Gender and identity in the Mahābhārata
By: Peter Sahota
Tags: Gender Identity, India, Gender, Sanskrit, Mahabharata

Draupadī

It is perhaps Draupadī’s vulnerability as a woman in male-dominated environments that make her one of the most articulate and expressive characters in the Mahābhārata, able to put into words not only her own predicament, but also the injustice and humiliation which she and the five Pāṇḍava brothers experience time and again. Her passionate speeches give eloquent expression to the situation that she and the Pāṇḍavas find themselves in, and she appears to be most conscious of the gravity of the situation, in fact, in marked contrast to Yudhiṣṭhira, who appears highly quiescent in many situations.

The Virāṭa Parvan is one part of the narrative where they are most acutely conscious of their total humiliation, and Draupadī in particular is eloquent in expressing their awful predicament. This is the episode where they must live incognito for a year, disguised in subservient roles. Draupadī is disguised as a maid, and Yudhiṣṭhira, as depicted above, disguises himself as a Brahmin courtier to entertain the king with dice games.

We may perhaps compare this to the contemporary lockdown situation, where many people are suffering mentally due to a sense of spending too much time together in a confined space, of being isolated from their normal rhythms of life and society, and of being in a situation which they cannot control.

Draupadī makes a vivid and moving lament as follows -

Here is that attendant of the king who has achieved total unhappiness,

In his assembly playing dice, Yudhiṣṭhira, calling himself Kanka.

He to whom, when he lived at Indraprastha, kings

Carried tribute, now carries things around for others.

You, Bhīma, are in the unfitting job of a cook,

Calling yourself Ballava; Who wouldn’t feel grief?

When the king delightedly makes you fight with elephants,

While the women of the palace laugh, I am terrified.

[Mahābhārata Virāṭa Parvan, Chapter 17, verses 22–23; my own translation; Chapter 18, extracts from opening; my own translation]

In considering her own plight, she manages at this point to be slightly more philosophical -

See the awful state of me, conquering prince!

I am just biding my time, suffering every sorrow.

Impermanent are the achievements, victories and defeats of mortals

Knowing this, I am eagerly waiting for my husbands to rise again

[Mahābhārata Virāṭa Parvan, Chapter 19, verses 2–3; my own translation]

Here Draupadī looks back to their time as rulers in Indraprastha, when their wealth and power was at its height, in order to highlight the despair of their present situation by contrast. Further, we can see that it is not merely the activities that they are involved in that causes Draupadī such pain, but also the fact that they must act in accordance with the will of another, with no independent ability to choose their own course of action in any situation. In this way, there is a removal of their personal autonomy that is closely connected with the lack of acknowledgement of their true identities.

This is one of many powerful and rhetorically effective speeches that Draupadī makes, which include her speech when she is assaulted in the assembly and when in the forest she reflects on the desperate nature of their predicament.

Indeed, her eloquence also seems to be motivated by the fact that she is conscious of the additional level of vulnerability she is exposed to as a woman moving in male-dominated environments, or even, we might say in regard to cultures that allow such figures as Duṣyanta and Kīcaka to flourish, spaces of toxic masculinity. At the same time as criticizing this state of affairs, however, she continues to look to her own husbands to protect her in the last line, perhaps acknowledging that she is living in a largely patriarchal society.