DRAUPADI BY MAHASWETA DEVI

Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016) is one the foremost writers in Bengali. Devi was an ardent fighter and her weapons were fiction and her political writings. She is well known for her prolific writings. Her impressive body of work includes novels, short stories, children’s stories, plays and activist prose that she published between 1981 and 1992.

Mahasweta Devi is not only known for her political writing style but her immense contribution towards communities of landless labourers in eastern India where she worked for years. Her intimate connection with these communities allowed her to understand and begin documenting grassroots-level issues, thus making her a socio-political commentator of the marginalized community.

This led to her editing a Bengali quarterly Bortika a forum for the poor peasants, tribals, agricultural labourers, industrial labourers and even the rickshaw pullers who had no voice and no such space to represent them. Devi used the imaginary space of fiction to begin a conversation about and conversation with the very real people on the ground who had been neglected all this while.

Mahasweta Devi’s writing life can be divided into significant phases and the graph of her activities can be mapped beginning with her first book, Jhansir Rani in 1956, a biography of the woman ruler in a princely state against the British in 1857. Despite lacking a research background, Devi did meticulous research to write this book. She was able to do so with the help of friends and well-wishers who generously supported her travel to the place to draw from archives, as well as documenting oral traditions of lore and legends transmitted through generations. She wrote voraciously, publishing 96 titles after this first book not including her non-fiction and political writings, children’s books and the other editing work that she was involved in throughout her lifetime.

If 1956 was the start of Devi’s calling as a writer, she wrote in four phases. For the reader to understand the corpus of work, the four phases are as follows: 1956-65 she published 19 titles; 1966-75, 9 titles; 1976-85, 27 titles, and her final phase was the 1986-95, 39 titles. The second phase seems to be the leanest among her writing phases. However, it was during this very phase that she produced some of the sharpest and most critical writing. The titles were Kavi Bandyoghoti Gayiner Jivan and Mrityu, depicting the struggle of a low-caste boy in 15th-century Bengal. It was during this phase that she wrote her very well-known and prolific work which was later on adapted as a motion picture, Hajar Churashir, a story about the radical-left Naxalite movement that took place in the 1970s.

The third phase of Mahasweta Devi’s career is a marker of major changes in terms of her creative writing as well as her political activities. It was during this phase that she was awarded the state-sponsored Sahitya Akademi Award for her work titled Aranyer Adhikar. From then on, her fiction subjects were the socially marginalized, the poor and neglected tribals and their struggles. Her intimate knowledge of what transpired on the ground allowed her to weave stories to bring these struggles into the mainstream. Among Indian languages, her work has been translated into Marathi, Hindi, Assamese, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Oriya, Gujarati and Ho, a tribal language. She has also been translated into English, Italian, French and Japanese.

The third phase of Devi’s work was more expansive. Though she was travelling profusely to the tribal regions of Bihar and West Bengal, she felt the need to communicate to a wider audience to speak of what was happening to people in the countryside in the name of development. She wrote in newspapers and journals during this period, because fiction was no longer an adequate medium to convey the political and social struggles she was witnessing during her travels and her interaction with the people of marginalized communities. The various areas she wrote about included the identity and dignity of the poor, their struggles for survival, ecology, and environment, the informal sector and minimum wage, and literacy and education.

The fourth phase of Mahasweta Devi’s work kept growing and she was rigorously involved in activism and continuously writing for the causes she believed in. She was preoccupied with the issues of mainstream development and the consequent marginalization of certain populations and the environment. While genteel Bengali literature glossed over the problems of Dalits and Adivasis, Mahasweta Devi used her position of privilege to actively amplify their voices and struggles. So dear was she that was called ‘Ma’ or ‘Marang dai’.

Mahasweta Devi started writing at the age of 13 but only got recognized after her first book was published, by which time she was 30 years old. This is the milestone from where Devi began her journey as a writer and activist not just chronicling social reality but consciously documenting exploitation.

One such anecdote is of a rickshaw puller who asked Devi the meaning of the Bengali word jijibisha that he had read in one of her books. Mahasweta Devi was intrigued by this rickshaw puller’s enthusiasm towards reading and she invited him to work with her on Bortika, her Bengali quarterly magazine. This rickshaw puller was Manoranjan Byapari, a distressed man who was an ex-Naxalite, who had taught himself to read while imprisoned in Alipur Jail. He eventually became one of Bengal’s most famous Dalit writers and went on to write more than 100 short stories and 9 novels about the lives of Dalits in Bengal.

