India’s Daughter: A Review

1. INTRODUCTION

At 9 pm on December 16, 2012, a 23-year-elderly person named Jyoti Singh Pandey and her male companion Awindra Pratap Pandey boarded a private transport in Munirka, New Delhi. Obscure to them, the transport was involved by a gathering of men who were hoping to raise hell, having just ransacked a past passenger. Throughout the following scarcely any hours, these men ruthlessly beat the two companions, insulting them for being unmarried and out together around evening time. As the transport traveled through the city, the men thumped Awindra unconscious and assaulted Pandey. The horrendous attack included one of the attackers, at that point a juvenile, embeddings an iron pole into Pandey's body and tearing out her digestive organs. After this, Pandey and her companion were left seeping out and about. They lay overlooked for a few hours, until certain passers-by at long last took them to a medical clinic. As Pandey battled for her life throughout the following fourteen days, she stayed open about her will to endure and her longing to see her assaulters rebuffed. As her condition intensified, her story turned into a matter of public concern. Mass protests in her help seethed in metropolitan zones and noticeable government officials got included. On December 26, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh led a gathering where it was concluded that she would be traveled to Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore for a multi-organ transplant. Media sources, for example, NDTV scrutinized the need of this move, speculating that Pandey was sent to another country in light of the fact that the government was worried that the protests would escalate on the off chance that she passed on inside the nation ("Delhi Gang-assault: The Debate over Moving the Student to Singapore"). Pandey passed on at 4:45 am Singapore Standard Time on December 29, 2012. She was incinerated the following day in New Delhi under stringent government organized police security. The occasion caught exceptional consideration in light of the ghastliness of the assault, which was portrayed in unflinching subtlety in papers. The public talk that developed around this misfortune was all the while problematic and enlightening. The conversation catalyzed genuinely necessary changes in regards to the meaning of assault inside the Indian lawful framework: the Verma Commission, shaped in response to this occasion in 2013, rolled out a few improvements to the Indian Penal Code's laws on sexual attack. Further, it made obvious how ladies are envisioned and surrounded in the plan of religio-public legislative issues in current India. During and after Pandey's death, the public's response against the assaulter and the occasion was gigantic, particularly in the significant Indian cities. Candlelight vigils were held in Pandey's honor and thousands rioted to dissent. In spite of the fact that Pandey's family later uncovered her name21 to the general population to enable different casualties of sexual attack, the casualty's name couldn't be intially uncovered with regards to Indian law. Therefore, papers gave her different pseudonyms that commended her apparently superhuman mental fortitude. contemporary literature is personally associated with the idealization of each woman like Pandey alongside semi-divinities and goddess figures in famous and political talk. Receiving these extraordinary women, regardless of whether real or abstract, to advance the patriot plan reduces them to images that are static and a recorded. Further, elevating epic women to models for contemporary Indian women to aspire to propels a particular narrative of gentility. It can likewise offer a reductive reading of their characters, which levels the multifaceted nature of the jobs they play in the epics. Therefore, there is a contemporary scholarly interest in offering voice to these courageous women to stand up against these solitary narratives. While the custom of abstract re-envisioning the epics is anything but another one in Indian literature, the rewriting the epic from the