WAS DRAUPADI HAPPY (PART II)

For Draupadi, that was a terrible, terrible day. She was dragged to the Kaurava court by her Kaurava brother-in-law, Dussasana, and Duryodhana asked him to disrobe her in front of all present. What needs to be noted is that neither Duryodhana nor Dussasana nor Sakuni or for that matter, anyone in the Kaurava family, had any complaint against her and was waiting for an opportunity to take revenge. Had Yudhisthira listened to the venerable Bhishma and stopped playing the game, Draupadi would have been safe at home; loss would have been only to the Mahabharata narrative.

   Till she was reduced to the status of Duryodhana’s slave, she wasn’t in anyone’s mind. After losing himself and his brothers, in a moment of sick frenzy, the hurt loser, who was unable to cope with defeat, ignored his grandfather’s words and pawned wife Draupadi in the game of dice and lost her. Instigated by Sakuni, Duryodhana wanted her to be brought to the court. There was nothing wrong in it, he was assured, because a slave had no right to privacy. Sakuni’s secret agenda was to push the Pandavas and the Kauravas to the battlefield. His father’s words came to his mind and he realized that his time had come (for details, see “The Revenge of the Dead: The Story of the Special Dice of Sakuni”, in this blog, posted on May 21, 2017). Humiliation of Draupadi would be the humiliation of the Pandavas - many-fold! - and once she was disrobed in public, that would have meant that for the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the point of no return had been reached.

   Duryodhana surely didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of Draupadi being his slave. Would a king ask his brother to go and bring a slave to his presence? What prevented him to send a few soldiers, if he thought that one might not be enough? Dussasana had dragged her from the palace but not into the court yet. When he told his brother that Draupdi was in her periods, Duryodhana said that he wouldn’t want her in the court because seeing a woman in her periods brought only misfortune.

   Sakuni must have sensed that his plan was going to go awry; so he readily thought of a different way to persuade Duryodhana.  His fear was unjustified, he told Duryodhana; misfortune would come if the woman in periods was virtuous and since Draupadi, with five husbands, was not, no harm would come to anyone who would see her. Further details are unnecessary here. (Essentials of the disrobing episode are given in the piece entitled “The Disrobing of Draupadi and the Sun god”, which was posted in this blog on April 4, 2008.)

   We may note that she was a pawn in the hands of Yudhisthira and a means in the hands of Sakuni.  She wasn’t the cause of her suffering; she had done no wrong. Thus, she didn’t have the comfort of coming to terms with her suffering through acceptance, which comes to the conscientious sufferer when he realizes that the suffering was morally deserved – a just punishment for the wrong he had done earlier. And not just Draupadi, we may also note that once Yudhisthira lost her in the game of dice, Duryodhana also became an instrument, a means, for Sakuni. And again, not just him, but all those, who, one way or the other, became part of that chain, Dussasana and Bhima, among others, unknowingly became his instruments. No one, except, of course, the One who knew everything and perhaps Sahadeva, who had the knowledge of the past and the future, knew that Sakuni was the agent, but neither would tell. Neither Bhima nor Draupadi ever bayed for Sakuni’s blood.

   Returning to Draupadi’s humiliation, if it did not move Yudhisthira, in the sense that he did not want revenge, it did another of her husbands, Bhima, who thundered revenge - he would tear apart Dussasana’s body and break Duryodhana’s thigh. But that would happen in future; on that day, none of her five husbands came forward to protect her from Dussasana.  To what extent Draupadi felt reassured that her torturers would perish one day, we do not know. We only guess that in the Kaurava court Bhima’s thunder meant almost nothing to her. Five affectionate and caring husbands; yet, when she was face-to-face with the gravest crisis of her life, instead of the help she needed, all she got was the assurance of revenge. For the first time in her life, she realized her vulnerability and the powerlessness of her husbands to respond adequately in her moment of crisis.

   But come to think of it, that day was not really her torturers’ day. It had turned out to be her day instead. She could not be disrobed and in the court, she was hailed as a virtuous woman. Her angry look directed at Duryodhana’s palace, burnt the women’s quarters and the royal inmates rushed out and were exposed to the public gaze. What Duryodhana wanted to do to Draupadi, in a way recoiled on his very own. Another angry look, this time at Dussasana, still at pulling her clothes and he collapsed on the floor. Dritarashtra and Gandhari came to the court and prayed to Draupadi to pacify her. Dhritarashtra, the head of the Kaurava family, gave Draupadi what she asked for - her husbands’ freedom and the wealth they had lost.

    By the way, it was also Sakuni’s day. He had attained his objective for that day; he must have believed that war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas would certainly take place someday. How else would Bhima redeem his vows? As for Draupadi’s disrobing, he had absolutely no interest in it. And he knew that that was not going to happen. In Sarala Mahabharata, didn’t he tell this to Krishna, after the fire in the lac palace: “Since you are protecting them, what harm can the imbecile and worthless Kauravas cause them?”

   

   That day, the Pandavas left Hastinapura in a pleasant atmosphere. There was bonhomie among the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Says Sarala, “aneka priti badhila sate uttare panchubrate (there was a lot of affection among the hundred and five brothers)”. Draupadi’s untied hair and Bhima’s suppressed anger could not spoil the geniality of the mood. And that surely wouldn’t have made her feel good, one would think.

   Unable to cope with defeat in the game of dice, her husband Yudhisthira went to Hastinapura desperately wanting a win. So the game was played again. This time, her youngest husband, not Sakuni, rolled the dice (for details, see “The Second Game of Dice” in this blog, posted on May 7, 2010). And Yudhisthira lost.

   Draupadi found again how vulnerable she was during the twelve-year long exile and a year’s incognito living. She realized, for the first time, that she couldn’t protect her husbands when they faced what threatened to be a calamity for them. Sage Durvasa, who would not forgive anyone for failing to satisfy his wants, arrived with his disciples and demanded food from Yudhisthira and went for ablutions. Now, Draupadi was the family’s food giver and she had nothing to give the guests. It is another matter that things so happened that day that the awe-inspiring sage did not return.  

   She found herself vulnerable again, when one day, her brother-in-law, Jayadratha, Duryodhana’s sister’s husband, took advantage of her being alone in their hut and tried to molest her. She would have wanted him dead, but her eldest husband would allow Bhima to only humiliate him. Kin could just not be punished with death. During their incognito living, the mighty Kichaka lusted for her. This time Yudhisthira did not constrain Bhima and he crushed Kichaka to a ball of meat. That immensely pleased Draupadi. 

  

   Only once after that she was in that state. That was when Bhima poured the blood from the mangled Dussasana’s body on her hair. As the blood trickled down, her tongue touched it. For two aeons she had been waiting for this (see “The Killing of Dussasana” in this blog, posted on April 3, 2008). After thirteen long years of waiting, she tied her hair. She invited Bhima to spend that night with her.

   She must have come to know that her five children had been killed before Duryodhana died. He had humiliated her and with his death, her revenge was complete. But that was not in her mind then. The loss of her children had devastated her. She told Krishna that she would kill herself. Then she told him, “mora putra bairi maribu ehiksani (Right now kill the enemy of my sons)”. Not to her husbands, but to Krishna she had turned this time. Maybe she knew that Yudhisthira would not allow his guru’s son to be killed – hadn’t he disallowed Jayadratha’s killing? The guru’s son had a much higher status than kin.

   Now, all Krishna did was dispossess Ashwasthama of his weapons. And that too, through cheating, which means he didn’t harm him physically. He showed the weapons to the weeping Draupadi and told her that he had stolen them. She was “pleased”, says the poet: “draupadi chhamure dileka debahari / dekhi sananda hoile je dropada kumari ((He) gave (the stolen weapons) to Draupadi / Seeing that, the daughter of Drupada was pleased)”.

