The Palace of Illusions - A review

  The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is Mahabharata told by Draupadi. It attempts to give voice to the heroine (or the villainess?) of Mahabharata – her travails, her innermost feelings, her confusions, predicaments and her vulnerabilities.

My verdict: This is a good first book on Mahabharata for the uninitiated ones; nothing more than that. I had to labor through the book, to keep my commitment not to leave any book unfinished.

Chitra brings the woman alive in Draupadi. The prose is dragging at many places for people familiar with the context. Unnecessary details turn the reader off.

In order to keep the readers stay with the book, some relationships and incidents are brought to focus and fictionalized (deviating from the original text?). The lead character’s enigmatic relationship with Krishna, her fascination towards Karna (I sometimes felt that the author did not bring in the extra-marital angle for fear of criticisms from self proclaimed puritans), her discontentment with the mother-in-law and the jealousy when her husbands’ court other women.

The most common rendition of Draupadi in literature and TV serials is of a highly tolerant, loving wife. The book feebly tries to question this. There are many instances where we encounter the lead character’s realization that she had been the cause of the war, the destruction, death of thousands including her kids and brother. She is mostly shown as any other female, who gets upset when other women come into the lives of men she adores. The book gets a little bit ‘Bollywood’ when the heroine and the actual hero of this book (Karna) are shown as mutual bête-noire, but carefully nurturing an admiration for each other below the surface.

I think Chitra worked on weaving a novel out of a simple situation – What happens if Draupadi tells her story? Will she talk about her hidden desires? Her hatred? Her unresolved conundrums? I don’t think there is anything wrong here. But for a discerning reader with a good understanding of Mahabharata, the story becomes a thin thread of predicable incidents, which leaves him unsatisfied.

Hence, I will not recommend this book to people who are looking at building their foundation on knowledge about Mahabharata. It best suits a starter.

PS: Microsoft Word kept warning me against using the term ‘her husbands’. Looks like they did not think of that possibility

- Chalked by Sanjay Gopinath

http://vagabondmind.blogspot.in