The Pious Silence and the Untied Hair

Mahabharata series – What Draupadi’s life asks of the women who carry everything

Whenever I read or watched the Mahabharata, one question always came to my mind: How did Draupadi manage it all?

She was the princess of Panchala, educated, pious, smart and independent. Married to the Pandava brothers. She managed a palace — an economy in itself, perhaps — and advised her husbands on matters of state whenever needed. And most of all, she served her family with duty and respect.

When I think about her life, I find myself asking not just how she managed it all, but what it must have cost her.

For me, even a small version of it felt huge: accepting marriage into a family very different from the one I had grown up in, running a household, finding my place, changing my name on almost every document, cooking a perfect meal, and then parenting the twins through COVID.

I am still not perfect, but I have come a long way.

A Decision Made for Her

Arjuna won her at her swayamvara by winning a difficult archery contest. So how did she end up married to all five Pandavas?

The brothers came home and told their mother that they had a surprise, and that she should come and see what they had brought. Kunti, busy with her chores, asked them to share whatever it was equally among themselves. The way they announced her arrival makes it sound as though they had won a trophy, rather than a person with feelings and a life of her own. And then they obeyed their mother’s words without a question. What began as an instruction became a decision that would shape Draupadi’s entire life.

Doesn’t something similar happen in many families?

The decision was made for her, through a mother’s command, the custom of the time and the elders’ wish for unity. How did Draupadi feel? Did she know about her past karma? For all that we go through, do we really know what our karma is?

In today’s world, how do we feel when decisions are made for us? Can we accept it as fate, or Do we tell ourselves that our elders must have thought everything through and that their decision must be for our good? Or do we sometimes accept what we never really chose because questioning it feels harder than living with it?

The Woman Who Had to Manage It All

After marriage, a woman’s life often takes a 180-degree turn: her home, her name, the people she lives with, her likes and dislikes. Marriage also brings a whole lot of invisible responsibilities, from managing a home to managing a family. And some women carry a quiet, invisible hurt: the weight of trying to belong to a family that doesn’t yet consider them one of it’s own.

Draupadi’s life was unusual even by the standards of her time. Draupadi lived with one brother at a time, for a full year. In some tellings, she walked through a sacred fire at the end of each year to renew her purity before starting the next. I have always found this difficult to accept. The Pandavas were free to marry other women, but Draupadi had to navigate a life that demanded extraordinary adjustments from her. The change was far greater for her than it was for them.

IIn the Vana Parva, Draupadi shares her secrets of managing a household with Satyabhama, Krishna’s wife. She followed a strict routine to keep the household running smoothly, day in and day out. She woke up before everyone else and went to sleep after everyone else. She looked after the servants, the treasury and the meals. She did not just oversee the kitchen but also kept track of the income and expenses. She was expected to be flawless, tireless and accommodating.

Doesn’t that sound familiar to many of us who balance careers and while still carrying much of the emotional labour at home? Remembering what everyone needs, anticipating what might go wrong, keeping track of the little things that keep a family running — so much of this work is invisible until somebody stops doing it.

When Everyone Stayed Silent

Then came the dice game. The men in the court humiliated Draupadi, taking away her dignity and treating her as a possession rather than a person with feelings and a life of her own.

None of her husbands stood up for her when it mattered the most. Draupadi asked a question that no one could answer: did Yudhishthira lose himself first, or me? She did not just weep or beg for mercy. She argued. The elders, Bhishma and Drona, and her own husbands sat silent, hiding behind rules and definitions while a woman was humiliated in front of them. Just one person spoke: Vikarna, a Kaurava, who said she had been wronged.

One voice, in a hall full of silence. Sometimes it is not so different today: it’s a private matter. Those are the rules. Let’s not make a fuss.

Maybe that is why I think of it as a pious silence: men who knew every rule by heart and still said nothing.

In the popular telling, when human law had failed her, Draupadi turned to her faith, and Krishna’s grace kept her garment from coming to an end. It is a moment often remembered as one of divine intervention. But I find myself returning to the people in that court. Before divine grace entered the story, there were human beings who had the power to act and chose not to.

How many times does a person have to ask for justice before someone decides to stand beside them?

When She Refused to Stay Silent

She vowed to leave her hair untied until it was washed in Dushasana’s blood. That vow became one of the driving forces behind the Kurukshetra war.

There are rumours. Myths. A persistent whisper across retellings that Draupadi was the cause of the war, that her oath, her anger, her refusal to let go of what was done to her somehow makes her responsible for the devastation that followed.

But what was she supposed to do?

She responded by taking an oath. By refusing to pretend it had not happened. By keeping the wound visible until justice came. And somehow, in certain tellings, she becomes the problem. Many women who refuse to quietly absorb an injustice have heard some version of this. You could have let it go. You are making things worse. Did you have to take it this far?

We push the original wrong aside and make the reaction the subject of discussion. We let the person who caused the hurt fade into the background, while asking the person who refuses to forget it to explain herself.

Draupadi’s untied hair becomes more than a vow. To me, it is a reminder of what happens when a woman refuses to make peace with an injustice simply to make everyone else comfortable.

Even After Everything, She Stayed

But she still stood by the Pandava brothers. Frightened by bad omens, King Dhritarashtra offered her boons. She asked for the freedom of the Pandavas and for their weapons, and she refused a third. Through the exile, through every humiliation that followed the first one, she did not leave. She stayed, and carried one oath that said: this cannot go unanswered.

After the Kurukshetra war, she continued to care for her in-laws, Kunti, Gandhari and Dhritarashtra. Years later, when the Pandavas set out toward the Himalayas, she followed them. She was the first to fall. When Bhima asked why, Yudhishthira said it was because she had been partial to Arjuna. As the story goes, he walked on.

I find this verdict unsettling. Her fault was a feeling — loving one husband more than the others — while the men were judged for their own faults of pride and action. And it was Yudhishthira, the husband who had staked her in the dice game, who judged her.

She was asked to love five men she hadn’t chosen with perfect equality, which very few people could do.

The tradition reads it as attachment that a traveller on the path of renunciation must let go of, and that is one way to see it. But I’m not sure we have to accept it. In some versions, Yudhishthira later finds her in heaven shining as Shri, the goddess of fortune, as if the epic itself knows she deserved better.

Do we judge a woman’s heart more harshly than a man’s pride?

Draupadi was the first to fall at the end. But through her life, the falls did not pull her down. She kept going, and she carried a whole family through exile, humiliation and war. I think many women do the same.

But how do they feel after all of it? Exhausted? Satisfied? Do they earn the respect and value of their own people? Or is all that they do simply expected of them, like everything else?

I began by wondering how Draupadi managed it all. Perhaps the more important question that needs to be asked is why she was expected to manage so much in the first place.

And when a woman does manage it all, do we ever stop to ask what it took from her?

What do you think? I would like to hear yours. Think of a woman who carried everything for her family. Did her people see it? Tell me in the comments, or send an email to theskymusings@gmail.com