Draupadi

Dragged into the hall, Draupadi does not plead. She puts a legal question to the assembled elders: Yudhishthira staked himself and lost before he staked her, so did a man who was already property have any standing to wager a wife at all. It is a technically exact challenge, and the court cannot meet it.

Of the elders present only Vikarna, one of Duryodhana's own brothers, answers her, and he is shouted down. Bhishma replies that the course of dharma is subtle and that he cannot decide the point, which from the conscience of the court is a confession rather than a ruling. Vidura protests and is ignored. The silence of men who are competent to answer and will not is what the epic actually indicts, more than the assault itself.

The rescue is the most famous image in the story and it is also the most argued. In the telling most people know, Duhshasana pulls at her garment and it renews itself without end, and Krishna is named as the cause. Readers of the manuscript tradition have long noted that the verses making Krishna the direct agent are not uniform across recensions, and whether the older narrative worked through her own righteousness or through his intervention is genuinely disputed among editors.

What follows is not a rescue either. Dhritarashtra, alarmed by omens, grants her boons, and she uses them to free her husbands rather than to punish anyone. Then she vows to leave her hair unbound until it can be washed in the blood of the man who touched it, and the war begins to move.

In the Tamil country Draupadi is not only a character in an epic. She is Draupadi Amman, a village goddess with her own temples, her own festival calendar and her own priesthood, concentrated in the northern Tamil districts around Gingee and carried by migration into Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Reunion and the Caribbean.

The festival runs for many days and is built around a performed Mahabharata. Companies of actors present the story in the Terukkuttu street drama form night after night, with the dice game and the disrobing as the pivot of the cycle, and the war episodes staged in sequence until the goddess is avenged. The narrative is not background to the ritual, it is the ritual, and the audience is participating in the recital rather than watching a play about something else.

The festival ends in firewalking. Devotees who have taken a vow cross a pit of embers, understood in the tradition as entering the fire that Draupadi was born from and passing through it unburned, and the walk is preceded by fasting and by a period of ritual restraint. Alf Hiltebeitel's fieldwork on the Gingee cult, published in 1988, is the study that established how tightly this ritual cycle is bound to the epic text.

The theological move is worth naming plainly. A wife who was humiliated in a court of law, and who could get no answer from it, is here a goddess whose devotees walk through fire on her behalf. What the assembly refused her, the village gave.