neither short nor tall, neither dark nor pale, 
with wavy dark-blue hair, eyes like autumn-lotus leaves,
fragrant like the lotus, perfect as Lakshmi herself in grace and beauty,
extraordinarily accomplished, soft-spoken and gentle, 
the ideal wife for the pursuit of Dharma, Artha and Karma.
She is the last to sleep, the first to wake, 
even earlier than the early-rising cowherds and shepherds.
Her sweat-bathed face is lovely like the lotus, like the jasmine; 
slim-waisted like the middle of the sacred vedi; 
long-haired, pink-lipped, smooth-skinned. (Sabha, 65.33-37)

Here Draupadi is hardly anything more than a chattel being staked. Her individual rights as an independent human being have been suddenly wiped out, indeed as though they never existed. She challenges this presumption itself and the very conception of Dharma of the Kuru elders in a situation where it would have been quite normal for any woman to collapse in hysterics. It is worthwhile for us to attend to her words [Sabha parva, 67.38-40,47]:

It is wrong, most wrong
to drag me in my period before the Kuru heroes.
But none here finds it wrong. Oh the shame of it! 
If all these great Kuru heroes find nothing wrong here, 
then the dharma of the Bharatas is dead, 
the dharma of the Kshatriyas is dead. 
Drona, Bhisma, Vidura,
and the great monarch have lost their greatness-else
why are they silent? . . There is no sabha without elders,
no elders without dharma; there is no dharma without truth,
no truth without honesty.
(The P. Lal transcreation)

When even this fails to move Bhishma beyond "Dharma is very subtle", Draupadi makes a last attempt to arouse the soporific manhood of the Kuru Court watched over by Bhishma:

Never before have we heard of
a wife forced to stand before a sabha. The Kurus have broken
that ancient rule . . . Something must be very .wrong
if the Kurus let their innocent daughter-in-law
suffer in this way! . .Where is your sense of dharma? (ibid., 69.6,8)

It is her repeated challenge to Bhishma that elicits that most revealing statement from him after he has initially sought to skirt the issue with "Dharma is very subtle, very confusing": "What a strong man says often becomes the only dharma. A weak man may have dharma on his side, but who listens to him? To tell you the truth, I do not know what to say" (Sabha Parva. 69.15-161). In other words, since the Dhartarashtras have won the dice-game, whatever they say and do is dharma, the accepted norm of conduct. Yet, he voices a meaningless approval of her stance which is significant in that it represents what was the ideal of feminine conduct in society while, simultaneously, condemning the inaction of the elders in the assembly hall:

Your conduct now, O Panchali,
is worthy of you- though you suffer, you appeal to
the truths of Dharma. Our elders, learned-in-dharma,
Drona and others sit here with lowered eyes like dead men
with life-breaths gone. (ibid. 69.19-20)

It is revealing that explicit condemnation, disgust at the proceedings and warning are voiced ultimately not by the Kshatriya patriarch Bhishma, protector of Hastinapura, but
by the son of a half-caste sage and a nameless servant-maid, Vidura:

Now they insult a woman. Nobility is dead
The Kauravas conspire sinfully . . .
Dharma violated in a sabha destroys the sabha . . . Kurus,
do not abandon dharma. (ibid., 71.19.20)

Indeed, among epic women Draupadi stands alone. Can we imagine any other heroine who would face being stripped and grossly insulted as a prostitute in a royal court with her five husbands remaining mute onlookers; then be abducted in the forest by her cousin-in-law Jayadratha and suffer her husband forgiving him; this followed by public molestation in Virata's court with her husband actually reprimanding her for creating a scene; be carried off to be burnt alive with Kichaka's corpse; and then, when the long sought-for war of vengeance appears inevitable, to hear her husbands tell Krishna to sue for peace? Would any other woman have borne all this and remained sane? This is not all. The worst is yet to come with the decimation of all her five sons by Ashvatthama. If Gandhari is left son-less in her defeat, so is the victorious Draupadi. Only Kunti ends her life as she had begun it—a queen with five sons intact, losing only Karna, the shame of her maidenhood removed from her life by death itself.
 
