Barbarika, son of Ghatotkacha and grandson of Bhima, arrives at Kurukshetra carrying three arrows that, by the boon of his guru, are sufficient by themselves to end any war. One arrow marks every target he intends to strike; the second destroys everything unworthy of survival; the third returns to his quiver having completed the task. He tells his mother, before leaving for the battlefield, that he plans to fight for whichever side is losing, so that no side is annihilated and the war ends as quickly and with as little death as his arrows allow, a vow that sounds, on its own terms, like the most humane approach to an unavoidable war that anyone in the epic proposes.
Krishna, disguised as a brahmin, intercepts him before he reaches the field and asks him directly how he intends to fight a war of this scale with only three arrows. Barbarika demonstrates: a single arrow, released to circle every leaf of a tree Krishna points to, then returns and threatens to pierce Krishna’s own foot, which Krishna has quietly placed among the leaves, until Krishna moves it aside. The demonstration proves the boon is real and, from Krishna’s perspective as the war’s architect, proves something else: a warrior fighting for whichever side is losing, switching allegiance as the tide turns, would end the war within a single arrow’s flight, before either side had exhausted the karma Krishna already understands the war exists to resolve.
Krishna asks for Barbarika’s head as alms, in the guise of the brahmin’s request, and Barbarika, recognizing Krishna’s true form and understanding what is actually being asked of him, gives it without argument, asking only to watch the entire eighteen-day war from an elevated position before he dies. Krishna grants this, and Barbarika’s severed head is placed on a hilltop overlooking Kurukshetra, witnessing the whole war unfold exactly as Krishna had already foreseen it needed to, uninterrupted by an intervention that would have ended it in an afternoon and left every accumulated debt between the two sides unresolved.
After the war, when the Pandavas argue over who among them deserves the greatest credit for the victory, Barbarika’s head, still watching, is asked to settle the dispute, and answers that he saw only Krishna’s discus and Draupadi’s rage doing the actual work across all eighteen days, the human combatants reduced to instruments of a larger unfolding they could not fully perceive from inside it. Barbarika is worshipped in parts of India today as Khatu Shyam, the god who gives to the most hopeless first, a warrior whose greatest act of dharma was never fighting at all, but recognizing early enough that the war needed to run its full and terrible course, and giving up the one thing capable of shortening it.
Part 11 of 30 — Series IV: Thus It Was