Decoding ‘Cheerharan’:
Accounting Gender-Based Violence in Chitra B. Divakaruni’s
The Palace of Illusions
Abhabya Ratnam¹, Dr. Samir Kumar
Sharma²
ABSTRACT
Being a woman is a subversive political position
even in this contemporary, modern setting of today’s world. It would
not be an exaggerated remark that rather than being just an innocent
natural phenomenon, this existence of the other sex has over the
years transformed into a complicated socio-political position, well
within the societal hierarchies, which paves the path for receiving
a series of direct and indirect acts of violence. Harsh or mild,
mental or physical, domestic or societal, such acts include some
sort of forced conditioning often driven by socio-economic or
socio-political hierarchies. Gender-based violence, thus, ceases to
be a purely patriarchal hegemony and turns out to be a suffocating
combination of factors which prompt inequality. As the most common
way to condition a woman turns out to be controlling her body, the
most heinous of crimes like public stripping, naked parade, honour
killing, rape continue to exist even today in all spheres and
spaces, particularly in our country. And the only question that
violently bothers the mind is- when did it all begin? Enters the
strongest and most ferocious of Indian mythological heroines
Draupadi, whose 'Cheerharan' or public stripping not only became the
reason for the most gruesome of wars, the war of Kurukshetra-
Mahabharata, but also set the fateful course that her successors
have to succumb to even today. Women writers, like Chitra B.
Divakaruni, have tried to bring such acts of violence under
contemporary light. This paper is a sincere attempt to decode the
shameful act of Draupadi's 'Cheerharan' and other such acts
reflecting GBV based on the readings of Divakaruni's The Palace of
Illusions, the modern Mahabharata told from Draupadi's perspective.
Key words: Subversive political position, Gender-based violence,
Patriarchal hegemony, Socio-economic hierarchies, Cheerharan/ public
strippin
