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STORIES · THE MAHĀBHĀRATA · Sabhā
Jarāsandha
Classical
Splitting him in two, and joining the halves, is how he is both born and killed.
Jarasandha is the great obstacle in the Sabha Parva, the king whom no one can beat, and the story of how he was born is one of the strangest in the epic.
His father is Brihadratha, king of Magadha, a commander of three regiments, and he has married the twin daughters of the king of Kashi. He has promised to treat both of them exactly alike. For a long time the marriage is childless. At last he leaves his kingdom with his ministers, goes into the forest with his two wives, and takes up austerities. There he approaches a sage called Kausika and asks for children.
The sage feels pity for him and is wondering how to help when a mango falls into his lap. He gives it to the king with a blessing that his wish will come true. The king, keeping his promise of fairness, cuts the mango in two and gives each queen half. Both become pregnant.
But each queen gives birth to only half a child, a lump with half a face, one eye, one leg and one ear. Horrified, they have the two pieces thrown away. The attendants dump them on a rubbish heap in the street. A man-eating Rakshasi comes across them and puts the pieces together to carry them. By accident they join, and the result is a whole, healthy baby. She cannot bring herself to eat him. She takes the form of a beautiful woman, brings the boy to the king, and says he is his son. The king gives the baby to his two wives, and he is named Jarasandha. Because he was made of two joined halves, he can, in principle, be split in two again.
Years later, Jarasandha has grown into the most powerful king around, and he holds a great many other kings prisoner. When Yudhishthira is thinking about his royal sacrifice, he has to deal with him. The retelling I read says that Krishna first judged him isolated after his allies, Hamsa, Hidimbaka and Kamsa, were dead, and advised a single combat rather than a war. Krishna, Bhima and Arjuna enter Magadha dressed as ascetics in bark robes with sacred grass. Jarasandha welcomes them, and they say they are under a vow of silence until after midnight. At midnight he visits them and, seeing the scars on their hands from bowstrings, grows suspicious. They reveal who they are. He dismisses Krishna as a cowherd and Arjuna as a boy, and chooses Bhima.
They wrestle without weapons for thirteen days, evenly matched. On the fourteenth, Jarasandha begins to tire. Krishna urges Bhima on. Bhima whirls him around a hundred times and tears him in two, but the halves rejoin and Jarasandha gets up. Bhima is stumped until Krishna takes a blade of straw, tears it in two, and throws the pieces in opposite directions. Bhima understands. He tears Jarasandha apart again and throws the halves apart so they cannot meet. Jarasandha dies.
The Ganguli text of the death scene, which I also read, is sparser. In it, Krishna urges Bhima to use the strength he got from his father, the wind-god. Bhima whirls Jarasandha a hundred times, presses a knee into his back and breaks his body in two. His roar is so loud that some women of Magadha go into early labour. The Pandavas leave the body at the palace gate. Krishna enters the fort in Jarasandha's own chariot, frees the imprisoned kings and asks them to support Yudhishthira's Rajasuya sacrifice. They agree. Krishna crowns Jarasandha's son Sahadeva as king of Magadha, and goes back to Indraprastha with the Pandavas.
So the two tellings differ on the details: the retelling I read has the disguise, the thirteen days, and the straw, while the Ganguli passage has the hundred whirls and the broken back but not these.
Told by Kṛṣṇa → Pāṇḍavas
Who: Bhima, Brihadratha, Jara, Jarasandha, Kṛṣṇa
Bound to
Shishupala: three eyes, four arms, a hundred forgiven insults mirror
Jarasandha: born in halves, killed in halves same-story-other-version
The Rājasūya and the first honour to Kṛṣṇa origin
Śiśupāla's death at the Agra-pūjā mirror
Places: Rajgir, Bihar
Where this comes from
- CE · Mahabharata, Critical Edition 2.16-24 2.16-24
- read for this telling · C. Rajagopalachari's Mahabharata summary, 'The Slaying of Jarasandha' (mahabharataonline.com/rajaji) Birth of Jarasandha; Krishna's plan, disguise, wrestling, the straw
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Sabha Parva, Section XXIV (as labelled): death of Jarasandha, freeing of the kings, Sahadeva crowned
Another telling
Magadha's king Brihadratha gets a fruit from the sage Chandakaushika and splits it between his two Kashi wives. Each bears half a body; the halves are thrown out; an asuri/rakshasi named Jara joins them, the child cries and is named Jarasandha ('joined by Jara'). Bhima kills him later by splitting him the same way.