Chitrangada

A man lies on his back in the dust outside a city, with an arrow standing in his chest and his great bow fallen beside him. A few paces off a younger man has dropped as well, senseless from wounds and from the shock of what he has just done. Out through the gate comes a woman, weeping as she runs. The man on the ground is her husband. The archer who shot him is her son.

She is Chitrangada, princess of Manipura, and this is the one day in the Mahabharata when the whole story bends around her.

It began many years earlier with a traveller. Arjuna, third of the five Pandava brothers and the finest archer of his age, was serving out a term of exile by walking from one holy place to the next. He went east through Vanga and Kalinga. At the border of Kalinga the priests who had kept him company turned back, and he went on alone along the coast, with the sea on one hand and the Mahendra hills on the other, until the road brought him to Manipura. There he saw the king’s daughter and wanted her. Arjuna collected wives on that exile the way other pilgrims collect blessings, so he went to her father and asked.

King Chitravahana did not say no. He explained. Generations before, an ancestor named Prabhanjana had been childless and had won a gift from the god Shiva by hard penance. The gift came with a ceiling. Each king of the line would have one child, and one only. For generation after generation that child had been a boy, and the throne passed down without trouble. Then Chitravahana’s one child was born a girl.

So he had made her a putrika. The word means a daughter who is appointed to do a son’s work. Her child would be counted as her father’s heir, as if the line ran straight through her. That, the king said in his quiet hall, was the bride price. Arjuna could marry Chitrangada, but the son she bore would stay in Manipura and rule it. Arjuna agreed. He lived in the city for three years as a husband and a son-in-law. When the boy was born he took his wife in his arms, said goodbye to the king, and walked on.

He did not take her with him. He could not have, under the terms, and the epic does not pretend he tried very hard. Chitrangada stayed where she was, raised her son Babhruvahana, and saw him made king.

The poem is thrifty about what she looked like. It calls her beautiful and faultless in every limb, and much later, when the Pandava women are pointed out one by one to a gathering of forest hermits, she is the one whose skin has the colour of pure gold, or of the pale yellow blossom of the madhuka tree. Nothing is said about her eyes or her hair or what she wore.

A whole war goes by without her. Then, after it, the eldest Pandava holds the great horse sacrifice, in which a consecrated horse is set loose to wander for a year and an army follows to fight any king who stops it. Arjuna leads that army, and the horse wanders into Manipura. Babhruvahana walks out to meet his father with priests and treasure, humble and glad. Arjuna is furious. A king, he says, meets an armed man with arms. At that moment a second woman rises out of the ground. This is Ulupi, a princess of the Nagas, the serpent people, another wife from that same exile and a second mother to the young king. She tells Babhruvahana to fight.

They fight. The son puts an arrow in his father’s shoulder, and Arjuna, staggering, praises the shot. Arjuna smashes the young king’s chariot and kills his horses. Babhruvahana, on foot and angry now, draws once more, and the bowstring cracks, and the arrow goes through Arjuna’s chest. The father falls. The son, seeing it, faints.

That is what Chitrangada finds when she reaches the field. She turns on Ulupi first and asks how a wife could bring her own husband to this and stand there dry-eyed. She kneels by Arjuna and calls on him to get up. Then she says the thing that changes the day. She will sit beside the body, silent, taking no food and no water, until she dies there too, unless Ulupi brings him back. When Babhruvahana wakes and understands what he has done, he swears the same.

Ulupi had been waiting for this. She calls to mind a jewel the serpents keep, a gem that restores the dead, and it comes to her hand. She lays it, cool and bright, on Arjuna’s breast, and he sits up like a man waking from sleep, rubbing his eyes and asking why everyone is crying. The explanation follows. In the war Arjuna had brought down the old warrior Bhishma by a trick, and the Vasus, the gods who were Bhishma’s kin, cursed him for it. Ulupi’s father had begged the curse down to something survivable. If Arjuna fell once at the hand of his own son, the debt would be paid. Ulupi had arranged for it to be paid.

