The Sabha Parva: Kingship, Kinship, and the Moral
Architecture of Power
Introduction: The Pivotal Book of the Epic
The Sabha Parva, or “Book of the Assembly Hall,” stands at the structural and philosophical
centre of the Mahābhārata. If the Ādi Parva constructs the genealogy and cosmic prehistory
of the epic world, and the Āraṇyaka unfolds its aftermath of exile and introspection, the
Sabha Parva marks the turning point between the world of kinship and the world of war. It
inaugurates the political universe of kingship, power, and ritualized hierarchy, exposing in
the process the moral ambiguities that accompany imperial ambition. As J. A. B. van
Buitenen observes, “The Book of the Assembly Hall is the pivotal one of the eighteen Major
Books of the Mahābhārata … for all its length and variety, the Book of the Beginninghas not
done more than lay the groundwork of the epic as we now have it.”¹
Within this Book, the architectural wonder of Yudhiṣṭhira’s new hall at Indraprastha,
designed by the asura architect Maya, functions as both a concrete space of kingship and an
allegory of cosmic order. Yet this same hall becomes the seed of envy, deception, and ruin.
The narrative begins with Yudhiṣṭhira’s consecration as a universal monarch through the
rājasūya yajña and ends with his complete dispossession in the gambling hall of
Hastināpura. Between these two assemblies—the divine hall of Indraprastha and the
deceitful hall of dice—unfolds the entire dialectic of dharma, hierarchy, and kinship that
defines the epic’s moral imagination.
The Sabha Parva thus thematizes the paradox of royal dharma: the desire to uphold cosmic
order through political sovereignty simultaneously unleashes the destructive forces of pride,
envy, and fraternal rivalry. The book’s narrative symmetry—two halls, two kingships, two
forms of assembly—exposes the tension between divine order and human fallibility. Its
philosophical core lies in the question: how can a king rule justly within a world governed by
kṣātra dharma, where violence and competition are not only inevitable but sacralized? In
the process, the Sabha Parva becomes a meditation on kingship as both the highest and
most perilous vocation, one in which dharma itself is tested through the body of Yudhiṣṭhira.
I. The Assembly Hall: Architecture, Vision, and Ideology
The Book opens with the construction of Yudhiṣṭhira’s new palace at Indraprastha, designed
by the asura Maya, whom Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa had saved from the fire of the Khāṇḍava forest.
This episode, seemingly ornamental, provides the symbolic architecture of the entire epic’s
political imagination. Maya—descended from the disinherited race of the Asuras—is
portrayed as a cosmic architect, a “Viśvakarman of the Dānavas,” who builds for Yudhiṣṭhira
a hall “covering the sky like a mountain or monsoon cloud, long, wide, smooth, flawless, and
dispelling fatigue.”² The hall, Buitenen notes, was “ten thousand cubits in perimeter,” more
splendid than even the Sudharmā hall of the Vṛṣṇis or the palace of Brahmā himself.³
This hall functions as both a physical manifestation of royal prosperity and a cosmological
map of the world. Narada’s subsequent visit, during which he describes the halls of the world
guardians—Indra, Yama, Varuṇa, and Kubera—explicitly situates Yudhiṣṭhira’s court within
the cosmic geography of power.⁴ Through Narada’s narration, the Pandava court is inserted
into a metaphysical order of space (dik), aligning the earthly hall with the celestial
architecture of dharma. In Buitenen’s words, “Yudhisthira’s hall is put in its place at the
nadir of space thus structured… by the precise indication of its position in the configuration
of the cosmos—it is included in and made a structural component of cosmic space.”⁵ The hall
thus becomes a microcosm of the universe, a political body that mirrors divine order.
Yet the origins of this cosmic hall are strikingly alien. Built by an Asura from the “remote
north” where “the ancient gods themselves go to worship,”⁶ Maya’s hall carries within it the
trace of foreign, even subversive, craftsmanship. As Buitenen suggests, this may reflect
historical memory: early Indian monumental architecture drew inspiration from the
Achaemenid imperial style, with Iranian artisans introducing new forms of stone
construction and spatial grandeur.⁷ The Sabha Parva thus encodes a historical dialogue
between Aryan and non-Aryan, between divine and demonic aesthetics, producing a palace
that is both sacred and uncanny.
Within the narrative economy of the epic, this duality—between divine harmony and
demonic artifice—becomes the seed of destruction. Maya’s hall, like the entire Kuru polity,
stands upon an unstable alliance between incompatible principles: the Brahmanic ideal of
dharma and the Kṣatriya drive for conquest. When Duryodhana visits this dazzling palace
and mistakes its reflective surfaces for pools or walls, his humiliation at the hands of
Draupadī transforms architectural illusion into political resentment. As the hall’s illusions
deceive Duryodhana, they also expose the fragility of perception on which power depends.
