ICONOGRAPHY OF DRAUPADI

Today’s culture, our ethics have become a tradition as a result of perseverance and dedicated adherence. To such an extent that we don’t even question its relevance and the reasons behind such practices. The true inspiration behind such doing is mythology. It has turned into a give and take relationship. The morals from the stories helped us become civilized. And later, after progressive advancements, we started interpreting these stories in our own ways so that we could tweak the morals according to what we were looking for. According to what was acceptable then.

As we discussed in almost all our lectures, clothes are like the trailers to what the civilization was like, in which they were worn. Be it the intention behind griff rhys’ film hidden treasures of Indian art which narrates how clothes of rabari women reveal their marital status or the khadi movement that turned the cloth into a uniform of rebellion. And after it solved the purpose, people reinterpreted the essence and said that it is the clothing for intellectuals, the forward thinkers who do not believe in ornamentation. Then there is denim, which transformed from being clothing for working class to something that erased segregation by caste.

I saw instances of identity transformation like these in mythological stories. They say that god is one. He/ she just transforms from one form to the other. For instance, clothing transformed pelt clad Shiva into silken robed Vishnu. Puranic goddess shakti alternates between naked and ferocious kali and bedecked and bejeweled gauri. It is said that the disrobing of draupadi symbolized change of civilizations. She moves from fields to forest and hence, from gauri to kali.

Fascinated by such conjectures, I decided to follow this identity transformation through clothing. But, transformations through interpretations. What was even more captivating for me, was, that despite having a somewhat prescribed depiction of her character, draupadi has had innumerable avatars over the years. Contrary to the ideology that it is those distinct features of the personality that make us relate to the person. In her case we were changing the features itself to match the situations. The reasons were many, was the true depiction socially acceptable? Did it match the whims of the emperor who had commissioned the depiction through painting? How did people who were not familiar with the way of living prescribed in the stories respond to the character? How can we bereft these stories of our ever-growing astuteness!

Therefore, I picked different depictions of draupadi during vastraharan, through paintings to show how they give us a peek into the way of living of that time period.

It began with the time closest to when Mahabharata came into being, somewhere around 3000 B.C. during Vedic times. The first character that I made was according to the sculptures of elephanta caves. This was also the closest to how it was described in the epic. She wore a loosely tied single piece of cloth with urna’s sutra and jewelry, just like the aryans did. Cotton clothes and skins of goats and spotted deer were prevalent during those times and were hence mentioned in the Vedas. Silk was only discovered between 3000 and 4000 B.C. Only yellow red and blue dyes were available during those times. The next one, from the medieval period, is probably out of the archives of the akbarnama, a visual narrative of events from his life. It was commissioned by Akbar himself done by abul fazl, one of the nine jewels of his court. The third volume called the Ain-i-Akbari contains some depictions of the stories from Mahabharata

 
Inspired by the art of Persia, fazl modified the depictions so the muslims could understand. Possibly akbar’s prejudices also governed how it looked. The next version is the most important one. Because of training under a british painter called Theodore Jenson, Raja Ravi Varma’s rendition is a fusion of Indian and European realism.Done in 1873, this painting was commissioned by Sayaji Pao Gaekwad, the maharaja of Baroda as a part of recreating a number of mythological scenes in their essence. Ravi Varma traveled all around the country sketching and finally recreated the imagery of a traditional Indian woman who was curvy and buxom as described by Beepanjana Pal, author of the book “ The painter: A life of Ravi Varma”. The image was a composite of what he saw and considered superior in beauty. The skin color was taken from north India, sari was draped in the maharashtrian style and the jewelry was from south. Contrary to the fact that the epic states that she was dark skinned and wore a single piece of cloth. Stitched garments were not even introduced during those times and the draping of sari, as we see in the painting, came about only during the Indus Valley civilization.  This time period also saw the advent of chromolithography. And, the most effective way of advertising was by putting an image of god on and making the product sacred! So, Ravi Varma’s version was being printed on everything and everywhere. It was widely accepted, because for the first time, every part of the country was looking at the same image when relating to the deities. Hence, these prints started reflecting how draupadi must look and became the base for the versions to come.
 The painting by an ISCKON artist, named Jadurani Dasi in 1986, inspires the fourth image. She has never lived in India and therefore has her own western take on the imagery. Draupadi has never been depicted in a white sari in India for it is only for the widows. Another reason why it was considered inappropriate for her to wear white at the time was because she was menstruating when the vastraharan happened.

Finally, the last image is from the painting by M.F. Hussain. He has captured the image quite appropriately, but he too has given it a new perspective. Unlike other depictions, draupadi is not a damsel in distress. The clothing is similar, but because of how the society works and thinks today, he has covered the bosom so that the depiction does not look vulgar, despite the fact that women did not wear anything on the upper torso. Yet, his painting was criticized for being disrespectful to our goddess. Another aspect that I found interesting is that he depicts draupadi in shades of grey if we think about it, Mahabharata was given to us orally. So we cannot truly picture what exactly was the color of her skin and clothes and so he has left it to our imagination.

There have been many more depictions through many different media, B.R Chopra’s Tv series, Shyam Benegal’s film called Kalyug, Grant Morison’s comic called 18 days, and many more. However, fascinated by Carl’s lecture, I decided to take up paintings to trace the changes.