Yama's boons

Yama's five boon-offering speeches are as follows:

The prohibitive words, absent from the final boon-offering speech, are vinā (satyavato) asya jīvitam: “except for his (Satyavat's) life”. (The word punaḥ in the second and third speeches just means “again”.)

Why does Yama eventually offer a boon without stipulating that the return of Satyavat's life is prohibited? That is the dramatic question. From one angle the joke is on Yama, for being careless.

Once Yama has granted Sāvitrī and Satyavat the boon of a hundred sons, it may seem that when granting further boons he cannot reasonably prohibit Satyavat's revival.Footnote ⁵ But the boon of a hundred sons for Sāvitrī, made as it is while Satyavat is still dead, evokes a situation mentioned by Kuntī at 1.112, when she tells Pāṇḍu the story of Vyuṣitāśva and Bhadrā. Vyuṣitāśva died, but Bhadrā mourned most effectively over her husband's corpse, thus winning the boon – in this instance, from the dead husband himself – of bearing sons by him even though he was dead. So she had three Śālva sons and four Madra sons (trīñ śālvāṃś caturo madrān sutān, 1.112:33). Though Kuntī's story adverts to the necrophilia of the aśvamedha rite (Hiltebeitel Reference Hiltebeitel, Adluri and Bagchee2011, pp. 275–277), it also links to Sāvitrī – whose father is a Madra and whose husband is a Śālva – and implies that it could be possible for Sāvitrī to have Satyavat's sons without Satyavat being revived.

If Yama really wants Satyavat to stay dead, he is careless in omitting, fifth time around, the prohibition of Satyavat's revival. But what else can he do? Sāvitrī has discovered how to make Yama offer her any boon except Satyavat's life, and she has made it clear that she is not willing to let him leave with Satyavat's soul without doing whatever she can to stop him.Footnote ⁶ The only way Yama might get away with Satyavat's soul is to change his policy on boon-granting, ignore Sāvitrī's next salvo of verses, and just keep heading south. But it seems that his divine integrity will not allow him suddenly to remain unmoved by Sāvitrī's statements and demonstrations of dharma. And if that is so, then his giving in to her primary wish is just a matter of time, the outer limit to which would be set, in storytelling terms, by the number of other unfortunate things in Sāvitrī's life that have been mentioned in the story so far and might be remedied through other boons chosen in the meanwhile.

From this perspective, the narrative necessity for Satyavat's father to be blind, for example, or for him to have recently lost his kingdom, could potentially be explained simply by the storyteller's desire to give Sāvitrī some more things to ask for before Yama eventually gives in. But this would be a misjudgement, because, as I will show, Satyavat's father's blindness and loss of kingdom are significant details within the stereotyped lineal situation that the story showcases: the situation whereby two patrilines each need a son, but there is only one son to go round. Nonetheless, it is worth keeping in mind that the story is told in broad strokes such that, in its pivotal scene, a number of emblematic problems can be remedied all at once.

Sāvitrī the putrikā

Consider Sāvitrī's relationship with her father's patriline. According to the norm presented in the Sanskrit Dharmaśāstras, a daughter is to be given away in marriage, at a young age, to another suitable family. Her natal family's duties with respect to her are principally to make sure that this happens; thereafter she is the primary responsibility of the family into which she has married, and for whom she will have sons. Once she has been married off, her natal family will concentrate on their own sons (through imported brides).

But Sāvitrī's father, King Aśvapati, had no sons; and before Sāvitrī was born he undertook an eighteen-year vow in the hope of having some. This vow included recitation of the famous sāvitrī formula (Ṛgveda 3.62:10, also known as the gāyatrī), and so it was the goddess Sāvitrī who came to grant him a boon. Aśvapati asked for many sons.

The goddess Sāvitrī insists that the terms of the boon have been set by her superior, and there is no point in Aśvapati complaining to her about it. Aśvapati might presumably want to argue for a son instead, but he does as he is told, asking only – redundantly and rather amusingly – that the child appear soon.

