In the past, there were many statements blaming Draupadi's laughter and her subsequent comment, "The blind man's son is also blind," after Duryodhana's fall at Maya Sabha, as one of the causes of the Mahabharata war—a war that destroyed everything for both sides. This is considered an accepted fact, and subsequently, a lot of folklore was also built around it.
The problem is that this doesn't fit the character of Draupadi mentioned in the epic. However, the super-successful Mahabharata TV serial made it so popular that people actually believed it. So when I heard about Maya Sabha again on a podcast today, I wondered—did she really laugh and say those words? I did a quick search on the internet, and it seems like the serial added these scenes, which were not there in the original text. It looks like, in most interpretations of the epic, Draupadi and Krishna were not even present in the scene at all. Those who laughed were the Pandavas, excluding Yudhishthira.
So, it's probably time for people to stop blaming Draupadi for her laughter at an occasion that didn’t happen.
Sajeev.
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