Draupadi: Women, Body and Protest

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ says, “Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effected…If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow”.

Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘Draupadi’ attempts at giving back this voice back to the doubly marginalized Dopdi Mejhen, where words and actions speak so loudly that they break the eardrums of the privileged class.

‘Draupadi’ narrates the story of a tribal woman being apprehended in the infamous Operation Bakuli carried out against the Naxalites. After Dopdi Mejhen is apprehended, she is raped by the army on the order of Mr. Senanayak in order to extract information about her fellow comrades. Dopdi, not only gives no information to them, but she also refuses to cover her body in an act of defiance against those wishing to ‘shame’ her into submissiveness. She reiterates the order of her rape “Make her. Do the needful” given by Senanayak after she is produced in front of him the next morning for interrogation. Her words reverberated in the ears of the army as she addresses the Senanayak: “The object of your search, Dopdi Mejhen. You asked them to make me up, don't you want to see how they made me?”

As I read these lines, they sent a chill through my spine. Dopdi represents all those marginalized women who have been the subject of horrific acts of the caste-ridden patriarchal society. It opens up the discussion of how rape is used as a weapon of war against women, how rape was a strategy used by the Senanayak not simply to extract information, but also to put the Dalit woman ‘back to her place’, as an instrument of suppression.

The story not only reclaims the rights of an oppressed caste that is not even allowed to drink water from the same well as someone from a so-called higher class, but it also reclaims the body politics that women are taught from their childhood as something disadvantageous to them.

At one level, the story functions as a critique of the stark reality and extent of the violence perpetrated daily on the bodies of women. On another level, it works as a trope or concept metaphor where the violation of the woman’s body becomes symptomatic of the breach of the land and its oppressed people by the ruling elite under decolonization. At this level, rape in Devi’s fiction can be read allegorically as an attack from within on nationalism and the failure of decolonization to reach the marginalized tribal populations of India. ‘Draupadi’ also serves as an attack on the Indian society that fails to uphold the constitutional values inscribed in the Preamble and guaranteed in Article 15 which they so religiously fought to achieve.

In conclusion, the short story is a protest against all the wrongs committed by the society against the subaltern, the protest against Indian society’s marginalization of the tribal community, and the reclamation of women's bodily rights.