Hughes does not bring out the supreme tragedy of Draupadi's life. She does become Empress of Hastinapura, but what does she have left at the very end? As she stumbles and falls on the Himalayan heights, not one of her five husbands stops to help her up; not one stays back to keep her company; none has a word of sympathy for her except Bhima and even he frames it as a question to Yudhishthira instead of addressing her. And the crowning insult is Yudhishthira's comment that she fell because of her partiality for Arjuna. That comment only serves to expose his hidden envy of Arjuna, who alone had truly won Draupadi in the test of skill, but neither of them ever got each other wholly.
 
Self-born, full grown, rising out of the sacred flames of the sacrifice, like Athene emerging cap-a-pie from the head of Zeus, Yajnaseni leaves the world all alone, five-husbanded yet with no husband, nathavati anathavat. It is only then that we realise that this remarkable woman did not ever ask anything for herself. It is as though she were profoundly aware that she was an instrument for bringing about the end of an era and an ancient dharma so that a new age could take birth. Being so aware, she seems to have offered up her entire being, her whole life, as a flaming sacrifice in that holocaust of which Krishna was the presiding deity as well as its motivating force and major protagonist.
 
On page 89 Hughes refers to "the Draupadi-harana of the Mahabharata"'. It is not clear to what episode she is referring. Is it to Jayadratha's abortive attempt to abduct her? There is no other harana episode concerning Draupadi.
 
One cannot agree with Hughes’ statement on page 91 that Kunti's words to the Pandavas lack the inflammatory quality of Draupadi's. The tongue-lashing Vidula gives Sanjaya, as narrated by Kunti, is directed at her own sons by implication. Moreover, she asks Krishna to tell them: "Can anything be more humiliating than that your mother, friendless and alone, should have to eat others' food?…Redeem your family honour. Do not watch your merits waste away. Flare up, even if briefly, like kindling. Do not smoulder away in billowing fireless smoke" (Udyoga Parva, 132.32-34; 133.14). To these twin spurs to egg them on, Kunti adds the culminating motivation, upbraiding her sons in no uncertain terms, to arouse their hibernating manhood:

The princess of Panchala followed all dharmas,
yet, in your presence they mocked her-how can you ever
forgive this insult? The kingdom lost did not hurt me,
the defeat at dice did not hurt me; the exile of my sons
did not hurt me so much as the humiliation of Draupadi
weeping in the sabha as they mocked her.    
Nothing more painful than that insult.
(Ibid. Udyoga parva, 137.16-18)

Apart from Kunti and Draupadi, the epic gives us a number of remarkable women who are not mentioned by Hughes. Satyavati is one whom Hughes overlooks. She literally takes Hastinapura by storm and ensures that it is her blood that runs through its rulers. Like her grand daughter-in-law Kunti, she has a pre-marital son born out of wedlock. But, unlike the Kshatriya princess Kunti, the dasa Satyavati is not averse to acknowledging this son openly. Like Kunti, again, she gracefully retires to the forest after the dynasty has been established. In her success in ensuring that she gets what she wants she reminds us of some other powerful feminine figures of the epic: Devayani, Sarmishtha, Savitri. Like Shakuntala, Satyavati too has an apsara for her mother and a king for father, and like her ancestress insists, before giving in to the amorous advances of the infatuated king (Dushyanta/Shantanu), that it must be her son who will succeed to the throne. It is Satyavati who is responsible for the chronicle of the Dynasty of Puru becoming the biography of the descendants of a fisher-maid. Thereby, she is a revolutionary figure who upsets the entire mystique of royalty. After all, she is the first woman to establish a low-caste, actually a sudra, dynasty in the heartland of the country long before Mahapadma Nanda came on the Pataliputra scene.
 
Of the direct ancestors of the lunar dynasty, the Brahmin girl Devayani remains unforgettable for the imperious confidence with which she grasps the hand of king Yayati, will not take no for an answer, and successfully forges an inter-caste marriage, possibly the first such in the epic. She even succeeds in turning the Asura-princess into her maidservant, but loses Yayati to Sarmishtha's blandishments and the kingdom slips out of her progeny's hands to Puru, her rival's son.
 
