What timeless literature tells us about injustice, war and human nature

A work of literature is called great when it remains contemporaneous across time spans and ages. In our civilisation, the Mahabharata is one such epic. One can spend a lifetime poring over the plots and subplots of this epic, examining the complexity of its countless characters, the inter-relationships and crosscurrents among them.

Why is it so? Have our moral values, emotions, and social complexity not changed a bit over the ages? It does seem that when we look closely at the incidents of the Mahabharata that nothing has changed.

Draupadi’s cheer-haran (disrobing) in the Grand Assembly of the Kauravas is one such incident. Dhritrashtra’s Grand Assembly was graced by fearless, brave warriors without number. Celebrated intellectuals, spiritual greats, and policy analysts – all were present there. In this assembly of greats, Draupadi was dragged in by the hair like some object, like a seized object, and her disrobing began.

Not one man in this Grand Assembly of Aryavrat’s most powerful people dared to unseal his lips in the face of this outrage. Courage, bravery, morality – all got muffled up when confronted with the might of the State.

Similar outrages have been recurring in every era over the ages.

But in that Assembly, there was one man who did dare...

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