After losing all material possessions in the dice game with Shakuni (who is playing on Duryodhana’s behalf), Yudhistira begins to bet his relations. Nakul, Sahadeva, Bhima, Arjun, and then Yudhistira himself, are staked and lost. The last bet is Draupadi.
Yes, my reading has finally reached what is perhaps the most crucial point in the whole story — the utter humiliation of Draupadi in a sabha full of royal Kuru men and their advisors. At no earlier point in my reading have I been more moved (enraged, perhaps, is the better word) than I am after reading the Dyuta Parva of the epic, in which the atrocious dice game is described.
In this country today, if it is a fact that a majority of the sexual violence faced by women is inside their own homes, then the story of Draupadi’s humiliation in an assembly hall filled with her husbands and her in-laws is a testament to how deep-rooted the notion of treating women as chattel is.
When I shared my outrage on Facebook, a friend reminded me that it might not be correct to look at mythology with a 21st century lens. But the Mahabharata, I feel, has never been just mythology. Even if we ignore the insistence of some people to call it history (and we should, given that these people often go to absurd lengths to ‘create’ facts for their case, fueling belief in notions like the usage of nuclear weapons in the war, or the impregnation of women through divine energy, and so on), the fact that there exists an entire contemporary literature focused on refurbishing the Mahabharata as relevant to our times, whole bookshelves of semi-scholarly or commercial work intent on keeping the story ‘alive’, even to transpose its rather inane tactical or strategic maneuvers as management lessons for the modern corporate workplace, it is crucial that no part of it that is unacceptable as per current value systems be allowed to be inherited as is, without condemnation. And there is nothing in the Mahabharata deserving more condemnation than the toxic masculinity that results in Draupadi’s humiliation at the hands of Kauravas.
What saves Draupadi is not Krishna’s extension of her garment but the paradox that she poses to the entire assembly, which is in turn based on two axioms. First, that wives are their husband’s property. And the second, that slaves can’t own property. If Yudhistira has lost himself in the game and become a slave to the Kauravas, how can he then bet Draupadi, who does not belong to him anymore.
Yudhistira has to accept that he lied when he bet himself, or accept that he has lost his right on Draupadi. Since the first is impossible, it follows that at this point in the story, unless the Kauravas reject the Pandavas’ servitude, Draupadi has been technically freed of her marriage with the five brothers.
I almost wish things had stayed this way.
Tanuj Solanki
Twitter@tanujsolanki
The writer is reading the unabridged Mahabharata