Inside the hole-in-the-wall office of the Draupadi Trust in Shahpur Jat village of south Delhi, files from various ministries, fine handicrafts and laptops lie scattered around. One shelf is devoted to books on Indian mythology and civilisation. Student volunteers from Delhi University crowd the tiny space.
On the walls are greeting cards and photographs of the NGO’s chairperson and trustee, Neera Misra, with various political and business figures. One photograph shows Misra leading a delegation of women to Pakistan in 1999.
Misra, 50 and diminutive, is a former entrepreneur and business consultant. A near-fatal car accident in 2000, she says, changed her life and led her to set up the Trust, which has a dual mission: the “socio-economic development of women and youth” and the restoration of heritage sites.
Misra’s roots lie in the village of Kampilya in Farrukhabad district of Uttar Pradesh, where she has an ancestral home. On the same site was ancient Kampilya, capital of the kingdom of Panchala.
So it is the birthplace of the legendary Draupadi, also known as Panchali, the daughter of Drupada and wife of the Pandavas. Years ago when Misra went to the village to conduct a seminar on entrepreneurship for illiterate women, she was welcomed as a “daughter of the village”. So she named her trust after Kampilya’s most famous daughter.
Not at all coincidentally, one of the Trust’s projects is an excavation in Kampilya, being carried out with the support of the Archaeological Survey of India and Lucknow University. Misra says it was her preoccupation with the Mahabharata — ever since B R Chopra’s popular TV series of the same name — that gave her the idea of digging at Draupadi’s supposed birthplace. Her aims, she insists, are not religious. “The Maha-bharata is not a holy book but a way of life.”
Kampilya has been protected by the ASI since 1920. The first excavation, by Benaras Hindu University, took place over 20 days in 1975, but Misra says it was a “shoddy” job. Another excavation was performed in 2000 by an Italian team of archaeologists led by Gian Giuseppe Filippi and Bruno Marcolongo (this resulted in a book entitled Kampilya — the Quest for a Mahabharata City), but even that dig, says Misra, was inconclusive.
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The Draupadi Trust, says independent scholar and IIT Gandhinagar guest professor Michel Danino, “has been instrumental in getting concerned authorities and agencies, from the ASI to Lucknow University, to sanction and initiate the current excavations, which is a creditable achievement.”
Danino was one of several speakers at a seminar in April this year on the Mahabharata, organised in Delhi by the Draupadi Trust. “Judging from [Lucknow University professor] D P Tewari’s presentation at the seminar, several trenches were taken at Kampilya, which secured a chronology going back not just to the PGW phase (or Painted Grey Ware; the prelude to urbanisation in the Ganga valley) but even to a pre-PGW phase,” explains Danino. “This could point to the mid-2nd millennium BCE, although we do need firm dates.”
The excavations so far have been on a limited scale, which is why remains of buildings and streets have not been identified, he says. If “the excavations can be horizontally expanded soon”, he says hopefully, the site will reveal its potential. Another speaker at the seminar was the eminent archaeologist B B Lal. A former deputy director general of the ASI, he is also an advisor to the Trust.
For Misra, the village is not just of historical significance. “Kampilya has a 500-year legacy of zardozi” — a style of embroidery with precious thread — “and we are now training artisans of block-printing in this art.” With CHIC-CAD, a designing software developed by the government’s Department of Information Technology, artisans can use a digital pen to create a pattern for their embroidery, and then reproduce and preserve it. Pilot testing was conducted by the Draupadi Trust, and months of training and workshops in Kampilya have helped to make the software accessible to artisans in the village, Misra says.
What’s more, she has trained two master craftsmen from karkhanas in Shahpur Jat to work with the digital pen. She regularly emails suggestions to the artisans in Kampilya. The Trust has two centres, one with nine computers and the other with six, at which, among other things, it teaches the basics of computing and the Internet to illiterate women.
The Trust was registered in 2003 and started with Rs 11,000 of Misra’s own money. The Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany donated about Rs 30 lakh to the Trust every year from 2004 to 2006. Since then the union ministries of culture, environment and health have provided funds to run the Trust’s different projects, says Misra. “While the government gives us a fixed amount, we always need to fill the gaps by borrowing from PSUs.”
“Draupadi was not just a symbol of sacrifice but a great manager,” says Misra, and adds with a laugh, “She managed five husbands, after all.”
