Pandu was savage in the battlefield, as we should expect him to be, the Mahabharata tells us. ![]() He had failed to prove his manhood in his bed, but he had to prove it somewhere, and now he could prove it in the battlefield. A bitter, frustrated, furious Pandu gathers up his army and leaves on a world conquest. He had now two gorgeous wives, each as beautiful as a goddess, and yet there was nothing he could do in their beds since he was impotent. It must have been a terrible whole month for an impotent Pandu. The Mahabharata tells us it is exactly after thirty nights that he left on the conquest – and the words used are not thirty days, but thirty nights: the nights of a whole month. It also explains why Pandu left on a world conquest thirty nights after his wedding with Madri. So Bheeshma goes ahead and gets Madri as a second wife for Pandu. And Pandu might not have revealed it himself, nor Kunti. He might not even have considered the possibility that Pandu was impotent. Bheeshma, who had no idea that Kunti was already a mother before her marriage, must have assumed this could be because of some fault with her – the woman is the first suspect in such cases and getting a second wife is the easiest solution for the man, particularly for a king. The Kunti-Pandu marriage had failed to produce offspring, which would be the case if Pandu had been impotent from the beginning. The marriage had failed to produce what the Kuru-Bharata family needed more urgently than anything else: an heir to Pandu, in case anything happened to the young king. ![]() ![]() It was not a love marriage but an arranged one, a political alliance does not seem to have been a necessity, which leaves us one other strong possibility. The second marriage should have been after some time and there should have been an important reason behind it.
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