KṚṢṆA’S SHADOW OVER KARṆA’S FALL: REORDERING THE KṚṢṆA–KARṆA, KAVACA-KUṆḌALA, AND KUNTĪ EPISODES IN REGIONAL MAHĀBHĀRATA TRADITIONS

Abstract

The Mahābhārata preserves three major pre-duel diminutions in Karṇa’s narrative: Kṛṣṇa’s confidential revelation of Karṇa’s Kuntī-birth, the loss of the congenital kavaca-kuṇḍala to Indra in disguise, and Kuntī’s extraction of a battlefield restraint ensuring the survival of four Pāṇḍavas. In the Critical Edition, these episodes remain textually dispersed and semantically autonomous, functioning primarily as independent expressions of Karṇa’s political loyalty, donor-heroism, and filial restraint. This article suggests that several regional Mahābhārata traditions take a radical approach to this inherited material in the process of transforming it into a tightly controlled narrative of pre-duel weakening, from failed revelation to bodily disarmament and bodily disarmament to final ethical restraint. In the Tamil Villi Bhāratham as well as the Jain Mahābhārata, Kṛṣṇa attempts to secretly convince Karṇa to revert to the original moral restraints and fails, only to neutralise him in the body by performing the kavaca-kuṇḍala ritual, and finally remove another moral restriction, the Arjuna dueling ritual, from Kuntī, so that the sequence of restrictions progresses before the Arjuna duel. The Kannada Kumaravyāsa Bhārata has the same trilogy, but in an intentional narrative sequence, the Bengali Kāśīdāsī war narration retroactively reconnects Karṇa's earlier loss of body as a precondition for his eventual defeat. When studied together, these witnesses give evidence of a particular vernacular reception-history, in which the celebrated virtue of Karṇa no longer serves as a moral emblem but as the very mechanisms of his progressive vulnerability to Kṛṣṇa's progressive shadow-play. The study argues that this tragic reinterpretation is produced not primarily through interpolation, but through the strategic rearrangement of inherited epic chronology.