Name: Robin Singh Arya

Professor Meenakshi Malhotra

Course: B.A. (Hons.) English Year: 3(v)
Paper: Women’s Writing

In Mahasweta Devi’s story, Draupadi’s nakedness unnerves the

Senanayak. Comment.

Mahasweta Devi’s corpus of tribal fiction delineates the lived experiences of

the downtrodden, humanising the subaltern subjects and its anxieties. In
Devi’s story, ‘Draupadi’ – Dopdi, a Santhal Naxalite woman - is apprehended
by the repressive apparatus of the state, and is subjected to brutal sexual
violence. While rape is used as a barbaric power tool to break her spirit and
to make her conform, Draupadi’s act of sheer defiance against the
Senanayak becomes emblematic of the reversal of symbolism of the rape,
and of a subject that refuses to bow down. The final act of subversion also
bears the stamp of the transient victory of native epistemology, as well as
the reversal of shame upon the perpetrators. The numbing delirium of
Senanayak ensures a juncture - however transitory - where all the power
hierarchies get inverted and the mutilated body becomes a site of sheer
resistance and subversion.

The essay shall attempt to constitute a structured discourse about the

culmination of the story - the rebellion of the subaltern, and the numbing of
the icon of the apparatus. A systematic approach shall be deployed to
discuss issues of other-isation of the native, and the feminisation of such a
native experience. Having delineated the theory of the body as represented
in the text, we shall also characterise rape, power and the location of shame
within the context of the story. After having deliberated the parallels and the
contradictions of the story with its mythic counterpart, the essay shall also
question and examine the extent of the subversion that is encapsulated in
the moment of retaliation, and expose certain fault-lines that lie beneath a
monolithic approach to the text.

Mahasweta Devi situates her story against the backdrop of the Naxalite
movement (1967-1971) and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), an era
which saw massive tribal uprisings against the social ostracism imposed
upon them by wealthy (upper caste) landlords and businessmen. Inhabiting
the periphery of the society’s social, political and economic constructions,
the tribal took to violent forms of protest - taking up arms, attacking police
stations, stealing guns - inviting fury from the government that resulted in
the likes of Operation Bakuli to nip the tribal rebels in the bud. As the
overarching concern of the story is to showcase the appropriation of the
tribal ‘other’ by the mainstream state apparatus, all the tribal
revolutionaries are rendered other-ised by invoking wild - ululating and
dancing - imagery, as well as the lack of access to their interior frame of
mind. Tribal are alienated from the Eurocentric discourse of knowledge, but
also from the national discourse of citizenship. The power dynamics between
the state and the tribal become imperative to our understanding of the
friction; and ultimate subversion of the same at the hands of Dopdi.

At our entrance into the story’s universe, Dopdi is on the run for having
murdered Surja Sahu and son(s) and having occupied upper-caste wells
during the drought. The vocabulary that Senanayak uses for Dopdi is target,
and the technical language of legality that’s employed to describe her
identity, renders her a different other from the very start. In the first part of
the story, the reader’s given no access to her interior stream of thought - she
is just painted to be a target and an absconding antinational. In the second
part of the story, even when Draupadi’s interior(ity) is in the foreground, she
continues to be a subject of the manipulation of Senanayak’s sly politics
through the metaphor of the chase. While Dopdi is the appropriated subject,
Senanayak is the appropriating agency - driven to appropriate their
epistemology and ultimately, to hunt and destroy. Dopdi’s final act of
standing defiantly - naked and unashamed, after having been gang-raped -
is a great subversive blow to the appropriating Eurocentric and national
discourses, as the ‘other’ refuses to be erased from history, the strain that it
constitutes being a perennial reminder of the same.
Interestingly, the process of othering - is also gendered, and complicit with
the power dynamics that gender relations encapsulate. The appropriating
agency - Senanayak - in a quest to destroy the menacing other, as Spivak
puts it, embarks on a masculine enterprise of penetrating the world of the
aranya, and defeating its true inhabitants. The representation of the
subaltern increasingly becomes more and more feminised by the end of the
story. While Dopdi is presented to us as the equal in power and agency as
her husband - her fighting skills also earn the title comrade - by the climax
of the story, her sex becomes her wound. The brutal sexual violence that
she’s subjected to stems from her gender identity, the masculine state
enterprise ensures that the subaltern feminine subject is issued a brutal
reminder of her gendered position.

