Why did Draupadi not defend herself when she was being dishonored?
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In the Sabha Parva, why did Draupadi not protect herself? Wasn’t she a Kshatriya trained in self-defence, moreover she was not an ordinary woman? Answer, there is no instance as far as we see in the Mahabharata where Draupadi fought physically. There are martial art skills which Indian traditional women also have learned, but that does not necessarily mean that Draupadi herself was trained, nor was it that, nor does it necessarily mean that she would have been able to match Vishasana’s strength, because Vishasana after all was a brute. Simply there are physical differences between men and women and while Draupadi was no ordinary woman, there is no indication in the Mahabharata that she had any mystic powers, that she had some syntheses either by performing austerities in this life or she had carried some from a previous life and additionally this whole Leela is orchestrated to show Draupadi’s dedication to Dharma, first to try to everyone else, to remind everyone else to do the right thing and when they forget, when they abandon their duty, they abandon their Dharma, then she shows how to practice the Paradharma exclusively and take total shelter of Krishna and Krishna’s eventual capacity to protect even amidst overwhelming austerity, overloading difficulty and abandonment is also demonstrated.
So overall every incident in the history happens in a particular context and it has particular lessons to be drawn from it. So Draupadi’s self-defense is not the key