The girl is born, and named after the goddess and the recited verse. But since she has no brothers, one wonders who will take on the responsibility – normally taken by the eldest son – of regularly feeding the patrilineal ancestors via the śrāddha ritual, and of having sons to do the same in turn. I quote from Ganguli's commentarial footnote in the Anuśāsanaparvan (at what is verse 13.44:14 in the critical edition):

The brotherless maiden is something of a legend in old Sanskrit literature:Footnote ⁹ keen for a partner, but to be shunned by good men. No wonder, then, that despite Sāvitrī's loveliness (she looks like a goddess, like Śrī in human form, with a slender waist, broad hips, and eyes like lotus petals, 3.277:23–31), there are no suitors for her hand.

The reason given for the lack of male interest in Sāvitrī is that potential partners were “warded off by [her] brilliance” (tejasā prativāritaḥ, 3.277:27). Despite Jamison's parenthetical comment that “many modern women will recognize this plight” (Jamison Reference Jamison1996, p. 245), it seems to me rather unlikely that Sāvitrī was too glorious to be wooed. I take this explanation as something of a joke, with a nice pun to boot (the verb vṛ meaning ‘ward off’ as well as ‘choose in marriage’), and instead I follow Jamison's endnoted suggestion that: “As she is also the only child of Aśvapati, her potential status of ‘appointed daughter’ may have put people off as well, though this obstacle is not mentioned in the story” (Jamison Reference Jamison1996, p. 305 n.96). I imagine the text's audience would infer the ‘no-brothers explanation’ without it being made explicit: no one wanted to marry her because, despite her abundant attractions, she would have seemed very unlikely to make a good patrilineal pativratā wife.Footnote ¹⁰

Satyavat's lineal death

As discussed by Jamison and others, if a man fails to find his daughter a husband, according to ancient Indian marital theory she is entitled to find one for herself (Jamison Reference Jamison1996, pp. 236–250; Schmidt Reference Schmidt1987, pp. 76–83; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1961, pp. 606–608). In Sāvitrī's case, her father sends her out to do just that, with ministers to accompany her. Being away from her family (and meeting people who do not already know her) might seem to be an advantage. In any case, she conducts what Meyer calls “the fairest Svayaṃvara in the Epic . . . a proceeding that by no means fits into the framework of the usual or court tales of the Svayaṃvara” (Meyer Reference Meyer1930, p. 78 n.3); and she comes back with the news that she has made her choice.Footnote ¹¹

Nārada is visiting Aśvapati at this point, and when he hears that Sāvitrī has chosen Satyavat, the only son of the blind and realmless King Dyumatsena, he reveals that although Satyavat is virtuous and from a virtuous family, he will die in exactly one year's time. Sāvitrī is accordingly advised to choose another man. But she refuses; and so Nārada tells Aśvapati to give her away as she wishes, and then he leaves.

Perhaps Nārada knows what lies in store for the chosen groom because he habitually frequents all manner of different lokas and keeps all kinds of exalted company. Nonetheless, it may seem that his comment makes explicit something that was already implicit within the narrative. Under propitious circumstances, one might expect one year hence to mark the birth of Sāvitrī's first son. (As the story goes, Yama comes for Satyavat when Satyavat and Sāvitrī are out on a fruit-gathering expedition.) So, since Sāvitrī's brotherlessness has already alerted us to her father's probable lineal interest in her son, we can also interpret Satyavat's impending death in lineal terms. If Satyavat and Sāvitrī's son is commandeered by Aśvapati,Footnote ¹² then Satyavat will not receive the śrāddha offerings that his genital son (and his son, and his, and so on) would ordinarily offer him, to keep him alive in lineal heaven; so he will starve and die, and his death will be because his wife's son is his and yet not his. As a lineal death, Satyavat's death can then represent the lineal death that might occur whenever any daughter is used as a putrikādharmiṇī.Footnote ¹³

