Contempt and Righteous Anger: A Gendered Perspective From a Classical Indian Epic

Preliminaries on “Emotion,” “Contempt,” and Cultures of Thought ¹

The classical Indian tradition is full of awareness of what is evident in our contemporary, English-language understanding of emotions. ² Two notable contexts in which the category of “emotion” (bhāva) is explored and analysed are what may broadly be called spiritual phenomenology—the identification, and either cultivation, therapy or extirpation of various states and dispositions—and aesthetics—the literary specification and expression in dramaturgy and poetics of sentimental essences (rasas) and various modes of being that correlate with them. Bringing classical Indian thought into contemporary interdisciplinary conversations about emotions would be fruitful and mutually beneficial. However, as is well established in the cross-cultural understanding of emotions, different cultures of thought both conceptualize and thematize emotions in a variety of ways (Bilimoria & Wenta, 2015).

It is only through exploring the context, concerns and application of terms do we get a sense of what might count as “emotion” in any reasonable use of the word in English. Keeping this general hermeneutic principle in mind, we should also be sensitive to the fact that the recognition of states of being which might be translated into emotional terms in English does not necessarily mean that they are thematized as such in a language or culture of thought. ³ “Contempt” is just such a word and concept. Let me lay my (comparativist) cards on the table. Ever since Aristotle drew from and influenced the literary, political and philosophical culture of the classical Greco-Roman world, the concept of contempt has been thematized clearly in Western thought. This will be evident with regard to that world in papers in this special issue, and I myself will touch on some of the contemporary literature. By comparison, we have classical Sanskrit where, despite the vast and sophisticated enumeration and exploration of emotions within dramaturgy, poetics, aesthetics and religious phenomenology, contempt does not get thematized as such. There is not a shortage of terms translatable as “contempt” or words adjacent to it in English: as Maria Heim points out (2022, p. 73), in the celebrated 6th c. lexicon, Amara's Treasury (Amarakośa 1.7.453–454), we have “contemptuous neglect, humiliation, disgrace, reviling, irreverence, despising, contempt, disrespect, and scorn” (anādara, paribhava, parībhāva, tiraskriyā, rīḍha, avamānan, āvajñā, avahelana, and asūrkṣaṇa). Contempt does not, however, play a named role, as it were, in either theoretical or literary works. If one explored the nature of emotions through the hugely important Sanskrit term śānta rasa, translates it as “the aesthetic essence of peacefulness,” and searches for functions comparable to it in Greek and Latin, we might well find an awareness of something akin to it, but we would not find it in the way it is theorized extensively in Sanskrit. ⁴ Conversely, one needs to adopt a different approach to the function of “contempt” in Sanskrit than we would in Greek and Latin materials; and that would be to find expression of it in the literature, especially in episodes that have influenced subsequent cultural norms and debates in the culture.

Once one makes such choices in cross-cultural comparison, further decisions have to be made about what is to be explored. So, without further ado, I will lay out the particular path I propose to take in this essay on contempt in Sanskrit. I shall work with the assumption made in some of the contemporary literature that “contempt” is a construction out of a combination of different attitudes (or “sentiments” [Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016, p. 350]) as well as phenomenologies (the well-worn division between contempt as having “hot” and “cold forms”[Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016, p. 346]). Psychologists and philosophers continue to puzzle over its relationship to emotions that are rather more stable across cultures in time and space, namely, anger and disgust. ⁵ (As it happens, anger (krodha [kopa, etc.] and its associated aesthetic essence of the furious [raudra] and disgust [jugupsa] and its associated aesthetic essence, the macabre [bībhatsa] are developed to a high degree in both philosophical and literary texts in Sanskrit.) While some have sought to distinguish contempt from both anger and disgust, others have argued that it is actually a form of the latter two (Prinz, 2007).

Considering the possibility of contempt being in some way derivative from more emotions that are more consistently described in different cultures and at different times, I read the absence of the thematization of contempt but the self-conscious elaboration of emotions such as anger (and disgust) in the Sanskrit as a prompt in this paper to think of contempt as an expression of anger. (While I will not directly argue against the claim that contempt is primarily about disgust [Bilewicz et al., 2017], I hope that an exploration of the literary passage which I read in this paper will show that there are at least some contexts in which anger rather than disgust is the stable emotion that expresses itself in contempt.) I do not aim to define contempt or debate whether it is or is not in any framework an “emotion” or something else. The textual culture—indeed, an entire cultural world—that I am working from is the longest composition of the premodern world, the Mahābhārata . Within it, I will explore the angry expression of contempt in a high-born woman, Princess Draupadī, in an episode of the epic that has been pondered and discussed in Indian culture across millennia to this day.

