Stories travel from culture to culture and their transmission through translation takes

innumerable forms. Translation into English sometimes acts as an instrument of empowerment

of the marginalized sections of society- dalits, tribals,women-giving writers who deal with the
struggle of the disenfranchised in society greater visibility and creating solidarities across the
multi-lingual and multi-cultural Indian society. Foremost among such writers in India is, of
course Mahasweta Devi, who has been well served by her translators in English. The present
paper aims to analyze the contours of Mahasweta Devi‟s intervention into history that seemingly
springs from her subalternist project. Being a social activist Mahasweta Devi writes about the
lives of ordinary men, women, particularly Adivasi (tribal) people like the Santhals, Lodhas,
Shabars, and Mundas, and other topics of social and political relevance. She also has spent many
years crusading for the rights of the tribals. Mahasweta‟s fiction, pitch forked into international
limelight by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak through her short stories entitled “Breast Stories” sets
different standards of aesthetics –standards which are counter canonical and almost anti-literary.
Spivak, in her essays has created a critical discourse around Mahasweta Devi from the
postcolonial subaltern perspective. Spivak‟s critique emerges as a means of both understanding
and combating the oppression of such indigenous people to whom she refers to as the “subaltern”
and the “forth world”. Spivak theorizes the characters of the tribal men and women in
Mahasweta‟s texts as “subaltern”. Paralleling the postcolonial, post-feminist agenda of
decolonizing the tradition, religion, ethics and everyother hierarchical institution Mahasweta
inscribes a new sexual/textual praxis in her narratives of the tribal, dalit women who undergoes
double colonization due to her ethnic/caste/class identity and her gender.

Subaltern

The term „subaltern‟ owes its origin to Antonio Gramsci‟s Writings and underlines a
subordinate position in terms of class, caste, race, and culture. It was popularized by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak‟s essay titled, “Can the subaltern speak?” (1985) „Subaltern‟ and
„Feminist‟ histories, among others, constitute some of the dominant historiographical positions
that deconstruct the mainstream to decentre it and reinvest the historical space with the voices of
the marginals. Colin Mac Cabe in forward to In Other Worlds comments on the articulation of
gender in Mahsweta‟s texts: “The force of Mahasweta Devi‟s text resides in its grounding in the
gendered subaltern‟s body, in that female body which is never questioned and only exploited.
The bodies of Jashoda and Dopdi figure forth the unutterable ugliness and cruelty which cooks in
Third World kitchen to produce the First world feast that we daily enjoy.” The sensitivity and
ironic intensity of Mahasweta‟s idiom multiples manifold when she documents the tensions and
struggles in the lives of the gendered subaltern. Devi does not treat gender, class and race as
analogous narratives; she rather takes them as interpenetrative ones. The co- editors of Women
Writing in India, Susie Tharu and K. Lalithanote: “Throughout Mahasweta Devi‟s varied fiction
women‟s subjugation is portrayed as linked to the oppression of caste and class. But in the best
of her writing she quite brilliantly, and with resonance, explores the articulation of class, cast,
and gender in the specific situations she depicts.” The present paper will analyze Mahasweta‟s
“Draupadi” where a Santhal tribe woman fought for the rights of her community. This paper
would critique the life of the tribal Dopdi and the mythic Draupadi of the Mahabharata as both
seem to have struggled for their legitimate rights, snatched by the establishment throughout their
life. Mahasweta intervenes into the cultural history of the nation by countervailing the mythical
givens. Myth as a source and vehicle of hegemonic control, serves to contain and condition the
responses of the marginalized „other‟. Mahasweta‟s history of the subaltern comes forth in the
form of a counter dialogue against the oppressively hegemonic Itihas Puranichistory of India.

