Whither Draupadi?

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There is an episode in the Mahabharata where readers come to feel that something is clearly amiss. The occasion is when Dusshasana, after the victory of the Kauravas in the gambling match, insolently enters the women’s quarters in the palace and drags Draupadi through its corridors as the horrified inmates look on.

Which palace was it? Was it as near as Kaurava’s Hastina-puri where the gambling match took place or was it the Pandava’s palace at Indra-prastha which was situated quite away from there?

To explain my quibble it is necessary that I narrate some background story.

By the time the Pandavas were finally beaten in the gambling match, they had lost everything they possessed. They not only did stake themselves and lost; they also forfeited in the process their right over their dear wife Draupadi. Now Duryodhana was the new master of Draupadi and her five helpless husbands. And so he sent for her to be brought to the gambling hall where all the respectable members of the Kuru clan and their well-wishers were present. Prominent among them were Dronacharya and Kripacharya, the two celebrated teachers; Bhisma, the grand old man of the royal family; Karna the friend of Duryodhana and the bête noir of the Pandavas. There, the five Pandavas were ignominiously made to shed their clothes reducing them into the five stark naked fellows on the street. And then, on the orders of Duryodhan the victor, an attempt was made to disrobe Draupadi, the queen of Indra-prastha. Had Krishna, the incarnation of lord Vishnu, not given her a continuous stream of cloth Dusshasana would have succeeded in outraging Draupadi’s modesty right in front of all the people present there. Thereafter, the rest of the Mahabharata veers around the theme how the Pandavas took revenge against the Kauravas, the perpetrators of such a dastardly crime, how victory in the war came at an unimaginable cost and so forth.

Here is my little quibble, based on a simple assessment of the setting of that crucial juncture. Duryodhan, with an elaborate plan to defeat the Pandavas with the help of his uncle Shakuni and his loaded dice, had invited Yudhisthira to Hastina-puri court to gamble. And Yudhisthira and his brothers had responded to the invitation and reached the venue of the match, a place that was not adjacent but really away from their own capital city of Indra-prasth. Oh yes, earlier the Pandavas, with the help of a Rakshasa architect Maya, had laid out the beautiful city of Indra-prastha in their share of the kingdom by cutting the forest of Khandava-prastha. The elegance of the city had stoked the fire of envy in Duryodhan. According to the epic, the day the gambling match took place, Draupadi, the common wife of the Pandavas was resting indoors at Indra-prastha palace as she was in the midst of her period. This means, while the five Pandavas headed for Hastina-puri, Draupadi was left behind in the palace of Indra-prastha. As the narratives in the epic progresses, Dusshasana is seen entering the women’s quarters of the palace and dragging Draupadi up to the gambling hall.

Which palace was that? Was it not the palace of Hastina-puri? Everything in the narratives points to the fact that Draupadi was just near. Or else how could Dusshasana produce her in the gambling hall before the victors so very instantly? So, arguably she was in the palace of Hastina-puri and not in Indra-prastha. The availability of Draupadi just around the corner enabled Dusshasana to quickly barge into the women’s area in the palace and maltreat Draupadi who was sitting there with her hair unbound and dressed in a single piece of cloth that was blood-stained. And he grabbed her by hair and dragged her through the corridors of the palace. Had she been in Indra-prastha, Dusshasan would not have so easily succeeded in abducting the queen of the palace. At least the guards of Indra-prastha would have resisted him. Moreover, had she been taken from one palace to the other, Vyasa would have narrated the scene of dragging in such a way that the road to her ignominy would have been vivid and the readers would have been made to feel that she was actually being dragged the entire distance that separated the two capitals. I’m sure even those days the writer of the epic knew that for effect it was necessary to show the story and not just tell it. In the other epic, when Ravana abducted Sita from the forest of Panchavati to Lanka, has not Valmiki said it in so many words? The route was aeriel; and the means of transportation was Pushpaka Vimana, the ancient aeroplane. But such clarity is not there in this particular episode of the Mahabharata. And it was so, simply because Draupadi was not dragged through the streets from the palace of Indra-prastha to the gambling hall of Hastina-puri; rather she was very much there in the women's quarters of Hastina-puri to be dragged up to that hall, both situated in the same building.

So in all reasonableness, Draupadi was resting in the palace of Hastina-puri on the day of gambling.

But a question arises here: why did she at all go to Hastina-puri, the capital of the Kauravas? What business did she have to go there when she was in the midst of her period? Was not she staying inside wearing a single blood-smeared cloth and with her hair let loose? And the bigger question is, did she willingly go there knowing well that it was a gambling match? Did she go there as the cheerleader of her team of five? And was she not doing something that would shatter her family so pathetically?

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By

A N Nanda

 Bhubaneswar

12-02-2013

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