The court of Hastinapura. The dice have come to rest, the tally of the loss has been written out, and a woman is being dragged by her hair, the very hair that had once been sprinkled with the mantra-blessed water of the Rajasuya yajna, the royal consecration rite. Bhishma sits in that hall, Drona sits there, Vidura sits there. Every one of them is silent. And in the middle of that silence the woman does not weep, does not plead, she asks a question. This scene from Vyasa’s Mahabharata reaches the page of this site with the very same edge: “When you lost me, whose master were you? Did you lose yourself first, or me?” One line, and the dharma of the whole assembly trembles. Even a knower of dharma like Bhishma has no answer, only this much escapes him, that the ways of dharma are subtle. That day, among defeated men, Draupadi stood alone as the one who had not been defeated.
Draupadi’s very birth was extraordinary. The Mahabharata says she rose from the altar of Drupada’s yajna, already in the full bloom of youth, dark of complexion, with eyes like lotuses, and that a voice from the sky came with her, saying this Krishnaa, the dark one, would become the instrument of the ruin of the kshatriyas. She was born of fire, and fire stayed the language of her life. At the svayamvara, the contest to win her hand, when Arjuna in the guise of a brahmana pierced the eye of the fish and carried her home, a single unforeseen word from Kunti made her the wife of five brothers. Life had drawn so vast a decision out of her without ever asking her leave, and the woman who lived through that never again gave up asking the questions that were hers to ask.
After that afternoon of the Sabha Parva came the exile, and Draupadi’s trials kept returning in one changed shape after another. In the Kamyaka forest, Jayadratha found her alone and dragged her onto his chariot, and the Pandavas gave chase and won her back. In the year of hiding at the city of Virata she became Sairandhri, the maid who dressed the hair of Queen Sudeshna, the same hands that had once belonged to an empress. There Kichaka kicked her in the open court, and once again everyone stayed silent, even King Virata. But Draupadi never let an insult go down quietly. At midnight she walked into the kitchen and woke Bhima’s vow, and in the dark of the dance hall Kichaka came to the fruit of what he had done. In the Mahabharata, Draupadi is the memory of justice that lets no one forget, neither her own people nor her enemies.
She Who Won Everything and Lost Everything
The eighteen days of war gave Draupadi back everything the dice game had taken, and took from her everything that had survived even the dice game. On the very night the war had been won, Ashvatthama slipped into the sleeping camp and Draupadi’s five sons were killed. Read that night of the Sauptika Parva and you begin to see how hollow the word victory can be. And yet, when Ashvatthama was caught, it was this same Draupadi who called his mother to mind and saved him from the death sentence. For thirteen years she had kept the memory of her humiliation from dying down, and at the end she climbs the hardest step of all, forgiveness. Those two things together are the whole definition of Draupadi.
On the Mahaprasthana, the last great journey, she was the sixth, five brothers, Draupadi the sixth, a dog the seventh, the same count they had carried into the exile after the dice game. On the climb into the Himalaya she was the first to fall. Bhima asked why she had fallen, and Yudhishthira, without turning back, answered that her partiality had leaned toward Arjuna. Her whole life had been divided among five men, and still one corner of her heart stayed her own, and the Mahabharata is an honest enough text to set down even this last human thing about its most radiant heroine, and to set it down without reproach.
Her Path
Draupadi’s Svayamvara · The princess born of fire, the eye of the turning fish, and a single word that brought about five marriages.
The Dice Game and Draupadi’s Humiliation · The question that left the full court with no answer, 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 of exile in the rattle of a single die.
The Abduction of Draupadi · Jayadratha’s audacity in the Kamyaka forest, and the punishment written into the five tufts of his head.
The Year in Hiding and the Killing of Kichaka · An empress in the guise of Sairandhri, and Bhima’s justice in the dark of the dance hall.
Ashvatthama’s Night Slaughter · Five lamps going out on the night of victory, the deepest wound of Draupadi’s life.
Gandhari’s Lament and the Grief of the Women · The women standing on the battlefield, on whose share the true price of the war came to rest.
The Mahaprasthana and Draupadi’s Fall · The climb into the Himalaya, that same count of six, and the most radiant of them all the first to fall.
The Power of the Question
What we learn from Draupadi lies far from the battlefield and its skills. It is this: 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 only doubles the insult, and her lesson about memory is that the one who forgets justice is never granted justice. But above all there is a balance that few people manage to see: this same Draupadi, who was the cutting edge of vengeance, could also choose forgiveness in the moment of Ashvatthama, because her anger was weighed and clear-eyed. When you come to make the decisions of your life, this distinction serves you well: anger that demands an accounting is power, and anger that forgets the accounting is ruin. Draupadi stayed on the first side all her life.