Keechaka and Sairandhri

M. V. Dhurandhar painted this scene of Keechaka and Sairandhri in 1934, inspired by that scene in the Mahabharata in which Draupadi, hiding out as the maid Sairandhri, gets cornered by Keechaka. The curious thing about Dhurandhar is that he doesn’t treat it as some faraway mythical scene at all. Instead, he drags it into his own world. Sairandhri wears a nine yard sari, the kind of sari women in the Bombay Presidency wore at the time, and everything around her, the food, the fruit, the jewellery, the architecture, all feels definitely local rather than epic or ancient. It ceases to feel like an illustration out of scripture, and starts to feel like something that could have happened in a real house that people would know. Only Keechaka adds to that effect. He is painted in trousers, not the grand, kingly clothing you'd expect from a man of his rank, and somehow that makes him feel closer, more present, more uncomfortably real. And there’s this tension that runs the whole length of the piece between how good it looks and how bad the moment actually is. The colours are bright and the fabrics patterned and lovely, and each object is carefully depicted, but none of that prettiness is a match for what is going on between the two figures. Keechaka acts as if he is entitled to come close to Sairandhri, regardless of how she may feel. Sairandhri is evidently alert. I think that clash is what makes the painting work. Dhurandhar clothes a story everyone already knows in the clothes and objects of his own era, stopping it from feeling like a far off myth. It starts to feel like two real people in a real room, and that makes the discomfort hit a lot harder.