Draupdi…..
Emerged out of fire, a girl, who will be instrumental in showing the male dominated society ,drunk with power of adharma ,the difference a woman can make in creating history ,which the world will remember for generations……..
Who was draupadi? Why was she so angry?what drove her to the path of vengeance and her wrath lead to the battlefield where only the blood of the adharmi prince Dushashan would be used to wash her hair and quench the fuming soul.
To understand the end ,it is quintessential to understand the beginning of the story of how the enigma called draupadi was formed .
King Drupad performed a yajna from which emerged his son Dhrishtadyumna who will take his revenge from Dronacharya…… and also emerged from the sacrificial fire a ,a full grown woman whose dusky sultry beauty which was more glorious than the fire itself,the glow on the skin was more lustrous than the golden flame ,the tresses were silkier than silk ,her eyes had the spark of fire,lips were as red as ambers , her body comparable to the dancing flames. But she didn’t have the faintest of the idea that her destiny wasn’t even remotely as beautiful as her beauty…. her own father gave her a forlorn look to why she was born and would hate her from now on, as she was an unwanted child.
As time would have it and the story unfolds a swayamvara calls in all the eligible kings to come and display their valour to win the princess over ….
In her mind she prayed a thousand times for Arjuna the best and famous archer amongst all ,to win her but there was no sign of him …… as God will have it ….The archer in disguise as a Brahman turned out to be non other than him…, Arjun was there and had successfully completed the task and was her husband….she felt as if on cloud nine …. The desire , the lust , the mixed emotions started to churn into a wild fire …the new couple goes to seek the blessings of his mother …….and ….an excited Arjun calls out ,” mother , look what I have got !” Without even looking back Kunti says ,”divide it equally amongst u five ” . Lo behold ….. Even before she could enjoy the bliss of being in the arms of the man of her dreams ….On the words spoken by his mother Kunti …In the name of dharma she stood divided between five brothers ………carelessly said words would now shape the future of the new bride ….the words which could have been laughed off , could have been contested on the grounds of the human rights ….Is this really happening thought drauapdi….the mothers words became dharma for the pandav princes ……so very conveniently ..she was now to be equally divided between the five brothers ………when she heard this …. She thought the world would explode into tiny pieces , the sky would fall but nothing of that sort happened…
she could not believe that the person who was the best archer in the whole kuru world had no clue to the simplest of the things that wife is not a commodity which can be equally distributed amongst the brothers at the behest of his mothers mere words.
Everyone from the likes of sagemahamuni vyas to Bhagwan krishna only painted the story and layered it with colour of dharma and adharma and further pushed down the agenda of the feelings of being a woman or a wife to one who was the rightfull husband,.
Everyone was only thinking and talking about what the dharma would be for pandavas at that time, but did anyone think of what was dharma befitting a man for his wife.
why did nobody see the pain, the tears flowing out of her eyes. Forever and ever this dharma changed everything for draupadi’s life to come….. She will become an object of mockery in the society for having 5husbands.nobody in the mortal world will understand the agony, the selflessness, the purity of thoughts and above all the helplessness of draupadi to the circumstances.
Draupadi stands amidst the five brothers, surrounded with confusion and anger and tears flowing down, not knowing what to do, who to ask? Five husbands is not going to be an easy task, it is rather going to be emotionally very challenging and exhausting. The words of her friend Krishna echoed in her ears ….”on the path to righteousness i will need two weapons and you will be one of them,”she hadn’t understood it at that time … And now it was making some sense,,, so really did god also use her for the sake of establishing dharma? Was she the chosen one? Why does everything needs a sacrifice? The words running through her mind would have been “when God is my sakha (friend) and I am yajasni (born out of fire ) why should I have anything to fear …and she embraced being a wife to 5 men …
But destiny betrayed her again …. Dharmraj yudhishtir …. Considered to be epitomy of dharma ,lost her in a game of dice …… Everyone watched her being dragged down by her hair and being disrobed …..under the pretext of observing dharma of their own …. Bhishma’s dharma to the Throne , yudhishtir ‘s dharma to the game and rest of the pandav were observing their dharma of towards their elder brother …. No one dared to ask that is it not anyone’s dharma to protect the honour and dignity of a woman …. It was the forces of the divine that intervened to finally protect her ….
Girl so fierce,a woman of substance was sacrificed so many times sometimes ,On behest of following mothers orders she was divided, on behest of following rules of the game she was almost disrobed….but she always maintained her strength and used it to find a way out of this labyrinth….
If you go thru the story of mahabharata you would know how her emotions were played upon everytime, by every man in her life…..
The history was written , a bloody war would wipe out the Kuru race from the face of the earth …..everyone was trying to take revenge but didn’t want to be politically incorrect …..wrong which was done to drauapdi…. No one told them that this would not have happened if they would have understood that the heavens had fallen on drauapdi because of .. Their blind perspective on dharma….. from the mortals to the immortal everyone in the name of establishing righteousness were forgetting that they lost sight of a woman who was in pain and her heartbreaker was none other than the way everyone understood their own dharma personally ….So who will define what dharma is ????
The only question which Draupadi has left us all to ponder upon is Should you become a slave to ur circumstances or pave and shape ur own destiny?would Mahabharata have been different if she would have disagreed to be a loyal wife to the five pandavas?