In doing so, I will suggest that some contemporary feminist writings on so-called negative emotions (and anger and contempt in particular) can be read with and against the episode I analyse. I hope that the result is both an interesting reading of this critical episode and an intervention in the discussion of the gendered role of anger and contempt.

Context: The Mahābhārata

The epic composition covers many generations of a family and has complex enframing narratives that we cannot go into here. Let us lay out the bare essentials that take us then to the critical episode that I am going to analyse.

There is an irresolvable tension between the claims of the sons of two brothers. The elder brother is Dhṛtarāṣṭra, but because he is blind, it is determined that he cannot ascend the throne. Instead, his younger brother Pāṇḍu becomes the king. But he is cursed that he will die if he has sex, and therefore retires to the forest, with his two wives, whereupon he asks his elder brother to rule in his stead anyway. Due to a boon granted to one of his wives, Kuntī, she is able to have children sprung from various gods, with which she has three sons. She also apportions her boon to her co-wife, Mādrī, who has twins. Pāṇḍu in fact does die one day in predictable circumstances. Mādrī too dies. The five sons are called, after him, the Pāṇḍavas. In order of birth, they are Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma and Arjuna; and the twins, Nakula and Sahādeva. Kuntī brings them up. What we know and the brothers do not is that Kuntī sought to test the vow before she was married, and gave birth to Karṇa, who she had to abandon and who is brought up by a charioteer and his wife. Meanwhile, through another miracle, Dhṛtarāṣṭra and his wife Gāndhārī have a hundred sons (called the Kauravas after their ancestor Kuru). The eldest is Duryodhana, and Duḥśāsana the second. The situation is one of unease. Dhṛtaraṣṭra sits on the throne, and Duryodhana lays claim to be the heir apparent. However, since Dhṛtaraṣṭra ended up on the throne only because Pāṇḍu asked him to, Yudhiṣṭhira could fairly argue that the throne revert to him. In the event, being the son of the god of Righteousness (Dharma), Yudhiṣṭhira is naturally inclined to divide the land between them, an inclination not shared by Duryodhana, who refuses to trust his cousin to act against the natural inclination of the warrior class (the kṣatriyas) to gather all worldly power to themselves.

Arjuna, the third Pāṇdava, and great archer, wins the Princess Draupadī in a contest (and she wants to marry him). However, when the brothers go home and jokingly call out to their mother, “Look what I have brought home for you!,” she devoutly says, “Whatever it is, share equally amongst you.” Given the unalterable power of her wish, Draupadī becomes the wife of the five brothers. ⁶

At a previous time, during a martial competition, the Pāṇḍavas had been contemptuous of a skilled archer in Duryodhana's company, refusing to compete with him because he was a mere charioteer's son. This, of course, unbeknownst to all of them, was their illegitimate elder brother, Karṇa. Duryodhana—both from genuine regard for Karṇa and to hit back at his cousins, promptly made Karṇa king of one of his dependencies. This made Karṇa devoted to Duryodhana and deeply resentful of the Pāṇḍavas. In the vulgate of the Mahābhārata (but not the Critical Edition), it is recounted that, in the contest to win Draupadī's hand, the only rival to Arjuna was Karṇa, but Draupadī refused to consider him. (We shall return to this incident later.)

As the cousins grew up uneasily and antagonistically, with each of Duryodhana and Yudhiṣṭhira having lesser kingdoms of their own, the former's maternal uncle, Śakuni, a skilled master of the dice, came up with the idea of inviting Yudhiṣṭhira to a gambling match. Although inexperienced, he agreed to a match in the Great Hall at the court of the empire (the unexpected unwisdom of which decision is pondered by many within the text, and subsequently in the broader commentarial and popular culture). He lost his wealth, then his land, and then, successively, he gambled away himself and his brothers until, in one last throw, he staked Draupādī and lost her too.

The Karuavas send for Draupadī, who refuses to come. To the horror of the riven and helpless assembly, Duḥśāsana dragged the Princess, wearing a single garment during her menstruation, into the Great Hall.

The Episode: Righteous Anger, Reactive Contempt ⁷

A complex and deeply significant term that is much used in the text and the culture, and which we cannot explore in detail is “dharma.” For our present purposes, we should just keep in mind that it is a polysemic term, carrying with it implications of social order, law, personal duty, righteousness, the right, honour and virtue (Hiltebeitel, 2010). As is the usual practice in the field, the relevant English word is used but I occasionally add “dharma” in brackets.

