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146
Secondary Tales of the two Great Epics
And that is the bedrock of the problem - this polyandrous marriage of Draupadi. “... there is no possibility of any doubt that such customs as polyandry and levirate were existing in their society. But in course of time these customs were gradually coming into disfavour."284 "...although at the time the Māhābhārata came to be written, Kuru-Pāñcala...was a country where the most approved Āryan practices were observed, at the date at any rate of the events of the Saga, it might have been and apparently was a good deal behind this stage, considering the proneness for resorting to niyoga found in the former principality and the five-husband marriage which admittedly took place in the teeth of all śāstric precedents."285 The problem has been neatly put by Mr. Ghose in these words. “The fact is that the Brāhmaṇ author of this part of the Epic found himself up against a stubborn piece of the original Saga narrative which had become traditionally so fixed and notorious that it did not admit of exclusion or erasure, against a fact (in other words) which he could neither ignore, explain away nor satisfactorily account for."286 It has taxed all the ingenuities of the Brāhmin author of these portions of AdiP who was hard pressed by the incumbent necessity of explaining in a satisfactory manner this polyandrous marriage of Draupadi to a society in which the custom of polyandry had long before become obsolete, unheard-of, alien, even abhorrent. On the one hand, Dharmaśāztras were entirely against such a marriage. On the other hand, the portion had become an unavoidable part of the original parrative. What a hard pill it must have been to the epic-redactor can be surmised fro.n the number of ways in which he tries to explain away the unpalatable fact.
What could indeed be more puerile than to seek to account for this marriage (i) by the necessity which existed of seeing to that even a casually dropped remark of that living flame of a woman" (arccirivānalas ya),287 Kunti (who imagining that her son had brought in food to eat and not a live girl to marry had advised them to divide the same up amongst themselves), was literally fulfilled !288 (ii) by the apprehension which had to be eliminated that over such a prize girl the Pandavas might fall out amongst themselves in the way Sunda and Upasunda, 289 the Daityas, did over Tilottamā in the legend...?'290
There is also a tale of Draupadi's previous birth in which she, as an ascetic maiden, pleased lord Sankara by her fierce penance and asking in clation for a husband five times, obtained the boon of getting five husbands; she then chose the realisation
284 "The Origin of the Pandavas', M. J. Kashalikar, Journal of the Oriental Institute; Baroda.
Vol.XVI, No. 4, June 1967. p.359. 285 Indo-Aryan Literature and Culture. pp.198-99. 286 ibid. p 197. 287 AdiP. 185.7. 288 AdiP. 182.fr. 289 Adip. 201-204. 290 Indo-Aryan Literature and Culture, p.197.
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