On Mythology, Memory, and Rewriting in Mahasveta Devi’s “Draupadi”

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Names carry weight. When a parent names a child, they are usually doing two things at once — marking identity and connecting the child to something larger than themselves. A name can be a blessing, a tradition, a story already in progress. But a name can also be a cage, something imposed from outside, something that tells the named person who they are supposed to be rather than who they choose to be.

This is exactly the tension at the heart of Mahasveta Devi’s “Draupadi.” The story’s title character has two names: Dopdi (the tribal, everyday form) and Draupadi (the Sanskrit form given to her at birth by her mistress, a landlord’s wife). These two names are not just two ways of saying the same thing. They are two different worlds pulling at the same woman.

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The Draupadi of the Mahabharata

To understand what Mahasveta Devi is doing, we need to spend a few minutes with the original Draupadi — the one from the ancient epic Mahabharata.

Draupadi is one of the most complex and celebrated women in all of Sanskrit literature. She is the wife of the five Pandava brothers simultaneously, making her an unusual figure in a patriarchal system — what the Spivak’s foreword calls “singular” in the sense of being uncategorisable, unpaired with any single man in the conventional way. She is fiercely intelligent, proud, and politically astute. But she is also, again and again, used as an object in a world that belongs to men.

The most famous scene involving the Mahabharata’s Draupadi is the vastraharan — the disrobing. Her eldest husband, Yudhishthira, loses her in a game of dice, treating her essentially as property (“Draupadi belongs within that all,” as the epic says). The victorious side attempts to strip her publicly in the royal court. Draupadi prays to Krishna, and through divine intervention, her sari becomes infinite — the more the enemy pulls at it, the more cloth appears. She cannot be stripped. She is saved, miraculously and divinely, from public humiliation.

The key point here: the Mahabharata’s Draupadi is saved by a god. She is passive in the moment of crisis. The miracle happens to her, not because of her. And her ultimate dignity is restored by a man — even if that man is divine.

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Enter Dopdi Mejhen

Now here is where Mahasveta Devi makes her boldest move.

In the story, Dopdi is also stripped. She is gang-raped by soldiers through the night, her body used as a site of state punishment — what the army casually orders as “making her.” This is the modern version of the vastraharan. But there is no Krishna. There is no miracle. No one comes to cover her.

And yet Dopdi does not collapse. She does not pray for rescue. Instead, she chooses to remain naked. The next morning, when soldiers come to present her before Senanayak, she tears apart what little cloth remains and walks toward her captor bare, bleeding, and unashamed.

Think about what this means in the context of the original myth. The Mahabharata’s Draupadi needed divine help to preserve her modesty. Dopdi needs no such help — because she refuses to be defined by modesty in the first place. She takes the weapon they used against her — the exposure of her body — and turns it into her weapon. Her nakedness is no longer humiliation. It is accusation. It is evidence. It is power.

Mahasveta Devi is not disrespecting the Mahabharata here. She is rewriting it for a different time and a different woman. The ancient Draupadi was a queen, fighting within a system that at least pretended to have rules. Dopdi Mejhen is a tribal peasant woman, fighting a system that has placed her entirely outside its rules. She cannot appeal to Dharma. She cannot call on a god. She only has herself.

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What’s in a Name (Actually)?

The name itself is worth pausing on. Dopdi was given the name “Draupadi” at birth by her mistress — the wife of the landlord Surja Sahu. This is described in the story with quiet irony as the “usual mood of benevolence felt by the oppressor’s wife toward the tribal bond servant.”

Think about that. A high-caste landlord’s wife gives a tribal girl the name of the most famous heroine in Sanskrit literature. Why? Not out of genuine respect for the girl’s potential heroism. It is more like an heirloom being casually tossed at a servant — a great name worn by someone the giver doesn’t really see as capable of living up to it.

But here is what happens: Dopdi grows into that name, just not in the way her mistress intended. She becomes heroic — not in the Mahabharata sense of being a queen surrounded by powerful husbands, but in a raw, resistant, earthly sense. She fights for water rights. She organises resistance against exploitation. She protects her comrades even when she is captured. And at the end, she does something the original Draupadi never did — she refuses to be covered up again.

There is a beautiful phrase Spivak uses in her foreword: Dopdi is “at once a palimpsest and a contradiction.” A palimpsest is a manuscript page where earlier writing has been erased and written over, but traces of the old text still show through. Dopdi is like that — she carries the ancient Draupadi’s name and echoes of her story, but her own story shows through, completely different, completely her own.

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The Cloth and the Body

The sari — or in Dopdi’s case, simply “the cloth” — is one of the story’s most important motifs.

In the Mahabharata, the sari is the miraculous protection that keeps Draupadi covered. In Devi’s story, it is the opposite. Dopdi wears a minimal cloth — no blouse, no underclothes, just a basic wrap. When she is captured and raped, the cloth is taken from her. When she is given it back, she tears it apart herself.

The act of tearing the cloth is not despair. It is a deliberate refusal to go back to the way things were. She is essentially saying: you have already seen everything, done everything, destroyed everything. There is nothing left to protect with this cloth. Putting it back on would be a lie — a restoration of a modesty that the state itself has already violated. She refuses the performance of shame.

In doing so, she exposes not just her own body, but the violence of the state. She forces Senanayak — the powerful, book-reading, theory-writing army officer — to look at what his order “make her” actually produced. He cannot look away. He cannot explain it. He cannot ask the right question. He is afraid.

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Myth as Both Trap and Tool

What Mahasveta Devi shows us is that myths can work in two directions. On one hand, mythology can be used to keep people in their place — the idea that everything is ordained by the gods, that one’s suffering is part of a cosmic order, that the proper response to humiliation is piety and prayer. This is the Mahabharata’s Draupadi at her most passive.

On the other hand, mythology can be stolen, rewritten, and handed back to the very people it was used to exclude. Devi gives the ancient name to a tribal woman who has no business, by the logic of the caste system, carrying such a name. And then she shows what real heroism looks like when it doesn’t have a god to call upon.

The ancient Draupadi asked “Am I not a person?” Dopdi Mejhen answers that question with her own body — and makes everyone in the room uncomfortable enough to have no answer.

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Next post: We turn to the story’s most fascinatingly disturbing character — Senanayak, the army officer who reads Brecht, understands his enemies better than they understand themselves, and is still incapable of truly seeing Dopdi Mejhen.

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