Sita and Draupadi: The Unmaking and Remaking of India’s Mythological Heroines
A scene from Jyotsana Shourie’s Face to Face. Source: Jyotsana Shourie Dance Centre
In the comparisons between Sita and Draupadi, Urmi Bhattacheryya argues how the trope of ‘the other woman’ has hurt feminism in Indian mythology.
Imagine you’re twenty-one, dressed in a black mini, ready to go out and live some. Don’t let petty things like geography or a worldwide pandemic inconvenience this daydream—you could be in Colorado, Calcutta or Calgary for this sexist charade.
Now, imagine the stupidest of interjections: a figure of authority of some sort—an elder brother, a great-aunt, a father, an uncle—stop you at the door. Won’t you consider changing out of that into something less conspicuous, s/he asks? The interjection is so deferential that you’re almost convinced that they are only concerned about your well-being.
Subtext wide open for anyone to read: you don’t want to look like that other girl.
That other girl is a common trope used by patriarchs, and one that is challenged and confronted by feminists worldwide. It’s a trope as old as the stories of Sita and Draupadi, the two leading heroines of India’s most popular epics, Ramayan and Mahabharat, respectively.
Does it matter that, out of the chaotic scene of men and god, the names of these two solitary heroines bubble up often, only because they far outweigh the mention of any other woman in the mythological realm? Not at all. Does it matter that the two fighting for podium are only as alike as chalk and cheese? Not in the slightest. Does it matter, also, that both the Ramayan and Mahabharat, in which the two women supposedly play a central role, miserably fail the Bechdel test? It doesn’t.
But it should. It should also bear significance that the contrasting characteristics and unrealistic binaries of Sita and Draupadi—fiery vs. docile, all-sacrificing vs ever-destructive—were painted by two men. Valmiki and Vyasa's women have been compartmentalised by traditionalists and modernists for centuries now. (You probably know your Sita-Draupadi origin stories like the back of your hands since, when your grandparents wanted to teach you about super-heroic women in the epics, it was slim pickings!) But suffice to say, it’s funny how traditional writers (and their readers) have venerated Sita and scoffed at Draupadi, while the modern ilk have made a darling out of Draupadi and turned their noses up at Sita.
It should also bear significance that the contrasting characteristics and unrealistic binaries of Sita and Draupadi—fiery vs. docile, all-sacrificing vs ever-destructive—were painted by two men. Valmiki and Vyasa's women have been compartmentalised by traditionalists and modernists for centuries now.
Sita vs. Draupadi. I feel like I’ve had the title thrown at my face my whole life, an inescapable battle between two of Indian literature’s most famous women. I would pick up anything about the two. Or maybe that’s just me. Or maybe that’s just me pretending to be self-referential to stroke the literary shmuck of an ego. It’s a lot like the Madonna/whore complex. A ‘girls like you’ and a ‘girls like them’ complex. The girl that wears the short dress and the one that doesn’t. A girl like Sita, or a girl like Draupadi.
But Who ‘Wins’?
If you typed in Sita versus Draupadi on the net, you'd be astonished at the helpful nudges Google provides: Who's greater? Who's more beautiful? And even the blasé ‘Who's better?’
Kavita Kane—who authored Sita's Sister and Lanka’s Princess (among others)—makes a case for both women as “feminist icons, though different in situation and character”. Kane, whose own novels have revolutionised the way modern readers re-read previously overshadowed or reviled women, wrote in an essay for The Indian Express of how “...each woman rose above her status in society to show free will and courage to stand up against injustice”.
In late 2013, a powerful dance-drama took stage around the theatres of New Delhi, bringing together—for the first time, in pseudo-celluloid—the characters of Draupadi and Sita to engage in gut-wrenching conversations about shared trauma and sisterly solidarity. Aptly called Face to Face, this depiction of the two women most-talked about in mythological literature surprised many with its conciliations for both. “We all perceive Draupadi as this multifaceted fiery beauty, and Sita as an embodiment of loyalty and courage,” said choreographer and auteur Jyotsna Shourie of the feat de accompli at the time. “However, it would be wrong to infer that Sita was more submissive and Draupadi more aggressive. Their personalities were moulded by the times in which they lived, and this is a piece which deals with just that,”
Sally J Sutherland attempted to understand this in a poignant piece she wrote in 1989 for the Journal of the American Oriental Society called “Sita and Draupadi: Aggressive Behavior and Female Role-Models in the Sanskrit Epics”. At the time, Sutherland , without preamble, announced her intent to investigate “a recent survey taken of one thousand young Indian men and women in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh” which had revealed that “from a list of twenty-four goddesses, literary heroines, and famous women of history, an overwhelming percentage chose for their ideal female role model Sita, the heroine of Ramayana”.
