The excursion into the past to recall the epic heroine raises a whole range of questions about memory, representation, retrieval and about the patriarchal structure within which these mental activities take place. The questions are about her very existence in the memory storehouse, and if she does exist, then the questions are about her “location” and about the nature of representation in the individual and collective memory. In the interviews that I conducted, I found a sharp contrast between the recollections of other characters in the Mahabharata and the recollections of its heroine Draupadi. A significant 67 percent of the subjects said that they either had no thoughts on Draupadi, or they didn't care about her or even disliked her or simply reported the events in which she was the central figure (See Appendix I, Table 5).

The questions that came to my mind were varied; has Draupadi disappeared from the memory storehouse, or was she never encoded in the memory to begin with, or is she disseminated, or is it a problem of retrieval, because recalling her would mean confronting some ugly gender questions and waging the gender battle, or is the memory in the Freudian sense repressed; the ego simply cannot handle the anxiety she produces.