I will now lay out key passages from this episode, with minimal commentary. Once the story has been told, we can turn to an examination of key aspects in light of various considerations about the concept of contempt.

When the messenger gives Draupadī the message that she has been wagered away and must come to the assembly, she asks in horrified astonishment:

What?!… What prince wagers away his wife in a game? The king was certainly intoxicated by the dice game! Did he really not have anything else to stake? (02,060.005a–c)

She sets aside her initial, incredulous response, although it reveals the deepest emotional aspect of her situation, and which arguably is the origin of her contempt towards Yudhiṣṭhita. Instead, now she turns to a pointedly legalistic question.

Its lethal power is evident when the messenger returns to the Great Hall and relays her question.

Yudhiṣṭhira, however, did not stir out of his haze of confusion, as if he had lost consciousness. He was unable to muster any response, good or bad (sādhv asādhu vā).

As everyone else in the Great Hall watches this sight in profound misery (abhūd duḥkham), the eldest present, the great-uncle Bhīṣma, who forsook the throne two generations previously, takes up Draupadī's question.

(The initial reasoning is incomprehensible as it stands: clearly, Yudhiṣṭhira has no property at the point of wagering Draupadī, and indeed, already belongs to Duryodhana. But what is the “property belonging to another”? Even if it is to say Draupadī was her husband's property (which is not at all clear) that would only mean she was already Duryodhana's; in which case, why wager her? Something has gone wrong in the text, it would seem.)

Draupadī then replies:

The inexpert king was invited to the hall by the dishonourable, wicked cheaters who love to gamble; how could you call his actions voluntary? The first among Kurus and Pandavas was blind to his challengers’ wickedness and corruption, and was defeated. Only afterward did he understand their tricks. These are Kuru lords here who have sons and daughters-in-law. Think this through carefully, and make your decision! (60.43a–45c)

Then Karṇa argues against Vikarṇa and ends by saying:

Perhaps you think it was wrong to bring her into the hall in her one garment, but listen to reason, Kurus: The gods have ordained that a woman have one husband, but this one serves many masters, which make her a whore! So there is nothing strange in bringing her into the hall in her single garment, or even with none. Saubala [Duryodhana] won her fairly, along with the Pāṇḍavas’ property and the Pāṇḍavas themselves. Duḥśāsana, this Vikarṇa is nothing but a fool, given his so-called words of wisdom. Take off the clothes of the Pāṇḍavas! And strip Draupadī! (61.34a–38c)

The core event then unfolds, as it were. Duḥśasana attempts to pull her single cloth off Draupādi. In different recensions, there are variations in what exactly happens next. She prays passionately to the common cousin of the two sets of cousins, her beloved friend, Kṛṣṇa [indeed, she is called Kṛṣṇā, The Dark One] who we will later in the Mahābhārata find is God incarnate, and he intervenes. Or it may be that it is the mysterious god of truth, righteousness and death, Dharma who intervenes. (Or Dharma may be simply another name for Kṛṣṇa, for he is truth and righteousness in the fully developed theistic tradition of Kṛṣṇa.) The garment becomes endless and continues to cover Draupadī until Duḥśāsana falls down, exhausted and ashamed (śrānto vrīḍitaḥ), and the assembly is stunned into acknowledging the wickedness of the attempt. Another elder, Vidura, recounts a didactic story in the hope of clarifying the situation, but still, the assembly does not say anything.

Draupadī then says:

I have an urgent duty that I was unable to fulfill before, afflicted as I was by this brute who has dragged me around. I must pay respects to the elder Kurus gather in this hall; if I have been delayed, it has not been my fault! (2.62.1a–c) ¹⁰

She then continues:

Time is surely out of step. How can these Kurus allow their daughter and daughter-in-law to be tormented so?! What greater misery can there be for such a one as I, a virtuous and beautiful lady, to be forced into a hall full of men? What has happened to the righteous honour (dharma) of kings? It is well known that kings of old never brought a lady to a public place. The Kauravas have destroyed this ancient virtue (dharma). (62.7a–9c)