viewpoints of female characters has acquired a political desperation in light of contemporary discussions encompassing women. Sītā of the Ramayana and Draupadī of the Mahabharata are considered to have different, if not restricted personalities. This significantly affects the manner by which their accounts are re-imagined in contemporary Indian literature. Sītā is accepted to be a more agreeable figure than Draupadī and therefore, a superior model for patriarchally endorsed female conduct in religio-public talk. Pamela Lothspeich has noticed that goddesses or semi-divinities, for example, Sītā inspired M.K. Gandhi, who trusted her to be an ideal spouse. That Sītā is an ideal for female conduct persists well into modern day India. Sutherland's investigation revealed that men in North India see Sītā as an ideal accomplice due to her "compliant quiet submission" and long lasting unwaveringness to her better half. She is accepted to be the ideal woman whose life is set apart by misfortune that she eventually acknowledges as a saint. Researchers of the epic writings have likewise called attention to that Sītā is regularly a more agreeable spouse than Draupadī. Albeit the two women are reliably depicted as pativratās, the individuals who adhere to the female Hindu spiritual calling of being an ideal spouse and friend, Sītā is frequently observed to censure herself for the couple's adversities whereas Draupadī reprimands her husbands for theirs. Kinsley, for example, takes note of that Sītā's sexual and spiritual commitment is depicted at a few focuses in the Rāmāyaṇa, underlining that an ideal spouse venerates her better half as god.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-American author situated in Houston, Texas. She is most huge Internet fan base that she regularly interfaces with on her Facebook page. On September 30, 2015, she gathered information on her page soliciting her readers which from her books they loved the best and a greater part of them responded that it was The Palace of Illusions, which was distributed in 2008. Some remarked that it was rare in giving a female epic character a voice, which proposes that these fans are not extremely acquainted with a few other women's activist epic rewriting in English or other Indian languages. The fans, who were Indians and Indian-Americans, additionally expressed enthusiasm when the author reported that the book had been optioned for a film in January 2016 ("Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Facebook Fan Page"). The Palace of Illusions, a transformation of the Mahabharata from Draupadī's perspective, endeavors to speak more loudly about numerous contemporary women's activist issues, remembering the disregard of female education and demand for women putting their families' honors before their own needs and desires. While the book is on the whole correct to generate these conversations, it has not really been effective for its political message but since of the manner by which it is advertised to satisfy the neo-liberal reader, regardless of whether high society Hindu Indian, diasporic Indian, or Western. Divakaruni's books are regularly showcased in a key way that feature her work's outlandish characteristics. For example, a statement from the Houston Chronicle on the intro page of The Palace of Illusions announces that the book is a "brilliant entree into an ancient mythology virtually obscure toward the Western world… " The reasonably picked word "entrée" welcomes the figure of the Western reader to both literally expend this item and to leave on an excursion into a colorful world. The language is reminiscent of the colonial manner of speaking that promotes the utilization of Otherness through food and geological investigation which has been talked about differently by scholars, for example, McClintock and Susan Zlotnick. Further, the idea that the Mahabharata is an obscure mythology in the "West" of the Houston Chronicle's hailing is interested, since avoids both diaspora Indian readers who reside in the West and scores of scholars and fans of Indo-European mythology in America.

