Reading Post B: Draupadi's Plight

I thought Sita was mistreated in The Ramayana, but compared to Draupadi, Sita had it easy. SIta was merely cast into a stereotypical role and never allowed to truly shine as the woman she could have been. Draupadi was forced into a marriage with five men. While they all treated her well, and promised to erase all thoughts of her while she was with one of the other husbands, how unfair is that? No one asked Draupadi what she thought of this arrangement. There is no passage describing Draupadi's joy at having five husbands. Sure, there is a tale that describes how she came to be fated to have these five husbands. But even in the tale, she is simply calling out for her husband that she served her whole life who left her. And this is just the beginning. After that, she is dragged out into a room full of men after she was lost in a bet by her husband, in a single cloth because she was on her period. She was a princess! And this is how she was treated. After she was manhandled and dragged by her hair into the presence of not only her husbands but all these elites, her single cloth was torn off of her. Not a single of her brave five husbands stepped in to stop it. No one did anything, so she begged Krishna to help her, and he was her only salvation. There is so much wrong with this character and the situations she was put in.


The Disrobing of Draupadi
Image Source

Bibliography: Narayan, R. K. (1978). The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic.