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?
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