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The Four Great Women
The men play dice and wage wars in Mahabharata, as anywhere else; but the women who wield power and influence. The women make decisions, direct the course of events, and decide the fate of men and their generations to follow. The women are the true leaders of the Epic Mahabharata. The four such women are Satyavati, Gandhari, Kunti, and Draupadi.

The women in particular who wielded power in more than one form were Satyavati the dusky fragrant fisher girl who became the queen. Gandhari, a prominent character, was a princess of Gandhara and the wife of Dhritrashtra, the blind king of Hastinapura, and the mother of a hundred sons, the Kauravas. Kunti is the fair maiden who reluctantly became the mother of five sons and daughter of the fire, Draupadi that interwoven with the remarkable sagacity in the exercise of their power and leadership. As a devoted wife, without parallel, Gandhari regarded as an epitome of virtue, among the most respected moral forces in the epic. She was not only married to a blind man but at the time of her wedding, she resolved to spend the remainder of her life as a blind woman herself, in order to share the debility and pain of her husband. For the rest of her life, she kept a cloth tied to her eyes and thus deprived herself of the power of sight.