Week 6 Reading Diary B

Merciless killing of Abhimanyu, from Wikipedia

Today, I finished up the last quarter of Narayan's Mahabharata. This reading really, really reminded me of the Lord of the Rings series, as well as Game of Thrones, though a little less of the latter. A solid chunk of the reading today was edited out because it was too battle and strategy heavy, as noted in a footnote, and yet it was still very much focused on the battle. A lot of the text came from who was fighting who, if they had died yet, when they died, why they died, the long journey to their current standpoint...

That said, there was still a lot of good material there. Yudhisthira continually makes me question his ability to be king, but it makes a lot more sense as we're dealing with half-god, half-men, instead of in the last epic, where Rama was flawless. It's interesting to see the parallels between the stories, both heir apparents ousted from their place of being into exile for a long time, and then fighting a battle and resuming their throne.

It's also really interesting that the wives consistently get treated incredibly poorly. Sita was also a goddess incarnate, and therefore flawless, and Rama was fairly terrible to her after they left exile. Similarly, Draupadi does nothing but sticks her neck out for her men, and gets absolutely nothing in return. Like, she yells at them every now and then. And that's it.

I feel like every week this just turns more and more towards me being entirely indignant for the women in the epics. They're awesome, awesome characters, and yet they're treated like cardboard cutouts for the men to enjoy but not worry about past that.