Boundary Violation and Rape: Reading Draupadi in the Silences of the Metanarrative

Abstract

The persona of Draupadi in The Mahabharata is an enigmatic portrayal of contradictions. Her body is the site on which the entire saga of power and control unfolds. Conceived in hate, she is born to restore power. She is left vulnerable to male gaze—her body a text inscribed by the rules of patriarchy. Objectified and allocated like a commodity, caught in a web of the hyper-phallic enterprise of war and aggrandizement, silenced or made a spokesperson of the establishment, Draupadi loses her all, and then her sense of self when she is blamed by Yudhisthira and left to die on the Himalayas. Yet we find Draupadi directing the course of the narrative. She is the catalyst to the unfortunate chain of events that leads to the decimation of the Kauravas. What is denied her in the metanarrative is usurped by her in the retellings. As Bharati’s Panchali, or Devi’s Dopdi, or Ray’s Yajnaseni, she transcends the gendered ventriloquism of an essentially male preserve and renegotiates the margin. This paper reads how Draupadi, a gendered subaltern in a phallogocentric milieu, questions the culture of violence and emerges as the mascot of feminist assertion. The paper traces her journey from submission to subversion and follows the trajectory of her empowerment from a postcolonial and gender perspective