Her texts demolish the dominant symbol/myths embodied in the cultural-histories texts like
Vedas, Puranas, and Ramayana and Mahabharata. In “Untapped Resources”, she writes: “It is
essential to revive existing myths and adapt them to the present time and, following the oral
tradition, create new ones as well. While I find the existing mythologies, epics and Puranas
interesting; I use them with a new interpretation.” (UR17) Peering history through myth Devi
intervenes into the Brahaminical history by appropriating and re-deploying the mythical
narratives. The pre-historic narrative given are re-constructed and refurbished from the
perspective of the suppressed voices. Myths, in her texts, signify a site of cultural contest over
discourse between the center and the margin.Perhaps by using the myth, Mahasweta devi is
showing the continuity of exploitation from the days of the Mahabharata to the present times.
Her de-mythification of the patriarchal myths betrays her desire to create a gender neutral
national culture space. Instead of opting for the passive mythical investment of women in the
figures of Sati, Savitri etc. She resurrects and reinvents active mythical figures like Draupadi,
Shakti. Mahasweta sees in these mythical figures a potential for nationalist reorientation. She
posits the tribals, dalits and women not as passive subjects but as active agents of thenation‟s
cultural and political ethos. Instead of demolishing the myths per se she engages with these
deconstructive manners, so as to consciously recast them into vehicles of empowerment and
affirmative episteme. Her stories, like “Draupadi”, “Breast Giver”, engage with the Indian epic
tradition as crystallized in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in an innovative way.Through
thesestories, Mahasweta subverts the Hindu nationalists‟ attempt to “brahmanize” two-thousand
year old narrative tradition. Mahasweta‟s stories are counter hegemonic as these reveal the
history of repression/violence written within the mythical narratives. Referring to her re-
construction of subaltern history by creating an alternate mythical discourse, Radha Chakravorty
writes: “One of the most notable features of Mahasweta Devi‟s writings is the visionary, utopia
or myth-making impulse that actsas acounterbalanceto her dystopian, “forensic”, critical
perspective on the contemporary world.”(RMSF 69) Summing up Mahasweta‟s engagement
with myths, Maitreya Ghatak writes: “whether it is a struggle for political power or more
immediate problems like demands for land, a higher shares of the crop, minimum wages, roads,
schools, drinking water or for sheer human dignity, the remain the hallmark of her fiction
especially the little known, little landed struggles which are part of everyday life and don‟t
necessarily find a place in history books or the mainstream media”. (Ghatak, 2000, p.10-11) The
lives of poor peasants, tribes, their rebellions, their requirements and their pains never find any
mention in mainstream history books. Through her literary endeavors, Mahasweta attempts to
give them a voice because she believes that their voice should be heard. Dopdi, in her story
“Draupadi” is a revised and demythicised incarnation of the epical Draupadi who belongs to the
Santhal tribe. In her reincarnation, she is placed within contemporary historical contexts where
her ancestry is treated to Champabhumi of Bengal and her present status is described to be that
of an activist the naxalite movement of the seventies, in the area of the northern part of West
Bengal, a fugitive on the run from the police. Dopdi is a gendered subaltern. As a woman
belonging of the lowest of the low economic class, she is subjected to double subalternization.
Her subaltern status is further compounded by the grotesque workings of her caste. Mahasweta,
once again, inverts and revises the legacy of cultural nationalism by reinterpreting the story of
the most powerful female character of Mahabharata, Draupadi, in her story “Draupadi”. She
displaces Draupadi from her place in royal kingdom to put her into the forest area of the
Jharkhani belt as a tribal woman. Mahasweta reinterprets the story of Draupadi‟s disrobing, one
of the famous episodes of this cultural religious text. Unlike her mythological namesake,
Mahasweta Devi‟s Dopdi gets disrobed in the dark, dreaded, wild world of a forest where no
divine male power comes to her rescue. She is in a place and situation where she must act for
herself. Force, physical violence, verbal abuse and other forms of aggressions have always been
used to control women‟s bodies and gain their obedience. It is always „the female body‟ which
is both the object of desire and the subject of control. Dopdi, as she is apprehended tortured,
gangraped, brutalized all through the night, neither expects nor receives salvation from any
quarter.She would not wash, nor allow the rapists to clothe her the morning after. By disallowing
her torture, rape and nakedness to intimidate her and instead by using these as weapons to insult
and browbeat the enemy, Dopdi inverts the whole system of significations the epic is premised
upon. The meanings that the Mahabharata episode assigns to sexual assault and
nakedness,i.e.,shame,loss,fear only serve to consolidate the operating relations of power.
Mahasweta‟s Dopdi ironically reverses the semiotics of these signs to produce a sense of
bewilderment, incomprehension and scare among the male-violators. Dopdi‟s defiance is
absolute and is unaided by any divine male agency. The mythological Draupadi prays and asks
for benign paternalism to come to her rescue. Draupadi of Mahabharata comes across as a
hapless, helpless feminine figure, desperately seeking help from paternal powers in her