   Was she really pleased? A reader of Sarala Mahabharata would ask, in disbelief - she isn’t someone who would be content with so little. She would ask for a sound justification, at the very least. She did nothing of that sort. So, did she only pretend to be pleased, realizing that there was no point in pursuing the matter since beyond Krishna there was just nothing? And there was no point asking Krishna. In Sarala Mahabharata, his answers and explanations were like his doings. Lila (cosmic play) does not explain itself. Trying to understand it, the mortals and the immortals construct their own explanations. And no one’s is privileged.

   The war over and won, the Pandava family were talking animatedly about on whose account the victory was achieved. Draupadi claimed that it was her. But so did everyone else: the five brothers, Kunti and Subhadra. She didn’t argue. Her ahamkara (arrogance) was gone, with the death of all her sons, her brother and her father. She became the queen but the episode of Yudhisthira’s rajyabhisheka (enthronement) hardly makes a mention of her. One would wonder what happiness the grieving mother would have felt, sitting with her husband on the throne during the ceremony of inauguration.

   She faded into the background in the narrative. It had lost interest in her. She had emerged from the sacred fire to kill. Her children’s death had doused the fire within. In her private moments in the royal palace of Hastinapura, she must have shed copious tears for her beloved little ones.  All alone. As did Kunti. She spent sleepless nights grieving over the death of Karna, Ghatotkacha and Abhimanyu and she condemned Arjuna for killing her son. As for Gandhari, what can one say? She had a hundred sons and she had lost them all. She wept alone, like did Kunti, like did Draupadi, although the poet Sarala ignores her in the last parvas (cantos) of his retelling. We do not know from Sarala Mahabharata how she felt when Krishna passed away.  

   After they left Hastinapura on their vanaprastha, Draupadi figured in the narrative meaningfully only once.  In the Himalayas, feeling extremely cold, tired and unwell, she pleaded with Yudhisthira to be allowed to rest for a while. Yudhisthira said, no. They had come to give up their bodies in the sacred mountains, so why indulge it, he told her. “A world without Krishna is unfit for living”, he said. She said nothing. Was she convinced by Yudhithira’s words? We do not know.

   Soon after, she had fallen to her death, before she had accepted death.

   Let us end with this: if my understanding of Draupadi in Sarala Mahabharata is correct, with Krishna, and Krishna alone, deep down, Draupadi felt “at ease” even when she gave vent to her anxiety, frustration or anger in front of him and sometimes even targeting him. But his presence calmed her, deep down. The feeling of ease that we are talking about cannot be called “happiness”, because happiness is an experience of the ego. She connected with Krishna with an attitude of surrender, where ego dissolves.  And no wonder, since theirs was a relationship aeons old. It was just that her birth in the mortal world had wiped out that memory.       

FOR YOUR KIND INFORMATION, FRIENDS

The stories in this blog are also available in my permanent website:  https://saralamahabharata.org/

Thanks a lot!

"WAS DRAUPADI HAPPY?" (PART I)

asked Sriparna, the computer scientist, the other day.  One would think she must have been, she said; for if one day, one of her husbands was cross with her, there was enough room for compensating comfort – there must have been at least one other of them from whom she would have received care and affection on that day. But life being a tale of many twists, did it really happen that way to her, she asked.

   It didn’t, said the computational linguist, Sobha. That was what Pratibha Ray’s famous novel “Yajnaseni” suggests, she said. One gets the same impression from S.L. Bhyrappa’s well-known novel “Parva” as well.  Only the contexts are different and the victims, surprised and hurt, are different. In Ray’s novel it was the wife Draupadi. In Bhyrappa’s, it was the mother Draupadi. The mother Draupadi realized that Arjuna was teaching Abhimanyu, his son from Subhadra, military strategies that he did not teach his son from her. Maybe he found Abhimanyu more intelligent and more receptive; after all, didn’t Drona teach things to Arjuna which he was disinclined to teach his son? Draupadi felt too badly let down to even think of such a thing. 

   Dealing with five husbands, we guess, who were five different personalities, she might have been emotionally drained and often felt lonely, when she found time to be alone. In any case, that was a very demanding task, Sarala’s Bhima told Yudhisthira in the snowy Himalayas, and she had performed it with much grace and élan. She was extraordinary, he said.

