The illustrious poet Upendra Bhanja’s Subhadra Parinay plays with the ‘abduction followed by saviour’ trope, but also finds a way to hint at Krishna’s will. In Odia, we find a sizeable genre on their romance. In Telugu, we come across Tallapaka Tirumalamma’s 15th-century Subhadra Kalyanam.
Regional authors, who came from centres of Vaishnavism, also took cue from the Bhagawat Puran. The premise of abduction is reduplicated and made so comedic that one begins to disbelieve the earlier violence of the act. The play ends with the resolution of this absurd conflict.
Arjun falls in love with the woman he saved and also finds himself conflicted about his prior love for Subhadra. Subhadra, who is in love with Arjun, is conflicted when she falls in love with her saviour (also Arjun), and again with a man in the guise of an ascetic (also Arjun). Arjun saves her but doesn’t know who she is. Kulasekhar Varma’s 10th century Subhadra Dhananjay takes away the burden of abduction from Arjun and dumps it on Duryodhan, who apparently sent a cloud-demon to abduct Subhadra. Courtly ‘epic’ romancesĪs the Bhagawat Puran began to be widely circulated, this new story of Subhadra and Arjun replaced the old. It licensed authors who were too uneasy with her abduction to create an elaborate and ornate romance. It, thereby, convincingly shifted Krishna’s lapse onto Balaram, and made abduction look like a better alternative. They introduced a subplot that wasn’t mentioned in the Mahabharata. They said Balaram had chosen Duryodhan as Subhadra’s groom without taking her consent. The second task required a bigger build-up. The composers of the Bhagawat Puran thus had the two-fold task of creating a sense of ‘consent’ and shifting the blame elsewhere.įor the first, they obliterated any mention of swayamvar and insinuated that Subhadra and Arjun reciprocated each other’s desires. With time, the divine cult of Krishna became bigger than other brahmanical gods. So, there was a need to revise myths, including that of Subhadra’s abduction. Many devotees would have found it difficult to entertain the possibility that their god sanctioned the abduction of his own sister. Her elder brother Balaram is enraged when he learns of the abduction, but Krishna pacifies him.Īlso read: Our daughters will see Sita as a single mother and Draupadi as a #Metoo warriorīhagawat Puran: Consenting abduction and introduction of Duryodhan In all of this, we know nothing about Subhadra’s consent, or who she would have chosen in the swayamvar had the decision been left to her. The word used here is ‘ aropyat’, which is strangely the same word that Valmiki used to describe the abduction of Sita in Ramayana. With Krishna’s approval, Arjun abducts Subhadra (fig. 1) because he doesn’t know what Subhadra’s decision in the swayamvar would be.įigure 1 | The Critical Edition of Mahabharata However, marriage by abduction is also a possibility for Arjun (fig. Krishna replies that swayamvar is the acceptable form of marriage for Kshatriyas.
His desires are awakened ( kandarpa samajayata), and he asks her brother Krishna about her. It begins with Arjun coming to Dwarka during a festival, and seeing Subhadra. The ‘Subhadra Haran’ episode in the Mahabharata is brief. Subhadra’s voice has been silenced and all the wrongdoings against her have either been disregarded or worse, romanticised. Subhadra’s painful story of abduction in the Mahabharata remains buried because of the nationalist glorification of Arjun and Abhimanyu over time. Generations of authors have glossed over a significant act of violence by their heroes, without which the Mahabharata (in its composed form) wouldn’t have been possible. The coronavirus lockdown in India has revived the Ramayan and Mahabharat series on Doordarshan for a younger generation, and has reinforced the collective silencing of Subhadra’s story, rather than ‘wronged’ Draupadi or Sita’s. Some figures have been deified and their wrongs condoned. However, over the last millennia and a half, this grey has slowly been erased. None of its main actors are flawless. And it is this shade of grey that adds to its importance. The epic encodes violent moments in our collective history. There is an old saying that one shouldn’t keep the Mahabharata in their home.
0 kommentar(er)