In some scenarios it would only be Satyavat who would die in this way; but in the present situation the matter is more serious, because King Dyumatsena has no sons other than Satyavat, and he would thus be as dependent as Satyavat is upon the future śrāddha offerings of Sāvitrī's sons. This is made explicit when Satyavat repeats to Sāvitrī what his parents have told him previously:

Dyumatsena's blindness

Given how precious Satyavat is for King Dyumatsena's line, why would Dyumatsena allow him to marry an only daughter? From one perspective the answer would be: because otherwise the situation would not be so dramatic and paradigmatic. But in terms of narrative content, there is no suggestion that Dyumatsena and his wife appreciate the danger they are in. Aśvapati takes Sāvitrī with him and goes to visit Dyumatsena to give Sāvitrī away, and Dyumatsena receives them with every courtesy, agrees to the match, and even says, at the end of the dialogue, that he had always hoped to establish a marriage alliance with Aśvapati's family. But he expresses concern that Sāvitrī might not like the rigours of forest life, and that since his family has fallen on hard times, they are perhaps not the most desirable in-laws.

During this brief exchange (3.279:8–14) Dyumatsena expresses reservations concerning the match, but these fail to dissuade Aśvapati from his intention. It is hard to tell whether Dyumatsena is just being modest and polite, or whether he actually wants to avoid this marriage; but in any case, the question of whose lineage the offspring will support is not raised, so if Aśvapati has Sāvitrī in mind as his putrikā, he is keeping his cards close to his chest, and if Dyumatsena has any fears on that score, he keeps quiet about them. Dyumatsena is already acquainted with Aśvapati's family to some extent, so perhaps he would know that Sāvitrī is an only child; or perhaps he does not know this.

If it seems as though Dyumatsena is rather precipitous in agreeing to the marriage, he is blind! Sāvitrī has already told Nārada and Aśvapati that while Dyumatsena was ruling his Śālva realm he became blind, and in his hour of weakness he was deposed and exiled by “a neighbour who was an old enemy” (sāmīpyena . . . pūrvavairiṇā, 3.278:8, tr. Smith Reference Smith2009, p. 217). He is in a bad spot; and it seems that in his situation he is glad of any noble marriage his son might make. Perhaps Sāvitrī's choice of this man is connected with her family's search for a family vulnerable and needy enough to accept their daughter. As well as serving as an explanation for his loss of kingdom, Dyumatsena's blindness can be interpreted, regardless of his alleged old wish to establish marriage links with Aśvapati's family, in light of his apparently blithe acceptance of his crucial son's marriage to a brotherless daughter.

Here we can compare the blind Dhṛtarāṣṭra – the uncle and uncle-in-law of the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī, who are listening to the story. As is clear from the various remonstrations of Vidura, Saṃjaya and several others, as well as being physically blind, Dhṛtarāṣṭra is blind to the likely consequences of his decisions and actions (see Hudson Reference Hudson, Brodbeck and Black2007); and in this he resembles Dyumatsena. In both cases the blindness bears upon the business of the character's son. But although Dhṛtarāṣṭra in his blindness will suffer enormously and lose his sons, Dyumatsena in contrast will keep his son, and will have his sight restored by Yama's boon, thanks to Sāvitrī. The comparison might thus lead one to Dhṛtarāṣṭra's extra, concubinal son Yuyutsu, who, as Yudhiṣṭhira points out (6.41:93), will carry the piṇḍa line for Dhṛtarāṣṭra after the Kurukṣetra war, but who is not a legitimate kṣatriya heir as Satyavat's son will turn out to be for Dyumatsena.

