The Mahabharata follows the familial clash-turned-war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the two lineages from the ruling house of Hastinapur. One of the key scenes occurs midway through when the Pandavas play a game of dice to win back their kingdom from their cousins. As the eldest Pandava, Yudhishtira, continues to lose (out of a vice for gambling), the five Pandava brothers are soon left with all but one possession: Draupadi, their wife through polyandrous marriage. Yudhishtira loses her as well, and in their triumph the Kauravas begin to disrobe her in full view of the Hastinapur court, as an act of humiliation to their cousins. As the sari is unwrapped from her body, Draupadi prays to Krishna, who divines a neverending cloth of sari that continues to unfurl, leaving her body covered.

[Note: I have written on this scene prior at The Millions. Footnote formatting is unclear on this platform]

The influence of the Mahabharata on Indian culture stands on par with the Greek epics in the West, as part myth, part liturgy, and part morality play. Since, the story has been compiled across India’s languages, including into Persian during the years of Turkic rule. Today, in an India marked with religious majoritarian fundamentalism, which positions itself as a righter-of-historical-wrongs by taking back the country from its legacy of Muslim invaders, the Mahabharata stands as a polemic work. Counter to this, I consider my trajectory as a student of letters and literature, with focus on the primacy of a physical text – a tradition that thrived under those very Muslim courts. As I wrote in my Literary Text biography, the development of India’s oral literary culture alongside advents of print posits many gaps in the historical record to its authors, and by that, the authority of where cultural narratives arise from. In a country where literature is adopted deeply into the populous to consider as its own, we could take from Benjamin that the notion of critique can quickly fall to the wayside. It is for this reason that this moment in the Mahabharata, feels an apt means of explaining my approach to textual practice. The physical creation of texts presents many skillsets and challenges towards their production, but it is important for me to consider their reception and the environment they will live in.

What is at question is how it, through various forms, is reproduced. Walter Benjamin notes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” I myself grew up with an illustrated collection of 24 books. In 1988, the nationalized television network Doordarshan produced a television adaptation that became appointment viewing (my mother often talks about how empty the streets were when a new episode aired). In his piece, Benjamin states that the removal of ritual is what creates the space for mechanical reproduction, and that its aura “withers.” So what is then strained from the narrative’s impact as it proliferates? What to make of art created through the same processes, and that which gains new communal value? Benjamin’s point on aura is that  it “withers” with mechanical reproduction: “The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” It is with these notions I entered the course of Text Technologies, aware that some of the most seminal works I grew up with do not have clear textual origins.

The dice game scene stands as a fulcrum point on cultural moores around gender; a woman’s body is both sacred and yet open to subjugation, a dynamic that continues to play out in media and cultural narratives in the Subcontinent. Textiles remain one of the key technologies through which cultural and historical narratives are told – the adorning of clothing on Hindu idols, the gifting of jewelry and dress during weddings, the manufacturing of garments from East India Company ports. In an oral literary culture, such are the sites through which the mythical, liturgical, and moral narrative plays out. Dress and costuming are key features of the world-famous Bollywood dance numbers, which combine with Persian-descended Urdu lyrics to be the popular texts of the day. With the rise of the Hindustva right-wing in the modern day, such an ancient myth taken as history continues to be a political powderkeg, such as the consecration of the Ram Mandir on the land of the demolished Babri Masjid. Hence, while the story can be republished and retold, what is more impactful is how text technologies such as clothing, art, land, and more continue to be ways with which people engage with their social and political identities.

When discussing the unpublished corpus of Emily Dickinson and her variations on poems, I mused on the idea of the “forever book,” the continuous text that is never finished, only iterated on and revised. Many of the critics cite the primacy of the text as tantamount, such as Lori Emerson’s notion that, “media history can be conceived as a shifting practice of uncovering the ways in which media themselves, in a very physical, concrete sense, engender and delimit what can be said, what can be thought” (Emerson 132). This is followed up by Chartier who writes, “the text exists in and of itself, separate from anything material, we need to remember that there is no text apart from the physical support that offers it for reading” (Chartier 9). While this is important to consider, a sprawling story such as the Mahabharata makes it inscrutable for certain ideas to rise above when it is so ingrained in the culture. It is important to note that following the attempted disrobing, Draupadi then shames the Pandavas for failing to protect her, asserting she is not property and that to bet her in the dice game is fraud and negates Yudhishtira’s losses (he loses it anyway in an all-or-nothing bet following this). As such, Draupadi’s sari is one that repels the “human designs” and yet, is rarely the lesson elicited from the scene by devout Hindus, instead one of her piety to Krishna as absolute salvation.

So what prevents the unfurled sari from being the poignant political metaphor in favor of feminism, rather than devotion? As we discussed textiles and wearables in more depth, I was faced with questions about how the communication system of wearable technology is a closed one between user and technology, and what steps can be taken to subvert or intervene. While Draupadi’s sari is not a new “technology,” its divine auspices encode saris worn today as symbols of Indian female purity. Despite styles and designs that vary across the region, as a garment they are a tradition as opposed to western dress, markers of cosmopolitanism veering from “Indianness.” Fast fashion pre-stiched saris mark women who have no time for antiquated ideals in the modern world, and yet when it’s time to get married, the ordeal of dressing up as a bride in her red chunni becomes an elaborate affair. As Ryan says in Garments of Paradise, “WT rehearses an age-old dialogue between society and the body that proposes a process of invisibility based on an ideal of pure functionality and pure information, and ultimately a pure uniformity of dress.” (Ryan 103). Draping the sari makes them again one of the tribe, plucked outside of modernity.

In an era where we are growing in our engagement with narratives through both text and paratext, across platforms and media – what new affect is achieved in these types of readings? Examining Dickinson’s writings, Perlow writes, “they might also imagine a world in which we could be possessed by our feelings and possess them too.” (85). Do they reinforce the affect (intended or otherwise) of the end product’s themes and emotional register, or does the audience begin to draw a different response? Draupadi’s humiliation rests as one of the core moments in the Mahabharata of bloodless disgust and horror that plays out on the streets. Misogynistic violence in India is an issue that has been covered time and again, from errant cat-calls to brutal rapes. In keeping with Perlow’s idea of “possession,” women are forcibly ensnared to act out Draupadi’s predicament, which in turn poses the question of where their defense comes from? The Pandavas, of course, do little to defend their wife. As protagonists of “Great India,” they offer little by way of role model or moral guidance in this situation.

The salient notions of author- and reader-ship that continued to arise throughout the course were questions around how mechanical reproduction of a text, across many forms and media, provoke similar or different types of response. Especially when taking texts that have wide influence such as the Mahabharata, to what degree is the authorship still present, and what political agency does the reader (or reproducer) have in continuing to shape it? Does the proliferation of a text gradually strain itself from authorship, and hence make it vulnerable to malleability? Does the technology of the text offer different entry points of performing a media archeology, and hence different positionalities to its political and social functions?

Works Cited:

Benjamin, Walter E. “The Work in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1969.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, Stanford UP, 1994. 

Emerson, Lori. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 

​​Perlow, Seth. The Poem Electric: Technology and the Lyric. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Ryan, Susan Elizabeth. Garments of Paradise. MIT Press, 2014.