Here stands a beautiful, dark-skinned woman, the princess Draupadi. \u201cI\u2019ve so much,\u201d she says, \u201cso much more than other women. I have five husbands, the eldest the prince of justice. But I stand in full public view, like a widow with no one. And look, a man tugs at my sari; other men leer.\u201d In the\u00a0Mahabharata<\/em>, a story of epic proportions, Draupadi, born of fire and earth, is quick to curse. She nurses her desire for revenge. She is earthy, very different from her pious counterpart, Sita, also born of earth and the heroine of the epic\u00a0Ramayana<\/em>.<\/p>\n As with all matters in India, we begin with an old story that leaks into our times through parallels and metaphors. These form a part of that contested territory,\u00a0culture<\/em>, through the ideals they raise on pedestals and the interpretations they inspire from multiple voices. Inevitably, in a culture that is a composite of cultures, they give rise to challenges through counter-narratives.<\/p>\n In the\u00a0Mahabharata<\/em>, Draupadi has five husbands; they take turns with her a year at a time. Each has one of the qualities that make for a perfect husband. One is handsome; another is a scholar. The third is a skilled warrior; the fourth has the strength of ten bears. And the eldest among them has a fine sense of justice because he knows the rules and how to uphold them. This worthy has just gambled away all their money. Left with nothing, he gambles himself and his brothers into slavery; then he stakes and loses their shared wife, Draupadi.<\/p>\n Draupadi is dragged by her hair to the royal court. She is no meek victim. \u201cWhat kind of man,\u201d she asks, \u201cstakes his wife in a game?\u201d She also tries a legalistic defence. If her husband was a slave, no longer master of himself, could he stake his wife? Her cleverness only makes her unpopular with the audience, including her erring husband, who stares glumly at the ground. Her words fall on deaf ears. Only her body remains.<\/p>\n The man who has tugged at her sari begins to unwrap it. Draupadi is unravelling. She prays to Krishna, the cowherd philosopher-god who has an impressive scorecard with women. A miracle happens. The gift Draupadi receives from a womanizing god is, ironically, cloth that will keep her body covered. Her sari grows, every six yards a different colour. Draupadi\u2019s tormenter unwraps endless yards then swoons, exhausted. Draupadi\u2019s body remains covered, though she has provided humiliating titillation for the male audience. She makes a couple of promises to herself and the court. She will wash her hair in the molester\u2019s blood; and until she does this, she will not tie her hair. She will leave her hair open like an angry river, like a devouring Kali. Then, despite her anger, she manages to get her husbands and their money back. Draupadi, a privileged woman, what we may consider part of the establishment today, is, nevertheless, a rebel\u2014a woman who acts.<\/p>\n This old story still lives in many ways, in the community worship of Draupadi as a village goddess, and in plays, films, art, poetry, novels. The\u00a0Mahabharata<\/em>\u00a0is a complex legacy for \u201ctellings\u201d of every sort. These telling and retellings are not always set in times of warfare when the woman\u2019s body is used to define, defend, lose, or win the battle. Draupadi\u2019s story also lives in times of peace; it is the ancestor of a range of contemporary narratives. These challenge sanctioned ideas about \u201cheritage\u201d or \u201cIndian Culture\u201d by placing a woman\u2019s naked body centre-stage\u2014an Everywoman\u2019s body, a favoured site for power struggles.<\/p>\n Perhaps the finest example of Draupadi\u2019s body as a victim resisting victimhood is a story by the great Bengali writer and activist Mahasweta Devi. \u201cDraupadi\u201d appeared in 1978, soon after Indira Gandhi\u2019s infamous State of Emergency was lifted. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak\u2019s translation appeared in the winter issue of\u00a0Critical Inquiry<\/em>\u00a0in 1981.)