Dyumatsena's loss of kingdom

Like the lineal drama between Dhṛtarāṣṭra's sons and Pāṇḍu's, the lineal drama between Dyumatsena's line and Aśvapati's is enhanced by the fact that both families are royal. The necessity for any king to arrange his son as the next king, and thus to arrange his family's (and his realm's) lineal succession, makes stories of royal families particularly well suited to the playing out of lineal problematics in more or less stereotyped forms; and this is what we see in those works of Sanskrit literature – and perhaps of all literature – that deal longitudinally with royal families. In the Aśvapati/Dyumatsena story, because Dyumatsena has already lost his kingdom, the stage seems set for the takeover of his land to be followed – or overlaid – by the takeover of his line through Satyavat's marriage to a putrikā from a different royal family. As the functional representative of his patriline, Dyumatsena's tenuous grasp of lineal heaven is almost exactly superimposed upon his tenuous grasp of the land that he would wish to be handed down from father to son within his patriline in the following generations. And this fits, because a royal patriline can only keep its kingdom if it succeeds in having a good heir in every generation.

In this respect, one might interpret the chronology of the narrative as deliberately warped, and superimpose elements that are presented as successive – Dyumatsena's loss of his kingdom, and Dyumatsena's agreement to his son's marriage to Sāvitrī.Footnote ¹⁵ One might even interpret the unnamed ‘old enemy’, who has deposed Dyumatsena and appropriated his kingdom, to be Aśvapati himself. Either way, interpretively adjusting the chronology would allow Dyumatsena to lose his kingdom as a consequence of accepting the poisoned gift that is Sāvitrī. The magical manner in which Sāvitrī solves Dyumatsena's and Satyavat's problems glosses over but does not obscure the suggestion that she is (she embodies) their cause; that would be why solving them is her brief.

In thinking about this issue, one wonders whether religious studies commentators might perhaps have been rather slow to think through properly the effects of such magical episodes upon the ancient audience. The reason why the story of Yama magically granting specific boons looks tall to us is because it is, in those details, a very tall story; it surely anticipates being seen as such, and it thus anticipates interpretive speculation.

Sāvitrī the pativratā, and Yama's boons revisited

Once Sāvitrī is married, the narrative shows her behaving like a model patrilineal wife to an extraordinary degree; a romantic ideal of sorts. But Ray suggests that “the first authors to typecast Sāvitrī in a romantic light were the colonialists, nationalists and European romanticists” (Ray, Reference Ray2006, p. 23); and Weiss, reviewing scholarship on Sāvitrī, says that: “In western ideology, the ideal of female fidelity and subservience is well defined, and its correspondence to the Hindu ideal seems to obviate the necessity for in-depth analysis” (Weiss Reference Weiss1985, p. 261). Nonetheless, it is right and proper for Sāvitrī to be seen as a model pativratā, because to become this from her situation as an intended putrikā is rare and special, and because although she no doubt does it in response to her new family, she does it effectively alone, or in partnership with death. Confronting Satyavat's imminent lineal demise, she does three days of supreme tapas, and then she makes everything proper in response to Yama's boons.Footnote ¹⁶

If we follow the suggested interpretation of Dyumatsena's loss of sight and kingdom, the first two boons – Dyumatsena's regaining his sight and kingdom – imply that Sāvitrī will have her children for Satyavat and for Dyumatsena's line after all, as per Dharmaśāstra norm. The third boon – a hundred sons for Aśvapati – relates to her father's line; the first two boons will presumably cause a problem for that line, and the third boon promises a solution. The fourth boon says that Sāvitrī and Satyavat will have many children, and at this point we might think that these could be distributed between the two lines, as suggested by Kuntī's story of Bhadrā – who has three Śālvas and four Madras – and, for example, by the Mahābhārata's story of Ṛśyaśṛṅga and Śāntā.Footnote ¹⁷ The fifth boon is Satyavat's life, which consolidates the first two boons.

