Draupadi's Silent City: Kampilya and the Poetics of Forgetting

Abstract

The village of Kampil today (Kampilya), in the Farrukhabad district of Uttar Pradesh, is removed from the mainstream of Indian culture. It is the place cited in Mahabharata as the place of Draupadi's swayamvara. According to the Jain belief it is the birthplace of 13th Tirthankara Vimalanatha. It was noted by the nineteenth century colonial surveyors as a mound that could be dug, and has been established by archaeologists that people inhabited it continuously from the Painted Grey Ware period and beyond. Kampilya, however, hardly became as integral part of the narrative that is the regular history of ancient India as did Hastinapura or Indraprastha. This paper argues that the recently provided edited collection of Kampilya: Unravelling the Essence of History, Literature and Spirit, by Shaleen Kumar Singh and Seema Gautam, should be read with epic, Jain and archaeological documents and poses the question about why this city of reference was on that much the slimmer of scholarship for so long. The argument is not "No evidence". It's that the proof still had to be spread out over disciplines and sects that scarcely read a lot of other people, and that an e-book made just to set those pieces on a single page are doing something which is incredibly useful.