Draupadi

Picture the great sabha of Hastinapura on the worst afternoon of the Kuru line's history: torches guttering along stone pillars, elders seated in rows they will spend the rest of their lives regretting, and at the center of the floor a single woman being dragged by her hair toward the throne. Yudhishthira has just lost the last throw of the dice. He has already staked and lost his kingdom, his brothers, and himself; in the final wager, urged on by the gleeful Shakuni, he stakes his wife and loses her too. Dushasana, drunk on Duryodhana's triumph, hauls her into the hall still in the single garment she is wearing, blood at the roots of her hair, and announces to the assembled Kuru elders that she is now a slave to be humiliated before them all. She does not turn to her five husbands, who sit frozen by their own vow never to break a wager once made. She does not appeal to Bhishma or Drona or Kripa, who stare at the floor, bound by the debts of food and shelter they owe the throne. She lifts both hands over her head and cries out to someone who is not even in the room: Govinda. Dwarkanatha. Anathanatha, protector of those who have no protector, save me.

That cry is the seed of everything the Bhaktamal wants said about Draupadi. Krishna is in Dwarka when Dushasana seizes the end of her sari and begins to pull. The tradition that Nabhadas and Priyadas hand down insists that though Krishna is, in his highest nature, present everywhere and needs to go nowhere, he came in that instant from Dwarka only so that his word to a devotee would be seen, in the world, to hold. As Dushasana pulls, the cloth does not end. It lengthens under his hands faster than he can gather it, fold after fold spilling into a heap at his feet, until a man reputed to carry the strength of ten thousand elephants sits down exhausted amid a mountain of silk, having never once bared her. The poets who set this scene to verse could not resist playing with the miracle itself: is it cloth wrapped around a woman, they ask, or a woman wrapped entirely in cloth, so completely does the sari become her shield. The wicked in that hall find they cannot lift their faces. The righteous find their voices, and the hall rings with the name of Krishna as it has never rung with the name of a king.

What the compilers of the Bhaktamal draw out of this scene is a single teaching, folded into a doha that follows it like a moral pressed into wax: one who desires nothing at all from Hari, ever, yet carries a plain and unforced love for him living always in the heart, that heart alone becomes Hari's own home. Draupadi is held up not because she performed some great austerity or renunciation to earn Krishna's rescue. She is held up because in the one moment she had absolutely nothing left, not her honor, not her husbands' protection, not even her own strength, the only thing that rose in her was love without calculation, sahaj sneha, love that had never once, in all the years before, asked Krishna for anything at all. That is why, the tilak insists, he came running.

To understand why that cry carried the weight it did, the story has to go back to her birth. Draupadi is not born of a mother in the ordinary way; she rises, already a grown woman, out of a sacrificial fire that King Drupada of Panchala has commissioned for a very specific purpose, to obtain a son capable of avenging his defeat at the hands of his old friend turned rival, the teacher Drona. The fire gives him both: a son, Dhrishtadyumna, destined to end Drona's life on the battlefield, and beside him, unbidden and unasked for, a daughter of extraordinary dark beauty whom a voice from the sky declares will one day bring about the downfall of the entire Kuru house. They name her Draupadi, daughter of Drupada, though the epic gives her other names that follow her through the story: Krishnaa for her dusky complexion, Panchali for the kingdom of her birth, and Yajnaseni, the one born of a yajna, the fire itself standing as her only mother.

Her swayamvara, the hall in which she chooses her husband, is arranged as an impossible trial of skill: a bow almost no one present can even lift, a target shaped like a fish fixed high overhead, and the demand that the archer strike its eye while watching only its reflection in a pool of water below. Prince after prince fails to so much as string the bow. It is Arjuna, disguised as a wandering Brahmin during the Pandavas' own hidden exile, who steps forward, lifts the bow, and looses the arrow true. Draupadi places the garland around his neck. But when the five brothers return home and announce their prize to their mother Kunti without her seeing what it is, she tells them, without looking up, to share equally whatever they have brought back, as she always has; and once the words are said, Kunti will not unsay them. The epic itself, sensing how strange this makes her marriage, reaches back into an older story to explain it: a woman in a former life, the tradition tells, prayed to Shiva so insistently for a husband that she asked five times over, and Shiva granted that in a life to come she would have five. However the mystery is explained, Draupadi becomes, uniquely among the queens of the epic, wife to all five Pandavas at once, and queen of Indraprastha beside them.

