01The blindfold
Gandhari, daughter of King Subala of Gandhara, had worshipped Hara, Mahadev, and received the boon of a hundred sons. Bhishma asked for her hand for Dhritarashtra. When she learned that her husband was blind, she took a cloth, folded it many times and bound her eyes, so that she would have nothing he lacked. Her brother Shakuni brought her to Hastinapura with great wealth, and she won the whole Kuru household by her conduct.
02The hundred and one
She carried her child for two years. When word came that Kunti had borne a son, Gandhari in anguish struck her own womb, and a mass of flesh as hard as iron came out. She was about to throw it away when Vyasa came, and at his word it was divided into a hundred and one portions and kept in pots of ghee. From them came a hundred sons, Duryodhana the first, and a daughter, Duhshala. At Duryodhana’s birth jackals and beasts of prey howled on every side, and Vidura and the brahmins told the king to give the child up. Dhritarashtra could not.
03Where dharma is
When Krishna’s embassy failed, Gandhari had Duryodhana called back into the assembly and told him before everyone to make peace. He walked out. As the war began he came to her with joined palms asking her to bless him with victory, and he asked again and again, and each time she gave him the same answer: where dharma is, there is victory. She says so herself to Krishna on the field afterwards. The well-known katha in which she unbinds her eyes once and her gaze makes Duryodhana’s body hard as iron, except where he had covered himself, is not in Vyasa’s text in the Critical Edition; it comes from later tellings.
04The curse on the field
Vyasa had given her divine sight to see the field of the dead, and she walked it with Krishna, naming the fallen to him one by one. Before that, about to curse Yudhishthira, she caught sight of his toes under the edge of her blindfold, and the nails were scorched. Her grief at last turned on Krishna, who could have stopped the war: in the thirty-sixth year his own kinsmen would kill each other and he would die alone. Krishna answered that he had known it, and accepted. She went to the forest with Dhritarashtra and Kunti, and died with them in the fire.
Famous verses
इत्युक्ते जानती सर्वमहं स्वं व्यसनागमम् । अब्रुवं पुरुषव्याघ्र यतो धर्मस्ततो जयः ॥
When he said this, knowing all the ruin that was coming upon me, I answered, tiger among men: where dharma is, there is victory.Mahabharata 11.17.6 (BORI CE), Gandhari to Krishna