Manreet Sodhi Someshwar who won the VoW English Fiction Award for the year 2020 for her book The Radiance of a Thousand Suns had interspersed her text with episodic references to the Mahabharata. Her most memorable lines on this metanarrative read ‘The world knows of no story which has not already been told in the Mahabharata’. I would go a step further. It is the only epic whose written text has not constrained a thousand retellings in the oral tradition, and hundreds of transcriptions in multiple languages across the world. It is this felicity to reinterpret the main events, and give them a fresh perspective each time that keeps it alive, and an inspiration for all future stories. Sonali Raje’s The Empress of Indraprastha is a welcome addition to this genre of stories inspired by the Mahabharata. Raje belongs to Pune, the city which houses the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), and brings us an eco-feminist retake of the great epic. Three of the proposed five-volume anthology by this science educator, currently based in the US have been published, and were the subject of an online conversation in the September edition of ‘A ernoons with an Author’ at the Valley of Words with discussant Shreya Jain, also from the city of Pune. https://www.youtube.com/live/4lqkYpQz7oY?si=luOVeqiIQT-g wURk The first book of the series is Entering Kuruvansh. This is the story of the young Draupadi, the daughter of Maharaja Drupad and Maharani Prishati, and her carefree childhood with her siblings Jyesth Shikhandi, and her twin Shristh. What Raje brings to the story is the salience of Maharani Prishati in the life of our muse, for so far the focus has been the rivalry between Drupad and Dronacharya Prishati tells her that at her Swayamvar– she had the right to refuse even the successful archer. Raje then delves into her absolutely unconventional polyandrous marriage with the five Pandavas. Did Kunti even realize what she was asking her daughter-in-law to do? To her question on whether it is moral and ethical for her to wed five husbands, Krishna says: ‘while morals are typically personal, ethics relate to societal norms. What might be right for one person may be wrong for someone else; people have their own views about what is right and wrong. In my (Krishna’s view), not being in charge of your actions, looking away when someone is being harassed, or deliberately cheating, and causing intentional harm to someone who is defenseless and weak, is immoral and unethical.’ And thus it was that at Rishi Narad’s suggestion it was agreed that she would wed all the brothers, but would be in residence with each one of them for a period of one year. Yudhishthira being the eldest was the first, but the next was Nakul, the first born of Madri– the second wife of Pandu– followed by Bhim and Sahdev, and it was only in the fi h year that Arjuna could cohabit with her. She is the one who lays down the norms for this unique marriage in which all six of them are in a polyandrous– polygamous relationship, for the brothers have their own individual wives as well. The first book has chapters on Hastinapur (the modern day Meerut) as well as on the city of Dwarka where the kinsmen of Krishna and Balram Dau took refuge a er leaving Mathura. The second book is called Building an Empire. The cover picture of Draupadi is different. She is an assertive Empress, seated on a golden throne with motifs of fierce lions as her arm rests and peacock feathers as adornments. This volume deviates from the staunchly patriarchal perspective of Mahabharata by focusing on the personality of powerful women like Shyabhama, Devika, Valandhara, Subhadra and Supriya, we get an idea of what women thought and did. Their conversations with each other, and with their husbands reflect a high degree of maturity and sensitivity. Arjuna’s undertakes a self-imposed exile for his inadvertent indiscretion of entering Yudhishtir’s palace during an intimate moment is one difficult and sensitive moment for her– she wanted to be the mother of Arjun’s first biological child, but this privilege was denied to her for many years till the birth of Shrutkarma. Before that Arjun had Iravan from the Naga princess Uloopi and Babruvaahan from Chitrangda, the princess of Manipur, and Abhimanyu from Subhadra. Draupadi’s emotional state on Arjun’s third marriage, and the poise and dignity with which she handled the situation are brought out quite delicately by Raje. The cover page on the third book Nadir shows a fierce Draupadi with a sword in her right hand, and a shield in her le . A er the infamous disrobing ordeal of a menstruating Draupadi in the full court of Kauravas, it is clear that she has to depend on her ownwits to protect her honour, her dignity and her children. Not only does she free her husbands from their enslavement, she also retrieves their weapons and kingdoms. But from this point on, it is not the story of the Pandus, it is the story of Draupadi’s revenge, the mobilization of forces by the Panchalas to avenge the insult in the Kaurava court. Raje also brings in fictional characters like Ashvinkarni, Shivantik, Maya, Kushkarnemi and Sennath– she brings them in to address the prevalent prejudice about physical disabilities as well as the code of only Kshatriyas being able and just warriors. It is abundantly clear that Raje has taken many liberties with the Mahabharata, or Vijaya as Ved Vyas called it. The story line does accept some of the main incidents and events– but there is a feminist and an ecological perspective in the narrative. It is this ability to connect the present with the past that makes it unique. For if events of the past can be related to the present, then logically, events in the present time can also be related to the past. ‘While the eons may change, the ethos remains the same. The vocabulary may be modern, but the emotions are timeless’. To study these emotions: love, anger, jealousy, rage, scorn, revenge, pride, greed, sacrifice as well as blind adherence to the text without the benefit of the context, turn to these pages, for the Mahabharata is a story that can be read any number of times, and you may well be inspired to pen or narrate your own version. For Mahabharata belongs to one and all, not just for the present but for the future as well
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