She then tells them to think carefully about whether she was won or not. Yet Bhīṣma himself, taken as the very exemplar of virtue and righteous conduct, confesses that he cannot answer her question. He does, however, show the complete uptake of her contempt and anger, saying, “The end of this lineage must surely be imminent, now that the Kurus have become slaves of greed and folly!” (2.62.17a–c). He declares that it is due to her nobility of character that she clings to virtue (dharma) despite the ill-treatment, while the other elders who are supposed to be steeped in dharma “stand with their heads bent, their bodies vacant like ghosts” (2.62.20a–c). He says that only Yudhiṣṭhira himself can give the answer as to whether he could have staked her after he had already lost himself as a wager. Oddly, it is Duryodhana who picks up this judgement, although only to point out the zero-sum nature of the choice Yudhiṣṭhira faces:

Let the question now rest with the noble Bhīma and Arjuna, or with Sahādeva and your husband Nakula, Draupadī. They should answer your question, saying here in this assembly of kings that Yudhiṣṭhira is not your lord; let them thus make the King of Dharma a liar and free you from the bonds of slavery! Make the great-souled King of Dharma, steadfast in Dharma, who is equal to the king of the gods, answer this question! (62.24a–26a)

Karṇa then presses his argument for what he thinks of Draupadī's situation, deliberately unmindful of the emerging agreement that it is Yudhiṣṭhira himself who should answer the question. He channels all his resentment into contempt, speaking with deliberate crudeness towards Draupadī while addressing her with sarcastic honorifics.

There are three who possess no property—a slave, a son and a dependent wife. Dear lady, you are the wife of a slave, without right to property; you have no master, and no property yourself! Enter now, King Dhritarāṣṭra's inner apartments and serve us with devotion. This is now your sole occupation. Princess, your masters are the sons of the king, not the Pandavas. Choose another husband without delay, splendid lady, one who will not gamble your freedom away. It does not need saying that the eternal way of slaves is to fulfil a master's desires.

No clear answer emerges, and Yudhiṣṭhira in fact never responds to the question. The inauspicious howl of a jackal, the braying of donkeys, and a chorus of terrible birds causes fear in all, the horror of the scene is acknowledged, the mysterious power of the miracle makes renewed attacks on Draupadī impossible, and King Dhrtarāṣṭra gives three boons to Draupadī in recompense. She frees her husbands and herself with them.

In the same boon, she also frees her son with Yudhiṣṭhira. With her second boon, she releases the others. But when she is offered a third boon, she replies—in what tone and with what attitude, we must interpret for ourselves:

I cannot, blessed king. Greed destroys the right (dharma)…a woman of the warrior class may receive only two boons…My husbands being freed from their wretched state of bondage, will once again obtain prosperity through the merit of their actions. (35a–36c)

This is obviously an insult to the Paṇḍavas, infuriating them by having a mortal enemy saying that although princely warriors, they had to be rescued by their wife. (Interestingly, on later occasions, the husbands repeatedly praise, acknowledge and express gratitude to Draupadī for rescuing them, so the masculinist outrage that here treats their rescue by a woman as a deadly insult is not necessarily the only attitude the husbands have towards their wife.)

While the powerful and passionate Bhīma—in other places in the epic too, always the quickest to lose his temper on behalf of Draupadī and always ready to fight for her—takes the terrible vow to drink her assailant's blood in the battlefield, even Arjuna, the key warrior amongst the Pāṇḍavas—counsels calm. The scene ends anticlimactically, with the brothers and Draupadī leaving the court. But the seeds have been sown for future horrors.

Righteous Anger, Reactive Contempt

The context within which we are exploring the expression of contempt is righteous anger, not merely any set of phenomenal states that are clustered around the feeling of anger. The righteousness is gendered by the fact that the anger is that of a woman ill-treated. I would like to suggest later on as to why and how the righteous anger takes expression in contempt. But first, I need to clarify what Draupadī's contempt is not. It is neither disregard nor scorn (Cova et al., 2017, e234). Cova et al. suggest that, if respect is the opposite of contempt, then, following Darwell's well-known distinction (Darwall, 1977), contempt could be either disregard, the opposite of Darwall's “recognition respect,” or scorn, the opposite of his “appraisal respect.” The former is contempt because one disregards another person and does not acknowledge them empathetically. The latter is contempt in the sense of having low regard for the competence of another, a negative reaction due to their lack of skill or ability. It should be clear that we are certainly not talking about disregard in our episode. (For one thing, one may have disregard and not be empathetic with many people without remotely being contemptuous of them. So, it is not even clear if there is such a tie between unempathetic disregard and contempt.) As for scorn, there is an element of it, in the sense that Draupadī's appraisal is of the lack of virtue, etc. (dharma and skill in dharmic conduct) on the part of the different groups of men involved. It is, however, not primarily that, because she is not judging others objectively on their skills in virtuous conduct but rather, reacting to the consequences of their lack of commitment to virtue.