The very perfection of Yudhiṣṭhira’s court—its symmetry, opulence, and divine
alignment—becomes intolerable within the imperfect world of kinship.
As Uma Chakravarti remarks, the Sabha Parva dramatizes “the conflict between the
aesthetics of kingship and the ethics of justice.”⁸ The hall, meant to affirm Yudhiṣṭhira’s
legitimacy, becomes a mirror that magnifies envy and resentment. It is an architectural
embodiment of māyā—illusion—which in the Mahābhārata is both creative and destructive.
Within its walls, kinship collapses into rivalry, and the very space designed to display
sovereignty becomes the stage for its unraveling.
II. Kingship, Kinship, and Hierarchy: The Rajasuya and the
Ambiguity of Sovereignty
The Sabha Parva’s second movement—the rājasūya yajña—transforms Yudhiṣṭhira’s
kingship into a theological problem. Following Narada’s account of cosmic assemblies,
Yudhiṣṭhira conceives the desire to perform the ancient royal consecration, seeking to
become samrāj, an emperor to whom all other rulers must submit. The ritual of the rājasūya
is more than a political ceremony; it is an ontological act through which a king becomes the
embodiment of dharma. Yet, as van Buitenen observes, Yudhiṣṭhira’s ambition “stood in
need of no justification; for he is to embark on a grand Vedic ceremony, and to qualify for it
the performer’s intention may suffice.”⁹ His desire for universal sovereignty arises not from
greed but from a ritual compulsion—the ancient Vedic equation of kingship with cosmic
maintenance.
In the Mahābhārata Now collection, Sibesh Bhattacharya interprets this moment as the
convergence of two historical models of kingship: the kin-based polity of the Kuru lineage
and the emerging territorial state premised on ritual sovereignty. The rājasūya signifies the
transformation of kinship into statehood, as the king moves from the familial centre of the
lineage to the impersonal centre of empire.¹⁰ Yet this transition is fraught with contradiction.
Yudhiṣṭhira’s kingship depends on the consent of his kin, yet the ritual itself demands their
submission. His claim to universality threatens the fragile equilibrium of fraternal hierarchy
that sustains the Kuru house.
Buitenen identifies this tension as the structural core of the Sabha Parva: “There can only be
one such suzerain at the time. So it requires not only the assent of the baronage, but also the
removal of the present suzerain. The one en titre is Jarasandha.”¹¹ To attain imperial status,
Yudhiṣṭhira must first destroy Jarasandha of Magadha, whose realm of Magadha symbolizes
both material power and sacrificial legitimacy. Assisted by Kṛṣṇa and Bhīma, he
accomplishes this through an act of ritualized violence: Jarasandha is torn apart by Bhīma’s
bare hands, a deed that fuses martial prowess with cosmic purification.¹² Once the
impediment of Jarasandha is removed, Yudhiṣṭhira’s consecration can proceed; yet the
victory itself foreshadows the collapse of dharma, for the ritual consecration of kingship is
purchased at the price of blood.
The rājasūya is not merely a ceremonial act but a performative reordering of the world. The
sacrifice reconstitutes hierarchy, assigning each participant a place within the ritual cosmos.
Yudhiṣṭhira’s enthronement thus depends on the recognition of others—the very kin whose
subordination will soon destabilize his reign. In a gesture of political theatre, Yudhiṣṭhira
honours Kṛṣṇa with the arghya, the libation of supreme respect, triggering Śiśupāla’s outrage
and subsequent death at Kṛṣṇa’s hands. The elimination of Śiśupāla—himself an avatar of
envy and dissent—momentarily stabilizes the hierarchy of kingship. But it also exposes its
dependence on exclusion and violence.
As Arindam Chakrabarti notes, “Every act of naming or recognition in the Mahābhārata is
simultaneously an act of negation.”¹³ By offering the arghya to Kṛṣṇa, Yudhiṣṭhira affirms
divine sovereignty but negates the human equality of the assembly. The political hierarchy of
the rājasūya mirrors the cosmic order only through the suppression of dissent. The death of
Śiśupāla—ritually justified as divine retribution—foreshadows the violence that will consume
the Kuru house.
Thus, kingship in the Sabha Parva is revealed as a paradox: it is founded on dharma but
sustained by adharma. The ceremony that sanctifies Yudhiṣṭhira’s power also engenders his
downfall. His universal kingship (samrājya) is undone not by external conquest but by the
internal dynamics of kinship. The hall that witnessed his consecration will soon witness his
humiliation. As van Buitenen remarks, “When Yudhisthira has reached the pinnacle of
temporal power as the acknowledged suzerain of all the world, he is challenged to the game.
Why he felt he had to accept the challenge… will be discussed later.”¹⁴ The transition from
sacrificial game (yajña) to gambling game (dyūta) encapsulates the moral trajectory of the
Sabha Parva: the transformation of ritual order into moral chaos.
