Analysis Of Draupadi's The Palace Of Illusions

As we already said, The Palace of Illusions is a rewritten version of the Mahabharata told through Draupadi's view, so it is preferable to get to know the original version of the myth before tackling Divakaruni's novel as well as the heroine, Draupadi.

1.1. What is a myth?

Myth is defined as follows by Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary: “a story from ancient times, especially one that was told to explain natural events or to describe the early history of a people” (1012). According to this definition, the truest sense of the word “myth” is “story” and Robert A. Segal defines it likewise in his book Myth, A Very Short Introduction. To begin with, we are going to try to define what is a myth and to do so we are going to base ourselves on Segal's book.

He thinks that ritual functions to apply the “explanation [of the world] to control the world” (63). According to him, myth is a more important aspect of religion than ritual because ritual depends on myth and its function is secondary. If for Tylor there is no myth nor ritual in modern religion, it is because modern religion does no longer deal with the physical world.

Like Tylor, J. G. Frazer subsumes myth under primitive religion and subsumes primitive religion under philosophy; and “primitive religion is the counterpart to natural science, itself entirely modern” (23). For Frazer primitive religion functions as the counterpart to “applied science, or technology” (24) and serves to “effect events” (24), particularly the growth of crops. And he thinks that myth is connected to ritual, which is a performance of myth.

Frazer distinguishes two versions of myth-ritualism. In the first one, myth recounts the life of the god of vegetation, and ritual acts the myth out describing his death and rebirth. Ritual obeys to the “Law of Similarity, according to which the imitation of an action causes it to happen”