Consequently, the contempt we are looking at here is best seen as what Michelle Mason calls “reactive contempt” (2018), and not contempt as an objective attitude. (I will later on point to an example of Draupadī's own objective attitude of contempt towards Karṇa in an earlier episode of the epic.) The particular type of contempt we see Draupadī showing is in response to the conduct of the men: whether the actions of her assailants or the non-action of the elders, or the action of her eldest husband in bringing the circumstances about. In that sense, her contempt is the justified reaction to immorality that in modern Western moral philosophy is anchored in Kant (Thomason, 2013). The reactive nature of Draupadī's contempt is therefore recognizable in a specific relation to her anger at her mistreatment. “[C]ontempt…occurs in reaction to social or moral transgressions that are perceived as wrong and that may also elicit anger, disgust, or hatred” (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016, p. 349). My suggestion, in reading Draupadī here is that, specifically, the moral transgressions and enabling of the transgressions on the part of the men elicit her anger, and it is in the social and phenomenal state that she is in that contempt becomes an integral expression of her anger.

The events in the Great Hall present an extreme situation of moral transgression, as a limit case of how socially validated processes—the acceptability of royal dice games and the wagers on human beings (including oneself) that were possible—can come up against intuitively moral limits: for, at no time does the text endorse Yudhiṣṭhira's actions nor the acceptability of the conduct of the Kaurava brothers. (The contemporary tendency in many an online discussion to defend the unwavering demonstration of dharma by Yudhiṣṭhira is driven by a masculinist, culturally defensive that disregards the text itself and its morally deep ambiguities.) Throughout, too, the text's perspective of a woman's anger and contempt is that they are justifiable and necessary. This makes the anger righteous, the contempt reactive; the latter could be thought to emerge from the former in the Great Hall.

How does the contempt emerge from the anger? Some contemporary findings in psychology suggest a connection that may be plausibly applied to Draupadi's responses.

Empirical studies suggest that a history of interacting with a target who flouts assigned identity goals often begins with a subject responding with anger that, if ineffective in prompting the requisite change in the target, transforms into what I am calling reactive contempt with increasing instances of transgression (Fischer & Roseman, 2007). This transformation likely tracks a transformation from attributing the eliciting event to unstable, specific features to stable, global features of the target. Contempt thus may originate in circumstances of increasing doubt that the target is likely to change or reform (Mason, 2018, p. 184).

Strategies of Reactive Contempt

Contempt has a purposive expression for Draupadī in two ways. The first is to provoke morally—by making the elders of the court ashamed, as also to make her eldest husband contemplate with shame his actions in the first place. Shame in X is what is warranted by the very conditions that warrant Y's contempt of X; this is my reading of Mason (2018). Draupadī makes the elders and her husbands question their lack of action to help her when she is being assaulted. Furthermore, at the point by which she has been dragged by her hair from the inner quarters to the Great Hall, she cannot but restore to expression of contempt because of the exhaustion from the psychological cost of her anger. One could say that her contempt allows her to convey, at less intense emotional and physical cost (she speaks softly, both from keeping her dignity and from the shock of the treatment), her moral condemnation of those who have allowed her to be in this situation. Macalaster Bell has argued for the way the psychological cost of anger is connected to contempt, although my analysis here differs from hers (2013).

The aetiology of Draupadī's contempt for elders and husbands is fundamentally different from that towards her assailants, as we will see. She has not entirely given up on the commitment to dharma on the part of the elders and her husbands. She does not yet take a failure of commitment as—to borrow from Mason's quote above—a “stable, global feature” of their character; but it seems to her to be more than an “unstable, specific feature” to have allowed this to happen to her, even if the event is a specific, unprecedented one. So, oddly enough, her contempt arises from an underlying expectation that they are indeed people committed to dharma; it is their failure to adhere to it that astonishes her as she is forced into the Great Hall, and it is that failure that makes her feel contempt at them at this point in her extreme experience. Mason has recognized in her work that reactive contempt can contain this oddness.

Might properly focused contempt be something we morally owe to others? With regard to the object of contempt, my argument embraces a claim that has the ring of paradox: contempt, that apparent antithesis of respect, might itself be a sign of respect for its object (2003a, 2003b, p. 270).

Along the way, I should point out one particularly emotive expression of this contempt—one which implicitly acknowledges that the recipients of her contempt know that they are contemptible but yet potentially could redeem themselves—is the way Draupadī barely looks at them (merely glances at them with blazing scorn). Too direct a look would make her anger incendiary beyond return: too much for her and for them. This may well be contextualized within the Sanskritic poetic tradition of meaningful looks by women, far more expressive than the narrower register that men are required to show in a masculinist world. Perhaps far too little has changed since.

