Mahasweta Devi
b. 1926
Writer, journalist and activist
The storyteller
Writing from the margins
• Narrating the stories of the most downcast sections of
Indian society, the subalterns--Among the most
marginalised, along with dalits/lower castes (former
untouchables)
• Tribals/adivasis in India: 8% of India’s population
• Considered outside the caste structure and social
mainstream; political marginalization (in spite of
affirmative action)
• Long history from the colonial period: both exotic and
savage, unassimmilable—British fascination
• Postcolonial India: attempts to assimilate them in the
nation, while prejudices remain
The gendered subaltern
• Materialism of the stories:
• Women’s work and bodies: how they are
incorporated into the IDL
• sexual exploitation within the structure of
economy
“The Hunt”
• Social composition:
• A village of subalterns—tribal, in an impoverished
ravaged area of timber plantations
• “outsiders” luring tribals into wage labour
• traces of imperial capitalism: white contractors, the
Dixons
• national capitalism: in the name of development and
progress, agricultural land converted for surplus profit;
dams displacing people; profound ecological
catastrophes
• local, national and global articulated
The gendered subaltern
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Mary as gendered subaltern: doesn’t quite fit the mould
Mixed blood, in love with a Muslim
A “free” agent: stereotype and reality of tribal women’s lives
Mary’s will and agency is the question
“an individual activating ritual into contemporary resistance”
(Spivak in Afterword, 202)
the community of women: songs—retaining memories of struggles
and calamities
the question of justice: gender justice
Exhaustion of the possibility of justice from the state (police and
the law in liberal democracies)
Tremendous social violence: Mary herself the product of violence,
sexually coded; postcolonial state violence
“Douloti” (the rich one)
• Set on the eve of the Naxalite movement
• Naxalism: a Maoist movement that was
sparked off in the village of Naxalbari in West
Bengal in the late 1960s. Peasant/tribal
rebellion against landlords, moneylenders,
police, state, all exploiters. A militant
movement consisting of landless farmers,
tribals, urban rebels, cadre Maoists that aims
to overthrow the state.
Role of intellectuals
• Role of intellectuals: “the bespectacled town
gentlemen will never understand these
things” (R. p. 27)
• Limits of sociological/disciplinary knowledge
(p. 49 bottom)
• Narrative of rescue: p. 75
• Read Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the
Comrades” for an elite intellectual’s alliance
with the Maoists
Limits of solidarity
The nation: real and imagined
• Indian nation: imaginary, unreal
• The state: corrupt, instrument of elites; the
diseased body politic
• Last para: Douloti/India
• Abstract citizenship versus the body of the citizen
• Question of who decolonizes?
• Gendering as the foundation of postcolonial
exploitation (Spivak)—exchange of women as
merchandise
Violence of all types
• Douloti the innocent victim: “the violated,
naked harijan woman’s helpless body” (58):
re-enacting the daily social violence enacted
on the bodies of subaltern women
• Sexual labour:bonded labour:wage labour
Draupadi/Dopdi
• The story brings up the
issue of resistance centrally
• Familiar story of state
repression
• Militants on the run
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• Imaginative rendering of
story from Mahabharata:
• Draupadi staked in a game;
disrobed, but as a devotee
of Krishna was saved
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• Dopdi’s abjected body
(raped, tortured) transforms
into a resistant body
• The body speaks
• Read last scene
• Masculinised state is what is
exposed for its corruption
and shamefulness
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Parallels
• Draupadi
• Character from the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata
• Married to the Pandavas (5 brothers) who stake her in a game of
dice and lose her
• The opponents try to dishonour her by disrobing her in open court
• Her devotion to Lord Krishna saves her honour—it remains intact
Dopdi
Modern tribal woman, a militant
• The postcolonial state attempts to dishonour her—she is raped
multiple times by policemen and state officials
• Dopdi reverses the stakes of the game—in looking back at the
officer, she redirects shame in his direction, away from her
mutilated body
The story continues…
Women insurgents