Mythology for the Millennial: The bro code, as exemplified by Mahabharata's Nakula and Sahadev

I’ve always felt sort of bad for Nakula and Sahadeva Pandava.

I mean, think about it. Sure, they got to share in the Glory of the Pandava Brothers, such as it were, but always as an afterthought. There was Yudhishthira the Just, Arjuna the Valiant, Bheema the Strong, and after you’re done listing them, you go, “Oh and the twins, whatstheirnames, Nakula and Sahadeva.” On the other hand, even in a famous family, not everyone can be equally famous. Someone’s got to stay at home and handle the admin.

Nakula and Sahadeva are a little bit like the culture guy and the food guy from Queer Eye, we know they’re there and they’re certainly very attractive, but what do they do exactly apart from teaching someone how to make an omelette or giving a pep talk? I suppose they serve to round out the crowd — two’s company, three’s a crowd, but five, five is a party.

[Other members of the Queer Eye cast as Mahabharata characters: The interior design guy is doing all the heavy lifting (Bheema), followed by the hair guy who is the breakout star of the show (Arjuna) and the clothes guy is generally moral and upstanding (Yudhishthira).>

The story of Nakula and Sahadeva really begins with the story of their mother, Madri. Unlike the other three Pandava brothers, the twins had a different mother, one who died really early on in the story. So they were raised by their stepmother Kunti their entire life.

We all know that ancient piece of gossip — Pandu, their dad, didn’t actually father any of his five sons, since he was “under a curse” that meant he’d die if he ever had sex. (Sure, honey, it happens to everyone.) But the Pandavas’ PR team is so good, we’ve all collectively decided that if they must be illegitimate, they must at least be sons of gods, the next best thing.

Pandu had two wives — Kunti, who chose him at her swayamvar, and Madri, an arranged marriage, but who, it is implied, was much hotter than Kunti. Kunti had, before her marriage, acquired a boon that allowed her to call down on any god to impregnate her. She offered to share this with Madri, so both of them could be the mothers of sons. (It’s a given that the gods never father daughters with humans.)

While Kunti had called on the gods of justice, valour and strength respectively to father her three boys, Madri, that cunning creature, went a different route. She decided to save time — and have a crazy god-menage-a-trois — by calling upon two minor gods at the same time: twins, the Ashvins, known for being young, handsome, and athletic. It’s like they both used sperm donors, and while Kunti hand-picked one NLS lawyer, one IAS topper and one IIT grad, Madri was like, “Eh, whatever, as long as they’re hot.”

Twins were born from this threesome with twins, and soon Madri wanted another go (she was young, her husband couldn’t have sex with her, and I always see her as more highly-sexed than Kunti, who seemed satisfied with her lot). However, Kunti refused to share the god-aphrodisiac boon with her again because, she argued, it wasn’t fair that Madri got two children from a single encounter, and what if she tried calling twins again? As the senior queen, Kunti wasn’t entirely comfortable with Madri having as many or, gods forbid, more children than herself.

I suspect Kunti was also a little jealous of Madri: Pandu’s inevitable death-by-sex struck because he eventually couldn’t control himself, cavorting in the forest with second wife Madri, while first wife Kunti stayed in and looked after the kids. Pandu died, pretty much immediately after the sex, and Kunti found Madri weeping over the body and promptly started to victim-shame her, saying things like, “Why did you let him take you out alone?” Madri kills herself to join her husband in the afterlife not much after this because, as she admits to Kunti, she wouldn’t be able to raise all the boys equally, as though they were all born to her and not just two of them, and Kunti was nice like that. She really was, there’s never any mention of her making a distinction between Nakul and Sahadeva and their three half-brothers.

But it turns out the sperm donors actually did make a difference, because all the Pandava brothers took after their fathers. Nakula and Sahadeva were no exception, except their dads weren’t good at much except horses and being very handsome, both of which qualities the brothers had. And it’s not like the twins didn’t fight well during the Mahabharata war or weren’t super loyal to their family, it’s just that their three older brothers had better stories, better lines, and ultimately, stories are told about heroes, not just two people who were pretty cool but not very important.

Indian myths, especially the big ones, your Ramayana and Mahabharata, generally deal with siblings in a similar sort of way. The heroes — Rama, the Pandavas — are from families where all the brothers grow up in the shade of the eldest.

In the Ramayana, crown prince Rama, born the eldest of four half-brothers, is sent into exile when one of his stepmothers gets Rama’s father to put her biological son Bharata on the throne instead. So accompanied by one of his brothers Lakshmana as sidekick, Rama gets to enjoy alone-ish time with his beloved wife in exile, and then go on a grand adventure, befriending monkeys, killing a king, avenging his name and so on and comes back to claim his throne in the end. It’s epic.

Bharata keeps the throne warm for Rama until then, and happily and competently so. He is only praised as a foil to Rama, his story arc is that of the Good Brother, he exists in this tale as an example of what good brothers do, they defy their mothers when their brother’s happiness is at stake, they wait for the rightful heir to return, they do not challenge the filial hierarchy. They may never be royal, Lorde, but they are definitely loyal.

But “good brother” isn’t as faint praise as it sounds. It’s nice to be a good brother, and the epics put value on that. Stories of heroes in Indian mythology often feature their tightly-knit families. One can’t get along without the others — the hero is only the hero because of his bro back home dealing with things: united we stand. And one’s downfall is everyone else’s — back in the Mahabharata, the eldest Pandava Yudhishthira gambles away the lives of his brothers and his wife after he runs out of money to bet with.

Also by the way, many powerful modern-day Indian families would do a lot better really looking at the lessons from these texts instead of just worshipping the heroes. Maybe they’d be a lot happier now.

Actually, I don’t feel so bad for Nakula and Sahadeva after all. They were part of the story, just following a different destiny.  You know, they  were offered their own kingdom? An uncle on their mother’s side said they didn’t have to be fourth and fifth in line to Yudhishthira, they could inherit his kingdom right then, no questions asked. They accepted — with one caveat. They always wanted to be able to live with their brothers instead.

Read more from the ‘Mythology for the Millennial’ series here .

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of several books, including The One Who Swam with the Fishes: Girls of the Mahabharata. She tweets  @reddymadhavan