I am not sure what I expected walking into a book discussion on the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, on a Sunday evening at the India International Centre in New Delhi, but I think somewhere at the back of my head I assumed it would feel distant from me, like most things do when they are treated as very important and very old. For a while it did feel that way; the panel was serious and the room was quiet and respectful and everyone spoke carefully. And then something shifted, and I started feeling this thing that I did not have a name for at the time, but which I think was actually just the tension between genuinely loving something and also being honest about it.

The book being discussed was From Death to Immortality: The Great War of the Mahabharata by Dr. Kavita A. Sharma and Indu Ramchandani and the panel included academics and poets and a Bharatanatyam dancer and people who have clearly spent a very long time inside this text. There were things said that evening that stayed with me, like the point that wars are never really sudden, that they are always built up slowly over years through accumulated desire and jealousy, and the particular human stubbornness of refusing to let go of what we think we deserve. I found that genuinely useful as a way of thinking not just about the Kurukshetra war but about almost every conflict I have watched happen around me, which is the kind of thing the Mahabharata does when it is at its best.

The Women in Mahabharata

But underneath all of it I kept feeling something that I could not quite put words to in the room and only started to understand properly on the way home, which was that the love in that room for this text had become so large that it was quietly setting a limit on how far anyone was willing to take the conversation.

The Mahabharata is not as feminist as I would have wanted it to be and I have been thinking about why it feels so difficult to just say that plainly. Draupadi is one of the most vivid and compelling characters I have ever encountered in any text but she is also a woman who gets put up as a stake in a dice game by her own husband and then stands in a court full of men and asks the most precise and devastating questions any character in the epic asks and gets answers that are either evasive or silent. The women in the Mahabharata are so often the sharpest people in whatever room they are in and also almost always the people with the least say over what actually happens to them, and I think when we gather to talk about what this epic teaches us about how to live we owe it to ourselves to sit with that properly rather than appreciating Draupadi's strength and quietly moving on from the conditions that made that strength necessary.

And it is not like the patriarchy in the Mahabharata is a detail sitting on the edge of the story that you can sort of acknowledge and then set aside. It is inside the structure of the whole thing; it shapes who the heroes are and whose pain becomes someone else's turning point and how the idea of dharma gets applied differently depending on whether you are a man or a woman in that world. I know the text was written when it was written and I am not asking it to have been something it was not, but I do think that when we present it today as a source of wisdom about how to live we have a responsibility to name what it gets wrong and not just celebrate what it gets right.

There is also the question of literalism that nobody in the room quite wanted to land on directly. After the event ended I had a conversation with someone who said something very straightforward, that the Mahabharata is literature and should be read as literature, that we can take real things from it without treating every word of it as fact. And I noticed that even though it was a simple and reasonable thing to say, it felt almost transgressive in the context of the evening we had just come from, which probably tells you something about the way we have been taught to hold this text.

Understanding of Grief 

None of this is me saying the Mahabharata is not extraordinary because I think it genuinely is, and I think the scholars who have given years to studying it are doing something that matters. The understanding of grief in this text, the way it shows how destruction moves slowly through families and generations without anyone quite meaning it to go that far, I have not found anything else that does that in quite the same way.

What I keep coming back to is that the Mahabharata has survived this long not because people received it quietly and agreed with all of it but because every generation brought their own friction to it, their own lives and contradictions and questions that the text had not anticipated, and that friction is actually what kept it alive. 

A young woman reading Draupadi's story today and feeling angry about it is not being irreverent. She is doing exactly what you are supposed to do with a text this old and this serious, which is to feel it in your own body and think hard about what it means for where you actually are. We do not honour the Mahabharata by protecting it from that questioning. We honour it by continuing to argue with it, the way every generation before us did, and trusting that the great epic is strong enough to hold the weight of an honest question.

(The author is a first year Political Science student and geopolitical researcher specialising in great power politics, South Asian studies and international strategic affairs. She brings to her work an interest in how ancient civilisational narratives continue to shape modern statecraft and identity. Views expressed are personal. She can be contacted at jiyashri2121@gmail.com )