Hindhu Inheritance

This is the 3rd Time I am watching the entire Mahabharatha series by BR Chopra. This time I discuss about basic rules of inheritance in the Hindhu culture. It has been a traditional hindhu rule that the eldest son succeeds the King to his throne. Dhritharashtra, being the eldest son inherits the throne. The throne however is given to the younger son Pandu, on the basis that dhirtharashtra, being blind would not be able to rule the empire. Pandu, however is kinda jaundiced as well. Pandu dies at an early age. Dhritharashtra rules the empire upon his death. Now duryodhana, being the son of dhritharashtra has rights over inheritance of the empire. He is not Blind like his father and doesn't need to forfeit the throne to his cousin. Why should he leave his throne for yudhistira.

Some variation of the rules are still in force today, like u will definitely inherit your fathers property, if the property was given to your father through inheritence of your grandfather's property, you'll definitely have a share in it(what we cal pithrarjitha aasthi). Where as if the property was earned by your father, u cannot claim rights over it, your father has the freedom to do whatever he wants with it. This being known, Duryodhan irightfully inherits the throne from dhritharashtra.

People argue that yudhistira was elder than duryodhana and hence he should get the throne. Now the rules aren’t clear whether the throne propagates through the eldest son of the clan always, or whether it goes to the eldest son of a generation.

A family tree of kuru vamsha with relavant characters.(its in a sorted manner with eldest on top)

shantanu-->dhiritharashtra-->Duryodhana
| |-->dushyasana
|-->Pandu -->yudhistira
|-->Bheema, etc


As stated above, due to the ambiguity in the law of inheritance, we don't know whether to pick along the top branches of the tree or to pick the one with higher age in a particular level. In this case, Yudhistira has age greater than duryodhana. With ambiguity it isn't right to call the fight between the cousins as dharma yudhha where dharma is fighting adharma. Besides, Pandu's sons, all of them are sons of kunti,madhari and some other gods i.e they have not actually inherited the genes of the kuru vamsha.

One more important thing to be noted is that history is always written by victors and they would definately not portray themselves as the bad guys. The Mahabharatha written by Great-grandson of Arjuna. The story would definitely be pro pandava propaganda. This is so effective that even after thousands of years, we haven't questioned or analyzed the story. We give it a mad religious level devotion and making it taboo to ask questions against it.