In the larger cosmology of the epic, kinship and kingship are not opposed but mutually
implicated. The king rules by virtue of his lineage, yet his sovereignty demands
transcendence of familial bonds. As the epic repeatedly asserts, the king’s dharma is
rājadharma, distinct from the kuladharma of kinship. But when these two collide—as they
do in the Sabha Parva—the result is moral disintegration. Yudhiṣṭhira’s desire to uphold
dharma through ritual kingship leads him to destroy the very relational bonds that constitute
his legitimacy. In the words of Uma Chakravarti, “The Sabha is the moment where the family
becomes the polity and the polity becomes the battlefield.”¹⁵
By the end of this movement, the moral architecture of the hall—its symmetry, hierarchy,
and divine sanction—has been established. Yet within this very structure lies the potential for
inversion. The rājasūya transforms Yudhiṣṭhira into a divine sovereign, but it also isolates
him from his kin. The hierarchy that he establishes through ritual recognition will soon
reappear in the hall of Hastināpura, where the same principles—order, consent, play—will be
perverted into instruments of deceit. The second kingship that arises in the Sabha Parva is
therefore the antithesis of the first: an anti-assembly where dharma becomes dice, kinship
becomes rivalry, and the architecture of sovereignty collapses into the abyss of illusion.
Notes
1. J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Mahabharata, Book 2: The Book of the Assembly Hall, 3.
2. Ibid., 8–9.
3. Ibid., 9.
4. Ibid., 10.
5. Ibid., 11.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Ibid., 9–10.
8. Uma Chakravarti, “Who Speaks for Whom? The Queen, the Dāsī and Sexual Politics
in the Sabhāparvan,” in Mahabharata Now: Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics, ed.
Arindam Chakrabarti and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2013),
132–133.
9. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 5.
10.Sibesh Bhattacharya, “Significance of the Early Parvans,” in Mahabharata Now,
37–39.
11. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 14.
12. Ibid., 17.
13. Arindam Chakrabarti, “Just Words: An Ethics of Conversation in the Mahabharata,”
in Mahabharata Now, 244.
14. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 6.
15. Chakravarti, “Who Speaks for Whom?”, 133.
Kṣatriya Dharma and Masculinity: The Ethos of
Violence and the Contest of Virtues
The Sabha Parva occupies a unique position in the Mahābhārata’s ethical architecture
because it not only stages the crisis of kingship but also dramatizes the conflict between two
masculinities — the Kṣatriya ideal of warriorhood and the Brahmanical ideal of restraint. The
Book thus becomes a field where dharma and gendered virtue intersect, where masculine
prowess is both celebrated and problematized.
In the world of the Mahābhārata, the Kṣatriya’s dharma (kṣātra dharma) is defined by its
paradox: the righteous exercise of violence. A Kṣatriya must uphold order through force, yet
his ethical legitimacy depends on the moral control of that same force. As van Buitenen
notes, Yudhiṣṭhira’s reign begins under the sign of this contradiction: he is “to embark on a
grand Vedic ceremony,” but his qualification lies not in conquest but in intention — in his
inner resolve to govern justly.¹ His brothers, however, embody the opposite pole of Kṣatriya
virtue: Bhīma’s ferocity, Arjuna’s martial perfection, and Nakula and Sahadeva’s chivalric
loyalty represent the kinetic and performative dimensions of warrior masculinity.
The tension between these two models — the contemplative dharma of the Brahmin-king
and the aggressive dharma of the warrior — pervades the Sabha Parva. It is crystallized in
Yudhiṣṭhira’s interactions with his brothers and advisers. When he contemplates the
rājasūya, his hesitation (“I wish not for sovereignty that brings about strife”) is countered by
Kṛṣṇa’s pragmatic counsel: that the sacrifice demands the removal of Jarāsandha, the
reigning overlord of Magadha.² Kṛṣṇa’s logic is purely kṣātriya: order can only be achieved
through the subjugation of rivals. Yet the act of killing Jarāsandha — carried out by Bhīma —
fuses ritual and violence in a single gesture, exemplifying how the Kṣatriya’s masculine
identity is both sacralized and compromised by bloodshed.
In Mahabharata Now, Arindam Chakrabarti describes this fusion as a moral aesthetic of
“just words and violent deeds.”³ The Kṣatriya’s ethics, he suggests, depends on maintaining
harmony between speech (vāc) and action (karman). A warrior’s word is his bond; his
masculinity is measured not by aggression alone but by the congruence of intention and
action. Yudhiṣṭhira’s moral ambiguity — his scrupulous honesty coexisting with passivity in
the face of injustice — thus represents a crisis of this masculine code. His inability to
reconcile Brahmanic restraint with Kṣatriya action transforms dharma from a mode of power
into a condition of paralysis.