In an interview with Gabrielle Collu, Mahasweta Devi remarked: I respect

Indian tribals because they are much more civilised and sophisticated than
we are. Their social codes say widows can remarry, divorce is allowed, men
and women can divorce, a woman’s place is of honour. There’s no one who
becomes an orphan because he or she has lost their parents. The community
rears then. There are many such laws which prove that they were most
civilised, most sophisticated and they are the people all India has exploited
like anything because they are black, because they don’t speak the language.
Draupadi is much more of a woman, much more polished, civilised,
courageous than many others.

The ideological apparatus of the state undermines this epistemology and

tries to break Dopdi’s spirit by invoking shame and inferiority in her rape.
The final defiant assertion of Dopdi - where she challenges the association of
the feminine rape survivor with inferiority and degradation - becomes
emblematic of the victory of the women’s place in the native epistemology
over the gendered-sexist-misogynistic treatment of women in so-called
progressive Eurocentric discourse.

In Mahasweta Devi’s oeuvre, representation of the female body becomes

imperative because it becomes the site of a clash between the competing
discourses of state nationalism, native culture, capitalism, patriarchy and
social exploitation. Within the nexus of these social institutions, the body of
the female subaltern other is rendered the most marginalised, subject to
brutality and violence. In Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories, the
representation of the body becomes representative of the gender politics of
the contemporary milieu, and the physical body also becomes a mirror to
the societal wrongs. In Stanadayini (or Breast Giver), Jashoda’s breasts (of
erotic and maternal significance), are readily commodified, exploited and
soon fall prey to disease and decay, underlining sheer horror and loathing.
In ‘Choli ke Pichhe’ (or Behind the Bodice), the ‘aestheticization’ of the
female breasts, as Kanika Gandhi puts it, bears violent repercussions on the
female subject - ultimately stripping her off her body parts. In ‘Draupadi’,
the erotic body of Draupadi is mutilated, violated and brutalised: her nipples
torn and her vagina wounded. The ultimate act of accosting Senanayak with
the brutalised black body also becomes an act of owning the body by the
self, irrespective of the crimes and force perpetrated on it. The body - having
had symbolism for the erotic, the maternal, the commodified - also becomes
the site of feminist politics and the subversion of patriarchal gaze and
sexual violence.

As Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan argues in ‘The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing:

Meanings of Our Times’: sexual molestation of any form happens to be
patriarchy’s method of social control rather than a pathology of sexual
violence as such. Rape happens to be a powerful tool in the hands of
patriarchy to curb dissent in any form, to ensure social conformity by
reminding the victim of their vulnerable gendered position in the structure.
As Meenakshi Malhotra elaborates, especially in South-Asian cultures: the
very act of rape is justified by invoking shame in the victim, even driving
numerous rape survivors to self-harm. Rape is intimately linked with the
feminisation of the victim, and it reminds the female victim of her
vulnerability. It’s with this definition and semiotics of rape that the
predators in Mahasweta Devi’s fiction impose sexual crimes (or the
masculine gaze) upon their victims. Senanayak in ‘Draupadi’ wishes to
break the victim’s spirit by raping her, Upin in ‘Behind the Bodice’ wishes to
appropriate Gangor’s breasts through the male gaze, and the young Haldar
son in ‘Stanadayini’ wishes to force the family cook into a (forced) sexual
encounter.

The emphatic heroines of Mahasweta Devi’s fiction, however, subvert the

very semiotics of rape and sexual abuse. The sheer confrontation of the
oppressor, and accosting one’s perpetrator seems to guarantee a sense of
emancipation in its own. The very location of shame is brought into question
by the assertive boldness of owning one’s body irrespective of the violation.
The shame gets reversed, and it also brings into question the masculinity of
the rapist. The possession of one’s own being guarantees that the entire
vocabulary associated with rape goes through a massive transformation.
Let’s examine three such instances from Mahasweta Devi’s fiction: excerpts
from ‘Dhouli’, ‘Stanadayini’ and ‘Draupadi’ to substantiate the argument.