Draupadī also deploys an intuitively compelling strategy for conveying contempt towards Yudhiṣṭhira, the chief culprit because of the original moral failure: she excuses him as being inexpert, misled, gullible, slow (“he only understood afterwards” that he had been tricked; when, exactly, if at all?). Together with her initial sweeping statement that she does not blame him at all (nothing more scornful than that), her making poor excuses for him itself becomes a demonstration of her contempt. Yet again, this is finely tuned contempt: it is judgementally negative but also emotionally precise, contempt that still seeks transformation rather than only condemning it for its own moral sake.

We should also note that the contempt does not end with the ending of the outrage. Her elaborate invocation of the future of Yudhiṣthira as a moral exemplar, when she uses one of her boons on him (and their son alone) arguably looks like another subtly coded yet pointedly expressive contempt for the “glorious servant of dharma” who has just so notably failed to act according to it with regard to her. (What her theatrical refusal to cash in a third boon by saying she is not entitled to one mean? Arguably, more contempt. To the King, for showing that he does not know that the dharmic rule is only two boons for high-born women—as throughout this scene, only she seems to know dharma, none of the men. To her husbands, for saying she could have done more than freeing them from slavery but will give them the opportunity to redeem themselves by doing all the rest.

Draupadī's contempt for the Kaurava brothers and Karṇa, on the other hand, has a different emotional aetiology, where the contempt also condemns. She uses it to distance herself from her attackers, protecting herself existentially, by holding them as beneath her in emotional interaction, to make herself invulnerable to being shamed by them. This, I would think, is because she holds herself to be someone with a moral standing—adherence to dharma in its manifold nature—that cannot be undermined or lowered by her attackers. This is a sense of superiority, and her behaviour at other times in the epic might be thought of as haughty. In this case, she is holding herself as superior, as the exemplar of dharma (it is King Dhrtarāṣṭra at the end who praises her thus), but rather, holds her attackers as being lowly due to conduct against dharma. We must be careful here in not thinking of her contempt at the Kaurava brothers as hierarchizing through self-regard.

The sort of pride found in a sense of one's own integrity can readily seduce us into the kind of arrogance in which we see ourselves as an essentially higher type of moral agent than others. But the remedy for this, insofar as there is one, is not the removal of contempt from our emotional repertoire. Instead, we should cultivate a sense of moral humility… (Sussman, 2018, p. 168).

Throughout, one notes that Draupadī's consistent commitment is to her own dignity. There is hierarchic dignity, informed by her being a princess and wife of princes. There is the dignity of virtue, as a woman who both knows and lives dharma and argues through it within the framework ostensibly shared with the men. There is also dignity as attitude informed by anger at sexist mistreatment. In this third dimension of dignity, contempt is arguably an apt strategic response to gross mistreatment. It does not expend one's emotional resources or social capital as screaming with anger or complaining or other instinctive and entirely understandable responses in the face of awful wrongdoing might, and its effectiveness is seen in her being treated with dignity in the end by the elders. Her dignity perhaps even slows Duryodhana enough to make him expend his malice on Yudhiṣṭhira and his brothers. Only with Karṇa—with his own deep resentment at the indignity she heaped on him originally—does Draupadī's dignified contempt have no impact.

Contrasting Reactive and Objective Contempt

Reactive contempt, then, is a purposive moral expression of the attitude to the situation that caused righteous anger. I want to take a little bit of time here to rule out some of the ways in which certain descriptions of contempt can be ruled out in the case we are considering. First, I think it is clear here that with neither the elders and husbands nor with the assailants does Draupadī's contempt contain an attitude of “withdrawal” that is so often seen as a core aspect of contempt: “Whereas angry emotions or attitudes are associated with motivating confrontation and aggression, contempt is associated more with withdrawal from, and exclusion of, its target from the contemnor's social circle” (Fischer & Roseman, 2007; Mason, 2018, p. 180). As we will explore in the last section of the paper, when we turn to the importance of contempt (and anger) as a gendered response to masculinist oppression, Draupadī's emotions in the Great Hall are an expressive engagement with her ill-treatment, not a withdrawal from the situation (would that she had been left out of it in the first place); and it is not the exclusion of others—even her assailants—from the social circle of the warrior class but the determination to have them punished within that very circle.

