The Disrobing and the Vows

Duryodhana sent Duhshasana, his brother, to fetch Draupadi into the hall. She was in her chambers, in a single garment, in the seclusion that custom gave a woman at that time of the month, and she did not come at his word. She sent back a question instead, the question that the whole assembly of the wisest men alive would prove unable to answer: whom did my husband lose first — himself, or me? If he had already staked and lost himself, he was no longer a free man; and a man who owns nothing, not even his own person, by what right does he then stake another? Put my question to the elders, and let the law answer it.

It was an unanswerable question, and it was put in the one room that should have been able to answer anything. Duhshasana did not carry it back for a ruling. He went into her chambers and dragged her into the assembly by the hair, a queen in one cloth, into a hall full of kings.

What followed is the passage the Mahabharata builds its whole moral weather out of, and it does so chiefly by showing who said nothing. Bhishma was there — the most honoured man alive, bound by the dreadful vow — and he could not untangle the law: a man may stake what is his, he reasoned aloud, and a wife stands in a husband’s power, and so the dreadful conclusion might hold, and the question of whether Yudhishthira owned himself when he staked her he confessed himself unable to resolve. Drona was there, and Kripa, and the blind king on his throne, and they let the elder’s paralysis stand for the room. Vidura alone said the plain thing — that an unfree man’s stake is void, that this was lawless, that a hall that permitted it was already destroyed — and Vidura, as ever, was the one voice the room had trained itself not to act on. The Pandavas sat bound by their own loss and their own code, five of the greatest warriors alive watching and not rising, because they had been wagered and lost and held that the loss bound them. The story records every one of these silences by name. It wants them remembered.

Duhshasana, with the hall not stopping him, set his hands to Draupadi’s one garment to strip her bare before the kings, and Duryodhana, enjoying it, slapped his thigh in invitation. Draupadi had asked the law and the law had failed her; she had asked the elders and the elders had looked away; she had called on her husbands and her husbands sat bound. With nothing in the hall left to appeal to, she let go of the hall entirely, lifted her arms, and called on Krishna, who was not there. And the cloth did not end. Duhshasana pulled, and pulled, and the fabric came away endless and unending, a heap of it rising on the floor of the assembly, until he sank down exhausted and she stood still clothed, and the hall understood that it had been answered by something it had not been able to summon, defend, or comprehend.

Then the vows came, and they are the load the rest of the epic carries. Bhima, on his feet at last, swore before the assembly that he would break Duryodhana’s thigh — the thigh he had slapped — and tear open Duhshasana’s breast and drink his blood, and he named the war he was promising in the swearing of it. Draupadi, her hair still loose from Duhshasana’s hand, vowed that it would stay unbound, ungathered, uncombed, until it could be tied again with hands wet from that same blood. Nothing in the Mahabharata is ever merely said. These were said in a full hall, before the elders who had failed, and the war now had its cause spoken aloud and its terms set, and only the occasion left to find it.