When Sāvitrī has named the fifth boon and Yama has granted it, Yama gives a summary of what he is granting her all told, including the following detail:

So the solution for Aśvapati, about which we were naturally curious, will be for him to have sons from a woman other than Sāvitrī, and thus for Sāvitrī to have a hundred little brothers without having to give birth to them herself.

Sāvitrī and Satyavat go home

After Yama has granted all the boons and Satyavat is alive again, it is getting late in the day, and it seems that the couple will have to camp out for the night. Satyavat is not happy at the prospect. He is upset at the thought of his parents worrying that he, upon whom they depend, might have come to grief; and because of this, Sāvitrī and Satyavat travel through the night to get home. The image of Satyavat coming to grief matches the interpreted situation earlier in the day, before Sāvitrī made her deal with death; and it is presented here as if out of sequence, since by this later point everything has, in principle, been solved. But in this delayed moment, Dyumatsena and his wife Śaibyā are indeed worrying; they have become convinced of Satyavat's possible death, and they are trawling the āśramas looking for news.

Dyumatsena – who can now see – cries in anguish: “Ah, my son, ah, my good daughter-in-law, where are you, where are you?” (hā putra hā sādhvi vadhūḥ kvāsi kvāsīty, 3.282:9, tr. Smith Reference Smith2009, p. 230). The sentiment matches the scene very well, but the scene – and the whole sequence between the granting of the boons and the young couple's arrival home – might seem rather narratively gratuitous, or even a bit perverse; it is a new tack to the story, and is omitted in Leslie's summary presented earlier. Nonetheless, the parents-in-law's son-hunting āśrama-tour parallels Sāvitrī's husband-hunting tīrtha-tour near the beginning of the story. Also, it fits very well in allowing a displaced and delayed presentation of the existential moment before Sāvitrī reinvents herself – with Dyumatsena, Śaibyā and Satyavat all suffering, separately and together.

Many new characters also appear in this extra section of the story: Suvarcas, Gautama, his pupil, the ṛṣis, Bhāradvāja, Dālbhya, Māṇḍavya and Dhaumya. The association of these characters with Sāvitrī's switch from the putrikā to the pativratā mode is underlined at this juncture by their telling the worried old couple in no uncertain terms, in sequence one after another in various ways, that Satyavat is still alive (3.282:10–19); and only then do Satyavat and Sāvitrī turn up and prove it, and explain why they are so late back. We might infer that these ṛṣis supported Sāvitrī's revolution against the putrikā method; and it is here that we see “a socio-political message of vast proportions, seeking to invalidate all other versions of femininity” (Ray Reference Ray2006, p. 23). The ṛṣis certainly congratulate Sāvitrī on her deeds: “The line of the king was sinking in a lake of darkness, overcome by disasters, when it was saved by you” (nimajjamānaṃ vyasanair abhidrutaṃ kulaṃ narendrasya tamomaye hrade ǀ tvayā . . . samuddhṛtaṃ, 3.282:43, tr. Smith Reference Smith2009, p. 232).

We now hear how Dyumatsena's kingdom is regained according to the surface story: the neighbour who had taken it is killed by his own minister, his gang are also killed, his army flees, and a party comes to find Dyumatsena and invite him back to his old realm. Then Sāvitrī has a hundred sons, and so does her mother Mālavī.

And so Aśvapati has a hundred sons. The solution to Aśvapati's lineal crisis, after his daughter Sāvitrī switches sides, seems simple and elegant – so much so that we wonder again what it was that prevented it earlier, and meant Sāvitrī had to be a putrikā in the first place. Aśvapati had no sons, and now, because of Yama's third boon, he has a hundred. But there may be a sting in the tale for Aśvapati, because the hundred latter-day sons of Mālavī – Mālavī who we learned earlier (at 3.277:22, when Sāvitrī was born) is the daughter of a king – are called Mālavas, apparently following in the line of their maternal grandfather. So it seems that the sonlessness that afflicted Aśvapati at the start, and which led to the appointment of Sāvitrī as a putrikā, could have been caused by his own wife's being a putrikā herself. And it is not clear that the third boon has really solved this problem.