The Sabha Parva stages this crisis through two parallel masculinities: the disciplined
violence of Bhīma and the self-restraining verbalism of Yudhiṣṭhira. Bhīma, in tearing apart
Jarāsandha’s body, enacts the corporeal violence that Yudhiṣṭhira cannot. His act restores
political order but destabilizes moral balance, for the victory is achieved through trickery —
the manipulation of Jarāsandha’s divided birth.⁴ Thus, even in triumph, the kṣātra ideal
reveals its dependence on māyā (illusion). The warrior’s masculine prowess is inseparable
from deceit, reflecting the larger tension between māyā and dharma that defines the epic’s
moral world.
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, in his essay “Of Gambling: A Few Lessons from the Mahābhārata,”
interprets this tension as the clash between two types of play — sacred play (līlā) and
destructive play (dyūta).⁵ For the Kṣatriya, violence and competition are not aberrations but
ritualized performances of sovereignty. The rājasūya itself, as a sacrificial “game” of
conquest, transforms the ethical necessity of rule into a ceremonial contest. Yet, when this
spirit of play detaches from its ritual context and becomes mere chance — as in the later dice
game — it corrodes both masculine virtue and royal dharma. The masculine ethos of the
Kṣatriya thus becomes the vehicle of his downfall: the very qualities that define his strength
— pride, rivalry, and competitiveness — turn into instruments of ruin.
The opposition between Kṣatriya and Brahmin masculinities also unfolds at the level of
discourse. The Sabha is not only a political but also a rhetorical space — a theatre of speech.
Narada’s kaccid-questions to Yudhiṣṭhira, as van Buitenen notes, are a “manual of kingship,”
a text of Brahminical governance that subjects Kṣatriya power to the discipline of
knowledge.⁶ The hundred-odd questions concerning justice, taxation, war, espionage, and
the king’s moral conduct codify a model of masculine control through intellect rather than
force. The king is asked whether he “governs without oppressing,” whether he “rises early
and hears cases impartially,” whether he “avoids the vices of drink, gambling, and women.”⁷
In these interrogations, the ideal king emerges not as the conqueror but as the ascetic
administrator — a masculine ideal grounded in brahmacarya rather than vīrya (virile
energy).
This duality — the ascetic and the heroic — is precisely what the Sabha Parva dramatizes.
Yudhiṣṭhira’s failure lies in his attempt to inhabit both roles simultaneously. He seeks to be
both Brahmin and Kṣatriya, sage and sovereign. His masculinity, torn between renunciation
and responsibility, becomes the site of tragic irony. As Chakrabarti observes, “Yudhiṣṭhira’s
words are just, but his silence is unjust.”⁸ His refusal to assert authority at the decisive
moments — during the dice game, during Draupadī’s humiliation — reveals the ethical
exhaustion of Brahmanical masculinity when faced with the political demands of Kṣatriya
dharma.
Uma Chakravarti’s feminist reading of the Sabhāparvan illuminates this crisis further by
foregrounding its gendered implications. In her essay “Who Speaks for Whom? The Queen,
the Dāsī and Sexual Politics in the Sabhāparvan,” she argues that the male codes of dharma
and masculinity are constructed upon the silencing of women.⁹ Draupadī’s interrogation in
the assembly — “Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?” — destabilizes both Kṣatriya and
Brahminical ethics. Her question exposes the logical and moral contradiction in
Yudhiṣṭhira’s claim to righteousness: a king who has gambled away his own agency cannot
claim the authority to gamble another’s body. The Sabha, in this sense, becomes a space
where masculine dharma collapses under the weight of feminine speech. The ethical
eloquence of the queen dismantles the performative masculinity of the king.
Thus, the Sabha Parva constructs masculinity as a layered and unstable category — a
dialectic between power and speech, between domination and restraint. The Kṣatriya’s
dharma, though outwardly a code of valor, conceals within it the contradictions of class and
gender. When the Brahminical virtues of detachment and self-control infiltrate the warrior’s
ethos, masculinity turns inward, becoming self-defeating. Yudhiṣṭhira’s dharma, ostensibly a
mark of moral superiority, becomes the very reason for his downfall. The ensuing dice game,
in which he loses everything, literalizes the fatal gamble of reconciling incompatible
masculinities within a single body.
The Dharma of a King: Yudhiṣṭhira’s Dilemma and
the Game of Dice
If the first half of the Sabha Parva celebrates the triumph of ritual kingship, the second half
dismantles it through the spectacle of moral humiliation. The transition from the rājasūya
yajña to the dyūta sabhā — from the royal consecration to the gambling hall — marks the
collapse of dharma into adharma. The two assemblies mirror each other: both are theatres
of consent, both depend on ritualized play, and both end with the redistribution of power.
Yet the second assembly inverts the first: the sacred order of the rājasūya becomes the
profane chaos of the dice game.