\u00a0Why is this story so important in the larger narrative of cultural politics? Mahasweta\u2019s Draupadi is real, not a princess but a \u201ctribal\u201d\u2014an\u00a0Adivasi<\/em>. She does not have five husbands who define her purpose in life. She has one, a comrade in the fight for the rights of indigenous tribes. Possibly this Draupadi cannot even say her Sanskritised name; but it makes sense for a guerrilla Draupadi to be vernacularised to Dopdi. Her husband, like so many Adivasis, is killed in an \u201coperation\u201d by the special security forces in charge of \u201cencountering leftist extremists.\u201d So prolific is this state-sanctioned killing that the noun \u201cencounter\u201d becomes the verb \u201ccounter,\u201d then Indianised to\u00a0Kounter<\/em>.<\/p>\n This is 1971. In an \u201coperation against militant tribals,\u201d three villages are cordoned off because a landlord has been murdered, and tribals have occupied upper-caste wells during a drought. In the wry tone she uses throughout the story, Mahasweta writes, using emphases for the words imported from English into Bengali: \u201cIn the forest\u00a0belt<\/em>\u00a0of Jharkhani, the\u00a0Operation<\/em>\u00a0continues\u2014will continue. It is a carbuncle on the government\u2019s backside. . . . Catch Dopdi Mejhen. She will lead us to the others.\u201d<\/p>\n Draupadi moves carefully in the forest, cold rice knotted into a cloth that hangs at her waist. Her head itches; she longs to rub her scalp with kerosene and kill the lice, but she is afraid the smell of kerosene will give her away. Despite her precaution, she is \u201capprehended\u201d and taken to the police camp. Before he goes to dinner, the encounter specialist in charge, Senanayak, tells his subordinates: \u201cMake her.\u00a0Do the needful\u00a0<\/em>. . .\u201d<\/p>\n It is night. Her arms and legs are tied. She is raped by more people than she can remember. Over her still body, \u201cActive\u00a0pistons<\/em>\u00a0of flesh rise and fall, rise and fall. . . . Her breasts are bitten raw, the nipples torn.\u201d In the morning, the big boss, Senanayak, orders that she be brought to him. But there is a problem. Draupadi refuses to wash herself or wear her clothes. Senanayak sees Draupadi \u201cnaked, walking towards him in the bright sunlight with her head high. The nervous guards trail behind.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDraupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds.\u201d Draupadi\u2019s black body goes closer to him, her lips bleeding as she laughs. She wipes the blood on her palm and asks Senanayak in a terrifying voice: \u201cYou can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?\u201d<\/p>\n She spits a bloody gob on Senanayak\u2019s immaculate white shirt and demands: \u201cCome on,\u00a0kounter<\/em>\u00a0me\u2014come on,\u00a0kounter<\/em>\u00a0me?\u201d She pushes him with her two mangled breasts. For the first time in his illustrious career, Senanayak is afraid of \u201can unarmed\u00a0target<\/em>, terribly afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n What happens when a woman\u2019s naked body speaks? Draupadi does not suddenly turn into a leader. But she becomes a source of power insofar as she turns her wounded body into a weapon. In that brief lightning flash, her ravaged woman\u2019s body, the \u201cunarmed target,\u201d terrorizes her plunderers. It threatens Senanayak\u2019s manhood, the source of his power.<\/p>\n When a woman\u2019s naked body speaks, its language can turn the victimized body into a speaking, fighting one. Her body is no longer only for the powerful male to inscribe upon; her body turns her into an inscriber. Surely we have heard this language before, in homes or on the streets? It should be familiar, but something, its challenge to acceptable language, perhaps, makes it bold, even shocking.<\/p>\n Draupadi\u2019s story travelled from Bengal in the East to Manipur in the Northeast.<\/p>\n The Northeast, like Kashmir, has long suffered the brutalities unleashed by a combination of \u201csecurity forces.\u201d Their misuse of power, whether by \u201cencountering\u201d people, \u201cpreventive detention,\u201d or the rape of women, is exacerbated by laws that provide the armed forces immunity. For instance, the much-hated Armed Forces Special Powers Act, popularly referred to as AFSPA, gives the armed forces special powers in what are categorized as \u201cdisturbed areas.