Sita—Sutherland surmises—is revered by mainstream Hindu society as a wife acquiescent to her husband’s every whim and fancy. But this, despite the fact—argues Sutherland—that both women's roles “depict...the basic attitudes of a patriarchal and male-dominated society towards women”. Thus, more than 30 years ago, Sutherland had hit the nail on the head, that the women’s seeming-submissiveness and apparent-chutzpah are just two limited archetypes of femininity, created, playdough-like, by two epic redactors, Valmiki and Vyasa. True to fallible human form though, we compartmentalise them into black and white extremes each time.
It isn’t just us, though. Sita and Draupadi have been studied with increasing fascination by feminists around the globe. Halfway across the world, at the University of Botswana, Motswapong Pulane Elizabeth published a piece called “Understanding Draupadi as a paragon of gender and resistance”. How Elizabeth understood her, however, was to juxtapose one woman in contrast to the other—her selected heroine Draupadi was a “pioneer of feminism”, unlike Sita whom she analysed as more true to the tenets of “normative Hindu society”.
The Unmaking and Remaking of Heroines
But that ‘normativity’ attacks and eats away at the characters of both Sita and Draupadi. The latter, too, despite all her famed fieriness, is blamed as a catalyst for vengeance (even reared to be one). Ultimately, she is punished by the very writer who creates her by being insignificantly dropped off the face of a cliff. None of her brave Pandava husbands chase after her.
Sita, of course, leads that unilateral life awarded to her by her narrator, loving, then leaving Ram, her avatar husband, but only after her heart is broken at being asked to stand a “purity test” by him. Isn’t each woman's choice—if such a thing even exists—a mere illusion created by men of their time, to be read by men of all times, as black-and-white prototypes of what women should and shouldn’t be. They are reduced to the version preferred by the reader: the traditionalist or the modern.
And in such a case, shouldn’t one reclaim their stories—making and unmaking and remaking them, according to the times?
Draupadi's polyandry—despite it being a prevalent practice of the times—is treated with toxic censure; Sita's fealty held to high esteem, despite no one displaying the same fealty back to her.
“We all perceive Draupadi as this multifaceted fiery beauty, and Sita as an embodiment of loyalty and courage,” said choreographer and auteur Jyotsna Shourie of the feat de accompli at the time. “However, it would be wrong to infer that Sita was more submissive and Draupadi more aggressive. Their personalities were moulded by the times in which they lived, and this is a piece which deals with just that.”
Still Relevant Today
In recent years, that very unmaking and remaking that we spoke of, has been ventured, to great success, by a spate of new authors.
In The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni places her heroine front and centre, announcing her intent to right the epic wrongs (pun intended) of treating women’s machinations as secondary to a plot. Draupadi is vengeful, yes, but she is far more relatable as she soliloquises for our benefit, dissecting her every thought. She acknowledges her fallibility, but she is willing to live with herself, thereby giving herself something the Mahabharat did not: self-acceptance.
In Aditya Iyengar’s Bhumika (2019), Sita—a heroine forever benumbed—gets a voice of her own, and choices galore. Her story is told from where the Ramayan largely forgets her: the point of the sacrificial fire.
Turns out, there was plenty to write about; only no had cared to ask.
The number of Quora hits, Reddit sub-threads and re-imaginings of the Mahabharat and Ramayan probably tell one enough about the contemporary appeal of both. It is a debate/dichotomy we need to smash. Epics—from the Iliad/Odyssey to the Ramayan/Mahabhara—have always been the mouthpieces of victors, stories told by upper caste/higher-up men about the spoils of battle, many of which/whom are often women.
It is a trope still existent, with women who act outside “codes of conduct” held up as cautionary tales for other women, boxed in and compartmentalised. If you want to take anything from the tales of Draupadi and Sita today, refuse the labels and cut up the boxes. Refuse the ‘othering’ of women, the comparison of one with the other. Refuse to be separated into ancient patriarchal polarities that continue to permeate modern society in how women act, live, or dress-up. Sita and Draupadi—as all women—aren’t one or the other, black and white, but complex in all shades of grey.
***
Urmi Bhattacheryya is an independent journalist, formerly at The Quint, a feminist and trashy-reality-TV-watcher (like you wouldn't believe) and a reader of reads. If you ask, she'll channel her inner Bipasha Basu and tell you to do bicep curls. So don't ask. You can find her on Twitter: @UBhattacheryya or Instagram: @urmi6.
