Draupadī

Summary

Draupadī is the wife of the five Pāṇḍava brothers in the Mahābhārata and the daughter of Drupada, king of Pāñcāla. She was born from fire. Drupada had lost half his kingdom to the teacher Droṇa and asked two priests for a sacrifice that would give him a son to kill Droṇa; when the priest poured the butter into the fire, a youth in armour and arms came out of it, and then from the middle of the sacrificial altar rose a dark girl with large eyes, and a voice from the sky said: she will be the first of women, the cause of the destruction of many warriors, and through her the purpose of the gods will be done. The priests named her Kṛṣṇā, "the dark one", because of her colour.

Her father then promised her to whoever could string a great bow and hit the target; the kings failed, and Arjuna, disguised as a Brahmin, hit it. The brothers came back to their mother Kuntī and said: we have brought today's alms; and she, from inside the house and without looking, said: "Enjoy it all together." The eldest, Yudhiṣṭhira, saw that all his brothers had fallen in love with her and, fearing a division among them, made her the wife of all five. When her father objected that no woman was ever known to have many husbands, the sage Vyāsa told him that in a former life she had asked Śiva five times for a husband and been granted five, and that the five brothers were five former Indras born on earth.

In the game of dice Yudhiṣṭhira lost his kingdom, his brothers and himself, then staked her and lost her. Duryodhana sent for her to come and sweep the hall like a slave woman, and she asked the messenger: whom did he lose first, himself or me? If he had lost himself, by what right did he stake me? Then Duḥśāsana dragged her by her long hair into the hall in a single garment, and the elders said nothing. He was told to strip her, and he pulled at her cloth, and each time he pulled one away another lay beneath it, until the clothes were heaped up in the hall and he sat down tired and ashamed. In the text Ganguli translated she cries "O Govinda", and Dharma, unseen, covers her. Bhīma swore to tear open Duḥśāsana's breast and drink his blood, and to break the thigh Duryodhana had bared to her. Then the old king Dhṛtarāṣṭra offered her boons; she asked for her husband's freedom, then for his brothers' freedom with their weapons, and refused a third, saying her husbands would win back prosperity by their own deeds.

Before the war, when the brothers leaned towards peace, she took her braided hair in her left hand and said to Kṛṣṇa: in all you do, remember this hair seized by Duḥśāsana's hand. Udyoga Parva 82. At the end of the epic the brothers walk with her into the Himalaya on the road to heaven; she falls first, and Yudhiṣṭhira says: we were all equal to her, but she favoured Arjuna.

The idea her story turns on is that the woman born from the sacrificial fire to be the cause of war was also the one who saved her husbands when they had lost everything. One of those present in the hall says that she became for the brothers "a boat" in a boatless sea. Her question, "whom did he lose first?", was a question of law that no one answered, and it stayed open until the war answered it.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, a reading proposed on the method that builds on the Hindu essay's reading of Kṛṣṇa. Draupadī is a patronymic, "daughter of Drupada", and Monier-Williams gives drupada as "a wooden pillar", a post to which captives are tied. Her own name, Kṛṣṇā, is the feminine of Kṛṣṇa. The project's Hindu essay reads the name of Kṛṣṇa as qarasha, with q becoming k because Sanskrit has no q. In Lane qarsh is gathering from here and there, and taqarrasha al-qawm, the people gathered together. That is what the dark Kṛṣṇā did: she gathered the five brothers into one house, having been married to them "from fear of a division amongst the brothers", and kept them together in exile and war.

Linguistic Root

Her many names record her origin: Pāñcālī after her country, Yājñasenī after her father's title, and Vedijā, "born from the altar", all gathered in two consecutive verses of the Sanskrit lexicon Abhidhānacintāmaṇi.

The Arabic reading takes her own name, not the patronymic. Kṛṣṇā has k, r and ṣ, then the n that belongs to the adjective's formation, and the feminine ending. Q becomes k and š stays a sibilant, so it answers q-r-š letter for letter, as on the Kṛṣṇa page. The limit that keeps it open: the Mahābhārata says she was named for her darkness, and qarsh does not mean dark, so the reading meets the letters and what she does in the story, not the sense the text gives. We found no Arabic reading for Drupada that answers both its parts, dru, tree or wood, and pada, foot or place.

Key Mythic Narratives

The abduction in the forest

During the years of exile in the forest King Jayadratha carried her off. So Yudhiṣṭhira tells the sage Mārkaṇḍeya that he grieves less for himself, his brothers or his kingdom than for Drupada's daughter, who saved them at the dice and was then carried off from the forest, and asks whether he has ever seen a woman like her; the sage answers with the story of Sāvitrī. Vana Parva 291.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Indian myths reads the Mahābhārata as coded history: the Kurukṣetra war as a civil war among the clans of northern India, and the dice by which Yudhiṣṭhira lost his kingdom as "the immediate cause of the war", a picture of political gambling. In that reading Draupadī is the stake that should never have been laid, and the question that exposed the game.

The text itself holds another picture: the Earth complains to Brahmā of the weight of the mighty, the gods are born in human form, and the voice at Draupadī's birth says she will accomplish the purpose of the gods. The war she provokes is a war meant to lighten the earth.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The summary of the Greek Cypria says that the earth was weighed down by the number of men, and Zeus pitied her and resolved to lighten her by the Trojan war, of which Helen was the cause. At Draupadī's birth the voice says she will cause the destruction of warriors and accomplish the purpose of the gods, after the Earth had complained to Brahmā of her burden. In both stories a woman is the cause of a war heaven wanted, to lighten the earth.

In the North Guðrún whets her sons to avenge their sister Svanhildr in Guðrúnarhvöt, "Guðrún's whetting", as Draupadī shows Kṛṣṇa the hair that Duḥśāsana seized, to stop the peace. Both are insulted women who drive the men to a vengeance from which no one returns.

Her sister in the other epic is Sītā: both were born without a womb, Sītā from the furrow and Draupadī from the fire altar; both were carried off in the forest; both were the cause of a war.