MAHASWETA DEVI’S

DRAUPADI
Mahasweta Devi
Mahasweta Devi (1925-2016) was a
prominent Bengali fiction writer, a social
activist and a leftist intellectual in
Bengal, who immersed herself in the
lives of
the marginalized populations and
chronicled the injustice against them
through
her literary crusade. Her writings reflect
the squalor and misery in the lives of the
tribal communists and indicts the Indian
society for the indignity it heaps on its
most oppressed constituents.
Devi’s narratives are de-sentimentalized and detached articulating the lives of
aboriginal communities in India’s tribal belt, to whom the privilege entitlements of
constitutions equality and citizenship are not extended. Therefore, her fictions
remains charged with political urgency and is laced with anger. In the introduction
to the collection of short political narratives, “Agnigarbha”, Mahasweta writes,
“Life is not mathematics and the human being is not made for the sake of
politics. I want a change in the present social system and do not believe in
mere party politics.”
Indeed, her agitation towards immortal political structures echoes in her fiction –
the protests of a rebellious mind, protests against oppression and injustice,
protests for the liberations of the most down-trodden sections of the Indian
society.
Her active involvement and pioneering work, both as a social activist and a
writer, for the welfare of the tribal communities, earned her several notable
awards, namely, The Sahitya Akademi Award (1979), The Padma Shree
Award (1986), and the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1997). Several of
Mahasweta Devi’s works have been translated into various foreign languages
and have won her international repute. Some of her prominent works include,
Rudaali, Hajar Churaswrma, along with several collections of short stories.
Draupadi is a short story originally written in Bengali by Mahasweta Devi.

Book: ‘Draupadi’, in Breast Stories

Author: Mahasweta Devi (translated by Gayatri Chakarvorty Spivak)

Publisher: Seagull Books, Calcutta (2010)

Genre: Feminist Fiction

Devi situates her story against the Naxalite movement (1967-71), the Bangladesh
Liberation War (1971) of West Bengal and the ancient Hindu epic of Mahabharata,
engaging with the complex politics of Bengali identity and Indian nationhood. The
tribal uprising against wealthy landlords brought upon the fury of the government
which led to Operation Bakuli that sought to kill the so-called tribal rebels. Draupadi is
a story about Dopdi Mehjen, a woman who belongs to the Santhal tribe of West
Bengal. She is a Robin Hood-like figure who with her husband, Dhulna, murders
wealthy landlords and usurp their wells, which is the primary source of water for the
village. The government attempts to subjugate these tribal rebel groups through many
means: kidnapping, murder, rape. Dopdi is captured by Officer Senanayak who
instructs the army officers to rape her to extract information about the rebel uprising.
Ironically, the same officers who violated her body, insist that she covers up once she is
‘done with’. Intransigently, Dopdi rips off her clothes and walks towards officer
Senanayak, “…naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts. Two
wounds”. Senanayak is shocked by her defiance as she stands before him “with her
hand on her hip” as “the object of [his] search” and exclaims, “There isn’t a man here
that I should be ashamed.”

In both, the case of Durga and Draupadi, what happens

to their body is a result of patriarchal voices which
denies them agency.

The story is stripped away from the Mahabharata’s grand narrative and royal attributes and
situated in Champabhumi, a village in West Bengal. The ‘cheelharan’ of Draupadi is
reconstructed in Devi’s story, subverting the narrative where Draupadi is rescued by a man, Lord
Krishna. Instead, in Devi’s narrative, Dopdi is not rescued, yet she continues to exercise her
agency by refusing to be a victim, leaving the armed men “terribly afraid”.
 Analysis
The Castes and patriarchal discourses which are largely based upon a series of
binary oppositions- man/woman, centered/marginal, dominator/subject, produce
a hierarchical framework in the society. In such a duality, one end forcefully
governs the others. In this backdrop, Mahasweta Devi’s renowned short story
“Draupadi”, subverts and reverses the hegemony of powerful and dominant ends
of these binary oppositions.
The short story which was published in 1981 in the collection titled Agnigarbha,
is the narration of the predicament of a santal, tribal woman – Dopdi Mejhen, and
the barbaric act of violation of the female honour amidst a feudal and patriarchal
framework of the state. It is the contemporary retelling of the archetypical
disrobing episode of a Mahabharata. However, Draupadi’s symbolic rape in the
epic, becomes on actual violation of the female body in Mahasweta’s rendering
of the tale and ends with a complete denial of patriarchal claim female body.
“Name Dopdi Mejhen, age twenty-seven, Husband Dulna Majhi
(deceased)… information whether dead or alive, and / or assistance in
arrest.”
Dopdi Mejen, as suggested by the attributive characteristic of its namesake , had
waged a war against the exploitative feudal system and its stakeholders, by
murdering the landlord, Surja Sahu and his son, along with her husband.
Because they had refused them water from their “upper-caste wells and tube
wells” during the drought. Also she had been an a active rebel involved in the
naxalites struggle for an agrarian reform in the 1970s and Therefore, Dopdi is a
fugitive on the run from the police.
“Most notorious female long wanted in many…”
The female protagonist is Antonio Gramsci’s ‘gendered subaltern’ . As a
woman belonging to the lowest strata of the economic class, she is subjected to
double subjugation and suppression. Her oppression further deteriorates by the
atrocious dealing of her caste. In this context, the woman’s body becomes an
object of male desire, that can be violated, abused and controlled, becoming a
centre of patriarchal, masculine aggression.

