Voices Unbound: The Fire Beyond Draupadi

I am not your Draupadi.

Not Panchali.

Not the queen of Pandavas,

offered to silence and sacrifice.

I am not the woman who waited for justice

in a hall of shame.

I am not a sermon of obedience,

not your cautionary tale.

I am Krishna.

I name myself.

I am not your myth —

I am the fracture,

I am the reckoning.

For too long,

we wore your stories like cages.

You stitched our pain into poems,

sang our wounds as metaphors,

offered us altars only after we bled.

Enough.

This is not Mahabharata’s time.

This is not your epilogue of silence.

This is the age of voice,

of shattering,

of becoming.

We are not your shadows —

we are the storm that remembers.

We are not your footnotes —

we are the ink that rewrites.

We are not your victims —

we are the earthquake that levels.

And in our rising,

we carry them:

Nirbhaya, who loved jasmine in her hair.

Abhaya, who hummed while she studied.

Tilottama, who dreamed in three languages.

Damini, who laughed like summer rain.

Amanat, who danced barefoot on terrace floors.

Not headlines.

Not bodies for blame.

But galaxies —

snatched,

silenced,

still screaming in the marrow of this nation.

They were not weak.

Not asking for it.

Not born to bleed

for the world to awaken.

They were daughters.

Sisters.

Dreamers with notebooks and bare feet,

stardust in motion —

the futures you stole before they could speak.

Now —

they are memory turned to movement.

They are fire beneath our feet.

They are the ghosts that vote.

So we say this,

not with fear —

but with fury:

No more abuse.

No more humiliation.

No more invisibility.

No more stolen tomorrows.

We do not shrink — we blaze wider.

We do not whisper — we thunder back.

We will not dim our light for your comfort.

We will not trade our rage for your peace.

We will live —

with dignity.

With autonomy.

With breath that breaks old chains.

With voices like shattered glass.

With fire that scrawls our names across the dark.

This is not a poem.

This is a war cry.

This is not a tribute.

This is transformation.

This is not mourning.

This is a movement.

Let the world know:

We are not your past.

We are the echo you feared.

We are the dawn that breaks your silence.

We are the fire that rewrites the ending.

To Abhaya,

To Nirbhaya,

To Tilottama,

To Amanat,

To Damini,

To every unnamed sister lost in the margins —

We do not say, “Rest in peace.”

We say: Rise in power.

Rise in us.

Because we are not done.

Because we are just beginning.

Let this fire bear your name too.

Join us.

Rise.

Rewrite the story.

We are the uprising.