Van Buitenen identifies this structural symmetry as the organizing principle of the book:
“The settlement at Indraprastha needs a hall—the hall needs validation as a royal court
through the Royal Consecration—it evokes the others’ envy—and brings about a game in
another hall where Yudhiṣṭhira loses all.”¹⁰ The progression from architecture to ritual to
envy to downfall encapsulates the epic’s cyclical vision of human history: every act of
creation generates its own destruction.
Why Yudhiṣṭhira Accepted the Invitation
The question that has preoccupied commentators since antiquity is why Yudhiṣṭhira, the
embodiment of dharma, accepted Duryodhana’s invitation to gamble despite knowing its
disastrous potential. The text itself acknowledges the paradox: “Why, when everything has
been achieved, must it now be gambled away by the hero, in all of whose previous life there
has not been so much as a hint of a compulsion to gamble?”¹¹
The answer lies in the ritual logic of kingship. As Buitenen notes, the rājasūya sacrifice in
Vedic tradition was followed by a mandatory game of dice — a symbolic enactment of chance
within the cosmic order.¹² In this sense, Yudhiṣṭhira’s acceptance of the invitation is not
merely a lapse of judgment but a continuation of ritual necessity. The king who has been
consecrated through sacrifice must also confront chance, for sovereignty itself is a wager
with fate. The dice game externalizes the metaphysical risk inherent in kingship: the king
must gamble with fortune as the cosmos gambles with creation.
Yet the transformation of ritual play into moral catastrophe signals the corruption of this
sacred order. The dice game at Hastināpura is no longer a symbolic rite but a calculated act
of deception, orchestrated by Śakuni. Its outcome is predetermined; its stakes, absolute. In
this perversion of ritual, dharma becomes complicit with adharma. Yudhiṣṭhira’s consent,
though freely given, is ethically compromised, for it legitimizes an unfair contest. His moral
error lies not in gambling but in confusing the sacred game of fate with the profane game of
politics.
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s reading of dyūta as a form of destructive play elucidates this
transformation. “The Mahābhārata,” he writes, “teaches that the playful element of the
universe — when severed from moral proportion — leads to dissolution.”¹³ Gambling, in this
sense, is the negative mirror of sacrifice: both involve loss, but in sacrifice, loss produces
meaning, while in gambling, it annihilates it. Yudhiṣṭhira’s acceptance of the invitation thus
represents a tragic misrecognition: he mistakes the symbolic loss of ritual for the literal loss
of self.
The King’s Dharma on Trial
The dice game becomes the trial ground of Yudhiṣṭhira’s dharma. As he loses his kingdom,
his brothers, and finally Draupadī, the Sabha transforms from a hall of justice into a theatre
of moral collapse. The silence of the elders — Bhīṣma, Droṇa, Vidura — underscores the
paralysis of dharma in the face of power. When Draupadī is dragged into the assembly and
questions her husband’s right to stake her, the epic confronts its most profound ethical
paradox: can dharma survive when its own custodians are complicit in adharma?
Yudhiṣṭhira’s responses to Draupadī’s interrogation expose the limits of his moral reasoning.
Bound by the letter of law rather than its spirit, he defers judgment to the assembly,
declaring that “the learned should decide.”¹⁴ In doing so, he transforms moral crisis into
procedural debate. Uma Chakravarti interprets this moment as the exposure of patriarchal
dharma: “The queen’s question renders visible the invisible — the legal fiction that allows
men to treat women as property.”¹⁵ The Sabha, a space meant for public deliberation,
becomes instead a stage for the public violation of justice.
Arindam Chakrabarti reads Yudhiṣṭhira’s silence here as a speech act — an ethics of
conversation gone awry. “In the Mahābhārata,” he writes, “the failure to speak is itself a
form of speech.”¹⁶ Yudhiṣṭhira’s silence signifies not ignorance but complicity. His refusal to
intervene allows adharma to masquerade as law. In this sense, the dice game dramatizes the
ethical failure of language: words that once upheld order (the vows of kingship, the oaths of
sacrifice) now serve to conceal injustice.
The Sabha Parva’s treatment of Yudhiṣṭhira’s dharma thus reveals the fragility of moral
absolutism in a world governed by ambiguity. His unwavering commitment to truth (satya)
blinds him to the demands of justice (nyāya). By adhering to the letter of dharma, he
violates its spirit. As van Buitenen remarks, “The disturbing contradiction in the character of
Yudhisthira… demands the question whether the events in his life may not have been
modeled on a preexisting structure.”¹⁷ That structure — the ritual of the rājasūya and its
ensuing dice — inscribes within the king’s destiny the inevitability of moral loss.
The Collapse of Kinship and the Reversal of Hierarchy
The consequences of the dice game extend beyond Yudhiṣṭhira’s personal fall; they dismantle
the entire structure of kinship and hierarchy that the rājasūya had consecrated. In the
earlier assembly, the brothers and allies occupied positions of honor according to ritual rank.