If we review our earlier speculation that the takeover of the kingdom by Dyumatsena's neighbour might have represented Aśvapati and his putrikā trick, we can extend our speculations to the identity of the neighbour's murderous minister (amātya, 3.283:3). One possibility might be to identify this minister as a representation of Sāvitrī. A better option might be to identify him as Aśvapati's father-in-law, the Mālava king.

Regardless of this detail, the consequence of Aśvapati's lineal sonlessness has been averted within Dyumatsena's line. The main point of the story is that a woman's father should not take her sons for his own line; but also shown quite clearly now, in retrospect, is that one of the reasons why he might want to do so is because his own son is not lineally his own. This consequence means that despite the fact that no daughter of Dyumatsena is mentioned, we can imagine putrikā usage spreading in a rippling chain through a wide community of possible intermarriage, unless it is checked at some point.

In this story, the consequence of putrikā usage is checked by the disciplined resolve of Sāvitrī. And this female fulcrum can suggest a third, even more preferable representational identity for Dyumatsena's neighbour's murderous minister – to wit: Aśvapati's wife Mālavī. In any case, if we have been given a glimpse of the infectious nature of putrikā usage, we are also encouraged to imagine the similar counter-infectious consequence of women being lineally pativratā, through their sons, to their husbands. By being pativratā in this way, such women would ensure that their fathers keep trying for sons of their own; and thus the story of one woman's reformation can stand for a reformation in lineal custom across a community of intermarriage – a reformation that can then become constitutive of what it means to be ‘high class’.

Draupadī's mirror

Mārkaṇḍeya concludes the Sāvitrī story as follows:

Draupadī has already saved the Pāṇḍavas at the dice match by intervening (thanks to Yudhiṣṭhira's having staked her) and winning the rescue of her husbands, in a manner comparable to Sāvitrī, through successive boons (given by Dhṛtarāṣṭra), as a result of her knowledge of dharma (2.58–65). She has also done her bit, while living in the forest, to ensure Yudhiṣṭhira's resolve to regain his kingdom and pay Duryodhana back for the insulting way in which she was treated on that occasion (see 3.28–33). But Mārkaṇḍeya uses the future tense here: she will save the Pāṇḍavas.

How precisely are we to take the tathaiva (‘in just the same way’)? Perhaps the reference is to the getting back of the kingdom – an ongoing project as yet unfulfilled. Brian Black, pondering the reference of Mārkaṇḍeya's prediction, draws attention to an important future move:

Black's comments here are suggestive, and we will return to this passage. But first let us think of the tathaiva in terms of our specific discussions of Sāvitrī. Could Draupadī be a sleeping putrikā, who stands in need of converting herself into a pativratā? On the face of it she is already firmly pledged to the pativratā way; this is implied by Yudhiṣṭhira's initial question (3.277:3, quoted earlier), and it has been made clear when she spoke on the subject to Kṛṣṇa's wife Satyabhāmā, explaining how devoted she is to the Pāṇḍavas (3.222–223). She also has several brothers. Sāvitrī herself was only ever a putrikā in between the lines; but if Yudhiṣṭhira were to have heard that subtext and become subject to fears of his own, then Mārkaṇḍeya's comment would seem to be reassuring him that Draupadī's sons will be dedicated to the Pāṇḍava line, not to Drupada's line.