Devi’s writings are peculiarly devoid of sentimentality. She does not tug at her readers’ emotions and is rather straightforward with her approach to talking about the lived experiences of the marginalized. Her language is simply an ironic juxtaposition to the complexity of the issues she talks about. It is precise because she is talking about complex realities that she uses simple language to reach the reader. Her fiction allows the reader to look at cultural practices, social institutions, identity formations, sexual roles and how they operate in spaces with different power dynamics. The arrangement of all these in her narratives comes together to display the exploitation of differences in caste, class, and gender.

Devi’s work hints at a particular kind of change in the discourse of sexuality where it no longer oppresses marginalized women but becomes the very ground of political liberation. In her famous short story Draupadi, about the rape and mutilation of a tribal woman called Dopdi, the protagonist threatens the masculinities of her oppressors by refusing to be ashamed of her mutilated body – forcing them to survey her nakedness with a defiance that exhibits her power and autonomy.

Mahasweta Devi was awarded the Padma Shri, not for her work as a writer but as an activist working with the tribal groups of the Purulia and Medinipur districts of West Bengal.

Devi wrote profusely on the issues of mainstream development and critiqued the trickle-down theory. Her work is important to understand subaltern politics and their struggles to visualise their invisiblized exploitation. She was associated with several organizations and founded several others. She is as comfortable leading the processions of the people fighting for the rights of bounded labourers as she is behind her desk writing about these struggles. Mahasweta Devi, the activist, has been constantly involved in varied struggles and was a part of several associations despite the demands of her increasing age. She played these varied roles throughout her life and the activist in her was alive and resisting till her last breath.

SUMMARY

The story begins with highlighting the gap between Dopdi and Draupadi, and is set against the backdrop of Naxalite activities of 1967-72. In May 1972, a peasant uprising in protest against the oppression of the landless peasantry and tribal cultivators took place at Naxalbari, in the northern tip of West Bengal. The West Bengal state government retaliated sharply, and with help from the centre, the police and the military forces brutally put an end to both peasant and urban action. The story comments on this brutality by the state government and emphasizes the etherized gaze of state machinery towards the tribal people and the classification of various tribes as a homogenous entity. For instance:

“By the Indian Constitution, all human beings, regardless of caste or creed, are sacred. Still, accidents like this do happen…not merely the Santals but all tribals of the Austro-Asiatic Munda tribes appear the same to Special Forces.”

The otherisation faced by these tribes is not very different from the First World’s approach towards the Third World and its classification as a homogenous entity with homogenized identities. Spivak in her foreword to the story argues that in Senanayak, she finds “the closest approximation to the First World scholar in search of the Third World.” Senanayak “respects” his enemy in theory, whatever his practice, as mentioned in the story.

Albeit Senanayak attempts to understand his opposition in theory, he is contained in his class and caste boundaries and just imposes the epistemic violence mentioned above in the essay vis-à-vis European intellectuals. Another instance of undoing class containment is the presence of students from cities who aligned themselves with the peasant movement. It seems that the text questions the politics of representation through the presence of these urbane students. The text seems to posit that organic intellectuals must get a voice but that mustn’t problematise the work of traditional intellectuals because this kind of negative capability of transcending one’s self and associating oneself with another’s cause is a greater work.

‘Draupadi’ highlights how in conflicts a woman’s body becomes the primary target of attack. Women, in such circumstances, become doubly subjugated and marginalised because of their gendered identity and in this case, their socio-economic condition. Hence the gendering of subaltern subjects by Spivak in her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak.’ Devi represents this gendered subaltern subject that exists at the periphery of postcolonial economic and cultural conditions of India. She is a revolutionary who is arrested for her revolt against the socio-economic authority and then the story ends with her revolt against the phallocentric authority. Spivak had shown concern regarding the representation of subaltern in mainstream discourse on the basis that the subaltern cannot be represented; only re-presented. However Mahasweta Devi’s use of polyphony not only re-presents the subaltern, it explores the politics around the category ‘subaltern.’