Silencing Draupadi

Women are good as long as they are quiet, docile, helpless and submissive. But a rebellious woman, a woman who challenges and provokes, asserts and speaks her mind, is never acceptable. She is dangerous as her weapons cannot be countered by these men. She has to be silenced. History they say is written by winners. So are epics. Except that the story tellers are men and it is carried forward too by men…..who want to continue to win.” Silencing of the voice of a woman is as old as civilisation and we find traces of the same from the world of mythology. Homer labelled speech as “the business of men” and Sophocles wrote that “silence is a woman’s garment”, the first laws to have come down to us included a speech code for women. This view is seen world over, where the woman doesn’t have a voice and if she does, it is to support that of the man. In ‘Silencing Draupadi’, Utkarsh Patel explores this idea in the form of a fictional recreation of a world gone by. Gone by??