In spite of the fact that Divakaruni's complicity in advertising Indian culture is problematic, it might be uncalled for to excuse the novel's women's activist points entirely. By offering voice to Draupadī through a first-individual narrative and an inside speech, the author endeavors to wrestle with

interlinked issues are especially prominent in the novel. The first is the scrutinizing of the courageous woman's office, especially given the epic reflects the Hindu thought that each human activity is pre-foreordained. The second is Divakaruni's Draupadi's scrutinizing of socially determined methods of propriety and behavior for women, in spite of the fact that the author's choice to remain inside the narrative structure of the epic itself precludes any extreme transgression for the character. Divakaruni in this way presents how Draupadi endures on the grounds that she is paradoxically considered responsible for causing a war, even while unmistakably her behavior is ordered by heavenly, social and political forces that are outside her ability to control. From the earliest starting point of The Palace of Illusions, it is built up that Draupadi will "change the course of history". In some mainstream interpretations of the Mahabharata, Draupadī is considered a negative power that basically causes the war that will end the two sides of Draupadi's conjugal family. Irawati Karve has noticed that the readings of female figures in the Sanskrit epic writings took a more sexist turn after the Jain Puranas. A stanza one of writings declares that women were kṛityās, a demonic and dangerous female power, in each age:

Divakaruni's tale, then again, is focused on setting up Draupadi as a positive power that welcomes the reader's sympathy. In The Palace of Illusions, kid Draupadi feels that she is both inferior to and by one way or another more dangerous than her sibling Dhristadhyumna, who was conceived simultaneously as her and specifically to execute their dad's enemy. Growing up in this manner, Divakaruni's Draupadi struggles with her function in the occasions that finish in the war and a few characters complicate her feelings of trepidation. A sorceress, who isn't in the first epic, says that women add to a large number of the world's issues and Draupadi, being more remarkable than normal women, could cause significantly more of them. She therefore encourages Draupadi not to get "cleared away by passion", proposing that it is feminine passionate overabundances that cause the world's great issues. Nonetheless, the sorceress underscores the imminent requirement for the war, so the earth can renew itself and the age can reach a conclusion, indicating that Draupadi has a higher spiritual with her. He reveals to her that she is prepared to do either obliterating their group or "lighting [their] approach to popularity". Both these conversations stress that while her spiritual and other-common forces are colossal, she should in any case be engaged in fitting feminine behavior in her regular day to day existence.

The two Divakaruni and Ray's adaptations are focused on refining Draupadi and decide to do as such by giving the courageous woman inferiority. This is significant from a women's activist just as complex perspective in light of the fact that the epic doesn't give an admittance to interiority. Getting to these inward considerations assist readers with testing their view of Draupadi as reactive and vengeful and set up her as an uncertain and relatable woman. Nonetheless, neither of the epic adaptations invest a lot of energy on the most awkward snapshot of Draupadī's life, when she is hauled into court and undressed before male family seniors (2.27). One of the Kaurava siblings, Duḥśāsana, strips Draupadī of her imperial articles of clothing to imply that she is presently a slave. This humiliation is intended to connote a financial as well as a sexual degradation. Planned as a transition to rebuff Draupadī for her presumption, it is likewise a sign for future private sexual humiliations. In playing out the undressing, Kaurava siblings need to make it known to Draupadī and the audience that her body is not, at this point her own however theirs to utilize and manhandle hereafter. Divide Rajan composes that despite the fact that the episode has the nature of a nightmare for the courageous woman, "[she] abuses the public space that she approaches through the sexual humiliation". When Draupadī is brought to court, she shows up "in her one piece of clothing, hitched underneath, sobbing and in her courses" (MhB 2.27.59). This proposes she was unprepared and underdressed to be in broad daylight or presented to the male look. Dhand noticed that Draupadī's state is huge on the grounds that while her single piece of clothing leaves her physically uncovered, the way that she is bleeding shows that she is a prolific woman. Showing up in such a state in the court features her sexuality before a gathering of male older folks who ought to always have been unable to get to her thusly, which adds to the experience of her infringement and humiliation. Despite the fact that the political inquiries epic Draupadī raises before the undressing are critical, in the epic and both these adaptations it is at last her admittance to godliness that spares her from further humiliation. unclothed. Beam and Divakaruni engage differently with the women's activist inquiries of body and autonomy that this episode raises. Beam shows Draupadi's indignation is full power that stretches out past the space of the epic. She conveys a passionate discourse where she refers to a long convention of gendered oppression in Hindu custom. She cautions that her humiliation will "demean the entire male sex for constantly". Divakaruni's respectable Draupadi is more repressed than Ray's. She invests energy quietly considering her secret love Karna's failure to support her and implores before she talks. At the point when she talks, she restricts her searing comments to her family by saying this occasion will prompt the finish of the Kuru faction, to which her spouses and their enemy cousins have a place. In spite of the fact that Divakaruni permits Draupadi some indignation when she says: "I proved unable—would not—stop my words", her hotness rapidly passes. It clears a path for another inside monologue where a hurt, relinquishing Draupadi expresses how disillusioned she is in her spouses for not sparing her since she "would have tossed [herself] forward to spare them". Draupadi then spends the rest of the monologue reflecting on the enthusiastic differences among people, and regrets that she is tainted, "with vengeance encoded in my blood".

