Mahabharata - Kingship Knows No Kinship! Quiz

Answer: Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble)

Jawaharlal Nehru (the first Indian Prime Minister) has written in his book 'The Discovery of India': "In the Mahabharata, a very definite attempt has been made to emphasize the fundamental unity of India, or Bharatvarsha (the land of Bharata) as it was called, from Bharata, the legendary founder of the race," (the people were called Bharatasantati or the descendants of Bharata.)
India does indeed show a deep underlying unity in spite of great diversity.

The quotation given in the question has been taken from 'A Source Book in Indian Philosophy' by Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, OM, FBA. He was the first Indian Vice-President and went on to become the second President. It is his birthday which is commemorated by the Indian Teacher's Day celebrated every year on the fifth of September throughout the country since 1962.

Sister Nivedita was an Anglo-Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda. The word 'nivedita' literally means "dedicated to God" in Hindi.

Answer: Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita, more simply known as Gita, is a sacred Hindu scripture, just like the Quran is the central religious verbal text of Islam. Ramayana is the other great Indian epic.

The Gita consists of approximately 700 verses. Like the rest of the Mahabharata, it too was authored by Ved Vyas in Sanskrit.

It teaches that a person must carry out the duties assigned to him by his caste and rank under all circumstances without any desire for reward. It propagates the 'karma theory', i.e. Do your best and forget the rest.

As a Sanskrit student, I studied some of the more popular verses of the Gita itself in eighth grade.
Even today in many an Indian court, the eyewitness is made to swear upon the Gita, "Whatever I'll say will be the truth. Apart from the truth, I'll say nothing else."
Interestingly, nowadays, though many Hindu Indian households have a copy of the Gita with them, they don't like to keep the entire Mahabharata because of the belief that it will lead to a fratricidal war in their homes.

Answer: Bharata

The Bharatas were one of the earliest Vedic tribes.

In the first half of the first millennium B.C., they combined with the other major tribe, that of the Purus, and thus formed the Kuru people.

Gradually they coalesced with a people called the Panchalas.

Both the Kauravas and the Pandavas belonged to the Kuru clan, and the battle between them is the main theme of the Mahabharata.

Answer: Parikshit

Parikshit (the one who has been tested) was born to Abhimanyu (Arjun's son) and his lawfully wedded wife Uttara, the Matsya princess. It is unfortunate that the poor chap was born only after the death of his courageous father.

Ved Vyas (the one who split the vedas), also known as Badarayana, was the offspring of a fisher-woman (Satyavati) seduced by a traveling sage (Parashar). Apart from being the author of the Mahabharata, he is an important character himself.

Pandu was born to Ambalika after the death of her husband Vichitravirya (a name of staggering simplicity, don't you think!). It may be prudent to point out here that at the time of the death, she was not pregnant. Pandu was actually fathered by Rishi Ved Vyas, on the express command of his mother Satyavati, whose daughter-in-law was Ambalika.

Karna was born to Kunti, Pandu's wife, before her marriage. He was the son of Surya (the Sun god).

Theirs is a complicated family tree, no doubt about that!

Answer: Dhritarashtra

Dhritarashtra, Hastinapur's king at the time of the great war, had only one wife, Gandhari, but she bore him a hundred sons and a daughter. Moreover, when his wife was in an advanced state of pregnancy, he conceived another son (Yuyutsu) with his maid servant.

Shantanu, the youngest son of King Pratipa of Hastinapur, had two wives: Ganga (Bhishma's mother) and Satyavati (mother of Chitrangad and Vichitravirya); though, to his credit, only one at a time.

Bhishma (he of the terrible oath) had vowed life-long celibacy and he honoured that vow till his last days (as opposed to Pandu, upon whom celibacy had been enforced by Rishi Kindam's curse and who still couldn't control himself, which ultimately led to his death.) Consequently, Bhishma had no wife, because of which he even succeeded in making Amba (reborn as Shikhandi) his arch-rival.

I hope you didn't answer 'Arjuna' because he was the most 'adventurous' of all. He had more than forty main wives (lucky fellow!).

Apparently, polygamy was a done thing during those times. It was only in the nineteenth century that some Indian reformers like Raja Ram Mohun Roy tried to rid the society of this practise.

Answer: Arjuna

That's right, folks! Arjuna's fourth wife was Subhadra. Arjuna's mother was Kunti. Subhadra was Lord Krishna's sister. Krishna's biological father was Vasudev, who himself was the son of King Shurasena. Vasudev and Kunti were themselves real siblings.

In fact, when Pandu died, Vasudev even invited Kunti along with her sons and those of Madri (who committed sati and was burnt alive with her husband Pandu's dead body) to his palace (by that time Kamsa had been vanquished by Krishna), but they went back to Hastinapur, where they rightfully belonged, or else this war wouldn't have taken place at all.

Krishna used to call Kunti (Pritha) as 'bua' which is the Hindi term for maternal aunt.

That's why Krishna became a charioteer for Parth (Arjuna) during the war; not only was he his first cousin but also his brother-in-law. Another reason was that Indra (Arjuna's actual father) had requested Krishna to look after his child and Krishna had acquiesced.

It is indeed ironic that the Hindu Marriage Act bars marriage for five generations on the father's side and three on the mother's side.

Answer: The Pregnant King

It is perhaps rightly said about the Mahabharata that "What is found here, may be found elsewhere. What is not found here, will not be found elsewhere."

P.S. - The book review given in the question is referenced from hindu-blog. The book was published in 2008.

Answer: They died in a forest fire.

After the end of the battle, the Pandavas ruled Hastinapur for some time with Dhritarashtra as their head. Later, Dhritarashtra, along with his wife Gandhari and his sister-in-law Kunti (mother of the Pandavas) left the kingdom to go live in a hermitage in the mighty Himalayas. It was there that they died in a forest fire, and thus came to a tragic end.

The Mahabharata is divided into 18 books (parvas) concerning an 18-day war among 18 armies. The fifteenth parva, called the Ashramavasika Parva or The Book of the Hermitage, contains an elaborate description of the state of the affairs of Dhritarashtra, Gandhari and Kunti after the end of the great battle at Kurukshetra.

Answer: Kalidasa

Kalidasa can be said to be the Shakespeare of the Sanskrit literature.

He was one of the Nine Jewels or the Navratna, a group of nine who excelled in literary arts, in the court of Chandragupta II or Vikramaditya (the Sun of Power).

Shakuntala herself was the daughter of the sage Vishwamitra and the apsara Menaka. Thus, Vishwamitra happens to be one of the connecting links between the two great epics - Ramayana and Mahabharata.

The play was the first Indian drama to be translated into a Western language, by Sir William Jones in 1789.

Answer: to pick up the bow, hold it, string it, and then use it to shoot the eye of a rotating artificial fish, just by looking at its reflection in oil below

It was Arjuna who managed to fulfill this condition, and won Draupadi's hand in marriage, but then he had to share her with his brothers, due to some misunderstanding.