But things go differently for Draupadī. Her five sons, the Draupadeyas, though they fight nobly for their fathers at Kurukṣetra, never prosper them as Sāvitrī's sons do theirs; they are all killed by Aśvatthāman in the night massacre (10.8:44–58). The Pāṇḍava heir comes through Arjuna and Subhadrā's son Abhimanyu, who is killed in the battle but whose widow Uttarā is already pregnant; her son, after being stillborn and revived by Kṛṣṇa, is Parikṣit, the next king after Yudhiṣṭhira. So we never know whether the Draupadeyas, had they survived, would have carried their fathers’ line, or their maternal grandfather's. The latter possibility certainly is there, though, in that while they live they are collectively named after Drupada.Footnote ¹⁸

Given Mārkaṇḍeya's statement, the fate of Draupadī's sons warrants further consideration. As a first step, we can think in terms of Draupadī's disgrace before and following her earlier treatment at the dicing match. After Yudhiṣṭhira has staked her and lost the throw, the Kauravas bring her into the hall while she is menstruating, grab her by the hair, insult her verbally, attempt to strip her naked, and make lewd gestures (2.59–63). Karṇa, responding to Vikarṇa's claim that Draupadī was not lawfully won, concludes that this type of treatment is appropriate in any case, because of her unconventional marital arrangements:

Whether or not Draupadī is disreputable before the dicing match, she certainly is after it. Bhīma says to Arjuna:

So eventually, some time after hearing about Sāvitrī, the Pāṇḍavas fight the war at Kurukṣetra as much to try to restore Draupadī's honour as to regain their lost realm. But when all is said and done, although the kingdom can be won back, there is no remedy for Draupadī's disgrace. How can the next king after Yudhiṣṭhira Dharmarāja be born from a tainted woman? Accordingly, as the tale would have it, he isn't.

Compare the Rāmāyaṇa, where the doubts over what Rāvaṇa might have done to the captive Sītā can never be removed. Regardless of whether or not the reader or listener is convinced of Sītā's purity, Rāma's subjects are not, and her misadventures, when coupled to Rāma's failure to take another wife after abandoning his first one, spell disaster for the royal Aikṣvākava line in Ayodhyā.Footnote ¹⁹ In contrast, Sāvitrī's reputation is unimpeached. When she goes out on tour to find herself a husband, her chaperones are mentioned three times in the space of four verses. She travels accompanied by a specially appointed retinue including venerable and trustworthy ministers.Footnote ²⁰

Putrikā and the night massacre

If Sāvitrī's story is the story of the putrikā option being suppressed in favour of pativratā wifehood, then the comparison with Draupadī has led us to the deaths of the Draupadeyas in the night massacre. This massacre is explicitly designed to annihilate Drupada's line (10.3:28). It is the last act in a longstanding feud between Droṇa's family and Drupada's (see Brodbeck Reference Brodbeck2006 and Reference Brodbeck and Koskikallio2009c); but in terms of the Mahābhārata as a tale of the Bhārata patriline, its effect is to efface any Pāñcāla influence or ancestry within that patriline. If in Mārkaṇḍeya's narrative the putrikā possibility is suppressed by Sāvitrī's reformation, in Vaiśaṃpāyana's it is suppressed by this massacre, as perpetrated by Śiva in the guise of Aśvatthāman. As Ruth Katz says, “all named victims of the night raid are Pāñcālas”; “someone is getting rid of the Pāñcālas to make way for another Pāṇḍava heir” (Katz Reference Katz and Sharma1991, pp. 133, 135).

Following the suggestive leads of several other scholars, I have elsewhere argued that the suppression of the putrikā possibility is dramatised in Vedic literature by the story of Śiva's killing the Prajāpati who mated with his own daughter, and that the Mahābhārata's repeated story of Śiva's wrecking Dakṣa's sacrifice is a transformation of that Vedic story and a dramatisation of the same suppression (Brodbeck Reference Brodbeck2009a, pp. 52–55, 90–95; Brodbeck Reference Brodbeck2012, pp. 152–153).Footnote ²¹ In light of these results and the fact that the Sāvitrī story has led us to focus on the night massacre in this regard, it is notable that there are extensive structural parallels between the night massacre and the story of the wrecking of Dakṣa's sacrifice, as set out by Alf Hiltebeitel in the 1970s (Hiltebeitel Reference Hiltebeitel1972, pp. 105–122; Hiltebeitel Reference Hiltebeitel1976, pp. 312–335). Hiltebeitel details these parallels under 14 headings; some are more convincing than others, but overall the point is very well made. The argument mounted by Hiltebeitel on the basis of these parallels is peripheral to our present concerns, but the connection he establishes between the two stories is vital. In symbolic terms – and this fits with Draupadī's disgrace as discussed above – we thus see a firm connection between Dakṣa and Drupada, even though there is no explicit suggestion that Draupadī was intended to be a putrikā.

