The Mahabharata is arguably one of the most forceful exploitations of the maltreatment of women. One of the most problematic and complex issues in it that need to be addressed is the ideal of Dharma. ‘Hinduism’ says that Dharma is the religious and moral law governing individual conduct and one of the four ends of life to be followed according to one’s status, class and stature in life. But the contradictions that lie in it are the very basis of humanity. Dharma says that duty is more important than rights and that if one upholds one’s dharma, then the universe will remain in harmony and the wrong can never be the victor (“Yato dharma tato jayaha”) but if humans are denied what they were meant to be born with, how can it lead to Dharma?
In such a warped scenario, does ‘Santi’ refer to a lull or a silence rather than stillness if it comes at the cost of somebody’s rights? I believe that Dharma or the idea of a moral binding comes from within us and if that binding turns into the cause of unnecessary destruction then we need to question the very being where the Dharma arises. What differentiates humans from the rest of the beings in this world is the fact that while we can respect our place in the order that was created, we also have the intellect to question ourselves in that order.
The Sabha Pravan or the Book of Assembly in the Mahabharata begins with the need to proclaim Yudhistira as the emperor by performing the Rajasuya Yagya. The need for this is unclear because by this time, Yudhistira neither has enough credentials nor the ultimate desire to be the suzerain. The Panchala kingdom was obtained by marrying Draupadi and the five brothers were satisfied with living in a forest before that. The duties of an emperor entailed not only the protection of his peoples but also eschewing war at all costs. Yudhistira fails to do both of these things. The war that could have been prevented by Yudhistira alone leads to the ultimate question of why the war was necessary. The dereliction of his duty as a king and as a husband leads to the rights of his wife being stripped; the right to dignity and respect that a woman deserves. The lovely Draupadi, her long hair that was stroked by war heroes and loosened during lovemaking gets pulled violently by Dushasana. She gets taunted by Dushasana to add another husband to the slew. This disrobing is considered so inauspicious that sometimes it is omitted altogether from festivals and even the mainstream media. The obfuscation of justice which needs to be highlighted time and again gets suppressed. The deep contrast lies in the fact that there is the grave need to be protected by the brother(Krishna, who has been tied a rakhi by her according to stories) at all costs but she is of no value to the husbands. Krishna promises to save her when the ‘time comes’. Why was her molestation predestined?
The vulnerability that stems from her ‘deviant’ sexuality (“Tell the woman with five husbands to come here immediately” – Duryodhana) results in her morality being questioned. She gets stopped by Gandhari from cursing the entire assembly because a woman has to protect the honour of her family and the nation. She cannot curse them. Had she cursed them, she would have been provided with a voice stronger than she is ‘supposed’ to have had. Her disrobing that is said to culminate in the war of Kurukshetra, is a cumulative result of the choices people make in the epic. One tends accept the war as being predestined but rather than calling Draupadi the predestined cause of the war, one needs to question the destiny which made her that cause and stripped her of the will that is so essential to any human being.
The disrobing scene in Mahabharata shows Draupadi as being ‘de-classed’ and stripped of her dignity as a queen. Mahasveta Devi in her short story Draupadi deconstructs this idea to assert that it is her very class that makes her the target of Senanayak’s exploitation. Both the stories assert how a woman’s gender is exploited to ‘punish’ her. Draupadi is a queen who is desired for her beauty and kingdom. Yet she has to bear her molestation because she is a woman. Dopdi is not apprehended because she is woman. She is apprehended because she is a Naxal leader. But she is apprehended and raped because she dares to do what she does in spite of being a woman. Other than the difference of the period during which both the texts were written, what tells us about the movement in time is the fact that while Draupadi’s anger was suppressed by the honour she had to uphold for her family, Dopdi is successful in asserting that there is no honour left for anybody; the community or the society when a woman is brutally seized and gangraped. Mahasveta Devi depicts this in a poignant concluding scene when Dopdi goes to Senanayak start naked exhibiting the bites on her breasts and the dried up blood on her pubic hair to reflect a picture of his own atrocity before him. One can feel actual terror in his eyes as opposed to the sheer lack of remorse shown by every one of the Purus in The Mahabharata. She was the joined wife of the five Pandavas and could be proclaimed a ‘harlot’. Thus it “wasn’t wrong to bring her clothed or unclothed into the assembly.”
