ABSTRACT
First through an emissary and second in direct address to a full court of Hastinapura luminaries, DraupadI, the Pancala princess of the longest Indie epic of antiquity, The Mahabharata, asks a recondite question that begs legal erudition: "Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?" Her question, addressed primarily to her eldest husband, Yudhisthira, is charged and pertinent across time and space. Unlike Helen, Draupadi's Western counterpart around whom also a war was launched, as read in Homer's The Iliad, DraupadI speaks. She is given ample room to articulate her resistance, anger, intelligence, and equipoise, especially in moments when the patriarchs of the court stumble, and when the eldest wiseman of the lot, Bhishma, finding her question obscure, pronounces: "I cannot speak to the riddle (143)." If her gambling husband Yudhisthira had lost himself first, and not her, in his game of dice, as DraupadI had correctly estimated, then he would have relinquished all rights to his possessions and thus, the patriarchal law that rendered DraupadI his property would have become illegitimate.
