Sunda and Upasunda

Why it is told

Narada came with a warning.

The Pandavas had won Draupadi, built Indraprastha, and were ruling in peace. One day the sage Narada came to visit. He blessed Draupadi, asked her to leave the room, and then spoke to the five brothers.

She was one wife to all five of them, he said. "You must lay down a rule among yourselves, lest there be dissension." Then he told them about two brothers who ruled one kingdom, lived in one house, slept on one bed, sat on one seat and ate from one plate. And still they killed each other over a woman.

Who they were

Daitya princes, born into Hiranyakashipu's line.

Their father was Nikumba, also spelled Nikumbha. He was a lord of the daityas, the asura sons of Diti, and came from the line of Hiranyakashipu, Prahlada's father. His two sons never ate unless they were together and never went anywhere alone. Narada says they were "like one divided into two".

As young men they made one plan: to conquer the three worlds.

The boon

They asked Brahma for immortality, and he refused.

The brothers went to the Vindhya mountains and performed terrible austerities. They lived on air, offered their own flesh into the fire, and stood on their toes with their arms raised. The heat of it made the Vindhya belch smoke.

The frightened gods sent jewels and beautiful women to tempt them. Then they sent an illusion: the brothers' own mothers, sisters and wives, running from a demon and crying "Save us!" The brothers did not move.

At last Brahma came. They asked for the art of illusion, every weapon, great strength, the power to change shape, and to be immortal. Brahma answered, "Except for being immortal, everything else will be the way you wish." They had done all this to conquer the three worlds, Brahma said, and austerities done for that could not earn immortality.

So they chose their own death. Let nothing in the three worlds harm us, they said, except each other. Brahma agreed.

The conquest

They emptied heaven and then the earth.

Back home, their city celebrated for years, and the years felt like a single day. Then the brothers marched. The gods knew about the boon and fled from heaven to Brahma's world. The brothers conquered Indra's world, the yakshas, the rakshasas, the nagas below the earth and the creatures of the sea.

On earth they hunted down the sages and Brahmanas who made the sacrifices that strengthen the gods. The sages cursed them, but the boon made the curses useless, "like when arrows strike stone".

The brothers took the shapes of elephants in musth, lions and tigers, or became invisible, and killed wherever they found a hermitage. Sacrifices, marriages, farming and trade all stopped.

With no enemy left, the two made their home in Kurukshetra, the same plain where the Pandavas and Kauravas would later fight.

Tilottama

A woman made from the best of everything.

The sages went to Brahma. He thought for a moment and called Vishvakarma, the architect of the gods. "Create a lady who will be desired," Brahma said. Vishvakarma gathered whatever was beautiful in the three worlds, bit by bit, and made her from the essence of gems. Every part of her held the eye.

Brahma named her Tilottama. Tila means a tiny particle, and uttama means the best: she was made of the best tiny pieces. He sent her to Sunda and Upasunda with one task, to set the brothers against each other.

Four faces, a thousand eyes

Before she left, she walked around the gods.

Tilottama circled the assembled gods to pay her respects. Only Shiva and Indra kept still. But Shiva so wanted to see her that as she went round him, a new face appeared on each side she passed, until he had four. Indra grew a thousand eyes, on his back and on his sides. Everyone else simply turned their heads to follow her.

The epic says this is how Shiva came to have four faces and Indra a thousand eyes. Much later, in the Anushasana Parva, Shiva tells his wife Uma the same story himself.

The fall

One took her right hand, the other her left.

The brothers were feasting in a forest of flowering shala trees in the Vindhya mountains, drunk and surrounded by dancing women. Tilottama came walking along the river, picking karnikara flowers, in a single red garment. Both brothers got up at once. Sunda seized her right hand. Upasunda seized her left.

"She is my wife and your superior," said Sunda. As the elder brother's wife, she would rank above Upasunda. "She is my wife and your sister-in-law," replied Upasunda. Each shouted "I was the first," and each picked up his club. They struck each other down, and fell "like two suns dislodged from the sky". The boon had come true.

Brahma came with the gods, praised Tilottama and gave her a boon of her own: her radiance would be so great that "no one will be able to look at you for a long time." Then he gave the three worlds back to Indra.

The rule

Twelve years in the forest for breaking it.

The Pandavas understood. In front of Narada they made a rule: if one of them saw Draupadi while she was with another brother, he would go to the forest and live as a brahmachari, a celibate, for twelve years.

Years later, thieves stole a Brahmana's cattle, and he came to the palace crying for help. Arjuna ran for his bow, but the weapons were kept in the room where Yudhishthira was with Draupadi. Arjuna weighed it: a king who does not protect a Brahmana at his door commits a great wrong. So he went in, took his bow, and brought the cattle back.

Then he asked leave to go into exile. Yudhishthira did not want him to. "There is no sin if a younger brother enters where the elder brother is lying with his wife," he said. Arjuna would not take the way out: "The truth is my weapon." He left for twelve years. On the way he met the naga princess Ulupi, and later married Chitrangada and Subhadra, Krishna's sister.

The name comes back

Even Krishna remembers them.

At the end of the war, Duryodhana hid in a lake. Krishna told Yudhishthira that a clever enemy must be beaten by clever means, and listed the demons who fell that way: "It is through deeds that Vatapi, Ilvala, Trishira and the asuras Sunda and Upasunda were killed."

And when Bhima and Duryodhana finally faced each other with clubs, the poet said that in battle they were the equals of Sunda and Upasunda: two men who had grown up together, now trying to kill each other.

Where this comes from

This site follows the Critical Edition, the text rebuilt at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.

The story is in the Adi Parva, the first book, in the Arjuna-vanavasa Parva, "Arjuna's sojourn in the forest". Narada tells it in chapters 200 to 204, and Arjuna leaves in chapter 205. Krishna names the brothers in the Shalya Parva, chapter 30, and Bhima and Duryodhana are compared to them in chapter 54. Shiva tells Uma about his four faces in the Anushasana Parva, chapter 128.

Keep reading

Narada tells this story inside a story. Vaishampayana tells it to King Janamejaya, and Ugrashrava repeats it to the sages. Read who narrated the Mahabharata. Kurukshetra, where the brothers made their home, later became the battlefield. Read about the eighteen days of Kurukshetra.