predicament. Mahasweta‟s Dopdi is a strong female, full of life and self-respect who seeks help
from none. She is too self- respecting to let the patriarchal norms of morality subjugate her into
submission, and thus redefines the patriarchal nationalist construct of sexual „honour‟ of a
woman. She defies the authority of the nation-state that perpetuates violence and terror through
its functionaries. Gangraped by police,Dopdi refuses to be clothed by men in uniform. In her re-
figuration of Draupadi, Mahsweta not only localizes her name(“Draupadi” is desanskritised and
vernacularized to “Dopdi”) but indigenizes her habitat also. Her Dopdi is a woman of forests, an
offspring of nature and so love for freedom and disregard and detestationof the attempts to
control and curtail is apart of her basic instincts.Senanayak, a representative of modern
patriarchal world-order in the story, while supporting Dopdi and her cause in theory, attempts a
total decimation of the resisting “object” in practice. After capturing Dopdi with his strategies
maneuvering, Senanayak orders her “making”. Dopdi‟s abuse doesn‟t stop short at the dignified,
refined limits of an attempted “vastraharan” (an act of forced disrobing) of the epic variety, it
entails an absolute “making” of her exercised over „a billion moon‟, „a million light years‟
(Draupadi 34).
Resistance through female body The tale of Draupadi out performs that of the epic in terms of
the ravages are used as well as the reaction displayed by the victim. Unlike her mythological
namesake, Dopdi doesn‟t seek any divine intervention. The place of Dopdi‟s defiance is not the
court of a „Maharaja‟; it is the wild space of a forest. Dopdi gets no divine male rescuer. The
custodians of low offer a piece of cloth to hide her shame after subjecting her to multiple-rape
throughout the night. Dopdi pours down the water, tears the cloth to pieces and refuses to cover
herself up with the male –defined notions of „shame‟ and „female modesty‟. Covering herself
up would have been a reaffirming and a fortification of the man made morality preserved and
sanctified by the patriarchal ideologies constructs of „female honor‟ and „breach of woman‟s
modesty and her subject hood‟. According to Spivak, Dopdi “acts in „not acting‟”. (In Other
Worlds95). However, the effectiveness of Dopdi‟s resistance is not the refusal to act, but the
refusal to act predictably. She redefines the construct of “sexual honour” of a woman when she
comes out naked and confronts Senanayak. Unlike the mythological Draupadi, she resists guilt,
fear, shame or servility that are typically associated with the discourse of her “making”(in shame
and servility), Dopdi challenges the brutalizer to “kounter” her and instead of lamenting at the
loss of the supposed “respectability” , she goes forward to question the masculinity of her
“maker”: “Draupadi‟s black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable
laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins
laughing. Draupadi wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is as terrifying, sky
splitting, and sharp as her ululation, what‟s the use of clothes? You can strip me but how can you
clothe me again? Are you a man? She looks around and chooses the front to spit a bloody gab at
and says, there isn‟t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me.
What more can you do? Come on, Kounter me- Come on, Kounter me-? Draupadi pushes
Senanayak with her two mangled breasts and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand
before an unarmed target,terribly afraid”. (Draupadi 36-37 Dopdi‟s action totally dislocates and
belittles the disciplined „resistance‟ displayed by Draupadi‟s lamentations as she attempts to
awaken the masculine powers of the great patriarchs in the grand epical narrative.In a stunning
transformation the powerless tribal woman challenges the entire power of a ruthless postcolonial
state embodied in figure of Senanayak. Draupadi confronts Senanayak, denigrates his false
masculinist pride and challenges him to „Kounter‟ her. Draupadi looks like a victim but acts like
an agent. Indeed, the binary of victim and agent falls apart as Draupadi effectively separates
violation from victimhood. As she stands insistently naked before her violators, Dopdi manages
to wield her wounded body as a weapon to terrify them. By refusing the disciplining power of
shame scripted into the act of rape, Draupadi becomes, in the words of Mahasweta Devi‟s
translator Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a “terrifying super object”.(Spivak 1988,184).
Conclusion The re-presentation of Dopdi proves two undeniable facts: the subaltern woman can
be represented in imaginative writing and she can be represented as an “agent”. In this sense
Mahasweta Devi‟s short story effectively dismantles Spivak‟s contention in her essay “Can the
Subaltern speak?” that “subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (1994:104). In Dopdi we
have a subaltern woman who speaks, speaks loudly- literally and metaphorically, for, her
„voice…is as terrifying, sky splitting, and sharp as her ululation‟- makes herself heard.

References: 1. Chakravorti, Radha. “Reading Mahasweta: Shifting Frames,” Ed.Mahasweta

DeviCritical Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2011. Print. 2. Devi, Mahasweta.
“Draupadi”Breast Stories. Trans. by Spivak, Gayatri, Kolkata:Seagull Press, 1997. Print. 3. Devi,
Mahasweta, “Untrapped Resources”, Seminar359 (July1989). Print. 4. Ghatak, Maitreya.
Introduction Dust on the Road: The Activist Writings of Mahasweta .ed Maitreya Ghatak.
Colcutta: Seagull Press, 2000. Print. 5. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can Subaltern
speak?”Norton Anthology of Criticism. 2011. Print.