Deconstructing the Marginalized Female in Mahasweta Devis Draupadi

J.Subhiktcha,
PhD scholar,
Periyar University,
Salem-11.
Abstract

The presentation attempts to portray Dopdi as a symbol of womanhood standing against the
patriarchal society, and examine how classical myth is deployed to claim a gendered tribal
subject a place in history, with a resonant voice. Marginalized women, the tribe or the poor
women and the outcast or the rebellious women, do not have any decent or proper position
and identity in society. Their sufferings have long been avoided, and were not even considered as
wrong but the usual consequences of everyday life. Every woman does not belong to the upper
class or face the fate of misery or every single woman has the same tragedy to endure but many
of them have similarities. Mahasweta Devi pinpoints a perceived necessity of sounding a strong
protest by creating a defensive resistance against echelon hegemony of upper caste and caste-
bound discrimination. She brings to light the pain, suffering and silence forcefully hurled on
marginalized, victimized lower class or Dalits. She discusses the experiences that thrive on
presumed mainstream-marginal or core-periphery relationships. The main attraction lies in the
composure and tolerance of Draupadi who wades through the ordeal of barbaric acts perpetrated
on her and sheds no tears, nor sighs, and her hysteric laughter unnerves the tyrants. She, single
handedly, unarmed, as a solider of her caste, challenges the entire authority and defeats them by
her confidence and shames them.

The experiences and spaces of marginalized-dominated women are subversive and have
multiple shades of formation and understanding. Not every woman belongs to the upper class or
faces the fate of misery, still every single woman has the same tragedy to endure but many of
them have similarities. They have similar stories in different pronunciation and different
situations. Additionally, their resistance provokes the different set of ideas from each other.

On the other hand, these women characters do not have their own voices. They receive a
given voices by the narrator of the stories. Similarly, Mahasweta gives the voices to the
characters. She speaks the unspeakable truth of these characters. These characters' voices and
authority of voices are held up by their superior, the narrator.

The marginalized women are those who are living in the peripheral line of living in terms
of their gender discrimination, class differences and caste position, particularly as indigenous
woman. These kinds of women are usually are unseen in the common society. Their sufferings
are long been avoided and do not consider as wrong but the usual consequences of everyday
life.
Additionally, these women do not have any voices in regard of their authority on their
own body and everyday life of living. This body authority is controlled by her superior male
partner. Even, the act of mutilation of the female of body is considered as the part of the normal
act in case of marginalized women. These women are also dominated as indigenous women.
They are neglected in all terms of living in a society. In a word, they are subjugated not only in
one layer, but also in multiple shades of oppression and domination.

In this phenomenon, Mahasweta Devis stories do exemplify the minor details of these
women living, suffering and enduring suffering. Her stories tell us this unspeakable truth of
womens misery and their power of enduring and resistance.

Draupadi is a story of Dopdi Majhen; it is a story of victimization of a woman who

dares to confront the oppressive system. It narrates the predicament of a tribal woman caught
between the pulls of subsistence living and the appropriatory logic of feudalistic-modernist
patriarchal state and its allied system.Dopdi Majhen, a naxalites informer-activist, is a Santhal.
She, along with her husband Dulna, had rebelled against the oppressive state feudal nexus. In
the time of drought, Surja Sahu the feudal kingpin of the area in connivance with the state - had
got two tube wells and three wells dug within the compound of his two houses. When the whole
Birbhum was reeling under famine, he and his class refused to let tribals share their unlimited
water sources. This instigated the rage of the suffering tribals and led them to join the naxalites
group, headed by Arijit, and culminated in the revenge- killing of Surja Sahu and his sons. In
the aftermath of this killing, and consequent upon the brutal and indiscriminate manhunt
launched by the state through Operation Bakuli Dopdi and Dulan were forced to flee and live
the life of fugitives. Working in different guises with different land owners in and around
Jharkhani belt, they, completely sacrificing their family and desires, dedicated themselves to the
cause of movement and the social utopia and economic freedom it promised.
They kept on informing their comrades about the movement of the army. Their
dedication and theirability to survive created a terror among moneylenders, landlords, grain
brokers etc. In order to suppress the Naxalitemovement and contain the deviance inherent in it,
the state launches Operation Jharkhani, initially under Arjan Singh and then under Senanayak,
a specialist in combat and extreme left politics(393). Dulna, who could not survive this
dastardly onslaught/hunt, fails to match Senanayaks cunning. Betrayed by his people, he was
entrapped while drinking water and countered. Since then, Dopdi Majhen is on the most
wanted list of the police and is living life anonymously. It is at this stage that the story begins.
So far she has proved a match for Senanayaks cunning and has, so far, eluded his grasp.