If the Draupadī narrative turns upon the violent destruction of her father's line, this turning point is presented in the Sāvitrī story in terms of Sāvitrī's loyal dedication to her husband and his line. Also, and relatedly, whereas in Draupadī's case the destruction is initiated by Aśvatthāman (who has his own motives), Sāvitrī mounts the heroic stand herself. This last difference can be closed up if we consider Kṛṣṇā Draupadī not as a single autonomous character, but as a functional aspect of a dark force that operates through her as well as through Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva and Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa.Footnote ²² If Draupadī eschews the putrikā possibility by suffering the destruction of her father's line as effected by Śiva, she facilitates the furthering of her husbands’ line, in Uttarā's delivery room, in the guise of her namesake Kṛṣṇa.Footnote ²³ Parikṣit's stillbirth (14.65) can be seen as a representation of the death-by-putrikā that the Pāṇḍava line could have suffered (and it is linked back to the massacre of the Pāñcālas through Aśvatthāman's curse); but Kṛṣṇa intervenes, as he said he would (at 10.16:15). Like Sāvitrī, Kṛṣṇa gets the better of death, reviving the endangered line through the power of his discipline and dharma. He uses an ‘act of truth’, a miracle technique employed in the Mahābhārata usually by women:Footnote ²⁴

The parallel thus formed between the Sāvitrī story and the story of the Pāṇḍava line is underlined by Sāvitrī's performance of an ‘act of truth’ after Satyavat has come back to life and has expressed concern that his parents will be worried. We know, as Sāvitrī does, that all danger is already past, provided no one accidentally dies of worry; but the sentiment is encapsulatory.

In this way, the comparison between Sāvitrī and Kṛṣṇā Draupadī comes down to Kṛṣṇa in Uttarā's delivery room.Footnote ²⁵

Lest this nominal shift be thought tangential, we return to Black's suggestion that Draupadī, in her disguise as Sairandhrī, saves the Pāṇḍavas at 4.34. I believe this is so, but not quite in the way that Black intended. When King Virāṭa and his army are away dealing with the Trigartas, and there is no one to defend the nearby Matsya herds from the Kauravas’ parallel attack, Draupadī speaks out to ensure that Arjuna goes to do the job with the feckless Prince Uttara. Viewed through the Sāvitrī lens, the result of this intervention is that Virāṭa, pleased with Arjuna's heroic deeds and discovering Bṛhannaḍā's true identity, offers him his daughter Uttarā, and Arjuna says can Abhimanyu have her instead, and Virāṭa gives her to Abhimanyu; and so after the war Parikṣit, the Pāṇḍavas’ heir, is born from Uttarā, a maiden untainted by multiple husbands, public insults, or implied putrikā suspicions.Footnote ²⁶ It is Draupadī who arranges this, as if at Bhīma's suggestion (see again 2.64:5–7, quoted earlier). Speaking to Uttara, she extols Bṛhannaḍā's driving skills and says:

And so Uttara sends Uttarā to send him Bṛhannaḍā, her dancing tutor, to drive him into battle. Draupadī's contribution towards the marriage of Abhimanyu and Uttarā is also confirmed a few scenes later, when she intervenes to ensure that a brief disagreement between Yudhiṣṭhira and Virāṭa does not spoil the relationship between the two families (4.63:46–47; 4.64:8).