Summary Of 'Sita's Ascent' By Draupadi

“Suddenly the King stopped. The furrow revealed a golden hand: tiny fingers rising up like a grass, as if drawn by the sunshine. Janaka moved the dirt away, and found hidden within the soft, moist earth a baby girl, healthy and radiant, smiling joyfully, as if waiting to be found.”(Pattanaik 2013:9)
In the same supernatural way, Draupadi is gifted by Holy Fire. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has explained the birth of Draupadi through Dhai Ma in The Palace of Illusions:
“Behold, we give you this girl, a gift beyond what you asked for. Take good care of her, for she will change the course of history.” (Divakaruni 2008:4-5)
In ‘Yajnaseni’, Draupadi tells about her birth:
“My birth? But my birth was an exception. I was born nubile. The sacrificial
In her book Sita’s Ascent, she accepts that, “the character challenges the author, as well as the reader. To follow a narrative through the remembrances of the people with whom she lived in the time of the epic. But this story is not merely about the perspectives of other people on Sita. I attempt to create a new story, a fiction, by drawing upon an age-old familiarity with the different characters of the epic.” (Naidu 2012:172)
The epic Mahabharata is full of myths and mythical characters. But, in the context of the Mahabharata, we can say that the characters are more human than the characters of the Ramayana. In the Mahabharata, Shri Krishna has supernatural powers and there are many incidents that show his extraordinary powers. Though the birth of Pandavas and Kauravas are not natural, they are not stronger than Shri Krishna. Divakaruni speaks through Draupadi in her revisionist work:
“There were other stories about Krishna. How he’d been born in a dungeon where his uncle Kamsa had imprisoned his parents with the intention of killing him at birth. How, in spite of many prison guards, he had been miraculously spirited away to safety in Gokul….How, in infancy, he killed a demoness who tried to poison him with her breast milk. How he lifted the Mount Govardhan to shelter his people from a deluge that would have drowned them….People loved to exaggerate, and there was nothing like dose of the supernatural to spice up the drudgery of facts.”
It is full of swashbuckling characters and adventurous incidents. In the mentioned books considered for this paper, we are directly taken to a time period when the ‘Dwaparyug’ is going to end, and Draupadi explicates the story of her own life as also indirectly the larger plot of The Mahabharata. The narratives start with King Drupad’s receiving a boon from the fire-altar in the form of Dhrishtadyumna and Draupadi. King Drupad was very happy at the birth of Draupadi because at her birth there was a prophecy: “This woman has taken birth to avenge your insult. She has appeared to fulfill a vow. By her, Dharma will be preserved on this Earth, Kshatriyas will be destroyed. She will be the destroyer of the Kauravas.” (Ray 1995:8) Though it is a boon for King Drupad, but for Draupadi, it is a curse indirectly. Her life is destined to be overshadowed by war and bloodshed and makes us wonder if she could ever be happy with such a prophecy. In Ray’s text, Draupadi reveals her true feelings at being the instrument of destruction, “From even before birth, I was destined to avenge my father’s insult! I was going to be the weapon for preserving Dharma on this Earth and destroying the wicked”. (Ray 1995:8) Veerappa Moily also, in The Flaming Tresses of Draupadi records Ved Vyasa’s foretelling of Draupadi’s married life in a punctilious way. She is not directly cursed by anyone but sadly endures a cursed life. Right from her birth