Ekalavya is a Nishada, a forest tribe, refused instruction by Drona because Drona has committed to teaching royal students. He builds a clay figure of the teacher, practises before it, and becomes better than Arjuna, at which point Drona — who has promised Arjuna he will be the finest archer alive — asks for gurudakshina, the teacher's fee, and names the right thumb. Ekalavya cuts it off. The tradition has read this in at least three ways: as a demonstration of ideal devotion to a teacher, as an indictment of Drona's pettiness which the epic makes deliberately, and, in twentieth-century Ambedkarite reading, as a straightforward record of how talent from outside the permitted castes was disposed of. That third reading has become dominant in Indian public discourse; Ekalavya's name is attached to schools for tribal children and to Dalit student organisations. A version in which Ekalavya later regains his skill and fights on the other side exists in the epic, which does not soften the scene.