Dhruvswamini
Jaishankar Prasad's landmark play: a Gupta queen defies a king who tried to trade her away — a drama of dignity and colonial allegory.
Overview
King Ramagupta of the Gupta dynasty made a calculation: hand over his queen, Dhruvswamini, to the Shaka king who had them surrounded, and the siege would lift. The surrender was presented as statecraft. Dhruvswamini refused to see it that way. Facing the Shaka court, she turned the transaction back on her husband with a question that the play never lets the audience forget: can a woman who was offered like a prostitute still call herself a queen?
Jaishankar Prasad wrote this play in the early twentieth century, reaching back into Gupta history to say something urgent about his own time. The parallel is not subtle: a society that trades away its women to foreign powers, that dresses exploitation as necessity, was as relevant under colonial rule as it had been in ancient India. Chandragupta — who refuses the transaction and stands with Dhruvswamini — embodies the alternative Prasad believed possible: a reformed, awakened India, proud of its classical culture and unwilling to surrender it.
As drama, it moves with the urgency of a play that has things to say. As a cultural document, it marks a moment when Indian literature began to speak to the condition of a people under occupation.
Queen Dhurvswamini married to King Ramagupta of the Gupta dynasty is bizarrely sent away as a peace offering to the Kind of the Shakas along with some other noble women to end a siege. Dhruvaswamini asserts herself and moves away from the trope of an abject wife to protest against the patriarchal injustices by challenging the authority of the Gupta king over her body and soul. As a rightful queen, she publicly questions the age-old patriarchal tenet of a women's position in the society as dependent on a man-"My king, am I still your queen? Can the one who was sent like a prostitute for Shakaraja's bed be still your queen?" Using a famous historical tale as the foundation of this play, Jaishankar Prasad's play expands our cultural consciousness. He highlights the reality of life in India under colonialism, particularly the issue of awakening and libteration of Indian women. In Dhruvaswamini, Prasad, an ardent lover of India's ancient culture, presents himself as a proud reformist and idealist, who interprets his contemporary socio-cultural problems from a philosophical and creative perspective.
