Draupadi by Mahasweta Devi

 The story begins with the highlighting of the distance between Dopdi and Draupadi,
the contemporanisatiom of the classical.
 The story is located against the backdrop of the Naxalite activities of 1967 to 1872. In
May 1972, a peasant uprising in protest against the oppression of landless peasantry
took place in the Northern strip of Bengal. The state government retaliated sharply
and with the support of the center and the police and with the military forces
brutally crushed both the peasant and the urban action. Mahasweta Devi addresses
this brutality emphasizing the etherized gaze of state machinery towards the tribal
people.
 The otherization faced by these tribes is symptomatically typical to the first world
approach towards the third world and its classification of the homogenous entity.
 Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak in her forward to the story argues that in Senanayak “the
closest approximation with the first world scholar in search of the third world.
(Akaaler Shondhane, Paar, Sadgati, Mrigaya, The Hunger Tides, Lowland).
 The classical Draupadi is married to five men; she has a sexual relationship with them
all, and that is formalized by marriage. Our Dopdi is formally married to one man
only but is raped by many. The former was an accepted choice, but from the
perspective our Dopdi is in actual rape beyond the marital. “Rape” here, is therefore
the link between the classical and the contemporary. The Senanayak is contained in
its class and cast boundaries, and he imposes his epistemic violence vis-a-vis the
European intellectual. The text questions the politics of representation through the
presence of these urban students. The text questions the politics of representation
through the presence of these urban students, Mahasweta Devi posits that the
organic intellectual voice, but that must not problematize the work of the traditional
intellectual.
 Gendering subaltern is discussed by Spivak in the essay, “Can the Subaltern speak?”
Devi represents this gendered subaltern as existing at the periphery of post-colonial
economic and cultural conditions of India. Mahasweta Devi explores the politics
around the category called the “subaltern”.
 Draupadi is a story about Dopdi Mejhen, a woman who belongs to the Santhal tribe
of West Bengal. With her husband, she murders wealthy landlords to usurp their
wells which is the primary source of water for their survival and sustenance. There is
a State sponsored attempt to subjugate these tribal rebel groups, and the attempt to
subjugate would be through many means such as kidnapping, murder, kidnapping,
murder, rape. Dopdi is captured by the Officer who instructs the other officers to
rape her to extract information about the other uprisings. The officers who violate
her body insist that she covers up once she is “done with”- Dopdi rips her clothes
apart and “walks towards the officer...naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry
blood. Two breasts…two wounds.” The male gaze is shocked by her defiance as she
stands “with her hands on her hips” and she exclaims, “there isn’t a man here that I
should be ashamed”. In the case of Durga and Draupadi, that which happens to their
body is the result of patriarchal voices which deny them their own agency. This story
has been stripped naked of the grand narrative of the Mahabharata and the
“Vastraharan” episode is reenacted through a subverted reconstruction – the
Draupadi of epic was rescued by a man, Dopdi is not rescued and yet she dares an
exercise of her agency.
 Sati “Durga”, the emblematic good wife self immolates her body, and her enraged
husband is executing the dance of destruction till Lord Vishnu commits the
dismembering of her body. Each part as relic becomes a place of pilgrimage. For
Dopdi, the dismembering is committed through rape and multiplicity of gazes. For
Mahasweta, she transcends the heritage of Durga and Draupadi. She does not need
a male to define herself.
 Dopdi is herself resistance. She embodies the concept of gender performativity as
explained by Judith Bulter. She performs that body, the marker of her gender
pronouncing and exhibiting the wounds of repeated rape as expressions, not of her
“femaleness” but of the perverse pronouncement of male sexuality.
 Draupadi, in the Mahabharata, remains eternally clothed. Although, because of the
concept of polyandry she is considered a prostitute by the Kauravas. The scriptures
prescribe one husband for a woman; Draupadi is dependent on many husbands.
Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi is brought into a similar assembly, she rewrites the
Mahabharata and now the infinitely clothed is publicly stripped. Krishna’s miracle is
now performed by her as she enacts her won rescue- “what’s the use of clothes...Are
you a man?” The Senanayak now is afraid to stand before her who had once been his
target. He is “terribly afraid” of the dignity of Dopdi’s violated feminine body. The
hunted becomes the resistance against the hegemonic patriarchal nation state. Ranji
Dwivedi observes, “Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi is a metanarrative capturing the life
and times of its protagonist Dopdi… at the intersection of modern developmental
state and subsistent subaltern survival. It raises the issues of class, caste and
colonialism and their pollution…through violent ‘othering’ of the margins” – Dopdi
ceases to be the subaltern. She turns her trauma into triumph. Dopdi dies and is
born again, like Lady Lazarus, “Herr Lucifer/Beware Beware.”