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The Palace Of Illusions Summary

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17/PELA/034
Self-assertion of Drupadi in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel
The Palace of Illusions
The famous work The Palace of Illusions is a revision, of the holy epic the Mahabharata which has always fascinated the people of our country as well as the universe. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni with her ingenuity and imagination has once again attempted to make her audience re-live in the era of the Mahabharata.
Divakaruni through her story depicts the inner-mind of Panchali, born into a traditional society, intended to change the face of time and the whole era. She, in detail, explains the birth of Draupadi, who was born out of fire, accompanied by the heavenly spirits announcing how the child would change the course of history, and would both embrace and resist it. Divkaruni has shown profoundly how Drupadi is haunted by loneliness and unhappiness because she is less loved by her father, the king Dhupad. Drupadi was completely underestimated by her father who praises her …show more content…

Her story makes her the protagonist and the ‘doer’ of the action. She is not a passive receptor. In a story the major character becomes the all-powerful ‘subject’, who controls the action and its consequences. He is not the weak ‘object’ who waits for the action to be done. The fire born princess Draupadi, indirectly, has a desire to be all-powerful, to come to the center and control and manage everything willingly. Draupadi wants herself to be heard and thus she requires a platform of her own where everyone can see and hear her. That’s why she decides to be the narrator in the novel and willingly takes the power in her hands and now she will decide how to narrate the great epic. It would be her choice to choose the important and unimportant events. Thus Draupadi ‘discards the object’ and ‘becomes the subject’

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