Role of Senanayak
The character of Senanayak is no less interesting. He is full of duality. He is the military
officer who arrests and demeans Draupadi. Mahasweta Devi paints the picture of
Senanayak as a pluralist aesthete who is both happy and sad at the capture of Draupadi.
But, Senanayak must kill an enemy, any threatening enemy. “Mr. Senanayak, the elderly
Bengali specialist in combat and extreme-left politics. Senanayak knows the activities
and capacities of the opposition better than they themselves do”. The representative of
the class in power, Senanayak in a bid to protect the interest of the State and its partners
(here the zamindars like Surja Sahu), and to subjugate the agents of resistance (here the
tribal Naxalite leaders like Dopdi) uses ‘the most brutal physical force’ to mute the voice
of the subaltern.
Senanayak is scrupulously presented by Devi as a plural aesthete who ‘in theory’ feels at
one with the enemy, but being a partaker in ‘the production of an exploitative society’,
‘in practice’ destroys the enemy, ‘the menacing other’. Not only does he theoretically
hold that “In order to destroy the enemy, become one”, he is an avid reader of
revolutionary literature (First Blood, The Deputy etc.) and even publishes articles
demolishing ‘the gentlemen’ (the bhadralok—for whom he carries out the repression)
and thereby points up the ‘message of the harvest workers’. Senanayak’s cognitive
operations may appear convoluted, but as Devi points out he is ‘a simple man’ and further
he is ‘as pleased as his third great-uncle after a meal of turtle meat’.
Senanayak can be seen as the 'Author' of tribal subjugation as he annihilates and
eliminates revolutionaries-firstly, through 'the male organ' of his gun and, secondly, in
his theorization, by reducing them to objects of intellectual scrutiny. Dopdi's text is
indecipherable to Senanayak which entices him as an 'Author' to give it a meaning. This
process of meaning making to gain knowledge, which he further intellectualizes, begins
at the level of "experiential space."
In an attempt to re-scribe the Book of the Assembly Hall episode of Mahabharata,
Mahasweta Devi in Draupadi introduces a young tribal woman Dopdi Mejhen and her
husband Dulna Majhi, two Naxalite rebel supporters who are in the wanted list of the
State for having a connection with the murder of the upper-class gentry of Bankuli
village, Surja Sahu, well known for his atrocities against the adivasis. The cops headed by
Senanayak hunts down Dulna in the forest of Jharkhani and Dopdi is eventually nabbed.
The gang raped Draupadi's unanticipated, unarmed retaliation startles Senanayak who
stands dazed and dumbfounded before his ‘target’ as this, for the first time, has happened
out of the scripted hegemonic discourse furnished by the State. Senanayak who once
proclaimed to be very adept at anticipating ‘every move’ of the insurgents, at this instance
utterly falls short to unearth any meaning to Dopdi’s behaviour. In fact, by way of
refusing ‘the hegemonic script of shame that the wounds of sexual violence are meant
to evoke’, Draupadi here re-signifies ‘her own raped body to produce an inscrutability
that escapes Senanayak’s interpretive grasp’. Standing unfalteringly in the scud before
the felons, Draupadi flaunts her defiled body as a weapon to appal them and thereby
brings about a counter discourse, to borrow Foucault’s vocabulary, that proves to be an
effective tool in dismantling the disciplinary power of the State and therefore its
representative, the masculine bureaucrat Senanayak. Thus, “Dopdi’s ‘making/
unmaking’ ultimately provokes Senanayak’s unmaking.”
Draupadi’s naked body serves not only as a challenge to masculinity, but also as a
signifier of its actual role. Draupadi thereby becomes a ‘terrifying super object’ (Spivak
1988, 184) in the eyes of Senanayak, the State power. For the first time, Senanayak
stands ‘afraid’, ‘terribly afraid’ before the ‘unarmed’ Draupadi. With her ‘two mangled
breasts’ as effective tools, she, in fact, pushes the hitherto unnamed Senanayak to
rethink/reconsider his previously androgynous and hegemonic role and acts as the State
apparatus towards her and her comrades who actually fight for the real welfare of the
state. Senanayak's cognitive ‘remarking' begins here.