   One gets the impression from Sarala Mahabharata that that each of her husbands desired her, respected her and was genuinely fond of her (although one of them – Yudhisthira -  was not at ease with her, but he kept his discomfort to himself till when saying it out loud wouldn’t hurt her) and she didn’t seem to fail in performing her wifely duties with respect to any of them. None of them said anything to the contrary. Till after she fell in the Himalayas. “She fell because of her sin”, said Yudhisthira to Bhima. And what was the sin? Taken aback, Bhima wanted to know. What he said shocked and shook Bhima but it is not relevant to our present concern, namely, whether she was happy; so let that pass.

   Yudhisthira’s response to Bhima’s question in Vyasa Mahabharata is relevant to us. He said that though she was the wife of all the Pandavas, she was partial towards Arjuna. On that account, she had failed in her stree dharma (wifely duties). Now, as far as we are concerned, doesn’t it show that she lived a life of compromise in the matter of her heart and had tried to conceal it all through her life? Now, was she happy?

   She had concealed something else too, according to Sarala Mahabharata, although the edition that I use makes no reference to this, namely that although he had five husbands, she was attracted towards Karna. In “Yajnaseni”, the author, drawing from both Vyasa Mahabharata and a certain edition of Sarala Mahabharata, makes a connection – Karna, a Kaunteya, was a brother of the Pandavas. We can think of it this way: before she saw Draupadi, Kunti had asked her sons to share whatever they had brought. That turned out to be a young woman, not alms. That there was an absent son when she said this, no one knew - not that she had him in mind then. But words, once uttered, are no more bound to the utterer, his intentions and the specific circumstances. Sometimes they materialize in the form predicted and sometimes in a form entirely unexpected; sometimes on account of the utterer, sometimes, on account of the context of the utterance.

   Born from the sacred fire of a yajna, performed for an unholy purpose by the great sage Vyasa himself for king Drupada, Draupadi was born to be the instrument of revenge. After giving two children to the jajman Drupada, the holy fire was unwilling to give him another; the gods eventually relented because of Vyaa’s spiritual energy, and the girl had emerged. Drupada wanted to avenge his suffering in the hands of the Kauravas. He needed a daughter who would fulfil his dark wish. He had prayed to Bhagawan Shiva to grant hi the boon that would enable him to kill the Kauravas. The great god, who is easily pleased and who readily grants boons without a thought, did not oblige; he told him that he would never be able to kill the Kauravas; only Arjuna could do that. He would give the girl in marriage to Arjuna, and one day, Drupada told Vyasa, there would be war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas and Arjuna would destroy the Kauravas and he would have his revenge. From the yajna fire had emerged, first, the one, neither male nor female, who came to be known as Sikhandi, then the boy, who came to be known as Dhristadyumna. Drupada was very upset but Vyasa asked him to look after them well because Shikhandi would be the cause of Bhishma’s death and Dristadyumna, of Drona’s and it would be only after their death that the Kauravas could be killed, he told him.

   Little is said about Draupadi’s upbringing in Drupada’s palace. We can imagine though what kind of upbringing she would have had, knowing that for her revenge-obsessed father, she was an instrument for the attainment of his objective.

   Incidentally, what had the Kauravas done to Drupada? They had given him a sound thrashing which he did not deserve and when he was not in a condition to defend himself. It was certainly a wicked act by the Kauravas. But for that did they deserve to be eliminated? And for that to happen, if venerable and virtuous persons like Bhishma and Drona had to be killed, Drupada wasn’t concerned in the least. When one thinks of Drupada’s revenge, Sakuni comes out as a saint! (About Sakuni’s revenge, see the posts “Concerning Duryodhana’s killing of his Maternal Grandfather” and “The Revenge of the Dead: The Story of the Special Dice of Sakuni” in this blog.)