Indeed, as Colin MacCabe writes in his foreword to ‘In Others Worlds’,

“The force of Mahasweta Devi’s text resides in its grounding in the
subaltern’s body, in that female body which is never questioned and only
exploited”
Dopdi is the de-mythicized reincarnation of Draupadi of the epic, framed within
contemporary and historical contexts. Unlike her mythological namesake, Dopdi’s
victimization is uninterrupted by any divine assistance. Also, in the
vernacularization of the protagonist’s name, the author re-defines the inherited
patriarchal construct of sexual, female honour and defines the authoritative state
of the nation that perpetuates violence and terror.
In the story, Mr. Senanayak,
“the elderly Bengali specialist in combat and extreme Left-politics.”
Is an Indian army officer and a intellectual subaltern, who primary participates in
the subjugation of Dopdi. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls him a ‘pluralist
aesthete’ , that is, he can identify with the enemy and hence, become a
participant in the production of an exploitative society, thereby destroying the
enemy – the menacing ‘other’ His identification with the tribal’s is similarly, a false
one. He despises the rebels who threaten his legitimization and authority, while
he pride in having successfully internalizing their way of thinking, yet only to
annulated them.
Senanayak, indeed, sympathizes with cause of Dopdi’s rebellion, but only in
order to become ‘one’ with his enemy. He orders Dopdi’s capture and sanction to
his subordinates,
 “Make her Do the needful”
After which, she is subjected to brutal sexual assault Mr. Senanayak is a
prototype of the typical bourgeois-patriarch, and represents a society governed
by the principles of phallocentricism.
Dopdi is subjected to violent and continuous sexual abuse. She is degraded
physically and raped repeatedly.
“The process of making her begins goes on. The moon vomits a bit of light
and goes to sleep. Only the dark remains.”
Dopdi’s abuse doesn’t stop short at the dignified, refined limits of an attempted
rape. It entails an absolute ‘making’ of her, exercised over ‘a billion moons’
and ‘a million light years’.
At this stage in her story, Mahasweta Devi uproots and breaks through all norms
of patriarchy and social hierarchy, when her female protagonist, after her sexual
violation, refuses to clothe herself covering herself would have been a
reaffirmation or fortification of the patriarchal mode of morality, sanctified by
masculine ideologies. She confronts Senanayak with her naked, violated body,
shaking with an ‘indomitable laughter’, that even Senanayak cannot
comprehend. Gayatri Chakravoty Spivak articulates of this instance,
“She [ Dopdi ] remains publicly naked at her own insistence. Rather than
save her modesty through the implicit intervention of a benign and divine
comrade, the story insists that this is the place where male leaderships
stops.”
By resisting the guilt, shame, fear and servility, conventionally associated with
the discourse of ‘making’ Dopdi redefines ‘sexual honour’. This Blatant action
and metamorphosis of a tribal woman , on crossing the sexual differential is
defiant act resistance to her victimization. Exposing her mutilated body, she turns
her corporeality and femininity into a weapon of power.
“Draupadi wands before him, naked, Thigh and public hair matted with dry
blood. Two breasts, two wounds.”
With the final image of Dopdi pushing Senanayak, with her ‘two mangled
breasts’, the story becomes an instrument of a vicious denunciation of
patriarchy. Such moments of transgression, have paved way for re-invention of
tradition and a re-inscription of the ascribed social roles, particularly to women.
Therefore, Dopdi assumes a sheer female materiality, unlike the mythological
namesake, that the intellectual Senanahak, simply cannot come to terms with.
Like the naked truth of her exhibitionism, Dopdi’s ravaged physicality ruptures the
law of the father, deriding the male economy and the phallocentricism, that she
as the subaltern ‘Other’ had just experienced in its ugliest form.
 Bibliography
1. ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Chakravoty Spivak.

2. ‘Draupadi : A Discourse of the Dispossessed’ by Indrani Rai Singh.

3. ‘Embracing the other : Addressing xenophobia in the New literatures in English ‘ by Dunja M.
Mohr

4. Translator’s foreword by Gayatri Chakravoty Spivak.

Submitted by :
Mridula Singh (172)
Saloni Aggarwal (180)
Shahreen Siddiqui (183)
Pranshi Aggarwal (664)