Who is who in the Gita
Gandhari
Wife of Dhritarashtra and mother of the Kauravas.
Who is Gandhari in the Bhagavad Gita?
Wife of Dhritarashtra and mother of the Kauravas. Her background reminds the reader that the consequences Arjuna fears will fall on mothers, wives, elders and households—not only on combatants.
Hansi Gita Bhawan Trust · The Gita for Life
Where this person stands in the house
Princess of Gandhara, sister of Shakuni, wife of Dhritarashtra, mother of the hundred. The Mahabharata records that on learning her husband was blind she bound her own eyes and kept them bound for life. Every son she bore is in the army Duryodhana is counting at 1.2, and none of them survives the war.
Relationship
Wife of Dhritarashtra and mother of the Kauravas.
Why she matters
Her position holds together motherhood, dynastic loyalty, moral warning and catastrophic grief. Even though she does not speak in the Gita, she represents the human world that Arjuna fears war will devastate.
Read together
Context for 1.31–44; later Stri Parva for the epic’s grief after war (Vyasa, trans. Ganguli, 1883–1896).
In the text
Gandhari in the seven hundred verses
Gandhari does not occur in the 700 verses under any name. The mother of the hundred is not in the book at all. Her page exists because Chapter 1 is unintelligible without knowing who Dhritarashtra married and what she chose to do about his blindness — but the Gita itself is silent, and the silence is printed here rather than covered.
What this page will not say
Gandhari does not appear in the Bhagavad Gita under any name, and this page says so before it says anything else. The blindfold is the most quoted image in the whole epic and it does not occur in these seven hundred verses; nor does her curse, nor her grief, nor her hundred sons as anything other than the plural धार्तराष्ट्राः. The Trust keeps her page because Chapter 1 cannot be read without knowing who Duryodhana’s mother was and whose brother stood behind him — and keeps the page honest by stating that the Gita is silent about her, which is itself a fact worth knowing about the Gita.