Draupadi: Feminist of Bharat

Is feminism merely a Western, left-wing and Woke concept of looking at gender in binaries? In the Bharatiya context, feminism is as old as our civilisation itself. That is 8,000 years, as carbon dating has proved, and the concept of the Mother Goddess is the idea of gender as balance and harmony in a nature-centric cosmos and not as a binary opposition to an anthropocentric world. These stories need to be retold, reimagined, and reconstructed. These stories, and particularly the female characters became the victims of patriarchy, reducing them to convenient embodiments of conventionality, rendering them mind-blowingly retrograde. Despite their powerful individual stories, the women characters from our mythology have been largely ignored. Sadly, it is this prejudiced interpretation of mythology that has, in many ways, shaped our concepts about the women of our society. But we can use these same stories to deconstruct these forgotten or distorted characters and employ them as a creative means to question and contest these stereotypes.