As it is told at Raksha Bandhan
Told in homes across India · 2 min read
When Yudhishthira was crowned emperor at Indraprastha, every king in the land came to the sacrifice. At the end of it, the first honour had to be given to one guest, and on Bhishma's word Yudhishthira gave it to Krishna.
Shishupala, the king of Chedi, stood up in the hall and laughed. "A cowherd?" he said. "You give the first place to a cowherd, before all the kings of the earth?" And he went on, insult after insult, until the hall went quiet.
Krishna did not answer him for a long time. Long before, he had promised Shishupala's mother that he would forgive her son a hundred wrongs. He let the insults come and counted them. When Shishupala spoke the hundred and first, Krishna raised his hand, and his discus, the Sudarshana, flew from his finger and took Shishupala's head from his shoulders.
As the discus came back to him, its edge caught his finger and cut it. Blood ran down his hand. The kings and the priests stood staring, and the servants ran about looking for a cloth.
Draupadi did not wait. She took the end of her silk sari, tore a strip from it, and wrapped it tight around Krishna's finger.
Krishna looked at the strip of cloth, and then at her. "You have given me this without being asked," he said. "Every thread in it is a debt. I will repay you, thread for thread, on the day you need it."
Draupadi laughed. "It is only a rag, Krishna."
"We will see," he said.
Years later the Pandavas lost everything at the game of dice, their kingdom, their brothers, themselves, and last of all Draupadi. Dushasana dragged her into the hall by her hair. Karna said that a woman with five husbands had no right to be clothed before the court, and Duryodhana told Dushasana to strip her.
She looked at her husbands, who did not move. She looked at the elders, Bhishma and Drona and the blind king, who said nothing. Then she shut her eyes, raised her hands and called on Krishna.
Dushasana took hold of her sari and pulled. Under it was another sari. He pulled that, and there was another, and another, in every colour, until the cloth lay in a heap as high as a man and his arms gave out. He sat down, panting, and Draupadi was still covered.
"I said I would repay you," Krishna said to her afterwards. "That was the cloth you gave me."
As the Mahabharata tells it: the dice hall
Mahabharata, Sabha Parva 61 · 1 min read
The epic tells the hall scene this way. The game is lost, and Draupadi, staked last, is brought before the court in a single garment, against her will. She asks the elders whether a man who has lost himself can still stake his wife, and nobody can give her an answer. Vikarna, one of the younger Kauravas, says she was not lost fairly, and Karna shouts him down.
Then Karna tells Dushasana to strip the Pandavas and Draupadi. The five brothers take off their upper cloths and sit. Dushasana takes hold of Draupadi's garment and begins to pull it from her in the middle of the hall.
In the version most people know, she thinks of Krishna then and calls him by his names, Govinda, lord of Dvaraka, lover of the cowherd women, and begs him to save her. Each time a garment is pulled away, another of the same kind is there in its place, hundreds of them, of many colours. The kings watching roar at the wonder, and they curse Dushasana. Bhima stands and swears that he will one day tear open Dushasana's chest and drink his blood.
The scholars who made the critical edition of the epic found manuscripts without her prayer. In their text the garments simply keep appearing, and the epic says nothing of how. Later, in the forest, Draupadi herself reminds Krishna that he came to her once before, in the hall, in the form of clothes.