Draupadi

The court of Hastinapura. The dice have come to rest, and a Suta messenger stands at Draupadi’s door with word that Yudhishthira has staked her and lost. She sends him back with a question for the hall, in the Sabha Parva, sections 64 to 80 in Ganguli’s numbering: “Ask that gambler in the assembly which he lost first, himself or me.” The Pratikamin puts it to the king in her words: “Whose lord were you when you lost me at play? Did you lose yourself first, or me?” Yudhishthira sits as a man sits who has lost his senses, and gives no answer. Then Duhshasana catches her by the hair that had been sprinkled with mantra-blessed water at the Rajasuya, the royal consecration, and drags her in before Bhishma, Drona and Vidura, in a single cloth. “Blessed lady,” Bhishma says, “dharma is subtle, and I am unable to settle the point you have raised.” Vikarna alone speaks up for her, and the hall applauds him. One question, and the dharma of the whole assembly trembles. That day, among defeated men, Draupadi stood alone as the one who had not been defeated.

Draupadi’s birth was itself an answer to a wrong. Drupada of Panchala wanted a son who could kill Drona, and from the sacrifice the Brahmin brothers Yaja and Upayaja performed for him, Ganguli’s Adi Parva, section 169, a boy rose armed from the flames, and after him a dark and beautiful girl rose from the center of the altar, with eyes like lotus petals, while a voice in the sky said she would be the cause of the destruction of many Kshatriyas. She was born of fire, and fire stayed the language of her life. At the svayamvara, sections 186 to 194, Arjuna rose from the crowd of Brahmins in a beggar’s deerskin, strung the bow no king had been able to string, and brought the mark down with five arrows. At the potter’s house the brothers called through the door that they had brought the day’s alms, and Kunti, without looking, answered, “Enjoy it, all of you together.” A word once spoken could not be allowed to become a lie, and by that one unforeseen sentence the girl from the altar became the wife of five brothers.

After that afternoon in the Sabha came the exile, and the trials returned in one changed shape after another. In the Kamyaka forest, the Draupadi-harana of the Vana Parva, sections 264 to 271, the brothers ride out to hunt, and Jayadratha, king of Sindhu, finds her alone at the hermitage door and tells her to leave her beggared husbands and mount his chariot. When he takes hold of her garment she shoves him off so hard that he falls like a tree torn up by the roots, and it takes force to haul her aboard. The brothers run his army down, he abandons her and flees, and Yudhishthira spares him for the sake of Duhshala, his wife and the one sister of the Kauravas. At the city of Virata, Virata Parva sections 14 to 24, she is the Sairandhri, a dresser of hair in Queen Sudeshna’s service. Kichaka, the king’s general, drags her down by the hair and kicks her in the open court, and Virata says he cannot judge what passed out of his sight. Her answer reaches the two husbands who sat still: “The men whose wife I am are very kind, I think, and because the eldest of them is addicted to dice, anyone at all may trample on them.” That night she goes to Bhima in the cooking quarters, and the next night Kichaka walks into the dark of the dancing hall expecting her and finds Bhima on the bed. When the keepers of the hall come running with torches, she tells them: “He is lying here, killed by my Gandharva husbands.”

She Who Won Everything and Lost Everything

The eighteen days of war gave Draupadi back everything the dice had taken, and took from her everything the dice had left. On the night of the victory, in the Sauptika Parva, sections 1 to 18, Ashvatthama enters the sleeping camp and cuts down her five sons, Prativindhya, Sutasoma, Shatanika, Shrutakarma and Shrutakirti. In the morning she sits beside Yudhishthira in praya, the vow of fasting to death, and names her price, the gem born on Ashvatthama’s head: “I will set it on your head, king, and then I will bear to live.” The gem is brought, and there are two tellings. In the Mahabharata, Sauptika 16, she says, “The teacher’s son deserves my reverence as the teacher himself does. Let the king bind this gem on his head,” and when he wears it she gives up her vow. In the Bhagavata, 1.7.42 to 48, Arjuna brings Ashvatthama in roped like a beast for sacrifice, and she bows to the killer of her children and says, “Release him, release him,” so that Kripi his mother is not made to weep. For thirteen years she had kept the memory of her humiliation from dying down, and on that morning, in either telling, the teacher’s son walks away alive with her consent.

On the Mahaprasthana, Mahaprasthanika Parva sections 1 to 3, they leave Hastinapura dressed in bark, five brothers, Draupadi the sixth, and a dog the seventh. North of the Himalaya, in sight of Meru, Draupadi, walking last in the line, is the first to lose her hold on Yoga and fall. “This princess never did a sinful thing,” Bhima says. “Tell us the reason Draupadi has fallen to the earth.” Yudhishthira answers without turning: “The five of us stood equal before her, and still she was greatly partial to Arjuna. Today she receives the fruit of that.” He walks on, and the line goes on without her. One corner of her heart had stayed her own, and the Mahabharata sets down this last human thing about its most radiant heroine without reproach.

Her Path

Draupadi’s Svayamvara · The girl from the altar, a bow no king could string, five arrows through the machine, and one sentence spoken through a door.

The Dice Game and Draupadi’s Humiliation · A question sent back with a messenger, a hall of lowered faces, and the cloth that never ran short however hard it was pulled.

The Second Dice Game and the Exile · Everything won staked all over again, and thirteen years in the forest in the rattle of a single die.

The Abduction of Draupadi · Jayadratha at the hermitage door in the Kamyaka forest, a shove that fells him like a tree, and a chase that ends with him spared.

The Year in Hiding and the Killing of Kichaka · An empress serving as Sairandhri with her hair in one braid, a kick in the open court, and Bhima waiting in the dark of the dancing hall.

Ashvatthama’s Night Slaughter · Five sons cut down in the hour of sleep, and a vow of praya kept until Ashvatthama’s gem is bound on the king’s brow.

Gandhari’s Lament and the Grief of the Women · The women walking the field of Kurukshetra among the dead, Gandhari’s lament over her sons, and the funerals that follow.

The Mahaprasthana and Draupadi’s Fall · The walk north over the Himalaya, the same count of six that once left the city, and the most radiant of them all the first to fall.

The Power of the Question

What Draupadi teaches lies far from the battlefield and its skills. When the order itself falls silent, one well-aimed question can grow larger than that whole order. In that hall she had no force at her command, her rights had already been stripped away, even her garment was on the table, and all that was left to her was argument, and with argument alone she bent men of Bhishma’s stature. Her lesson about fear is that keeping silent out of fear of an insult doubles the insult. Her lesson about memory is that the one who forgets justice is never granted justice. Above all there is a balance that few people manage to see. This same Draupadi, who kept the debt of the dice hall alive for thirteen years, could let the teacher’s son go, in the Sauptika Parva out of reverence for her husbands’ teacher, in the Bhagavata out of pity for his mother, because her anger had always been weighed and clear-eyed. When the decisions of your own life come, that distinction serves you well: anger that demands an accounting is power, and anger that forgets the accounting is ruin. Draupadi held the accounting and the forgiveness in the same two hands.