The Price of Power: Artha, Dharma, and the Tragedy of Kurukshetra

Ganesha writing the Mahabharata

upon Vyasa's dictation

“Man is slave to artha (power and wealth), but artha is slave to no man.” ~ So declared Bhishma and Drona to Yudhishthira in the final moments before the war drums thundered across the plains of Kurukshetra. 

These two venerable elders, paragons of knowledge and martial discipline, acknowledged without hesitation that dharma—righteousness—lay with the Pandavas. Yet they chose to fight for the Kauravas, bound not by belief but by allegiance, obligation, and the invisible chains of artha.

Artha, in the Hindu philosophical tradition, is one of the four aims of life, alongside dharma (righteousness), kama (desire), and moksha (liberation). It encompasses wealth, political power, and worldly security. But the Mahabharata is clear-eyed in its warning: when artha is pursued at the cost of dharma, it becomes a corrosive force—one that demands loyalty, silences conscience, and devours even the wisest of men.

Bhishma and Drona, despite their moral clarity, remained prisoners of their oaths, their pensions, and their ties to Hastinapura. In contrast, one figure stands apart in quiet defiance: Yuyutsu, the son of Dhritarashtra by a Vaishya wife. Alone among his 101 Kaurava brothers, he renounced the seductive pull of lineage and stood instead with the Pandavas, choosing dharma over artha. Of all Dhritarashtra’s sons, only Yuyutsu survived the war.

The war itself was apocalyptic in scale—an ancient Armageddon. It swept away kings and sages, heroes and foot soldiers, dynasties and doctrines. The battlefield became a cremation ground, its soil soaked with the blood of millions. At the war’s end, only eight warriors remained on the Pandava side: Krishna, the five brothers, Satyaki, and Yuyutsu. From the Kaurava camp, only Kripacharya, Kritavarma, and Ashwatthama lived to see another dawn.

Yet despite the devastation, the Kurukshetra war is not portrayed in the epic as senseless. It was a cataclysm, yes—but one with cosmic consequence. The war was not merely for a throne but for the soul of a civilization. In the Mahabharata’s moral imagination, the battlefield was a crucible through which dharma was reforged—at a terrible cost, but with enduring purpose. The rule of justice and virtue, however blood-stained its birth, was finally established upon the earth.

Kurukshetra thus becomes more than a battlefield; it is an eternal allegory. It reminds us that even the most principled minds can be ensnared by artha, and that standing with dharma may demand sacrifice, loneliness, and resistance to all that is familiar. In the end, survival belonged not to the mightiest, but to the most righteous.