Mahasweta Devib. 1926

Writer, journalist and activist

The storyteller

Writing from the margins

• Narrating the stories of the most downcast sections of Indian society, the subalterns--Among the most marginalised, along with dalits/lower castes (former untouchables)

• Tribals/adivasis in India: 8% of India’s population• Considered outside the caste structure and social

mainstream; political marginalization (in spite of affirmative action)

• Long history from the colonial period: both exotic and savage, unassimilable—British fascination

• Postcolonial India: attempts to assimilate them in the nation, while prejudices remain

“The Hunt”

• Social composition:• A village of subalterns—tribal, in an impoverished

ravaged area of timber plantations• “outsiders” luring tribals into wage labour• traces of imperial capitalism: white contractors, the

Dixons• national capitalism: in the name of development and

progress, agricultural land converted for surplus profit; dams displacing people; profound ecological catastrophes

• local, national and global articulated

The gendered subaltern• Mary as gendered subaltern: doesn’t quite fit the mould• Mixed blood, in love with a Muslim• A “free” agent: stereotype and reality of tribal women’s lives• Mary’s will and agency is the question• “an individual activating ritual into contemporary resistance” (Spivak in

Afterword, 202)• the community of women: songs—retaining memories of struggles

and calamities• the question of justice: gender justice• Exhaustion of the possibility of justice from the state (police and the

law in liberal democracies)• Tremendous social violence: Mary herself the product of violence,

sexually coded; postcolonial state violence

“Douloti” (the rich one)

• Set on the eve of the Naxalite movement• Naxalism: a Maoist movement that was

sparked off in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal in the late 1960s. A militant peasant movement consisting of landless farmers, tribals, urban rebels, cadre Maoists that aims to overthrow the state. Peasant/tribal rebellion against landlords, moneylenders, police, state, all exploiters.

Role of intellectuals

• Role of intellectuals: “the bespectacled town gentlemen will never understand these things” (R. p. 27)

• Limits of sociological/disciplinary knowledge (p. 49 bottom)

• Narrative of rescue: p. 75 • Read Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the

Comrades” for an elite intellectual’s alliance with the Maoists

Limits of solidarity

The nation: real and imagined

• Indian nation: imaginary, unreal• The state: corrupt, instrument of elites; the

diseased body politic• Last para: Douloti/India• Abstract citizenship versus the body of the citizen• Question of who decolonizes?• Gendering as the foundation of postcolonial

exploitation (Spivak)—exchange of women as merchandise

Violence of all types

• Douloti the innocent victim: “the violated, naked harijan woman’s helpless body” (58): re-enacting the daily social violence enacted on the bodies of subaltern women

• Sexual labour:bonded labour:wage labour

Draupadi/Dopdi• Draupadi• Character from the ancient

Indian epic Mahabharata• Married to the Pandavas (5

brothers) who stake her in a game of dice and lose her

• The opponents try to dishonour her by disrobing her in open court

• Her devotion to Lord Krishna saves her honour—it remains intact

DopdiModern tribal woman, a militant

• The postcolonial state attempts to dishonour her—she is raped multiple times by policemen and state officials

• Dopdi reverses the stakes of the game—in looking back at the officer, she redirects shame in his direction, away from her mutilated body

The story continues…

Women insurgents