In the gambling hall, those hierarchies are inverted. The eldest brother becomes the slave of
the youngest cousin; the wife of the emperor becomes a pawn in a game. The Sabha’s
architecture — once the symbol of order — now becomes the arena of disorder.
As Sibesh Bhattacharya notes, “The Sabha becomes the site of inversion, where all
relationships are turned upside down — brotherhood into bondage, sovereignty into
servitude, masculinity into humiliation.”¹⁸ The physical setting itself enacts this inversion:
the same motif of the hall that earlier connected the human and the divine now collapses into
moral darkness. The Kuru Sabha, designed for counsel and justice, degenerates into a court
of mockery and silence.
When Duryodhana orders Draupadī to be disrobed, the moral universe of the epic reaches its
nadir. The act is not merely a violation of modesty but a symbolic negation of dharma itself.
The miraculous intervention of the divine — Draupadī’s endless garment — restores her
bodily integrity but not the Sabha’s moral order. The elders’ silence, Yudhiṣṭhira’s paralysis,
and the courtiers’ laughter mark the total eclipse of justice.
The king’s dharma, which was supposed to protect the vulnerable, becomes complicit in their
vulnerability. Yudhiṣṭhira’s failure here is not only ethical but ontological: he ceases to be
rājā — the protector — and becomes merely pati — the husband who fails to protect. The
dice game thus completes the transformation of kingship into kinship and kinship into
catastrophe.
Notes
1. J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Mahabharata, Book 2: The Book of the Assembly Hall
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5.
2. Ibid., 14.
3. Arindam Chakrabarti, “Just Words: An Ethics of Conversation in the Mahābhārata,”
in Mahabharata Now: Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics, ed. Arindam Chakrabarti and
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2013), 244–246.
4. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 17.
5. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, “Of Gambling: A Few Lessons from the Mahābhārata,” in
Mahabharata Now, 3–10.
6. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 12.
7. Ibid., 12–13.
8. Arindam Chakrabarti, “Just Words,” 250.
9. Uma Chakravarti, “Who Speaks for Whom? The Queen, the Dāsī and Sexual Politics
in the Sabhāparvan,” in Mahabharata Now, 132–138.
10.Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 6.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. Ibid., 7.
13. Bandyopadhyay, “Of Gambling,” 11.
14. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 65.
15. Chakravarti, “Who Speaks for Whom?”, 137.
16. Chakrabarti, “Just Words,” 249.
17. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 6.
18.Sibesh Bhattacharya, “Significance of the Early Parvans,” in Mahabharata Now,
37–38.
Access to Resources and the Political Economy of
the Mahābhārata
While the Sabha Parva is often read as a moral allegory of pride and downfall, it also
encodes a rich subtext of material politics — a narrative of wealth, land, and resource control
that mirrors the transition from lineage-based chieftainship to territorial kingship in early
India. The two halls — at Indraprastha and Hastināpura — are not merely ritual spaces but
economic symbols: one embodies the accumulation and redistribution of resources, the other
their sequestration and loss.
Van Buitenen’s introduction to the Book of the Assembly Hall situates the Mahābhārata’s
political landscape within this transformation. The establishment of Indraprastha, carved
out of the wild Khāṇḍava forest, represents “the first economic act of civilization — the
conversion of unclaimed land into royal property.”¹ By clearing the forest, the Pāṇḍavas
assert the sovereign right to territorial possession; they turn prakṛti (nature) into rājya
(kingdom). The assistance of Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna, the destruction of the forest’s inhabitants,
and the alliance with the asura architect Maya all signal a new order of political economy,
where divine sanction legitimizes material conquest.
This moment, seemingly mythic, reflects a historical process. As van Buitenen notes, the shift
from pastoral to agrarian economies during the late Vedic period created new forms of
wealth accumulation that required centralization and control.² The construction of the
sabha thus marks not only the rise of imperial architecture but also the emergence of the
court as the locus of redistribution — the place where tribute, taxation, and gift-exchange
mediate social hierarchy. The Sabha Parva’s obsessive detailing of offerings — from
conquered kings, from tributary regions, from cosmic deities — maps a world where
sovereignty is defined by the ability to channel resources toward ritual consumption.
The rājasūya yajña dramatizes this principle of redistribution. As Sibesh Bhattacharya
observes, the sacrifice is “the ritual mechanism through which political economy is
transformed into moral economy.”³ By offering up wealth, livestock, and goods to the gods
and Brahmins, the king purifies material possession through ritual expenditure. Yet this very
act of purification reasserts inequality: the king’s power to give presupposes others’
compulsion to yield. The grandeur of Yudhiṣṭhira’s court, described as “resplendent with gold
and jewels, filled with tributary princes and sages,” is built upon an invisible network of
extraction.⁴
Arindam Chakrabarti’s essays on ethics in Mahābhārata Now highlight the tension between
generosity and domination inherent in this system. He notes that every gift (dāna) in the
epic “is a wound that creates debt.”⁵ The recipients of Yudhiṣṭhira’s largesse — Brahmins,
vassals, and kin — become bound to him through obligation. The ritual economy of giving
thus conceals an economy of dependence. When Duryodhana later mocks the Pāṇḍavas’
prosperity, his resentment stems not only from envy but from economic displacement: the
redistribution of wealth has shifted the balance of resource control from Hastināpura to
Indraprastha.