In ‘Dhouli’, when (the upper caste- upper class) Misrilal is courting (the
lower class - tribal) Dhouli, the latter’s response to a (veiled) sexual threat is
interesting:
Yes, deota. You’ll play your games and push-off, but what will happen to
me? Look what happened to Jhalo! And Shanichari! No, sarkar !
And what if I don’t let you go? What can I do?
Nothing. Deotas like you always get what they want. Go ahead, take me,
dishonour me.
No, no, Dhouli. Forgive me, please forgive me.
Elsewhere, in ‘Stanadayini’, when the young Haldar son forces himself on
the (female) family cook, the conversation reeks of familiarity.
One afternoon, the boy, driven by lust, attacked the cook, since her body
was heavy with rice, stolen fish heads and turnip greens, and her body
languid with sloth, lay back, saying, Yah, do what you like. Thud did the
 incubus of Baghdad get off the boy’s shoulders and he went repentant
tears, mumbling, Auntie, don’t tell.
In ‘Draupadi’, Dopdi’s shame isn’t derivative of the multiple rapes that she’s
been subjected to, but rather her being offered water and the (one) tear that
trickles down her cheeks. Her accosting of Senanayak with her naked-
mutilated body seems to defy the semiotics of rape, and unnerves the
Senanayak, precisely because of the sheer reversal of shame and
questioning. Her laughter, which claims a space for her body, even within
the space of her perpetrators acts as a subversive instrument. Her words
‘kounter me!’ render the Senanayak aghast, not because it’s just a female
reversing the shame onto him, but because his entire pedantic knowledge
stands nullified, at such a startling sight.

But how different is our Dopdi from her mythic counterpart- Draupadi?
Mahasweta Devi consciously reworks the myth of Draupadi from the
Mahabharata, throughout her story. While Draupadi and Dopdi (even the
semantics of the name give out a tribal touch) - both - suffer at the brutal
hands of patriarchy, the nuances of the violence and its response
characterise a conflict. Draupadi when publicly disrobed takes to physical
resistance, recourse to legal technicalities and ultimately, a revenge threat.
Her grave crime is not that her resistance per se - but how she resists -
arguing law like a lady pundit, she’s subjected to public sexual humiliation.
Dopdi, on the other hand, might be Comrade Dopdi, but by the end of the
story, violence on her body becomes increasingly gendered. While Draupadi
is ultimately saved by divine intervention, Dopdi is raped multiple times -
brutally so - until she bleeds and passes into a delirium. She’s her own
Krishna, it’s as if the divine faculty also alienates her. Spivak points out,
“Dopdi is… what Draupadi — written into the patriarchal and authoritative
sacred text as proof of male power — could not be.’ When viewed in the
context of Devi’s sympathies towards the tribal communities which predate
the Aryan scriptures of Mahabharata and Ramayana, this seems to be an
alternative racial history of the subcontinent itself.

The placing of the mythical characters in contemporary times underlines the

brutal violence carried out by the state, victimising the down trodden
communities. The encounter of Dulna Majhi - a young Santhal man lying
on stomach to drink water, dipping his face to drink water - (reeking of
animalistic imagery) also carries echoes of Shravan Kumar’s death at the
hands of Dashratha in Ramayana. Even then, this Shravan doesn’t get to
curse Dashratha‘ state, his corpse just lies there waiting to be claimed. In
‘Stanadayini’ the character of Jashoda carries reverberations of Lord
Krishna’s foster mother, and yet she goes from being the suckler of the
universe to dying a bitter and lonely death.
In some other stories, Mahasweta Devi also examines some silences in epics
such as Mahabharata, in ‘The Five Women’, peasant widows from
Kurujungal whose husbands died in the war present to us a version of the
story still unheard of, a version located in the lives of common populace and
not the elite palaces. In ‘Kunti and Nishadins’, Kunti is finally held
responsible for the tribal lives lost in the burnt palace of Varanavat, where
five tribals died in place of the Pandavas. Similarly, in ‘Souvali’, the trodden
protagonist seems concerned about her son - Yuyutsu (born to her by
Dhritarashtra - that he’ll be alienated from both Pandavas and Kauravas,
because of their elite politics. She also chooses to forego her life as a ‘dasi’
and opts for a lifestyle among her own (subaltern) community - where she’s
guaranteed greater freedom that ever could be found in palaces. The
reworking of the mythology is intricate, and the naked body of Draupadi
standing unafraid in front of the Senanayak becomes a mythical hero for the
tribal communities.

