The first of those was Karna in the Mahabharat, which is where the kavacha comes in. As a young reader, when I first became obsessed with the luckless Karna, I wasn't thinking about subtext - but I may have intuitively grasped that the divine armour, attached to his body until he cuts it away in one of the epic's most stirring passages, had a symbolic function too. I understood Karna's anger and resentment towards those who knew their place in the world and were comfortable in their own (regular) skin. Read The Rest at :