\u201d From the 1950s onward, the Northeastern states have reeled under these special powers manifested in some form or another. As in Kashmir, the security forces have ensured that state security, or the war against insurgency or terror, always, and anywhere, means brutalizing civilian lives. It means people living with permanent collateral damage, or dying from it. And, as always, a good number of these people are women; women with bodies that can be assaulted, tortured, raped, or killed.<\/p>\n Draupadi\u2019s story found its way to the theatre director Heisnam Kanhailal in Imphal, Manipur. Kanhailal, known for his politically potent theatrical productions, had already worked with a constituency important for both culture and resistance in Manipur: the Nupi Keithel or the women\u2019s market in Imphal, the capital of Manipur.\u00a0Kanhailal was also the force behind the Kalakshetra Manipur, a group aspiring to a sharper cultural creativity that would combine the power of austerity, silence, and the body. \u201cWhat we need is the creation of a new body culture,\u201d Kanhailal once said. He showed what he meant with his production of the Draupadi story. In the last scene, Kanhailal\u2019s actress-wife Sabitri, playing Draupadi, discarded her clothes one by one. Her protest against her rapists must have meant something powerfully real to the audience in Manipur, given that they knew what the AFSPA-supported army personnel were capable of doing, and what they actually did.<\/p>\n The play was staged in the year 2000, twice in Imphal, and many times in the rest of India. It stunned audiences everywhere. Was it possible for theatre to take such a bold political stand? In Manipur, the play spoke to some; it enraged others and was nearly banned. After two performances, wrote Kanhailal, the theatre group decided not to perform the play in Imphal rather than give in to demands to drop the nude scene.<\/p>\n And four years later, the play was called prophetic; Kanhailal was hailed as a seer by local newspapers. In 2004 real life brought together a tale from a literary epic, short fiction, and theatrical defiance. Draupadi\u2019s story came full circle with ordinary women living their anger on the streets, their only armour their own bodies. Twelve middle-aged women stripped naked in broad daylight to protest against the brutality of the Assam Rifles army contingent.<\/p>\n This is how fiction met real life. First Draupadi\u2019s story morphed into another woman\u2019s story. On July 10, 2004, a thirty-four-year-old woman called Thangjam Manorama was identified by the Assam Rifles as Corporal Manorama Devi, alias Henthoi, a militant who was an expert in \u201cIEDs or improvised explosive devices.\u201d In the \u201cnight operation\u201d that followed, the Assam Rifles personnel barged into her house, gagged her, and dragged her out of the house to the courtyard. Her mother and brothers were beaten up and told to stay in the house. But they could see Manorama through the windows; she was slapped, pulled by the hair, and thrown to the ground. Manorama struggled. A man (not in uniform) inserted a knife under her phanek, a sarong-like skirt. Her phanek was pulled down from her waist to her knees; her long blouse was pulled up, unbuttoned. Throughout she was being questioned about arms, and whether she knew where they were stored. They took her away around 3:30 am, telling the family she was being taken into custody. She was still alive. Two hours later, her bullet-ridden body was found four kilometres from the house. There were scratch marks and semen on her body; a deep gash on her left thigh. There were bullet wounds on her genitals, as many as sixteen. People were traumatized; there was great pain among the public; there were tears. Then followed the public protests, marches, and demands for the repeal of AFSPA.<\/p>\n The rage simmered. It had to boil over. In 2004 a few women reached the office of the Nupi Samaj as early as 7 am. They removed their underclothes and dressed again in their phaneks and white blouses. They took a banner and made their way to Kangla Fort where the Assam Rifles were stationed. Other women met them at the Western Gate of Kangla. By 10 am there was an air of waiting\u2014and of suspicion among the officers on duty. Why were so many women at the gate; what were they going to do next? Suddenly, without warning, twelve Imas, mothers, from among the gathered women took off their clothes. Their hair was untied\u2014a traditional sign of mourning. They held up a banner that said, \u201cIndian Army: Rape Us.