Equally memorable is Shakuntala whose immortal celebration of a wife's role needs to be stressed because it stands unique in epic literature. She tells boorish Dushyanta (Sambhava parva, 74.40-50):

A wife is a man's half,
A wife is a man's closest friend:
A wife is Dharma, Artha and Karma,
A wife is Moksha too . . .
A sweet-speaking wife is a companion in happy times:
A wife is like a father on religious occasions; 
A wife is like a mother in illness and sorrow. 
The wife is a means to a man's salvation . . . 
Happiness, joy, virtue, everything depends on her.

When this fails to stir him, Shakuntala upbraids him in words which provide proof of the remarkable force of character in Vyasa's epic women:

My birth, Dushyanta,
is nobler than yours. You walk on earth,
I roam the sky. A pig delights in filth
even in a flower garden; 
a wicked man finds evil 
even where there's good. 
If you and falsehood unite,
if you disbelieve me. I will go, 
now, by myself. [ibid. 74. 82, 83, 89, 106]

She leaves, confidently prophesying the inevitable succession of her son Bharata to the throne even without Dushyanta's help. Such is the finely tempered steel of her character.
 
As for Savitri, whose adamantine will won back her husband's life literally from the hands of death, and Damayanti who weathered all sorrows and skilfully sought out her husband from the midst of abject misery—both are epic heroines who ought to have been discussed by Hughes in her paper.
 
Yet another obvious omission is Amba, whose implacable will to be avenged on Bhishma reminds us of the Greek Erinyes as she relentlessly hunts him down from one birth through another. Her role in the epic is crucial, for without Amba there would have been no victory for the Pandavas, as it was Bhishma who stood between them and victory with Shantanu's boon of death-only-at-will.
 
On page 77, Hughes claims that Sita recited to their sons their father's story. This is not correct. Lava and Kusa were taught the story of Rama by Valmiki and since their singing it at the Ashvamedha sacrifice, all singers of tales have been named kusilava.
 
On page 74, Hughes states that on one has ever suggested that either Homer or Virgil was a women. No less a person than Robert Graves, the great poet and novelist, suggested precisely this in his novel Homer's Daughter arguing that the author of the Odyssey was a woman, viz., the princess Nausica.
 
In terms of Dumezil’s tri-functionality, the first function relates to the priestly class, with the performance of rituals. In that context, Hughes is mistaken in assigning Astaka, Visvamitra's son by Madhavi, to the third function (p.3). As a celebrated performer of sacrifices, Astaka actually belongs to the first function.
 
It is difficult to agree with Hughes in seeing in Draupadi a doublet of the Madhavi myth simply on account of their many-husbanding. Madhavi cannot be said to be a pre-figuring of Draupadi because she is bartered to provide kings with sons as a means of defraying Galava's debt of guru-dakshina. After the birth of each son, she does not retain any link with his father and is in no sense a wife to him, nor even a mother nursing the infant and bringing him up to manhood. She immediately re-attains virgin status and is taken to the next king by Galava. The emphasis is constantly on her function as a bringer-forth of men-children only. In this her true doublet is not Draupadi, who is pre-eminently the wife cleaving to her five husbands unto death, but perhaps Kunti. Kunti, too, has temporary liaisons with four persons—Surya, Dharma, Vayu and Indra—for the sole purpose of obtaining male progeny. The difference is that all along she remains the wife of a fifth person, the Kshatriya Pandu, and the four others are gods. Furthermore, Vyasa's emphasis is on Kunti's role as mother in bringing-up five fatherless boys in a viciously hostile court. Madhavi's wholly detached attitude to her sons is reminiscent of the behaviour of the celestial nymphs, the apsaras Urvashi with Ayu and Menaka with Shakuntala.
 