This displacement is crucial. The Kuru kingdom’s resources — land, tribute, military
manpower — are finite. The establishment of a parallel capital fractures the kin-based
economic unity of the dynasty. The dice game, in this light, functions as a political
instrument of repossession. As Uma Chakravarti points out, “The gambling hall replaces the
battlefield as the site of resource redistribution.”⁶ Through the manipulation of chance,
Duryodhana and Śakuni achieve what open warfare could not: the transfer of sovereignty
without the shedding of royal blood. The material stakes of the game — wealth, slaves, land,
Draupadī herself — reveal the economic underpinnings of the moral drama.
Even Yudhiṣṭhira’s acceptance of the invitation can be read through this economic lens.
Having performed the rājasūya, he is bound by dharma to reciprocate the gifts and honors
received from other rulers. To refuse the invitation would be to reject the circulation of
wealth and hospitality that sustains royal legitimacy. In van Buitenen’s words, “The game is
the king’s test of generosity: he must be willing to lose what he has gained.”⁷ Yet in playing,
Yudhiṣṭhira turns this virtue into vice. His readiness to risk everything, once a mark of
sovereign detachment, becomes a form of moral profligacy.
The political economy of the Sabha Parva thus reveals that kingship in the Mahābhārata is
inseparable from the control of resources — land, tribute, and bodies. The loss of these
resources in the dice game is not merely symbolic; it signals the reversal of the very process
of state formation that the rājasūya had inaugurated. By the end of the Book, the Kuru
kingdom is once again fragmented, its resources dispersed, its hierarchy inverted. What
began as a drama of ritual consolidation ends as an allegory of economic entropy.
The Significance of Disability: Blindness,
Impairment, and the Moral Body
If the Sabha Parva is the architectural and moral centre of the epic, it is also the point at
which the body — particularly the disabled body — becomes a site of moral signification. The
text’s recurrent imagery of blindness, lameness, and physical vulnerability encodes a deeper
reflection on vision, justice, and moral incapacity.
The most prominent figure of disability in the Sabha Parva is Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the blind king
whose very condition symbolizes the failure of moral sight. Van Buitenen notes that the
Mahābhārata’s original audience would have recognized blindness not as mere physical lack
but as a spiritual metaphor: “Dhritarashtra’s blindness is a hereditary defect — both of body
and of will.”⁸ His inability to restrain Duryodhana parallels his inability to perceive the
moral consequences of envy and pride. In the royal court, where sight equates with
knowledge and judgment, blindness becomes synonymous with ethical impotence.
Yet Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s blindness is not merely a personal flaw; it represents the structural
blindness of patriarchal authority. As Sibesh Bhattacharya argues, the blind king “sees
through others” — through Sanjaya, Vidura, and his sons — thereby turning moral
responsibility into a chain of delegation.⁹ The king’s disability externalizes the dysfunction of
the state: the sovereign who cannot see must depend on the very agents who deceive him.
His blindness thus allegorizes the collapse of epistemic hierarchy — the severing of vision
from authority.
In contrast, the Sabha Parva’s other forms of bodily impairment — from Bhīma’s wounded
pride to Draupadī’s threatened disrobing — expand the metaphor of disability into the realm
of ethics. Draupadī’s body becomes the battlefield upon which dharma and adharma
contend. When she is dragged into the Sabha and stripped of agency, the text confronts the
violence that underpins social order. Her miraculous protection — the infinite garment — is
both a divine restoration and a reminder of human failure. As Uma Chakravarti writes, “The
endless garment covers the nakedness of the Sabha, not merely that of the queen.”¹⁰
The theme of disability extends even to Yudhiṣṭhira himself. Though not physically impaired,
his moral paralysis during the dice game functions as a form of ethical disability — an
inability to act. Arindam Chakrabarti interprets this as the Mahābhārata’s critique of
perfectionist morality: “To be infallibly righteous is to be catastrophically inert.”¹¹
Yudhiṣṭhira’s dharma blinds him to justice as surely as Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s eyes are darkened to
wrongdoing. Both figures embody the failure of vision — one literal, the other moral.
Van Buitenen observes that the Sabha’s moral atmosphere is suffused with irony: “Those
who see do not act; those who act do not see.”¹² Bhīṣma, the seer-warrior, perceives the
injustice yet remains silent; Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the blind ruler, hears everything yet intervenes too
late. This disjunction between sensory awareness and ethical response constitutes what we
may call the politics of disability in the Mahābhārata. The body’s impairment becomes a
mirror of the polity’s dysfunction.
