Everyone who grew up with the Mahabharata knows the hundred as the bad guys. It is the shortest possible summary and it is not wrong about the plot. But read the muster roll slowly — the actual list of names, which the epic bothers to write out in full rather than summarise — and something in the Sanskrit is doing quieter work than the summary suggests.
The syllable that keeps repeating
Duryodhana. Duhshasana. Durmukha. Duhsaha. Read enough of the roll and the same opening keeps coming back: dur, sometimes softening to duh before certain consonants.
In Sanskrit that prefix does not mean evil. It does not mean wicked, or cursed, or damned, or demonic — the language has perfectly good words for all of those, and they are used elsewhere in the epic when they are meant. Dur- means hard, or bad-in-the-sense-of-difficult; it marks something as troublesome to do, awkward to manage, resistant to handling. It is the same prefix behind words meaning hard to obtain, hard to cross, hard to bear.
The roll, translated
Translate the famous names on that basis and they stop being labels and start being descriptions of a specific difficulty:
| Name | Reads roughly as |
|---|---|
| Duryodhana | The one who is hard to fight |
| Duhshasana | The one who is hard to restrain |
| Duhsaha | The one who is hard to withstand |
| Durmukha | The foul-mouthed one |
Notice that the first three are not moral judgements at all. They are assessments of how much trouble each one gives. Duryodhana is not named the wicked one; he is named for the specific quality of being difficult to oppose — and the epic bears that out, because he is not the strongest warrior on his own side, he is the one who does not fight clean and will not yield. When peace was offered before the war and the price was five villages, this is the man who refused to give up land enough to hold the point of a needle.
Why write down all hundred
It would have been easy to say *and he had a hundred sons* and move on. Most stories would. This one lists them, and the list has been carried, name by name, for as long as the epic has existed — a hundred names, most of whom do nothing individually in the plot, many of whom die in a single line.
There is a sister on the roll too. Exactly one, among the hundred: Dussala. She has almost no part in the events, and no telling has quietly dropped her either.
The charge that was never upgraded
A hundred enemies, and the family surname running through the whole muster is difficulty rather than sin. In five thousand years of tellings, in every language this subcontinent speaks, nobody has quietly upgraded the charge — no tradition renamed them the Evil Hundred, and no popular version replaced dur- with a stronger prefix that the language had readily available.
Whatever else that naming is doing, it is worth noticing that a sin calls for a judge, and a difficulty calls for something else entirely.
Written by Anurag Joshi — Author, Killing Bhishma. Notes kept while the book was being written.