I had presumed many things about this book. At first, I was absolutely unaware of it being based on the Mahabharata, later I thought it to be a feminist take on the great epic. It felt like a good time to let go of those inhibitions.

The cover image of City Palace, Jaipur had piqued my interest at some point of time and I had recently finished Gurcharan Das’ take on Mahabharata, So I was naturally inclined to read more on the epic.

This is a fictional work but at no moment I deemed it necessary to treat it as such, it felt more like an interpretation of Mahabharata by a person through the looking glass of one central character of the story, Draupadi/Panchali/Krishnaa/Yajnaseni. 

Mahabharata is a unique story in the sense that it doesn’t have one or two central characters although it looks like 5 brothers are the focal point of it but that isn’t really the case. Thrown in are figures like, Karna, Bheeshma, Drona, Kunti, Duryodhana, Krishna, Vidura, Dhritarashtra, Gandhari and the central figure of this story, Panchali. These characters and several other make the epic what it truly is and even the 5 brothers are a curious mix of personalities. Although they remain together through thick and thin each one of them thinks differently.

Then come the question of right and wrong, moral and amoral, Dharma and Adharma, and these questions have plagued the epic throughout. Each time I am brooding over an incident of the epic I am faced with a dilemma of deciding which side to take. The answers are difficult to come by. Dharma isn’t that simple or how Das liked to call it “Subtle”.

Panchali’s plight and the misdeed committed over the women of the epic were and are not that different from what women have been made to face in our 21^st century world. Yet it seems highly unlikely how that can be true. No men are bound by the vows or promises by which men in the story were bound by, no woman is going to get married to 5 husbands at the same time, no one is going to start a Mahayuddha over such insults. It is not the heroic things which are to be taken literally from the epic but the more subtle forms of discrimination. Such treatment continues unabatedly. What are we to make of that? The nature of man hasn’t undergone significant changes in the past thousands of years? It would become a bitter debate to have so I’ll casually shed my responsibility off of it. (Do excuse me)

The author wants you to look at Draupadi and not feel pity for her but just think about for once the way our society has been governed and ask some hard-hitting questions to not just men but women too. This might not be an issue of Gender only. And women aren’t the only victims of it too. It looks incredulous on the surface.

Reading certain lines in the epic are bound to provoke an unsettling feeling in your gut. When Panchali asks Yudhisthir in the assembly hall “Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?”, it left quite an impression on me.

Das has analyzed the nitty gritty of the legal dispute involved in the wager of Yudhisthir along with discussing about the moral nature of such an action. And yet I can hardly come to any conclusion on the matter. When Bheeshma didn’t rise up in defense of Panchali, you realize the faults even the greatest of great can have. Everyone has their weaknesses and their drives; it is wrong to impose our set of morality on those characters and yet it is wrong to commit acts which everyone has accepted to be amoral.

I have at multiple occasions despised Krishna for all his trickeries and yet whenever I sit for once and think about the Poem Ramdhari Singh Dinkar wrote I am shown my true place.

The beauty of Mahabharata will continue to grow and it seems apt to describe it the way Nehru described India in his book as “an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously”.

This book makes the story of Mahabharata more accessible and entertaining. This one was told from the words of Panchali and one can certainly imagine how it should be if told through the eyes of each and every character of the epic. Each trying to defend his/her actions. And yet the moral dilemmas would remain. Like they always do, even in the real world.