Draupadi

Fire gave Drupada more than he asked for. He had prayed to the priests Yaja and Upayaja for a son who could kill Drona, the teacher who had humiliated him, and the rite produced one: a youth in armour who stepped from the flames already dressed for battle. Then the fire produced a second gift nobody had asked for. A young woman rose from the same blaze, dark skinned, her hair blue black and smelling of blue lotus, so striking that no man who saw her could look away. Drupada meant her as a bride for Arjuna, the Pandava he hoped would kill Drona in his son's place. As she stood there, a voice spoke from the sky with no body attached to it, and it did not bless her. It said she would be the finest of women and, in the same breath, that she would cause the ruin of the kshatriya order. The priests named her Krishna, for her dark colouring, and the court called her Panchali, after the kingdom the fire had given her to.

One reference work, titled World Mythology, states that Draupadi was betrothed to Arjuna as soon as she rose from the flame, as though the outcome of the story had already been decided before the story began. The fuller tellings do not settle her marriage there. Her brother, the fire born prince Dhrishtadyumna, is raised by Drona himself, so that the man trained to be his family's weapon studies for years at the hand of the man he is destined to kill. Nobody in the hall that day, watching a girl and a boy step out of one blaze, could have said which of the two prophecies, war or marriage, would answer first.

Drupada was appalled when his daughter's wedding began to look like five weddings. One husband was custom; five brothers sharing one wife was not, and he said as much the moment the arrangement was proposed. The sage Vyasa asked to speak with him alone, and led him into a private chamber while the wedding party waited outside. There Vyasa told a story from far earlier than this one. A rishi's daughter, beautiful but unable to find a husband despite years of austerity, had once pleased the god Shiva enough that he offered her a boon. She asked him for a husband. Pleased, he granted it and vanished, but she called him back and asked again. He granted it again. Five times she asked the same request in the same words, unable to stop herself, and five times Shiva granted it, until he finally told her plainly that she had asked so often she would now have five husbands instead of one.

That woman, Vyasa told Drupada, had been reborn as his own daughter, and the five husbands promised to her long ago were the five Pandava brothers waiting outside. He added that she was, besides that old debt, an expansion of the goddess Lakshmi herself, born from the fire to become the Pandavas' wife because they too had been gods before this life. Hearing that the marriage carried a sanction older than his own objections, Drupada gave way. On an auspicious day, with the moon standing in the constellation Rohini, the wedding went ahead as five ceremonies for one bride, and the alliance it created gave the Pandavas the backing of Panchala and the Yadava lords of Krishna's own house.

Duhshasana caught Draupadi by her long hair, still washed and dressed from the royal sacrifice, and dragged her through the passage toward the Kuru court while she twisted to get free of him. Once inside, that same hair, seized and pulled loose in front of the assembled kings, became the mark of the day nobody in the hall stopped him. Draupadi refused to bind it up again afterwards. For thirteen years of exile she wore it hanging loose, and when the exile ended and war still had not been declared, she went to Krishna and lifted the same hair in her hands. This, she told him, was what Duhshasana had seized, and she would not know peace again until his hand was torn from his arm. If her own husbands would not fight for that, she said, her father and her sons would.

Bhima had already sworn what would happen once battle came. In the same hall, the day the hair was pulled, he had promised in front of everyone that he would tear open Duhshasana's chest and drink his blood, and he repeated that oath again when Draupadi asked Krishna for war. He kept it on the battlefield years later. He beat Duhshasana down, cut off the hand that had gripped her hair, and split his chest open with a sword, then drank the blood as it ran, calling it sweeter than milk. Kauravas who had cheered the dragging thirteen years before now fled the sight or fell where they stood. Krishna had already told Draupadi, before the killing came, that the men she was angry at were already as good as destroyed, and that she would live to see their wives weep as she had wept.

The Pandavas left Draupadi at the hermitage with the priest Dhaumya and went out hunting, and while they were gone King Jayadratha of Sindhu passed by on his way to another marriage entirely. He saw her gathering flowers and forgot the bride he had been travelling toward. He sent his companion to ask her name, and when he learned she was Draupadi, wife to five men living in the forest without a kingdom between them, he decided their poverty made them no match for him. He told her to leave her husbands and come with him as a queen deserved to live. She refused him outright and reminded him whose sister-in-law she was, since his own wife Dussala was the Pandavas' own kin, but he would not be shamed out of what he wanted. He picked her up and carried her to his chariot despite Dhaumya's protests, and drove off with his army around him while she cried out for her husbands by name.

The Pandavas read the signs of it in the birds and animals fleeing the forest before they even reached the empty hermitage, and set off after him at once. They caught his army within the day. Bhima beat Jayadratha down, tied him, and dragged him back to Yudhishthira as a captive with five tufts of hair shaved from his head, a mark meant to humiliate a king in front of his own men rather than kill him. Yudhishthira ordered him freed the moment he saw him. Draupadi, coming out to find her captor kneeling and ruined, thought of her husbands' sister married to this man and asked that he be let go rather than punished further. Jayadratha left alive, having lost his dignity in front of the men he had tried to rob, while Draupadi returned to the hermitage with nothing changed except the fright of it.

Krishna brought his wife Satyabhama to see the Pandavas during their exile, and while the men talked among themselves Satyabhama drew Draupadi aside to ask her something she had clearly been wondering for a while. All five Pandava brothers looked to Draupadi and answered to her, Satyabhama said, and she wanted to know how any one woman managed that with five husbands at once. Draupadi told her plainly that she was not being asked about the practices of evil women, and that no wife could hold a husband through charms or potions slipped into food, since a man who learned his wife dealt in such things would fear her the way he would fear a snake in the house. Those who used them, she said, were their husbands' enemies in every sense, causing sickness, blindness and worse in the men they claimed to love.

The real method she described was plainer than magic and harder to keep up. She served her five husbands and their other wives without complaint, never bathed, slept or ate before them, and kept jealousy down by staying occupied rather than staying angry. She rose before anyone else in the household, saw to the running of the whole estate down to the cowherds and the accounts, and gave up her own comfort whenever her husbands were away performing a sacrifice or a duty that mattered more than her ease. That devotion, not any spell, was the reason her husbands trusted her with everything they owned. When she finished, Satyabhama embraced her, and Krishna, before their chariot left, told Draupadi that the wives of the men who had wronged her would soon be weeping in her place.