Dumezil's analysis of the five Pandavas as representing the three function runs into serious difficulty when we realise that the aspect of fertility/fecundity, the third function, which he attributes to the twins Nakula and Sahadeva is not supported by any evidence in the epic. The Mahabharata, on the other hand, is a pitiless expose of the wasteland created by the Kurukshetra War in which the victors are like Milton's serpent who "instead of gust, chewed bitter ashes". Consequently, this is where Draupadi is akin to Deirdre. Both are the cause of the wholesale destruction and both are mothers who are not only left without any children, but are themselves the cause of annihilating an entire race of warriors. Their flaming beauty leaves only ashes behind, on rejuvenated greening   of the country. Amreeta Syam's long poem "Kurukshetra" (writers workshop, 1992) is an excellent portrayal of this aspect of Draupadi. To amend Hughes' statement, it is not only Deirdre, but also Draupadi who is "a sterile Sri" (p.25). Again, it is not Kunti who can be said to share with Deirdre the epithet "sorrowful one" simply on account of having given birth to illegitimate Karna (p. 27). It is Draupadi whose life is a long series of sufferings: saddled with the ignominy of a polyandrous alliance; grossly insulted in open court; exiled; abducted while in exile; abused again in exile; left without father, kith and kin and sons at the end of the war; abandoned by her five husbands as she falls helpless in the Himalayas.
 
Furthermore, Hughes' annotation on p. 8, note 1, that Draupadi resembles Krishna in being born without parents, is wholly mistaken, for Krishna's parents are Vasudeva and Devaki.
 
To take Hughes argument regarding Draupadi representing the tri functional capacity of royal power (p. 22) further, one could argue that the astonishing about-face of the Pandavas in the Svargarohana parva in callously leaving her behind in her last extremity, in complete contrast to their overwhelming concern whenever she has been abused, would represent their having given up their royal sovereignty which was embodied in its triple functions in her.
 
There is an obvious comparison with Thetis throwing away her seven children (p.33) which Hughes does not point out. The Mahabharata gives us a perplexing portrait of another river goddess who calmly drowns, one after another, seven of her sons, born to her of a mortal as in the case of Thetis: Ganga. Both Thetis and Ganga abandon their husbands, who have kept silent through seven murders, when they intervene on the eighth occasion. In both cases, this remarkable eighth son, Devavrata/Achilles, is the greatest of heroes of that time. 
 
While analysing the phenomenon of the fateful birth of one who will destroy the dynasty, Hughes cites Oedipus and Deirdre (p.39) but unaccountably leaves out the case of Alexandros/Paris whose birth was presaged by the image of a flaming torch and on the advice of soothsayers he was abandoned and brought up by shepherds. When he was recognised during a contest in Troy, his doting parents refused to have him slain, defying the prophecy, as Dhritarashtra refuses to give up Duryodhana. It is Paris who, Duryodhana-like, brings about the destruction of an entire generation of warriors.
 
In supporting Yudhishthira's simplistic exclamation, "If we had been united with Karna there is nothing that we could not have attained and this war need never have been fought" (p. 43) Hughes reveals a surprising naivety. The whole point of Vyasa's remarkable epic-structure is to bring out the clash of different types of dharma. Karna's grossly limited dharma is one of blind adherence to his benefactor regardless of the ethics of Duryodhana's actions. Bluntly, he tells Krishna that if the throne were offered to him by Yudhishthira, he would immediately surrender it to Duryodhana who, he knows, is evil. Hence, he begs Krishna not to tell the Pandavas of their uterine relationship. Yudhishthira's response, quoted by Hughes, is an immature sentimental effusion typical of him for which Krishna berates him on more than one occasion. The Pandavas would not have been benefited at all had this relationship been exposed earlier. Actually, they would have been condemned to the perpetual slavery of the Kauravas, with Karna leading them in serving Duryodhana! It might well be that, noticing Karna's unquestioning submission to Duryodhana, the remarkably perspicacious Kunti realised that he would not provide her other sons with the leadership to win back their heritage. That is why she made the heroic choice of keeping the secret despite the tremendous anguish it caused her, and ultimately chose to face the agony of being upbraided by her sons on this account. She deliberately chose the greater good, that of establishing a new kingdom founded on dharma under her nephew Krishna's leadership by the Pandavas, to the evil of not acknowledging her son Kara who had chosen to join the forces of adharma. To describe this choice as "blotting her record as a mother" (p. 43) is surely unjustified.
 