Afterwards Chitrangada travels with her son and Ulupi to the Pandava capital for the sacrifice, where the older queens load them with jewels, and she lives for years among the women of that house. When the Pandavas finally give up their kingdom and walk north to die, Ulupi goes down into the waters of the Ganges. Chitrangada sets out for Manipura. She goes home.

Two later traditions have grown over this small part, and both need telling apart from it. The first is Tagore’s. In 1892 he wrote a verse drama in Bengali called Chitrangada, put it into English in 1913 as Chitra, and reworked it as a dance drama in 1936. His princess has been brought up as a son, a plain, hard-handed hunter who begs the god of love for one year of borrowed beauty to win Arjuna and then tires of the mask and shows him who she is. It is a fine play, and almost none of it is in the epic, where she never touches a bow. The second is geographical. The poem puts Manipura on the eastern seaboard beyond Kalinga, and the oldest reading of the marriage chapter even calls the city Manalura. The link with the present state of Manipur, far inland in the hills of the north-east, appears in the eighteenth century, when its Meitei kings took up Vaishnava Hinduism and court writers gave them descent from Babhruvahana. Historians of Manipur such as Gangmumei Kabui treat that pedigree as a late graft.

There is also a namesake to keep out of the way. An earlier Chitrangada, a man, was a Kuru king and half-brother of Bhishma, killed young by a Gandharva who shared his name after three years of fighting on the bank of the Sarasvati. He has nothing to do with her.

Her strength in the story is a matter of standing and of nerve. As a putrika she carries her father’s line in her own body, which is why Manipura stays Manipura and is never swallowed by her husband’s family. Her vow to starve beside the dead is the only weapon she picks up, and it works, because it forces Ulupi’s hand in front of everyone. Her limits are just as plain. She has no magic and no army. She could not keep her husband, she could not stop her son from shooting him, and she could not raise him herself. The jewel that did that belonged to the other wife.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chitrangada in the Mahabharata?

Chitrangada is the princess of Manipura, the only child of King Chitravahana, and one of the wives of the Pandava hero Arjuna. She is the mother of Babhruvahana, who becomes king of Manipura. She appears in two parts of the epic, at her marriage during Arjuna’s exile and again years later during the horse sacrifice.

Why did Chitrangada’s son stay in Manipura instead of going with Arjuna?

Chitrangada’s father had made her a putrika, a daughter appointed to take the place of a son. Under that arrangement her son counted as her father’s heir. Arjuna accepted this as the bride price, lived in Manipura for three years, and left after Babhruvahana was born.

What did Chitrangada do when Babhruvahana struck down Arjuna?

Chitrangada ran to the battlefield, blamed Arjuna’s Naga wife Ulupi for urging the fight, and vowed to fast to death beside her husband’s body unless Ulupi revived him. Ulupi then placed a serpent gem that restores the dead on Arjuna’s chest, and he woke. Ulupi explained that the defeat freed Arjuna from a curse laid on him by the Vasus for the way he brought down Bhishma.

Was Chitrangada a warrior princess?

Not in the Mahabharata, where Chitrangada never fights or carries a weapon. The warrior princess raised as a son comes from Rabindranath Tagore’s verse drama Chitrangada of 1892, published in English as Chitra in 1913. In Tagore’s version she is a hunter who asks the god of love for a year of borrowed beauty to win Arjuna.

Is the Manipura of Chitrangada the same as the modern state of Manipur?

The epic places Chitrangada’s Manipura on the eastern coast of India beyond Kalinga, near the Mahendra hills and the sea. The identification with the modern state of Manipur in the north-east dates from the eighteenth century, when its Meitei kings adopted Vaishnava Hinduism and court writers traced their line to Babhruvahana. Historians of Manipur such as Gangmumei Kabui treat that link as a late addition.

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