The Palace of Illusions

Book Review

The Palace of Illusions

Read this poignantly told book for yourself. You won't stand
to hear Draupadi called a kritya ever again.
Love comes like lightning, and
disappears the same way. If you
are lucky, it strikes you right. If
not, youll spend your life
yearning for a man you cant
have.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Almost no parents name their daughter Draupadi - unless

it's for an upaay, an astrologer's trick to stave o the
hostile fates by pre-empting their ordained malice with
such an 'unlucky' name for the child.
For millennia, the fire-born Princess of Panchala has had a
bad press in the world of men. She's been casually, brutally
called a kritya (one who brings doom to her clan).
Ugly sayings based on elements of her story are used to
judge the bridal suitability of a girl, like this charming
South Indian Brahmin caution, 'Ati keshi pati naasha' - A
woman with long hair spells destruction for her husband.
So it's really intriguing to find a book that deals
dierently with Draupadi - not a Manushi article or a
Gender Studies tract on 'Mythical Women and Agency',
but a proper story, like Vyasa's epic, where Draupadi
begins.
But as often happens with the epics, the grandeur of the
story transcends the telling. This pattern can be seen at
Shiv Pratap Singh

ICS End-term Assignment

The Palace of Illusions

Book Review

work even with the tacky sets, gold crowns, bamboo bows
and bunches of pink plastic pearls in the tele-serial
versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata?
However shoddy the communicator's skills, it's almost
impossible to make an epic story flop. And Divakaruni is
not bad at all. In fact, she's pretty good in this book.
Author herself describes the "Mahabharat" as weaving
"myth, history, religion, science, philosophy, superstition,
and statecraft into its innumerable stories-within-stories."
No surprise, then, that her novel appears to bulge at the
seams with names, tales, crosscurrents and sidebar recaps,
for which the family tree and partial list of major
characters at the beginning seem scarcely adequate. At
times this is a novel that calls for an index.
Told in the first person, The Palace of Illusions takes us
through the epic in Draupadi's voice. From being born of
the sacrificial fire (thus her beautiful name 'Yajnaseni',
though the author doesn't use it, preferring 'Panchali'), to
her strange, lonely childhood, her tricky marriage to five
men with a persecution problem and a control freak
mother, her own, lovely home at last, and then the
unbelievable traumas that follow that nobody should have
to go through.
Having her home, freedom and honour gambled away,
almost stripped in public, her terrible life of hiding,
servitude, evading assault and finally, the grim justice of
war and a lonely death falling o a mountain track.
Most of this is 'true', as in the original epic. Divakaruni
adds other imaginative twists of her own: Which man
does Draupadi really love.How does she get to describe
the battle? And most resplendent discovery of all: who is
the one who really, truly loves her?
I can't bear to spoil the charm of these insights. Please
read this poignantly told book for yourself. You won't
stand to hear Draupadi called a kritya ever again, even
assuming you never liked it that they did in the first place.

Shiv Pratap Singh

ICS End-term Assignment