Her bond with Krishna, meanwhile, is its own thread, older than her marriage and stranger than kinship. Tradition tells of the day the Sudarshana Chakra, spinning back to Krishna's hand after felling an enemy, nicks his finger, and Draupadi, without a thought, tears a strip from the end of her own sari to bind the wound before anyone else in the room has even noticed the blood. Krishna, so the story goes, only smiles and tells her that a debt has now been opened between them that he intends to repay a thousand times over, a promise the hall in Hastinapura will later see kept in full. The Rupkala commentary frames the bond in gentler, more domestic terms still: Krishna regards her with the easy affection of a devar toward an elder brother's wife, and in that same warm, familial mood she holds toward him a bhakti so unclouded that the text says plainly, he counted her his own bhabhi. There is a chaupai tucked into this part of the telling that says few indeed in this world carry merit equal to those whom Raghubir claims for his own; nowhere in the whole gallery of the Bhaktamal is that claiming more visible than in what Krishna does for his brother's wife in that hall.

Years later, in the forest exile that follows the dice game, another crisis tests her, quieter than the sabha but built from the same faith. The Pandavas live then on the gift of an akshaya patra, an inexhaustible vessel given by the Sun god, which yields food without end until the day Draupadi herself has eaten and washed it clean; after that it gives nothing more until the next sunrise. Duryodhana, scheming even from a distance, sends the notoriously short-tempered sage Durvasa and ten thousand disciples to the Pandavas' forest dwelling on the one afternoon he knows the vessel will already be empty. Yudhishthira despairs, certain that failing to feed such a guest will bring down a curse on the whole family. Draupadi alone does not panic. Has our reliever gone somewhere, she asks quietly, that we should fear for food. She turns her mind toward Krishna and simply remembers him, and he arrives at once, laughing, demanding to be fed because he claims to be starving. Flustered, she tells him there is nothing left; he asks to see the vessel anyway, finds a single stuck grain of rice and a shred of green leaf clinging to its side, eats that alone, and sips a little water after it. In that instant, Durvasa and his entire company, far off at the river, feel so suddenly and completely full that they turn around and flee rather than risk facing a host they might now insult by refusing food they can no longer eat.

The years of hidden exile that follow bring their own trial. Living in the court of King Virata under a disguise as the queen's attendant, Draupadi draws the unwanted attention of the queen's brother Kichaka, whose harassment she endures until it becomes unbearable, and it is to Bhima she turns, trusting him to end the danger without exposing the identity the five brothers are sworn to conceal. He does, in a single night, and the danger passes, though not without reminding her again how precarious a queen's dignity can be even inside a palace she is entitled to call home.

The grief that comes after the great war at Kurukshetra is of another order altogether. On the very night after the fighting ends, the Kaurava warrior Ashwatthama slips into the Pandava camp in the dark and, mistaking sleeping boys for the men he means to kill, beheads Draupadi's five sons in their beds. When he is finally captured and brought before her, shackled and stripped of the protective jewel he was born with, the mother who has just lost every child she had does not ask for his death. She tells the men around her, still raw with her own wound, that a mother should not be made to weep the way she is weeping now, and asks that he be spared, remembering that his own mother waits somewhere to see him again. It is one of the few moments in the entire epic where mercy outruns the appetite for revenge that everyone around her still carries.

Her end comes gently, almost anticlimactically, after decades on the throne. When word reaches the Pandavas that Krishna has departed the world, they see it as the closing of their own age, and they walk away from Hastinapura together, up into the Himalayas, renouncing the kingdom entirely and taking nothing with them but each other. Draupadi is the first of the party to fall on that final climb. Only Bhima stays back with her while the rest continue upward, and when he asks his elder brother why she alone should be the first to go, Yudhishthira answers that even she, faithful and beloved as she was, carried in her heart a shade of favoritism toward Arjuna that the others did not. It is a strange note to end her story on, and yet the tradition seems to keep it deliberately: even a soul capable of that cry of total surrender in the Kuru hall still had, until her very last mile, one small unrepented preference to let go of.

What endures of Draupadi in devotional memory is not primarily the queen or the wife of five kings; it is the woman who called out with nothing left to bargain with and was answered. She is named to this day, alongside Ahalya, Kunti, Tara and Mandodari, in the old shloka of the panchakanya, five women whose very names are said to dissolve great sin in whoever remembers them each morning. And in the devotional songs that grew up around her story, poets have set her cry alongside every other soul Krishna is remembered to have rescued: the elephant Gajendra caught in the crocodile's jaws, the dying sinner Ajamil who called his son's name and was saved by accident, the gopis of Vraj who loved him without condition, the outcast hunter, the boatman, the tasted fruit of a devotee too humble to know her offering was imperfect. The refrain those poets return to again and again asks Krishna directly whether he still remembers his old promises, and among the first of those promises they name is the one he kept for Draupadi, the length of cloth that would not end. It is why the Bhaktamal does not close her story with a moral about honor regained. It closes it with an invitation: that anyone reading it, however far they feel from rescue, still has a voice, and a name to call, and a heart that Hari has already promised to make his home.