Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c7.42.4

v1.c7.42.4

In the end the great fight blazed up which brought her the long wished for triumph of her reviled sons, but along with it sorrow abounding beyond words, and so finally, as an old woman with her blind brother-in-law and his wife, she went off into the penitential forest—a much-tried, much-loving mother, but no weak or faint-hearted one, as we shall yet see. Characteristic, too, is Draupadī’s behaviour (ii, 71.26 ff.). She has been gambled away by Yudhiṣṭhira, and has fallen into slavery and shameful ill-treatment, and Dhṛtarāṣṭra now offers her a favour. She says : “Yudhishṭhira must be free, that my son may not be called a slave’s son.”¹ The unmotherly disposition shown by Gāndhārī towards her son, which comes out especially in her sermon to Dhṛitarāshṭra, ii, 75, stands alone, and has been put in her mouth by a calculated partisan distortion.