water, water that appeared to be floors, wealth stacked in every corridor. He returned to his own kingdom burning. It was Shakuni, his mother’s brother, who knew what to do with that kind of fire.

Shakuni’s Dice

Shakuni was not a gambler in the ordinary sense. He did not play for sport. The dice he used - carved, by some accounts, from his dead father’s bones - obeyed him in ways that ordinary dice did not. What he offered Yudhishthira was not a game but a mechanism, a device dressed up in the familiar forms of courtly ceremony.

Dhritarashtra was persuaded. He loved his son, and he was a man practiced at not looking clearly at what he did not wish to see. He sent the invitation. Yudhishthira came.

The court at Hastinapura filled with witnesses: elders, counselors, the patriarch Bhishma, Drona who had trained every one of these men in arms, Vidura who saw exactly what was happening and could not stop it. They all sat and watched. Shakuni took the dice.

The Wagers

Yudhishthira lost the first throw. He wagered more. He lost that too. The pattern is as old as gambling itself - the belief that the next throw will recover what the last one took. Shakuni gave him no mercy and no pause, just the smooth courtesy of a man enjoying his work.

First went the treasure of Indraprastha. Then the jewels and the herds and the stores of grain. Then the city itself, the magnificent Indraprastha that the Pandavas had built from barren Khandavaprastha by hand and divine favor, was thrown down on the board and lost.

Then Yudhishthira wagered his brothers. Nakula first - gone. Sahadeva. Arjuna. Bhima. Each of them bound now, slaves to the Kauravas by the law of the game. And Yudhishthira himself last, placing his own freedom on the table and watching it vanish.

He had nothing left. The court was silent. Then he spoke Draupadi’s name.

Whatever the legal argument - and Draupadi would make it, fiercely and correctly - Yudhishthira wagered his wife. Shakuni rolled. The Kauravas erupted.

Draupadi in the Court

Dushasana was sent to fetch her. He found Draupadi in the women’s quarters, ignorant of what had happened, and told her she was now a slave. She refused to come. She sent a message back to the assembly: had Yudhishthira wagered himself before he wagered her? If he had already lost his own freedom, he possessed nothing left to stake. The wager was void.

The court received this argument and did nothing with it. Bhishma, who might have ruled on it, said only that the question was too subtle for him to answer. Drona said nothing. The elders looked at the floor.

Dushasana grabbed Draupadi by her hair and dragged her in.

She stood before the assembly - before her husbands, who sat with their heads down, stripped of their freedom and unable to act - and Duryodhana ordered Dushasana to remove her clothing. The court of Hastinapura, full of the greatest warriors and wisest men of the age, watched.

Draupadi prayed. She called on Krishna, who was not present in that hall, and she put every shred of herself into that call. Dushasana pulled at her sari and it did not end. He pulled and pulled and the fabric kept coming, pooling on the floor in folds, and Draupadi remained clothed. The pile of silk rose around Dushasana’s feet and he could not reach its end.

The court fell silent in a different way than before.

When Draupadi finally spoke her vow, she spoke it clearly, in front of everyone. She would not bind her hair - leave it loose, unbound, the mark of a woman in mourning or in fury - until she had washed it in the blood of the man who had touched it.

Dhritarashtra’s Concession

Something in the room had shifted. Even Dhritarashtra felt it. He called Draupadi forward and offered her boons - any she wished. She asked first for Yudhishthira’s freedom and his return to himself as a free man, not a slave. She asked next for her other husbands’ freedom, with their arms restored to them. She stopped at two. A third boon, she said, she would not ask - it was not right for a kshatriya woman to press for more.

Dhritarashtra gave the Pandavas everything back: their kingdom, their wealth, their status. They were free to return to Indraprastha.

They had been in the hall perhaps half a day. It had cost them nearly everything.

The Second Game and the Forest

Duryodhana went to his father that same evening. He and Shakuni pressed and argued until Dhritarashtra relented again. One more game. Simpler terms.

The Pandavas were summoned back. The terms were these: the losing side would spend twelve years in the forest in exile, followed by a thirteenth year living in disguise among ordinary people. If they were discovered during that final year, the entire period would begin again.

Shakuni rolled. The Pandavas lost.

They left Hastinapura on foot, in bark garments, heading into the forest. Draupadi walked with her hair still loose. Bhima walked with his fists closed. The elders of the court watched them go and none of them moved to stop it.

The exile lasted its full thirteen years. The Pandavas trained, formed alliances, and endured. At its end, they sent an envoy to ask for the return of Indraprastha - or at least five villages, one for each brother. Duryodhana refused. The war that followed destroyed both families and killed nearly everyone who had been in that court on the day Shakuni first took up the dice. Bhima kept his word about Dushasana. And Draupadi, on the eighteenth day of Kurukshetra, finally bound her hair.