5 ideas
Treat mythic figures as historical actors inside a specific kinship and clan society: marriage rules, levirate (niyoga), succession by lineage, and clan feuds. Supernatural explanations fall away, and each character's choices become constrained responses to status, inheritance, and family obligation. Much of the apparent fate or divine plan turns out to be ordinary social pressure acting on particular people.
Devavrata gave up both the throne and marriage so his aged father Shantanu could marry Satyavati, earning the name Bhishma for the terrible vow. For the rest of his long life he served a dynasty he could neither rule nor father. Karve reads his life as a tragedy of futile self-sacrifice: a renunciation meant to secure the family ended up hollowing out its leadership.
Gandhari was married to the blind prince Dhritarashtra, and she bound her own eyes for life. Tradition praises this as wifely devotion. Karve reads it as an act of anger and protest at a marriage imposed on her, and argues it amounted to abdication. By refusing to see, Gandhari gave up the maternal watchfulness that might have checked Duryodhana, so her gesture of virtue contributed to her sons' ruin.
After Yudhishthira gambled away his brothers, himself, and then Draupadi, she was dragged into the Kuru court. There she posed a precise legal question: had he lost himself before staking her, and if so, did he still have any right to wager her? The elders, including Bhishma, responded with evasions about the subtlety of dharma instead of a ruling.
Stripped of later devotional additions, Krishna appears as a Yadava chieftain pursuing alliance and advantage. He engineers marriages and the burning of the Khandava forest, and he wins the war through calculated deceptions such as those behind Drona's and Karna's deaths. His divinization came later, and it recast pragmatic, often ruthless realpolitik as divine purpose.