Stri Parva, the Book of the Women, turns the epic's focus away from strategy and combat entirely to give sustained voice to the war's aftermath as experienced by the women left behind, led by the blind king Dhritarashtra's wife Gandhari, who has worn a blindfold since her own marriage in solidarity with her husband's blindness and now walks the ruined battlefield to see, for the only time in the epic, the devastation her sons' war has caused.
The book catalogs the widows' grief in unflinching, extended lament over the countless dead, a register of mourning almost entirely absent from the preceding war books' focus on strategy and combat, and gives Gandhari herself the epic's most severe moment of open anger: confronting Krishna directly, she accuses him of having had the power to prevent the war and choosing not to use it fully, and curses him that his own Yadava clan will one day destroy itself in the same senseless manner the Kuru family has just been destroyed, a curse the epic's final books confirm comes devastatingly true. Kunti, still not having publicly revealed to her surviving sons that Karna was their eldest brother until this book, finally tells them the truth, adding a further, retrospective layer of grief to losses the Pandavas had believed were their enemy's alone.