The Winning of Draupadi

King Drupada had not forgotten the half-kingdom and the whole humiliation Drona had dealt him. He had turned the years and the wealth that remained to him toward a single end, and at last performed a great sacrifice for the sons it would bring. From its fire two children rose, already grown: Dhrishtadyumna, born for the killing of Drona, and a daughter, dark and beyond ordinary beauty, born to turn the course of a dynasty — Draupadi, called also Krishnaa for the darkness of her, and Panchali for the land she came from.

Her swayamvara was a trap dressed as a festival, and Drupada had built it for one archer in the world, on the chance that the rumour of the burned Pandavas was false. He set a test no common man could pass: an enormous bow that few present could so much as bend, and, mounted high and turning, a fish-shaped mark to be pierced through the eye — while the archer aimed not at the fish above but at its moving reflection in oil set below it.

The assembled kings came forward and tried and failed, one after another, the great bow shaming each of them in turn before the whole gathering. Karna rose, and could plainly have done it — and here the epic opens his old wound once more: by the account most often told, Draupadi declined to wed the son of a charioteer, and Karna set the bow down and returned to his seat, carrying away one more door shut in his face on account of a birth he had never been allowed to choose.

Then a young brahmin walked out of the watching crowd — lean, sun-darkened, unannounced, plainly no king. The hall laughed at a priest reaching for a warrior’s weapon. He took the bow up as though it had been left there for him and no one else, strung it in one motion, set five arrows, and put them one after another through the turning eye while his gaze stayed down on the oil. The laughter stopped all at once. It was Arjuna, and among the watching kings the oldest and most observant began, quietly, to revise their belief about who had died at Varanavata.

The defeated kings turned ugly, as the story knew they would — a prize they had failed to win had gone to a brahmin, and pride does not bear that calmly. They rushed Drupada and his daughter. Arjuna and Bhima stepped in front of them, Bhima uprooting a tree where he stood for a club, and the two held the field against an army of kings until the kings fell back baffled, certain now that no brahmins anywhere fought in that manner.

The five brothers brought Draupadi back to the potter’s house where they lodged. At the threshold Yudhishthira called in to his mother in the old returning game of the disguise — Mother, see what we have brought home today — and Kunti, occupied and not looking up, gave the answer she had always given to a day’s gathered alms: share it among yourselves, equally, all of you. A word spoken in ignorance, into a room it could not have foreseen. And the truthful Yudhishthira would not let his mother’s word be made a lie, and the brothers would not be divided one from another, and so it came to be settled that Draupadi would be wife to all five Pandavas. Drupada was appalled; the world kept no custom for such a marriage, and his daughter’s honour seemed to him at stake. But Vyasa came — as he comes at every hinge of this story — and told them in private what their souls had been in lives before this one, and showed that the thing was right by a reckoning older and deeper than the world’s customs. So it was done. Draupadi married the five; the dead were now openly the living; and a charioteer’s son rode home from Panchala carrying one more reason, added to all the others, to want every one of them destroyed.