The connection that emerges between anger and contempt broadly follows a point Bell makes (2005, p. 83): “[W]hile resentment and anger are responses to a perceived harm or injury, contempt is a response to a perceived failure to meet an interpersonal standard.” For Draupadī, the injury to her—for which she is angry—comes from the failure on the part of all the men to adhere to dharma. I have already suggested why we may think of contempt as an expressive emergence of her anger in her situation. “While anger serves to bear witness to a wrong done, contempt can bear witness to the fact that someone has failed to meet an important standard” (Bell, 2005, p. 88). However, my analysis of the relationship between anger and contempt, arising from how the scene and its consequences go, differs from Bell's (2005, p. 88): “Anger tends to motivate direct engagement with the object of anger, while contempt tends to motivate people to disengage from the object of contempt.” As I have argued, it would seem that Draupadi's contempt is a desperate search for engagement with those who have put her in that situation, and not her detachment from them. One should keep in mind, though, that I am reading intuitively that a woman in her position would be desperate; for it should be noted that nowhere does she betray that desperation, instead always acting to preserve her dignity.

Also, it is often said that contempt is a response to those who would hold themselves superior to the contemnor; but it is not clear that a sense of superiority (“superbia” in Bell, 2013, chapter 3) is demonstrated by either the elders or the attackers in this instance. The exception is the expression of superiority by Karṇa; yet, it seems a form of insult to Draupadī (i.e., a deliberate inversion of her status, which itself points to his recognition of that status), rather than—say, like a racist—thinking himself superior to her. Moreover, his calling her a slave is not about her intrinsic qualities but his taking revenge on her previous, highly consequential insulting of him, to which we turn now.

As briefly described before, Arjuna wins Draupadī's hand by winning an archery contest. But in the vulgate (although not in the Critical Edition), an extra incident is given. The Pāṇḍavas have come disguised as learned brahmins, to the contest where Draupadī will choose who she marries (a svayamvara), and therefore must wait as the kings and princes of the warrior class (kṣatriya) seek her hand. But they all fail. Now, it will be recalled that Karṇa is taken by all to be the son of a charioteer, but has now been elevated to a tributary kingship by the eldest Kaurava brother, Duryodhana; and as such, he is entitled to step forward to try his hand.

Beholding the plight of those kings, Karṇa, greatest of archers, went to where the bow lay, and raising it quickly, strung it and placed an arrow on the string.

Her contempt in this crucial event is not, as in the scene in the Great Hall, a result of righteous anger but a hierarchizing insult. (Note that there are many examples of epic contempt by warriors towards others, as in Homer [Pakaluk, 2018, pp. 21–23]). The Pāṇḍavas’ and Draupadī's contempt towards Karṇa has consequences in the narrative that implies the contempt was wrong, even without their knowledge we have that he was in fact their eldest brother. (The Mahābhārata is vast, and there are examples of hierarchizing contempt that are condemned and others where it is taken for granted in a hierarchical society.) Given this previous behaviour on her part, it would seem that Karṇa expresses contempt by denigration of Draupadī and her husbands, due to his resentment of their treatment of him. He alone speaks consistently in defence of her ill-treatment, alternating in his expression of contempt between treating her as a whore already (since she “has” five men) and as now having become a slave girl regardless of how honourable she was beforehand. (His conduct elsewhere, his own marriage, as well as his scrupulous friendship with Duryodhana's wife are utterly at odds with his prescription of a women's subordination in the passage we have seen.)

We can conclude that, whereas Draupadī's objective contempt of Karṇa was based on class (and let to deleterious consequences for her as he almost carries off his defence of the behaviour of the assailants), her contempt towards all the categories of men at the scene in the Great Hall is gendered reactivity, both as anger and as contempt.

To summarize, then, Draupadī has broadly, three targets for contempt:

The elders of the court

The one complication is Karṇa: in fact, she does not address him directly at all, and he is in a way anomalous in his situation. He is not an assailant or the elder brother of the assailant who commanded it; nor is he an elder who watches passively or speaks timidly in defence of Draupadī. But he is the one who most explicitly contemns her, and if we follow the vulgate, we see his behaviour as revenge for her original objective contempt towards him. But within the episode itself, her contempt is coherent in its righteous reactivity.

Class(ical) Implication of Gendered Reactive Contempt

What we see in her words is Draupadī's persistent interrogation of the sequence of actions by which she was brought to that position of injury and danger by all the men, in their various ways. She challenges every point of the situation, all of it boiling down to her question—whether she could have been staked by Yudhiṣṭhira after he had lost himself. She does so not only through her questions but her emotions and tone of question. She deploys sarcastic rhetoric about the standing of the elders and an equally sarcastic and pious, yet morally dismissive defence of her eldest husband.