When Dushasana pulls at her sari, the whole idea of maintaining Dharma comes into being and gets exhibited in the form of infinite clothing that Krishna imparts her when she prays to him. Though there are implicit commonalities between the historical Draupadi and Dopdi, I can somehow see Dopdi in a brighter, more heroic light as a woman who refused to be ‘rescued’ by a patriarchal leadership or any godlike presence. Thus the modern account by Mahasveta Devi gets called revolutionary while the great Indian tradition of upholding the Dharma in this vast Universe somewhere suppresses the voice of the woman for whom the great battle was supposed to be fought. The deep-set desire for revenge and boiling rage has to be contained, if not hidden behind the duties of a wife, queen and mother.
The Book of Women or the Striparvan in The Mahabharata looks at the aftermath of the war, the dead bodies of the soldiers with vivid images of jackals, hyenas and vultures in the battlefield. All the elders like Bhishma and Drona along with the younger princes like Dhristadyumna and Abhimanyu get killed. The tears of the widows of the warriors *‘wash death away’ which is the focus of the Shantiparvan that follows. So, Vyasa in the Book of Women shows how the upholding of Dharma comes at the cost of violence, grief and at some level, grave injustice. Draupadi’s destiny held that ‘the dark one (krsna)’ would lead to the destruction of the kshatriya dynasty. The incarnation of the goddess Sri, the ideal wife, the ideal woman had to pay for her perfection by being blamed for arousing the Kauravas. As Sri, she represented the godly wife of a good king but the question that arises is that as a woman and the incarnation of a goddess at that; was the sole purpose of her existence the destruction of an entire clan? One might never know if it had anything to do with the fact that she was a woman but one needs to focus on why the establishment of Dharma entails the banishment of dignity, justice and peace. The peace that follows the Dharmic order comes at the cost of thousands of lives and unexplainable sorrow. This not only belittles a person and the respect that they are entitled to but in a way renders it meaningless. If individuals and their feelings are meaningless in this world, then what meaning does Dharma hold? Yes, belittling of a person is important for humans to realize their status and their position in nature, but natural inequalities should not become the basis for unnatural discrimination along with cosmic faith that society uses to implicate someone without any offense.
Following the book of Women, at the beginning of the Santiparvan, when Yudhistira is wrought with grief, even Krishna fails to explain the meaning of war to him. Narada and Bhishma also fall short. Vyasa says that war was unavoidable by referring to the devalasura frame story where those who supported the asuras were slain. Van Buitenen calls this story ‘inept mythification’ because it doesn’t really explain why the war was fought. The Pandavas’ choices are deified by comparing their victory to the victory of the devas. All rationality is curtained by the poet who mentions that the war was fought according to celestial wishes. This is ironical since Krishna, who could not stop the war or explain the cause of it was cursed by Gandhari to die a painful death. Cosmic claims of the poet are also followed by the explanation of abiding by one’s varnadharma (caste rules). One cannot help but notice how human greed, hypocrisy and the gender bias of the society at that time was convoluted by appeals to varnadharma and godly wishes. Draupadi being manhandled in an open court before her husbands and family members has to be or rather that it needs to be explained through lust and an ugly feeling of vengeance. There is nothing celestial about it.