\u201d And they called out, at first hesitant, then stronger, so that the air rung with defiant women\u2019s voices: \u201cRape us, kill us! Rape us, kill us! Indian Army, rape us, kill us!\u201d One woman shouted, \u201cWe are all Manorama\u2019s mothers. Come, rape us, you bastards!\u201d<\/p>\n Hair untied like the Mahabharata\u2019s Draupadi, naked like Mahasweta\u2019s and Kanhailal\u2019s Dopdi, shouting out a challenge with body and speech, from epic to story to theatre to real life on an Indian street in broad daylight: Draupadi had come full circle.<\/p>\n A continuing chain of stories, twists, and reimaginings\u2014metaphorical and real-life Draupadis for the people, for the times, and for different instances of injustice. It would seem clear at this point that like epics, stories, and the history of real events, the Draupadi legacy belongs to all. But the depiction of Draupadi triggers controversy in new ways. There is no end to the fight, it seems. The Draupadi story still has to resist those who distort her challenge and empty it of meaning.<\/p>\n In 2010 one of the most highly acclaimed Indian painters, M. F. Husain, was hounded into leaving India at the age of ninety-four. He gave up his Indian citizenship and became a Qatari. As a Muslim, his paintings of Hindu deities and icons were attacked by the self-appointed custodians of Indian culture as \u201cinsulting\u201d women. These groups, as right wing as they come, threatened the artist and filed legal cases against him. They vandalized galleries exhibiting his works. Perhaps the most controversial of Husain\u2019s paintings was his portrayal of \u201cMother India\u201d (Bharat Mata) as a woman being raped. Husain also got into trouble for two paintings of Draupadi.\u00a0Draupadi<\/em>\u00a0(1971) is a large female nude, surrounded by miniature male figures, the men in her life controlling her.\u00a0Draupadi on Dice<\/em>\u00a0(1971) has the heroine of the Mahabharata mid-fall, mid-scream, surrounded by dice.<\/p>\n Around the same time, the National Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi) announced an award to Telugu writer Yarlagadda Lakshmi Prasad\u2019s novel\u00a0Draupadi<\/em>. A group of Hindu \u201cactivists\u201d claimed the novel made Draupadi \u201cindecent\u201d and threw shoes at the author when he was onstage. Again, in 1984, the Oriya writer Pratibha Ray published a novel called\u00a0Yajnaseni<\/em>. The title (\u201cborn of the sacrificial fire\u201d) refers to one of several names for Draupadi. The award-winning novel imagines the Mahabharata story from Draupadi\u2019s point of view. It traces the life of a woman who grew up \u201clike a son,\u201d wrote poetry, and asked questions, only to be married to five husbands and make her life subservient to their duties and destinies\u2014their\u00a0dharma<\/em>.<\/p>\n Decades later, in 2013, the right wing, slow readers all, objected to Ray\u2019s all-too-human Draupadi, a survivor who fights and rages. In March 2013, a local edition of the newspaper\u00a0The Pioneer<\/em>\u00a0carried one example of these shrill reactions:<\/p>\n Yajnaseni\u00a0<\/em>has dishonoured Draupadi. . . \u00a0The modern feminist Draupadi . . . is aflame with anger and is upset beyond limit at the proposal of marrying all the brothers. . . . Draupadi\u2019s character is an established one and hence a writer has no freedom to redesign it or play with the same. . . . As an ideal Indian woman, she is committed to her husbands in her mind, body, and speech. Draupadi is like a jewel that adorns the crown of Indian womanhood. In a faithful wife\u2019s heart, her husband occupies a place higher than that of God.