Needless to say, she speaks of the Kaurava brothers with utter clarity about their failure to adhere to dharma. We could, structurally, see her contempt as “insubordination,” in the sense in which Bell uses it:

[A]woman's contempt for male oppressors or for male-dominated institutions may also constitute an act of insubordination…Insofar as feminists laud the insubordination associated with anger as subversive of the patriarchy, they have analogous reasons to laud the insubordination exhibited in feelings of contempt (2005, p. 85).

The Mahābhārata comes from a society of class and gender hierarchy, although its inexhaustible meaning for its culture partly arises from how it keeps subverting its own worldview. In Draupadī's case, there is a tension between her class and her gender, and the text provides us with the complex phenomenology of a person whose self-image as beloved and treasured high-born woman would seem to permit no reflexive sense of insubordination in terms of class, but whose gendered situation cannot but make her challenge masculinist power, howsoever unwittingly. In refusing to be a subordinate, she demonstrates insubordination. ¹¹

Now, the strict limitations of reading classical works from any tradition for general conclusions for a philosophical anthropology come primarily from their characters primarily being drawn from a narrow section of their societies. (There are exceptions, of course.) Paradigmatic representations, positive and negative, are those of high status. This makes it a very difficult to talk of specific applicability to any society today. And because class is now understood to be such a profound marker of human experience, there will always be limited applicability of the past when talking now about human nature. This quite abstract consideration of course informs what we may say from a reading of Draupadī (and that is without going into some sort of a census of women in Sanskrit texts to make the point that she is unique in many ways, not just her polyandry).

The other restriction, of course, comes from the inescapable patriarchy of epic compositions of all languages and cultures. (I am happy to be informed of any exception.) The point, however, is not to claim that any society in which the voice of Draupadī was created was not patriarchal, but to ask how we may, in our circumstances, draw ideas from such a composition as the Mahābhārata . (Perhaps with the Western classical tradition, the freedom to disembed characters and ideas from their historical context in order to talk about our concerns today is widely recognized, whereas Sanskrit is kept trapped in its history. But that debate is for another day.)

What all this amounts to is that we have to be clear on how to locate the anger and contempt that the text has Draupadī reveal. Draupadī is a high-born woman. Her righteousness is not subversive of the patriarchal society of the Mahābhārata , and indeed arises from her maximally exalted status as princess, and chaste and beloved wife. But I still think it is worth noting that the text presents her anger and her contempt as challenges to the failure of men to cohere with the very norms of which she is exemplary. This is not radical subversion as we might have it today, and my reading is therefore not a feminist critique of patriarchy. ¹² However, I think it is worth making the case that the incident we have been reading (and several others with other women characters) shows the text acknowledging the viability of the anger and contempt of women, if by viability we mean the recognition of the legitimacy—the uptake—of their anger and contempt. This is clear from the way Draupadī's emotions are justified and centred in the episode. In contrast, perhaps, to some truth-speaking women from Greek literature, she does not pay a price for it; indeed, she is thereafter exalted by men for her adherence to normative conduct.

It is, then, not the case that—granted all the things about her class status and her location within patriarchy—that the following applies to her: “Just as there are domains in which women's anger is not intelligible or viable, there are also domains in which women's contempt is not intelligible or viable” (Bell, 2005, p. 86). We may, of course, ask what this viability amounts to. Clearly, in the particular domain of the society of the Mahābhārata , Draupadī's anger and contempt are both intelligible and presented as justified. And this is so whatever the qualifications of her status and of that society within which she has it. But equally clearly, this does not amount to a challenge to class, nor indeed to the patriarchy of that society. All we can do is to disentangle contexts, pay attention to who—in any con/text—is marginalized and who is not, and try to look for anything that might make sense to us, in our present condition and with our present considerations (whoever we, the readers and writers of today are). Draupadī's aim is to get the elders to try and do justice then and there to stop the attack on her; but more fundamentally, to ensure that her husbands see her humiliation as theirs, and do justice to that experience in wreaking vengeance eventually upon her attackers. It is her “epistemic privilege”—as the woman knower of what it is to be attacked because she is a woman—that makes the argument to sharpen their humiliation as being about her. She succeeds, in that it is her experience and not theirs that becomes the leitmotif of the narrative subsequently. To that specific extent, we can think through the presentation of a woman's anger and contempt in this episode as telling us something about the positive and transformative possibilities of contempt.