WARNING: This reckons with portrayals of sexual violence & rape
An aspect of Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” that stuck out to me was her re-imagination and inversion of the Mahabharata in the story. In the Mahabharata, one of her husbands, Yudhishthira, wagers her in a game of dice against his cousin, Duryodhana, which he loses. She is then taken into the assembly room, where the men attempt to publicly humiliate her by unravelling her sari. In this moment, she prays to Lord Krishna, who having heard her plea, extends her sari infinitely and preserves her modesty. At all moments, she is at the whim of male figures: she is at the whim of Yudhishthira, who is willing to put her at stake for a mere game of dice; she is saved only because she appeals to the higher power of a male God. When she is saved, it is in terms of her modesty: her value exists as a pure, chaste woman. It is not even her own agency, but male agency, that saves it. Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi doesn’t go by her full Sanskrit name, but the more simple daknam (ডাকনাম) “Dopdi.” Already, Devi gestures at a move away from the canonized image of purity by moving out of the canonized language of purity into a vernacular. At the end of the story, Devi’s Dopdi is captured by the military and brutally raped. She does not pray, she does not ask for a savior. Instead, when the men cover her bloodied body with a cloth, she tears it with her teeth. To her guard, this is only intelligible as a sign of her insanity, and he calls his superior (Senanayak). Naked, she stands before them:
Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins laughing, Draupadi wipes blood on her palm and says in a voice that is a terrifying, sky splitting, and sharp as her ululation, What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man? (104)
After being subjected to shocking sexual violence — from which her namesake in the Mahabharata was saved by an act of male agency — Dopdi takes radical agency by altogether rejecting the imposition of modesty on her. She refuses to clothe herself. She forces the men to be confronted with the carnage of their actions and in doing so, makes carnage of their logic. The guard thinks she has gone crazy; Senanayak simply cannot understand: “for the first time Senanayak is afraid” (104). By destroying the constructed notion of sexual modesty, Devi’s Dopdi demonstrates how that very concept can serve to legitimize sexual violence by putting a cloth over its carnage.
At this moment, Devi goes back to referring to Dopdi as Draupadi. I’m not sure how to read this yet, but it certainly had the effect of mythologizing her character. By returning to the Sanskritized form of her name, Devi elevates Dopdi’s actions to the scale of an epic. When she wakes up after her rape, she has been asleep for “a billion moons” (104). When she inverts the logic of purity embedded in the original epic, it is as if a twentieth century incarnation of Draupadi herself has triumphantly, indomitably laughed at that logic. By bringing the Draupadi back in, Devi mobilizes the weight of the Sanskrit-language canon for her contemporary goals.
I’m not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, going back to Draupadi, in a way, affirms our vision of her purity. But on the other, perhaps Devi thought that, for that very reason, it must be Draupadi, not just Dopdi, who destroys that logic of purity.
Should she have stuck to Dopdi, and written a story that gestured at that canon but committed to re-writing it in vernacular terms? Or does that implicitly hold up the sanctity of the canon? Does it fossilize its embedded patriarchy? Can its symbols from be creatively re-invented for the sake of liberation?