In our enthusiasm to appropriate the Mahabharata as a compendium of human conflict and frailty, we often forget how gods, boons and miracles catalyse the events of this epic poem. Draupadi, for instance, was never strictly born. She emerged from sacrificial fire. In Panchali: The Game of Dice, artist Sankha Banerjee beautifully illustrates her conception, showing the princess wrapped in flames, but, sadly, his collaborator, author Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, never gives her agency that’s half as fiery.

In our enthusiasm to appropriate the Mahabharata as a compendium of human conflict and frailty, we often forget how gods, boons and miracles catalyse the events of this epic poem. Draupadi, for instance, was never strictly born. She emerged from sacrificial fire. In Panchali: The Game of Dice, artist Sankha Banerjee beautifully illustrates her conception, showing the princess wrapped in flames, but, sadly, his collaborator, author Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, never gives her agency that’s half as fiery.

Reading this graphic novel, one feels confounded by how little Draupadi has to say or, for that matter, even think. When her father turns her svayamvara into a muscle and archery contest, stealing from her the right to choose her own husband, she doesn’t once protest. She doesn’t demur when Kunti decrees she must be shared by all five Pandavas. Even when Duhsasana drags her into the Hastinapur assembly hall by her hair, subjecting her to a loud crescendo of lascivious abuse, her words don’t quite match her anguish. Far from being a protagonist of Panchali, Draupadi is given only a walk-on part.

The authors of this book could, of course, argue that theirs was never meant to be a feminist project; that like Vyasa: The Beginning, the first book in their five-part series, Panchali, too, “steadfastly follows” the Sanskrit Mahabharata. While this would perhaps explain why the graphic novel reads like a quick narration of events, that defence itself would also be somewhat disingenuous. Making it obvious that this series wishes to make more contemporary an ancient text, Bandyopadhyay drops colloquialisms thick and fast. To hear the demoness Hirimba call her brother “bro” and to then hear him say “b@!*h” is jarring, yes, but hearing the Pandavas and Kauravas bicker like boys in a schoolyard is plain comic: When Duhsasana calls Bhima “a cow”, he retorts, “Wait till I suck you dry of your blood.”

Caught between its want to be modern on the one hand and its rigid fidelity to the ‘original’ on the other, Panchali seems more strained than expansive. The Pandavas might be the rightful heirs to Hastinapur, but that, in no way, makes them blameless. Though the exemplary Yudhishthira loses his kingdom, brothers and wife in a game of dice, his recklessness is glossed over too hurriedly. It is only in a rare moment when Bandyopadhyay steps away from the grind of storytelling that he asks why Yudhishthira let an innocent lower-caste family die instead of Kunti and her five sons in Varnavata.

Bandyopadhyay’s narrator, the bard Ugrasrava, often makes apparent caste and class inequity without giving in to outrage or cries of discrimination. Born to a Brahmin woman and a Kshatriya man, he is “by birth and trade, a Suta, a peddler of stories”. Ugrasrava’s position in the caste hierarchy is somewhat analogous to that of the Mahabharata itself. An ostensibly Kshatriya text, the epic challenged Brahmanical order by substituting ritual with story. But in the Harivamsa, an appendix to the Mahabharata , Vishnu is seen taking Krishna’s form only to eliminate Kshatriyas. No wonder then that warriors and their kin accounted for a majority of the deaths in this giant, violent epic.

The next three books in this series might well be forced to further plunge down these rabbit holes of caste, asking more subtle questions about a person’s dharma but, for now, the primary rewards that Panchali offers come to us by way of Sankha Banerjee’s art. In almost everything he draws—snow-capped mountains, lush forests, Draupadi’s red eyes, Ugrasrava’s blue face—there seems to be an intensity that makes it hard for us to look away. His panels all hold secrets that demand inspection.

The book’s undoing, in the end, is its indulgence. There is much here that can be excised—a whole chapter dedicated to the significance of the number ‘four’, the switching of register from formal to everyday, and cultural allusions that seem altogether unnecessary. In the first few pages itself, we see Bandyopadhyay refer to Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) and Bob Dylan (‘Blowing in the wind’), but when Duryodhana says to Sakuni, “Let us go then, you and I”, he takes things a little bit too far.