Composing on the sexual ideology in the Mahābhārata, Dhand noticed that the Sanskrit epic writings keep on applying a tremendous impact over the construction of gender in Hindu society on the grounds that at last, narrative is convincing. It is effectively coursed and assimilated alongside its moral and political substance: Narrative is a delicate and nonthreatening vehicle for ideology, yet enormously powerful for all its enchanting characteristics; through stories skilfully told, the audience receives a moral education that advises and frames its own moral sense, and instructs it to separate between opposite qualities. Thus, the epic fanciful has kept on being a key apparatus in deciding and reinforcing ideology, especially concerning the parameters of feminine behavior in India. The New Delhi assault of 2012 is just one of numerous instances where the tales of the epic infiltrate the everyday realities of Indian women in creative yet additionally dangerous ways. An ahistorical and uncritical hailing of the epics to police feminine behavior is problematic in light of the fact that no human woman might have the degree of supernaturally appointed respectability and help managed by epic courageous women. Further, if the goodness, courage, or godliness can prevent women from encountering savagery and oppression. Further, since narrative is the vehicle for ideology, it appears to be well-suited that philosophies are being tested or re inscribed by adjusting the narrative itself. Journalists who draw from the epic repertoire to examine women's issues today can potentially engage in a multi valent, bury textual discourse with genuine and immediate political stakes. The Mahābhārata's length and complexity gives numerous slippages and chances to such imagined abstract departures that can address a full range of women's issues, from the accessibility of individual decisions to the realities of sexual savagery. Notwithstanding, sincere goals don't generally convert into the ideal results in light of the fact that the contexts that reinforce gender segregation on the planets past the epic content additionally keep on multiplying. While Divakaruni's anglophone variation of Draupadi's story makes the epic accessible to a more extensive audience, it likewise demonstrates how both neo-liberal, transnational feminism and worldwide commodity culture may wind up reinforcing a solitary narrative of feminine goals and an exotic feminized Other. Relatively, Mahasweta's story extends instead of agreements the narrative of the epic and history itself to incorporate gatherings of people, for example, non-Hindu, ancestral Dopdi, who didn't approach the Mahābhārata. Nonetheless, Mahasweta's subject herself is very different from the author and the little gathering of educated middle class Bengalis who could have read the first Bengali story. In spite of the fact that Spivak's English interpretation of the story helps increase its readership, it keeps on broadening the reach of the story upwards into first class circles and not downwards towards the subject and her context. Nonetheless, it might be said that intervention is required in both the world class circles where the force lies, and in the sphere of the marginalized. It should likewise be perceived that any artistic variation of a Brahminical and tip top epic, anyway ethically solid, ought to be one of numerous methods for political and moral interventions in a nation. Utilizing Draupadī to represent every Indian woman and their issues is likewise sure to raise issues of representation. On the off chance that Draupadī is a spokesperson for other women and their issues, it would imply that she stands for herself as well as for a frequently solid thought of the Indian, usually Hindu woman. Thus, the determination of Draupadī as an unproblematic everywoman is laden with challenges. Summing up Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's

[F]ocusing on original female figures from conventional Hindu writings, regardless of whether goddesses, epic champions like Sita, or viranganas (women warriors), is problematic in light of the fact that it avoids women from the minority religious networks, just as barring dalit (lower-position) women. Likewise, the landscape of the prototype women figures has been genuinely tainted by having been appropriated by Hindu conservative forces in administration of communal ventures. Hence, an author may choose Draupadī and the epic content, yet can rarely disregard the baggage of traditionalist Hindu conservative ideology that accompanies it. Draupadī is an exceptionally powerful female figure in the Mahabharata, while the epic itself is a significant custom for the prevailing religious gathering in the nation. In this sense, Draupadī can't be an every woman, regardless of how sympathetically she is depicted. In this way, she is significantly more problematic as a symbolic representative of the issues of women in a country than Jyoti Singh Pandey, whose life was composed more than a few times in recent public memory. Finally, as much as there is a requirement for an exchange about the real or imagined experiences of women, it must be joined by the understanding that continuing to zero in on goddesses or goddess-like women or rendering them as images can dismiss the discussion from building up the humankind and estimation all things considered. While festivities of courage and empathetic ID can be powerful motivators for changing existing frameworks of oppression, valor ought not be a condition for any woman's, or to be sure any person's, all in all correct to wellbeing and respect.