The Sabha itself, as an architectural space, participates in this semiotics of vision. Its
polished floors and deceptive reflections — which cause Duryodhana’s humiliating fall —
transform the hall into an allegory of illusion (māyā). The environment blinds even the
sighted, turning vision into misrecognition. As Buitenen remarks, “The floor of the hall was
so smooth that it reflected like water; he [Duryodhana] took for pools what were only
pavements, for walls what were only shadows.”¹³ The blind king presides over a hall that
deceives the sighted; blindness becomes universal.
In this sense, disability in the Sabha Parva functions not merely as a metaphor of weakness
but as a revelation of truth. Those marked by impairment — Dhṛtarāṣṭra, Draupadī, even
Yudhiṣṭhira — expose the limits of moral vision. Their suffering illuminates what the perfect
bodies of warriors and kings conceal: the vulnerability that underlies power. The politics of
sight and blindness thus culminates in an ethical inversion — the truly blind are those who
refuse to see injustice, not those deprived of eyes.
Conclusion: The Moral Architecture of the Sabha
Parva
The Sabha Parva stands as the epic’s most architecturally structured and morally
disorienting book. It begins with the construction of a perfect hall — the embodiment of
order — and ends with the disintegration of that order within another hall of deception.
Between these two architectures unfolds the total drama of human civilization: creation and
destruction, ritual and play, dharma and adharma.
At its core, the Book interrogates the nature of kingship and the ethics of power. Through
Yudhiṣṭhira’s rise and fall, it reveals that dharma, when abstracted from compassion,
becomes tyranny; and kingship, when severed from kinship, becomes solitude. The Sabha’s
symmetry — divine order inverted into human chaos — encapsulates the Mahābhārata’s
tragic vision of history: that every system of justice is haunted by the injustice it excludes.
The Kṣatriya’s masculinity, forged in valor and ritual duty, collapses under the weight of its
own ideals. The Brahminical virtues of restraint and renunciation, when imposed upon the
warrior’s role, turn into paralysis. The dice game exposes this incompatibility: the king who
refuses to act for fear of sin ends up committing the greater sin of inaction. As Arindam
Chakrabarti poignantly observes, “The Mahābhārata teaches us that doing right is not the
same as being right.”¹⁴
Economically, the Sabha Parva reflects the consolidation and dispersion of resources — the
transformation of nature into wealth and wealth into loss. Politically, it dramatizes the
fragility of hierarchy; socially, it unveils the gendered violence underpinning patriarchal
order. And ethically, it turns the metaphor of blindness into a universal condition: every
human vision of order contains within it the seeds of its own blindness.
Draupadī’s question — “Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?” — remains the moral
centre of the Sabha Parva. It reframes the epic’s central inquiry from cosmology to
conscience. In that moment, the queen becomes the true seer, perceiving the ethical void at
the heart of masculine dharma. Her interrogation shatters the illusion of the hall, exposing
the truth that no architecture, however divine, can contain the instability of moral life.
In conclusion, the Sabha Parva is not merely the narrative pivot of the Mahābhārata; it is
its philosophical core — a sustained meditation on the fragility of dharma amid the grandeur
of power. It teaches that kingship without self-knowledge leads to tyranny, that virtue
without empathy leads to blindness, and that architecture without humility leads to illusion.
The glittering hall of Indraprastha and the dark hall of Hastināpura are not opposites but
mirrors — reflections of the same human condition, where the desire for order generates its
own chaos.
Thus, the Sabha Parva endures as one of world literature’s greatest meditations on the
ethics of power. It transforms the spectacle of kings into the parable of humanity: that in the
end, all assemblies — divine or human — are held within the fragile hall of conscience.
Notes
1. J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Mahabharata, Book 2: The Book of the Assembly Hall
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4.
2. Ibid., 6–7.
3. Sibesh Bhattacharya, “Significance of the Early Parvans,” in Mahabharata Now:
Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics, ed. Arindam Chakrabarti and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay
(New Delhi: Routledge India, 2013), 42.
4. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 22.
5. Arindam Chakrabarti, “Just Words: An Ethics of Conversation in the Mahābhārata,”
in Mahabharata Now, 248.
6. Uma Chakravarti, “Who Speaks for Whom? The Queen, the Dāsī and Sexual Politics
in the Sabhāparvan,” in Mahabharata Now, 136.
7. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 7.
8. Ibid., 5.
9. Bhattacharya, “Significance of the Early Parvans,” 38.
10.Chakravarti, “Who Speaks for Whom?”, 138.
11. Chakrabarti, “Just Words,” 251.
12. Van Buitenen, The Book of the Assembly Hall, 11.
13. Ibid., 9.
14. Chakrabarti, “Just Words,” 253.
