Most of the Mahabharata's grief has somebody to blame for it. The dice hall has a cheat in it. The war has a prince who would not yield a needle's point of land. Amba's story has nobody. Every man in it behaves correctly, by his own code, for reasons he could have defended in any court of that world — and at the end of the sequence she has been comprehensively destroyed. It is one of the hardest things the epic keeps, and it keeps it in full.
The ceremony
She was the eldest princess of Kashi, standing at her own swayamvara — the ceremony where a princess garlands the husband she chooses — when the greatest warrior alive arrived and took her, along with her two sisters. Not for himself; his vow forbade that. He took them as brides for his young half-brother, because the throne he had sworn to protect needed heirs, and he defeated every protesting king in the hall on the way out, because that is what he did.
One of the three women in that chariot had already, in her heart, chosen someone: a king named Salva.
Four refusals, all of them proper
She told Bhishma so. And here is the detail that should trouble anyone reading it as a simple wrong: he agreed at once. He was not cruel about it and did not argue. He sent her to Salva with a proper escort and every courtesy the situation allowed.
Salva refused her. He had been defeated in public that day, in front of everyone, and he would not take what another man had carried off and returned. Go back to him, he told her, and do as he commands.
So she went back. And the young prince she had been abducted for refused her too — her heart, he said, was already given elsewhere, and he would not have a wife who came to him that way.
Which left one man standing in the wreckage of her life. She turned to Bhishma himself and asked him to marry her. And the vow — the one taken decades earlier, on a riverbank, about something else entirely, to make an old king happy — said no.
Six years
The epic gives her six years of trying. She went from court to court looking for a champion, and every warrior in the land was afraid of the man she wanted challenged. A god gave her a garland of ever-fresh lotuses and told her that whoever wore it would become Bhishma's enemy; she carried it from kingdom to kingdom and no king would touch it, until at last she hung it on a palace gate and walked away into the forest.
Even Parasurama — Bhishma's own teacher, the one with the axe — took up her cause, fought his former pupil for days, and could not win. His advice at the end of it was that she should throw herself on Bhishma's mercy, because nothing else was left.
She did not. She went to the mountains and undertook austerities so severe that Shiva himself appeared and granted her the boon her whole ruined life had narrowed down to: in her next birth, she would be the cause of his death. And she was too impatient for that birth to wait on the ordinary schedule of dying. She built a pyre and walked into it, carrying — the story says — a fire in her heart scarcely cooler than the one on the wood.
What the sequence leaves standing
Go back through it and try to find the villain. The warrior who took her was serving a throne and, when told of her prior choice, released her immediately and with honour. The king who refused her was protecting a rule about defeat that his whole world took seriously. The prince who refused her was refusing a woman whose heart was elsewhere, which in that world was a kindness. The vow that finally shut the last door was the most admired promise in the kingdom, and it had been made in love.
Every rule was followed. Nobody broke anything. Ask what that leaves her holding.
Written by Anurag Joshi — Author, Killing Bhishma. Notes kept while the book was being written.