<\/p>\n Draupadi has now been turned into an untouchable idol by a different kind of police in India, the thought police. For these new cultural experts, cohorts of the right wing led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who want a Hindu nation (\u201cHindu Rashtra\u201d), the rebellious spirit of Draupadi must be crushed. Maybe they are afraid of what it is capable of inspiring. Certainly they are allergic to multiple tellings of the same story, an inescapable cultural transaction in a diverse country like India. The right wing wants to tie a chastity belt on all the stories\u2014in fiction or real life\u2014that may question a woman\u2019s place in society or challenge the woman\u2019s body as a site for the exertion of power. Most of all, they object to making a story our own, mining it for meaning in our lives today. It\u2019s not surprising that the thought police would want literary chastity in a story in which a woman has to marry five husbands and is stripped in public. How do they censor the multiple readings of such a story? By making the woman a chaste goddess. Allowing her to be human, a real woman, even in a novel or a poem or a painting, may mean questioning the continued belief in the husband as the god of the ideal Hindu woman\u2014whether in art or in real life.<\/p>\n The right wing wants to tie a chastity belt on all the stories\u2014in fiction or real life\u2014that may question a woman\u2019s place in society or challenge the woman\u2019s body as a site for the exertion of power.<\/p>\n The mocking of Draupadi\u2014and her descendant Dopdi\u2014continues. In September 2016, the right-wing Indian government paid fulsome tributes to Mahasweta Devi on her death. Soon after, it was business as usual for the new guardians of culture. Students and teachers in the University of Haryana staged a play based on Mahasweta\u2019s story \u201cDraupadi.\u201d But the right wing, from official to garden-variety thug, has made itself the arbiter of what is \u201cnationalistic\u201d behaviour and what is \u201cantinationalist.\u201d Eating beef is antinational; expressing solidarity with those resisting the army atrocities in Kashmir or the Northeast is antinational; not hating Pakistan is antinational; women refusing to be subservient are, of course, antinational.<\/p>\n In the case of the Haryana University adaptation of Mahasweta\u2019s story, the right-wing student group Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) attacked the play\u2014and the students and teachers involved\u2014claiming that the story dishonoured the army. It is doubtful that these protesters had even read the story, let alone reading it for what it is. But they succeeded in changing the story so it was no longer about Draupadi or Dopdi. It was about the soldiers\u2014\u201cbrave hearts,\u201d \u201cmartyrs\u201d\u2014who must be valorised at all costs by \u201cnationalists.\u201d Draupadi, women, the woman\u2019s body are, merely, unmentionable collateral damage.<\/p>\n The combination of attacks on free speech is a poisonous mixture of hate-mongering, distortions, and idiocy. Recently, Facebook took down posts of the naked mothers of Manipur protesting against the Indian army. As in the case of the famous My Lai photograph from the Vietnam War, Facebook found the protesting Manipuri women obscene because of their \u201cnudity.\u201d In an angry response, a college teacher posted, \u201cPowerful women in Manipur shamed the Indian armed forces through this protest and today, Indian \u2018patriots\u2019 find the image offensive while being complicit with \u2018their\u2019 boys. What does Facebook do? It sides with the patriots rather than realizing this image is iconic.\u201d<\/p>\n In Pratibha Ray\u2019s novel, Draupadi says, \u201cAll the rituals and rules . . . built around the distinction between rich-poor, high-low, Brahmin-Chandal, male-female\u00a0 \u00a0 . . . the profound inequalities . . . based upon considerations of virtue and sin\u2014against all these a lifelong war would have to be waged.\u201d This means a lifelong war against intolerance of free speech, debate, and imagination. It means cultivating a lifelong habit of asking questions. How do we let the myriad challenging narratives of an inclusive culture flourish? Draupadi lives in India today with her tongue almost tied. Can that clothe her naked body?[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/githahariharan.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Draupadi-Dragged-from-Her-Chamber.jpg\")
\nPrivate Collection \/ Bridgeman images. Evelyn Paul, Draupadi Dragged from Her Chamber, 1912, colour lithograph from Stories of Indian Gods and Heroes, by W. D. Monro. An ad for the book claimed Monro\u2019s tales were \u201cthoroughly infused with all the glamour and warmth of colour of the East.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n