I have centred my story around a handful of these women, trying to understand the subtlety of their rebellion and the grief in their whispers. My personal quest, in Song of Draupadi, is to recover these muffled voices and examine the many ways in which they were able to express defiance and claim justice for themselves in what was in essence a profoundly patriarchal world. I have always been interested in the depiction of women in the text, in the polyphony of female voices that struggle to be heard against the crashing background of male concerns and the strident call to war of the conch shell.
When novelists retell the Mahabharata, especially as feminist retellings, they retain the curses and supernatural occurrences, the staple elements of “epics” which seem not to interest Mukhoty very much.Īlthough the title mentions Draupadi, the book touches upon perspectives and sufferings of all women characters. And the other difference has to do with the form. One has to do with her focus on women in the story-instead of focusing on one central character, Mukhoty attempts to explore all important women characters for a brief moment, she focuses even on the story of a servant girl too. Ira Mukhoty’s Song of Draupadi, a recent feminist take, stands out among such retellings thanks to two differences. The Mahabharata encourages a lot of these feminist interventions probing questions such as: How has women’s role been framed in the war? Are they actors with a sense of agency of their own? Are they victims? How does one make sense of Draupadi’s marriage with five men? How does one interpret women’s power to invoke gods to have children? A recent retelling is Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions narrated from Draupadi’s point of view that probes the events that lead to the war for which she is held responsible. The Mahabharata has been retold in various ways. That’s why it has fascinated readers and listeners for centuries with its fuzzy boundaries of right and wrong. Men who swear to avoid women to honor their fathers, women who demand impossible things of husbands, friends who forget their promises and who swear to avenge their insults, fathers who invoke occult powers to get children who would destroy their enemies, women who swear to be reborn to destroy men, and brothers who make each other feel insecure-the story is layered with jealousy and its causes and consequences very difficult to disentangle. It’s a story of a great war whose roots go back four generations, each addingan element of greed, curse, and revenge that climaxes in great destruction. The sermon, known as the Bhagavad Gita, is Krishna’s advice to Arjuna (and to anyone who is reading or listening) to give up doubt and to fight. The war is preceded by Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna.
When their exile ends, the Pandavas, urged by their wife Draupadi and supported by Krishna (a reincarnation of Lord Vishnu himself) challenge the Kauravas to war and win. They are also exiled for fourteen years-one of which they have to spend in disguise or they would need to spend another fourteen years in exile. They invite the Pandavas to a game of dice in which the Pandavas lose their kingdom, themselves, and their wife, Draupadi.
The Kauravas are jealous that their cousins have turned a barren piece of land into a flourishing kingdom they parted with very reluctantly and want to have it all. The five Pandavas, the sons of King Pandu, want their share of the kingdom but the Kauravas, the sons of Dhritarashtra, don’t want to share anything of the kingdom they see as entirely their own. The Indian epic Mahabharata is a complicated story of two sets of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fighting over property.
0 kommentar(er)