Another civilisation which has a history of rich mythological accounts is the Greek civilisation. The father of the Greek Gods was Zeus who has also been compared to Indra in a number of translations of Sanskrit plays because both of them are kings along with having the thunderbolt as their symbol. Indra is infamous for being corrupted by mortal desires and so is Zeus. There are a number of myths which show Zeus raping a number of women out of sheer lust. One of these legends is that of Leda and the Swan. W.B Yeats chose this legend as the main subject of one of his poems with the same title. The legend follows Leda, wife of Tyndareos who is raped by Zeus disguised as a huge swan that was supposedly running from an eagle. The Swan raped her as a result of which Leda laid an egg out of which the beautiful Helen was born. Helen was said to be the cause of the Trojan War and the subsequent fall of Troy.
Yeats, in the second quatrain of his poem suggests two possibilities:
“How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?”
While on one hand they might suggest that Leda was actually responding to the Swan’s sexual advances, on the other hand it might just be describing very vividly the sexual assault of a woman by a humungous swan. The second possibility seems more likely because of the forceful images in the first quatrain. They show a very helpless Leda who has no agency whatsoever in this act:
“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.”
Phrases like ‘the staggering girl’ and ‘her nape caught in his bill’ are not very likely to suggest mutual consent. There is a constant sense of violence that pervades throughout the poem even when Yeats describes Helen and the fall of Troy.
The last two lines of the poem present a very ironical question to the reader. It is constantly seen that even though the Greek tradition stresses on individual agency and human will, one can see that the Gods often have a major role to play in shaping the future. Heroes earn glory in the battlefield, but more often than not it is through the blessing or support of the Gods. For example Achilles was prophesied to be an invincible warrior but doomed to live a short life filled with glory rather than a long life filled with happiness. His mother tried to prove this prediction wrong by dipping him in the Styx but his heel was left out. Similarly the Gods made Agamemnon have a dream falsely predicting his victory in the battlefield that day. So the Gods have a very important role to play in determining the destiny of a mortal. In the last two lines of the poem,
[“Did she put on his knowledge with his power,
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”]
Yeats might be talking about a similar prophesy which was destined to beget Helen. John Welford draws a parallel between Leda and the Virgin Mary where being impregnated by a God might be the way of imparting a piece of information which is of great significance. While this is a plausible theory, one cannot help but wonder why the gods always choose to deny agency to a woman in an attempt to make a divine prophesy which is of huge consequence.
One can see how the woman is the agent rather than the cause of events. Leda was the mode for Zeus to bring Helen into the world. Though these women had no will when it came to choosing their destiny, they played a huge role in making history. Whether we consider them a cause of the war or players in a mythological account is a matter of perception. But the fact that their voice was constantly suppressed by objectifying their body is something that is ignored very often. Helen’s was a face that launched a thousand ships but nobody ever knew what she was thinking or how she felt. She was abducted and was practically a booty over which two men were fighting. Shawna Blake says that “If there was a lack of women in mythology, there would have also been a lack of war.” This could easily be said for men. In a patriarchal set-up men fought for everything that signified power; land, kingdoms, money and women. More often than not the women had to comply. The one stark difference that is seen between the treatment of the heroine in The Mahabharata and The Iliad is that while in the former the woman is stripped of her dignity after which she has to egg her husbands on for revenge, the latter sees two very powerful kingdoms who willingly go to war to protect the woman they value. One never hears from the woman if she actually feels like a valued person or a prized possession, which has always been important to bolster the male ego.
Bibliography
‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi; Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University of Chicago Press (1981),
Introduction; the Mahabharata, Vol.7, Book 11(Translated by James Fitzgerald), University of Chicago Press (2003)
Epic Undertakings; Husbands of Earth: Kshatriyas, Females and Female Kshatriyas in the Striparvan of the Mahabharata
The Mahabharata, Volume 2: Book 2: The Book of Assembly edited by Johannes Adrianus Bernardus Buitenen, University of Chicago Press (1981)
The Folklore of Draupadi; Saris and Hair by Alf Hiltebeitel
An Understanding of W.B Yeats’ Poetry by John Welford
Classical Myth by Shawna Blake/Dashmini Parasuraman/Sandra Douglas (http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/articlelist/The+importance+of+women+in+mythology/967833/)
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