Hughes reference to Kunti's "choice of fathers for her sons" (p. 46) is a misreading of the epic. It is part of Kunti's tragedy that she is not even given the freedom to choose the fathers for her sons. On each of the three occasions it is Pandu who prescribes which god she is to summon. On the other hand, where Madri is concerned Pandu is surprisingly considerate and leaves the choice completely to her. Obviously, Madri was his favourite!
 
In her survey of the recreation of epic characters in the vernacular, Hughes mentions Tagore's silence regarding Draupadi while discussing the Kunti-Karna encounter. This portrait has to be placed in the perspective of subsequent representation of the scene by Shivaji Sawant (in his epic novel Mrityunjaya), Buddhadeb Bose (in his poetic drama "Pratham Partha"), Jatindramohan Bagchi (in his poem on Karna), Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (in his semi-epic Rashmi-rathi), Prabhat Kumar Ghosh (in his novelKarna), Ramkumar Bhramar (in his novel Adhikar), S. Raman (in his verse play onKarna), P. Lal (in his long poem "The Man of Dharma and the Rasa of Silence") and Rahi Masoom Reza (in the Mahabharata TV Film Script, vol. 7). Of these, the most important is Buddhadeb Bose's interpretation. He reverses the sequence of Vyasa by having Kunti meet Karna before Krishna comes, and introduces Draupadi who carefully tries to sense if she can influence Karna in staying aloof in the war. Bose's Kunti explains to Karna that she had not acknowledged him during the tournament because fratricidal strife was not inevitable then as it has become now. She also offers him Draupadi, at which Karna retorts that he was unable to win Draupadi by himself only because Kunti had not acknowledged his paternity, that he will not share Draupadi with anyone, and refuses to accept anything he has not won by his own prowess. There is no pledge by Karna not to slay Arjuna, only a request by Kunti that he come to her after the war as her son, regardless of Draupadi and the kingdom. Karna responds that for him Kunti will always remain a lovely dream. Krishna appears at the end after Kunti and Draupadi have left, having failed in their mission. His meeting with Karna ends memorably with Karna glorying in the realisation that behind the facade of Arjuna it will be Krishna who is his true opponent, and that it is a vindication of his heroic prowess that this Krishna, whom some callPurushottama, will stoop to scheme to ensure his death.
 
Hughes mentions the gargantuan Peter Brook dramatisation of the epic only in passing (pp. 100-101). While she pithily makes the point that this was not a revival of Attic theatre, she fails to tackle the central issue that whatever else it might have been—pre-eminently a superb five-finger exercise—it was certainly not Vyasa's Mahabharata. The tragedy of the intellectual elite of India lies in its celebration of Brook's effort as carrying the true message of the epic for modern times. On the other hand, Hughes fails to take into account the brilliant TV Film Script of the epic penned by a Muslim, the late Rahi Masoom Reza, which is a far more authentic representation of the ethos of Vyasa with its profound lessons for all humanity that shine clearly through the garish overlay of the Hindi film-world conventions, [cf. my article on the Peter Brook film in Vyasa's Mahabharata: Creative Insights ed. P. Lal. writers WORKSHOP, 1992.]
 
Hughes does less than justice to Saoli Mitra's magnificent tour de force regarding Draupadi, Nathabati Anathabat which portrays the other epic women: Satyavati, Kunti, Gandhari. These have been given considerable attention in two studies by S. K. Sen and myself in Vyasa's Mahabharata: Creative Insights Vol. 1 ed. P. Lal {writers workshop, 1992) to demonstrate how she brings alive the past for the present precisely in order to fulfil that need, which Hughes speaks of at the end of her study: that we may learn not to repeat the perverse placing of personal greed over public good that brought about the cataclysmic end of an era, and build a wholesome future for the coming generations.