The most consequential thing Arjuna ever does is put his bow down. The armies are drawn up, the conches have sounded, he has asked his charioteer to drive him into the gap between them so he can see who has come — and what he sees are his grandfather, his teacher and his cousins. His limbs go weak, his mouth dries, the Gandiva slips from his hand, and he says he will not fight. Everything philosophical in the Mahabharata proceeds from that refusal. The greatest archer of the age has a breakdown, and the reply he receives is the Bhagavad Gita.
Indra's son, and Drona's favourite
He is the third of the Pandavas, born to Kunti by Indra through a mantra that summons a god to father a child, which makes the epic's finest warrior the son of the Vedic war god at exactly the point in literary history when that god's own reputation was declining. His half-brother by the same mother, unacknowledged, is Karna.
His training under Drona produces the epic's most-quoted teaching anecdote: asked what they can see while aiming at a wooden bird, the other princes describe the tree, the branch, the sky; Arjuna reports that he can see only the bird's eye. The same teacher's history contains the epic's ugliest scene, in which the low-caste archer Ekalavya, self-taught before an image of Drona, is required to give his right thumb as the teacher's fee — a demand made so that nobody will surpass Arjuna. The poem records it without excusing it, and modern anti-caste writing has made Ekalavya a central figure precisely because of it.
Names, vows and a great many marriages
He carries at least ten names and the Mahabharata has him list them himself when he is living in disguise: Partha for his mother, Dhananjaya for the wealth he won, Savyasachi for shooting equally well with either hand, Gudakesha for conquering sleep, Bibhatsu for never fighting foully, Kiriti for the diadem Indra gave him, Phalguna for the star he was born under.
His bow Gandiva comes from Varuna by way of Agni at the burning of the Khandava forest; his conch is Devadatta; and Hanuman sits on his chariot banner, which is why the Pandava standard is a monkey.
He wins Draupadi at her swayamvara by stringing a bow nobody else can bend and hitting a rotating fish target while sighting its reflection in water below. He then shares her with his four brothers, on the strength of his mother's careless instruction to divide what he had brought — and the arrangement generates the rule whose breach sends him into a twelve-year exile of his own, when he enters a room where Yudhishthira and Draupadi are together in order to retrieve his weapons for a stranger who needs help. He takes the punishment although the intrusion was virtuous, which is the sort of moral knot the epic specialises in.
That exile is a marriage tour. He takes Ulupi, a naga princess; Chitrangada, princess of Manipur, whose son will later kill him in single combat before being told who his father was; and Subhadra, Krishna's sister, whom he carries off with Krishna's blessing and who bears Abhimanyu — the boy who dies at sixteen inside a battle formation he knew how to enter and not how to leave.
His son by Ulupi, Iravan or Aravan, has an independent and living cult in Tamil Nadu. He is said to have offered himself for sacrifice before the war on condition of being married first, and Krishna took female form to marry him for a night. The annual festival at Koovagam draws thousands of thirunangai — transgender women — who marry the deity and mourn him the following day, and it is one of the largest gatherings of its kind anywhere.
The hunter on the mountain
Bharavi's sixth-century Kiratarjuniya takes a single episode and makes a Sanskrit masterpiece of it: Arjuna, doing penance in the Himalaya for divine weapons, quarrels with a mountain hunter over which of them shot a boar. They fight; the hunter cannot be beaten; when Arjuna's garlands settle on the hunter's head he realises he has been fighting Shiva, who grants him the Pashupata weapon. The poem is famous for its verbal fireworks, including verses composed of a single consonant, and it shows the epic character being taken up as literary material within a few centuries.
The great relief at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu, carved in the seventh century, is called Arjuna's Penance — and is also called the Descent of the Ganges, because scholars have never agreed which story the enormous rock face is telling. The ascetic on one leg is the crux, and he fits both readings.
The war, and what it costs him
He kills Bhishma by shooting from behind Shikhandi, whom the old warrior will not fight. He kills Jayadratha inside a single day under a vow to burn himself alive if he fails. He kills Karna while Karna is unarmed and lifting a stuck chariot wheel, on Krishna's urging, and the poem does not pretend this is honourable. The Gita's teaching about acting without attachment to consequence is tested against a war in which he is repeatedly asked to do things he would rather not, and the epic leaves the reader to judge whether it holds.
Afterwards it goes badly. Escorting the Yadava women to safety after Krishna's death, he finds he cannot string Gandiva or recall his weapons, and is robbed by ordinary bandits. On the final walk into the mountains he is the fourth to fall, and Yudhishthira's stated reason is pride: he had boasted he could destroy his enemies in a day and did not.
What his name is attached to now
India's principal national award for sporting achievement is the Arjuna Award, given since 1961; the country's indigenous main battle tank carries the name; and Arjun is one of the most common given names in India. B. R. Chopra's 1988 television Mahabharat fixed his image for a mass audience, and the Gita's battlefield frame has been used as a template in Indian cinema for a century. Western readers usually meet him only as the Gita's addressee, which produces a curious effect: the most philosophical Indian text is addressed to a man most of its foreign readers know nothing else about.
Questions that follow the archer
Why is the teaching given to him rather than to Yudhishthira?
Because he is the one with something to lose and no way of avoiding the choice. Yudhishthira agonises about dharma throughout the epic in a legalistic register; Arjuna's crisis is concrete, sudden and physical, which makes it the right occasion for an argument about acting under obligation. The narrative also needs a listener who is not a philosopher — the Gita explains itself as it goes because Arjuna keeps interrupting to say he has not understood.
Was he ever defeated?
Several times, and the epic is unembarrassed about it. He is beaten by Shiva in disguise, held off by Bhishma and Karna at various points, and killed outright by his own son Babhruvahana in the Ashvamedhika Parva, before being revived by a naga gem fetched by Ulupi. The invincibility attributed to him in popular retelling is not the text's own position.
What was the year as Brihannala?
During the thirteenth year of exile, spent in disguise at King Virata's court, he lives as Brihannala, a dance and music teacher in women's dress, teaching the princess and her companions. The epic explains it as the working-out of Urvashi's curse, imposed when he refused her advances in Indra's heaven — a curse Indra had reduced to a single year of his choosing. It is an unusually sympathetic piece of narrative engineering: a punishment converted into exactly the cover he needed.
Does he appear outside the Sanskrit epic?
Widely. Javanese and Balinese wayang traditions treat Arjuna as a central character with a substantial independent repertoire, where he is refined, irresistible to women, and rather less martial than his Indian counterpart. Regional Indian traditions add episodes freely, and the Tamil material around Aravan is a good example of a minor Sanskrit detail becoming the basis of a major local cult.