   One dark and rainy night the fire in the lac palace had happened and it upset Drupada’s plans. He heard that the Pandavas had perished in the fire. He now had to find someone who could kill the Kauravas.  So he arranged a swayambara for Draupadi. It was swayambara only in name; Draupadi had to marry the person who would succeed in the archery test. She had no say at all with respect to her wedding. Destiny would decide things for her and her destiny had a manifestation: Krishna! He wanted Draupdi to marry Arjuna, so he succeeded in the archery contest – let’s ignore the details. He sanctioned her marriage to the five Pandavas, so she married them all.

  

   Without going into details, let us note that her married life was uneventful in Sarala Mahabharata until her humiliation in the Kaurava court. There is not even a faint suggestion that any elder in the Kuru family was unhappy with her. Almost nothing is said about her interactions with Duryodhana’s wife, Bhanumati or any other princess in the Kaurava family. She didn’t do anything that would have upset any Kaurava brother. “The blind man’s son is blind” is what she had said in some other versions of Mahabharata, not in Sarala’s. There is no mention of her being impolite to Sakuni. As for Karna, in Sarala’s version, everyone knew that Karna was Kunti’ eldest child; thus, there was no relation of disrespect between her and Kunti’s eldest. She had not stopped Karna from participating in the archery test and Krishna had not suggested to her that she did so. Obviously, there is no place for that in a narrative in which Karna’s identity was no secret, namely, that he had grown up in the suta’s house but was Kunti’s eldest. Karna did not participate in the archery test to win her for himself; he wanted to win her for Duryodhana. He failed to hit the target; only the Creator god Brahma in the abode of the gods and sage Vyasa on earth knew how he failed, and of course, did Krishna. Let’s leave this matter here because it has nothing to do with our present concern. All in all, Draupadi’s wedded life was smooth; so perhaps she was happy; perhaps she was not. For the wife, especially for someone like Draupadi, sensitive, intelligent and self-confident, and wife to five persons, a quiet married life can be interpreted either way.

   Having five husbands had made her conceited and arrogant, was what Yudhisthira thought of her. He wasn’t really wrong. Now, anxiety and unhappiness are companions of conceit and arrogance. The arrogant person tends to take offence easily and loses self-control and becomes unhappy as a result.  

   In Sarala’s narrative, the first time she felt insulted in public was during the rajaswiya jajna of Yudhisthira. Bhima’s son, Ghatotkacha, from his demoness wife, Hidimbaki (Hidimba, in some versions) had arrived - his presence was needed. Following his mother’s advice, he bowed to his father, Krishna, Vyasa and Yudhisthira in that order. His mother had strictly forbidden him to bow to Draupadi, who, with five husbands, was a fallen woman for her.  The one who had emerged out of fire would not tolerate being slighted in public and she pronounced a curse on him: he would die the most dishonourable death in the battlefield. Hidimbaki came out of her hiding and cursed her that her yet unborn sons would die, when still children. How much it troubled her, the poet hasn’t told us. Sitting with Yudhisthira as a queen in the sacred jajna, among the Kuru family, sages and kings and princes, would have been a fulfilling experience for her had she not forgotten that she was like a mother to Ghatotkacha. What would have been a fulfilling experience for her turned out to be extremely unpleasant.

   To be fair to her, this was an exception, when it comes to her conduct as a member of the Kuru family. Incidentally, she hadn’t acted out of jealousy; that Hidimbaki was her husband, Bhima’s, first wife, or that her son was the first child in the Pandava family do not seem to have mattered when she cursed Ghatotkacha. 

   Bhima had married Hidimbai before he married Draupadi. But Arjuna had other wives after his marriage with Draupadi. However, apart from Subhadra, none of his wives lived with him. Draupadi had to swallow her pride and accept that situation because Subhadra was Krishna’s sister. We do not know about their interaction; we do not know whether they preferred to avoid each other rather than meet and talk like friends. In Sarala Mahabharata there is no murmur that they were unfond of each other, but there is no suggestion either that their relationship was truly cordial.

   Now what would one say? Was Draupadi happy or suffering so many compromises in life she had forgotten that there was an experience called happiness?