Nell Hawley - Draupadī's Eyes: An Epic Heroine in Sanskrit and Old Javanese

The Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata (300 BCE-300 CE) famously claims to capture all of human experience in a single, monumental poem. It recounts the good, the bad, and everything in between—but especially the bad. It tells the story of a violent war of succession between two wings of a family, the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. At the center of it all is Draupadī, the wife of the five Pāṇḍava brothers; her harrowing experiences throughout the epic become ciphers for the cosmological darkness of the story as a whole. A well known episode in Book 2 makes that point with excruciating clarity: Draupadī survives an attack that takes place in front of her husbands and all the men in their extended family.

The tightly entangled ethical and emotional knots of this scene have made it one of the most popular to recapture (and often to tell quite differently) in the many other accounts of the Mahābhārata that fill South Asian languages, genres, and media. My talk explores two early retellings of this scene: one that arises later in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata itself, in Book 4 (called the Virāṭaparvan, or The Book of Virāṭa’s Court), and another that unfolds in the Old Javanese Wirāṭaparwa (996 CE), which is not only an account of Book 4 but the first known telling of the Mahābhārata in Old Javanese. We examine how each of these retellings, through a technique that I call veiled narration, proffers a new sense of resolution—and often gauzy levity—while also revealing, at key moments, the darkness of the original.