This article has raised the claim that both films overlook the multi-faceted constellations and discursive complexity of their concerns about the particularly barbaric nature of the Jyoti Singh case, which have to keep informing any premises or hypothesis of perpetrators, victims' vulnerability, structural and political ineptitude or social apathy in the Indian c In identifying the reality of rape in contemporary India, the presence of an ongoing psychological dread of rape, frequently in the thoughts and minds of women in Indian, cannot be understated or sidelined. This anxiety is linked to the potential of violations in unforeseen and unforeseeable situations of everyday life. Representations of rape in Mehta and Udwin's films to a certain degree revitalise the stereotype of destitute slum-dwelling that respond with the violations of more economical victims to the inequality of their social and economic surroundings. custodians. The increase of populist right-wing party politics in India since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 is not to diminish these religious and political aspects of rape. The following case scenarios have shown that rape has grown more prevalent as an instrument of ethno-religious punishment, discipline and punishment. Indeed, on the macro, meso and micro-level, the uniquely Indian context of rape, abuse, and violence against women is done discursively, mentally and physically, frequently via the everyday validity of the dominant national narrative that favours patriarchy. The locations for these acts are diverse, on buses, trains, cinemas with item numbers, public and religious places in Bollywood, in a home setting and, especially, in the inner sanctuary of the cognitive space of the individual - their thinking process. Mehta and Udwin's films, while they contain compelling issues and emotional storylines, have not properly taken care of their many aspects or predicted them.

1) Bennett, Matt (2010). "Good Woman or Evil Woman? Draupadī as Active Agent in The Mahābhārata." International Journal of the Humanities Vol. 8. No. 9. pp. 145-54, www.ijh.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.26/prod.1921. Accessed 4 Jan. 2016. 2) Bhabha, Homi K. (1990). Nation and Narration. Routledge. 3) Bhāgavata Purāṇa (1950). Translated by J. L. Shastry and G.V. Tagare. Motilal Banarsidass, 1950. 4) Bharucha, Rustom. ―Peter Brook's ‗Mahabharata‘: A View from India.‖ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 23, no. 32, 1988, pp. 1642–1647, www.jstor.org/stable/4378860. Accessed 14 Sept. 2016 5) Bharati, Dharmaveer (2005). Andha Yug. Kitabghar Prakashan. 6) Bhāsa (1993). The Shattered Thigh and Other Plays. Translated by A. N. D Haksar. Penguin. 7) Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa (1998). Venīsaṃhāra of Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa, edited by Jaggadhara and M R Kale, Motilal Banarsidass. 8) Bhattacharya, Pradip (2004). "She Who Must be Obeyed: Draupadi The Ill-Fated 9) india.org/pdfs_issues/PDF%20144/Panch kanya%2019-30.pdf. Accessed 5 Sept. 2015. 10) "Peter Brook's Mahabharata: The Film." Boloji. 14 Nov. 2004, www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=143. Accessed 14 Sept. 2016. 11) Bhyrappa, S L. Parva (1994). A Tale of War, Peace, Love, Death, God, and Man. Translated by K. Raghvendra Rao. Sahitya Akademi. 12) Bharatiya Janata Party - The Party with a Difference. BJP, www.bjp.org Accessed 20 Nov. 2016. 13) Black, Brian, and Simon Brodbeck (2007). Gender and Narrative in The Mahābhārata. Routledge. 14) Brown, C. Mackenzie, and Nupur Agrawal (2014). "The Rape That Woke Up India: Hindu Imagination and the Rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey." Journal of Religion and Violence Vol. 2, No. 2, 234-80, digitalcommons.trinity.edu/relig_faculty/3/ Accessed 11 Jan. 2016. 15) Brennan, Timothy (1990). ―National Longing for Form.‖ Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha. Routledge, pp. 44-70. 15) Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. St. Martin's P, 1989. Buitenen, Johannes Adrianus Bernadus van, The Bhagavadgītā in the Mahābhārata. The U of Chicago P, 1981. trans. The Mahābhārata. Vols. 1-5. The U of Chicago P, 1973. 16) Butler, Pamela, and Jigna Desai (2015). ―Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras Chick-Lit Criticism and Transnational Feminism.‖ Meridians, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–31., www.jstor.org/stable/40338745. Accessed 29 Dec. 2015. 17) Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2008). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton UP.

PhD Student, MUIT, Lucknow