Ill-behaved men and the abused women

Audrey Truschke, whose lecture on Aurangzeb I attended in Chennai in January 2019 during my sabbatical and was condemned by the Hindutva and its sympathizers as whitesplaining, writes this about the Mahabharata:

The epic itself foretells:

आचख्युः कवयः केचित्संप्रत्याचक्षते परे

आख्यास्यन्ति तथैवान्ये इतिहासमिमं भुवि

Some poets told this epic before.

Others are telling it now.

Different narrators will tell it in the future.

One of the latest narrators is Karthika Nair, whose interpretation of the Mahabharata is absolutely innovative.  It compels the reader to rethink the old epic, however familiar one might be with the tales and the characters.

Nair gives voice to the Queen of Panchala--Draupadi's mother--who is a "woman without a name" in the epic.  Through this queen, Nair condemns how men--kings in particular--defined life that was hell for mothers because of wars and bloodshed:

As Truschke also reminds us, the Mahabharata "condemns many of the appalling things it depicts, but one area where its response is more tepid concerns the treatment meted out to women."

The world of the Mahabharata is stacked against women. Our world today looks distinct in its details, but some basic principles are not much different. For example, more than one person has compared Draupadi’s plight with that of ‘Nirbhaya’, the name given to the young woman mortally gang-raped in Delhi in 2012. Nirbhaya (meaning ‘fearless’) resisted her attackers, and one of the rapists later said that this resistance prompted him and his fellow assaulters to be more brutal than they would have been otherwise. Two millennia later, the corrupt ‘moral’ remains: she should not have objected to unjust treatment.

The Mahabharata is not as straightforward a story about good and bad as one might expect from an epic that features practically all the Vedic gods.  

The Mahabharata claims to show dharma or righteous conduct – a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thought – within the morass of the characters’ immoral behaviours. But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled. The bad guys sometimes act more ethically than the good guys, who are themselves deeply flawed. In the epic’s polychromatic morality, the constraints of society and politics shackle all.

This is also why Nair prefers this epic over the Ramayana.  She writes that in the Mahabharata, "right and wrong and not so easy to spot anymore."  Tragic!