Most readings of the story tend to be very sympathetic and emphatic to the
moment of emancipation that Draupadi claims when she reverses shame on
the Senanayak. This essay shall also like to examine the extent of this
subversion, and the impact of this victory in the context of the story. The
abrupt ending of the story - and for the first time, Senanayak is afraid to
stand before an unarmed target, terribly unafraid. - also culminates in a grey
area, where the female body also gets reduces to some sort of voyeurism:
and beyond this (transient) moment of freedom, the body also is at the risk
of being subjected to further sadism and barbarism. The politics of
translation by Spivak also lends an air of ambiguity to the momentary
freedom. As Babli Moitra and Nivedita Sen point out, the ending in the
Bengali original is written in the present tense. Spivak reproduces it in the
past tense, and given the distance of the event from the narrative itself in
such a reproduction, the translation in itself can also be construed as the
lessening of the impact of the (transient) moment of liberation.

Several language centric observations about the original and the translation
also become intrinsic to our questioning of masculinity. Also, interestingly,
Dopdi’s questioning of masculinity also rests on the premise of the male
gender role of being the provider and protector. Her invoking of masculine
tribal gender role also problematises her liberation, because it lends an air
of scrutiny to her rebellion in feminine isolation. As Babli Moitra points out,
Dopdi says: There isn’t a man I should be ashamed of. In the original, it’s a
more rhetorical question which eliminates the possibility of there being any
man there at all. It says: There is no man here that I should be ashamed of.
The politics of transience and translation also interact with the moment of
liberty, questioning and examining the extent and depth of subversion and
retaliation.

The essay has explored the themes of the feminisation of the other, and the
masculinisation of the state apparatus. Having discussed the issues of the
changing theories of the body, the essay has also debated the issues of rape,
power and the location of shame in the context of the story. Having
delineated the parallels and the contradiction between Devi’s version and
the mythic folklore, the essay also has problematised the extent of the
victory, and the subversion and emancipation that it essentially claims of
the state apparatus and Dopdi.

We see while Dopdi succeeds in reversing the location of shame in her

rapists and numbs their senses, the nuances of her retaliation can also be
constructed as ambivalent. The female - other(ised) - the body of the
subaltern becomes the site of the gaze, violence and ultimately resistance.
Given Spivak’s anxieties about delineating a subaltern experience through
the eyes of a First World academician, the crevices in her argument are
hardly unnoticeable - the very politics of translation also renders the impact
of the liberating moment diluted. Dopdi claims her body for the moment;
rejects any divine interventions, but can the subaltern really speak
emphatically and against all the atrocities and ostracism laid upon her?
Perhaps, a bit too much to ask for, history doesn’t allow that much
transgression.
Bibliography:

Primary Sources
Devi, Mahasweta. Breast Stories, Tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Seagull
Books, Calcutta, pr. 2016.
Devi, Mahasweta. Outcast, Tr. Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, Seagull Books,
Calcutta, pr. 2015.
Devi, Mahasweta. After Kurukshetra, Tr. Anjum Katyal, Seagull Books,
Calcutta, pr. 2014.
Sharma, Saloni. Women’s Writing, Book Age Publications, Delhi, 2017. Sen,
Nivedita and Yadav, Nikhil. Mahasweta Devi - An Anthology of Recent
Criticism, Pencraft International, 2008.
Abrams and Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Cengage Learning, pr.
2017. Secondary Sources
Sunder Rajan, Rajeshwari. Essays in Cultural Politics, ‘The Story of
Draupadi’s Disrobing’, Routledge, New York and London.
Malhotra, Meenakshi. The Marginalised Body: Shame, Humiliation and
Resistance in Mahashweta Devi. Malhotra, Meenakshi. "The Marginalised
Body: Shame, Humiliation and Resistance in Mahashweta Devi" Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies -
Annual Conference, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Toronto, Canada.
Speaking with Mahasweta Devi: Mahasweta Devi interviewed by Gabrielle
Collu. ‘Mahasweta Devi- An Anthology of Recent Criticism Ed. Nivedita Sen
and Nikhil Yadav, Pencraft International, 2008.
Colloquium on Draupadi, ‘Mahasweta Devi- An Anthology of Recent
Criticism Ed. Nivedita Sen and Nikhil Yadav, Pencraft International, 2008.
Gandhi, Kanika. Mahasweta Devi: An Introduction. Women’s Writing Ed.
Saloni Sharma, Book Age Publications, Delhi, 2017.

Reading List:
Bhowal, Sanatan, The Subaltern Speaks: Truth and Ethics in Mahashweta
Devi’s Fiction. Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2016.
Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi As A Symbol Of Subaltern Defiance by Nikhat
Hoque: https://feminisminindia.com/2019/02/08/draupadi-review-
mahasweta-devi/amp/
Class Notes