Mahasweta Devi in her way to rewrite this episode has attempted to, the deconstruction
and the reconstruction of the mythic figure of Draupadi, as a tribal Dopdi was not e
ntitled a heroic name, this pious name was given to her by the Brahmin mistress. The aboriginal
Dopdis name signifies the mark of her distance from the top. In her derivation of Dopdi from
Draupadi, Devi has made an implicit point of view. One may find a clear contrast between the
classical Draupadi and her. In the earlier case the intervention of God prevented male lust from
unclothing her.
On the contrary the tribal Dopdi is gang raped by police refuses to be clothed by men in
office.The story opens with the discussion between two medallion uniforms: What is this, a tribal
called Dopdi? The list of names I brought has nothing like it! How can anyone have an unlisted
name?...Draupadi Mehjen. Born the year her mother threshed rice at Surja Sahu (killed)s at
Bakuli. Surja Sahus wife gave her the name. (Spivak 392)
Dopdi is on the list of wanted persons, yet her name is not on the list of appropriate
names for the tribal women. The entire action of the story revolves around the search for Dopdi
until she is apprehended. The last disastrous scene finds her in a situation when she becomes
hapless victim of the most atrocious male violence on a woman. Surprisingly enough one may
detect that the reinvented Draupadi emerges as a heroic figure. The tribal Dopdi allows men to
strip her of as this has been shown as the result of political punishment.
 Senanayak permits the officials to do whatever they like. Her hands and legs are tied to
four posts. She becomes unconscious. In the morning she is brought to the tent. On seeing the
General the dishonored Dopdi walks towards him to exhibit what has happened to her. Her
empowerment freezes the General. The strong-willed lady indirectly questions their power. Her
"Power over" structure makes her dominate the scene. They can rape her, but they cannot stop
her from remaining naked after the rape.
Empowerment makes the two ladies, Draupadi and Dopdi, question the members of the
society of their roles that pulls up the unmitigated hidden power in them that simply jolts the
patriarchal authority. The questioning certainly causes discomfort to the family or to the
community but it is a definite therapy to effect healing operations to the long-drawn infections of
the society.
Here, Mahasweta Devi insists and emphasizes that at this point of the story the male leadership
stops and Dopdi ceases to exist as subaltern. After undergoing the trauma of the worst that could
happen to a woman she musters up the courage to speak if not for herself at least for her
comrades. It seems as if Dopdi dies in her and freaks like a new Dopdi is born out of the ashes.
She protests the entire hungry phallus society and contemptuously asks what more can you do?
Come on, counter me- come on, counter me-?(402) In spite of using the word encounter she
ask them to counter her and her ignorant and indigenous way she uses English language
correctly even without knowing it. She challenges her politico sexual enemy Senanayak to
encounter her.
Quite surprisingly Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breast and for the
first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target terribly afraid. It is ironical to
know that Senanayak who at the beginning of the story gave order to make up Dopdi, finds
himself badly afraid at the sight of Draupadis Crude female sexuality. This is how Draupadi, the
subaltern and the most exploited tribal woman represent her woman. Mahasweta Devi Draupadi
is a metanarrative, capturing the life and times of its protagonist Dopdi, a Santhal tribal, at the
intersection of modern developmental state and subsistent subaltern survival. It raises the issues
of class, caste and colonialism, and their collusion in the formation of hegemonic patriarchal
nation state and how this mainstream formation maintains itself through violent othering of the
margins. Negotiating various ideological locations the cultural pressures of her won
community, the exigencies of naxalites activism, and the onslaught of army/state
Draupadi/Dopdi encapsulates the gendered nature of the process of othering, i.e., how the
mainstream-margin antagonism uses the female body/sexuality as a site of honour/dishonour to
vindicate patriarchy, its values and norms. Mahasweta defines her modus operandithus: It is
essential to revive existing myths and adapt them to the present times and following the oral
tradition,create new ones as well. While I find the existing mythologies epic and puranas
interesting, I use them with new interpretations (qtd in. Rohtak 166) Mahasweta, as is evident
from Dopdis transcendence from the sense of bodily shame and her ultimate defiance of
Senanayak, uses Dopdi as a trope with rebellious overtones. The author transforms the
mythological into a tribal Dopdi, the agent of a potential unmaking of gender and class
containment. Draupadi questions this by placing Dopdi first in a comradely activists
monogamous marriage and then in a situations of multiple rape.
Mahasweta reinterprets the story of Draupads disrobing, one of the famous episodes of
this cultural religious text. Unlike her mythological namesake, Mahasweta Devs Dopdi gets
disrobed in the dark, dreaded, wild world of a forest where no divine male power comes to her
rescue. She is in a place and situation where she must act for herself. Force, physical violence,
verbal abuse and other forms of aggressions have always been used to control womens bodies
and gain their obedience. It is always the female body which is both the object of desire and
the subject of control.
Dopdi, as she is apprehended, tortured, gang raped, brutalized all through the night,
neither expects nor receives salvation from any quarter. She would not wash, nor allow the
rapists to clothe her the morning after. By disallowing her torture, rape and nakedness to
intimidate her and instead by using these as weapons to insult and brow beat the enemy, Dopdi
inverts the whole system of significations the epic is premised upon.
The meanings that the Mahabharata episodes signs to sexual assault and
nakedness,i.e.,shame,loss,fear only serve to consolidate the operating relations of power.
Mahaswetas Dopdi ironically reverses the semiotics of these signs to produce a sense of
bewilderment, incomprehension and scare among the male-violators. The men were able to de-
robe her but they could not clothe her, a moment when male authority and power cease to exist.
It is a telling commentary on a social system, which curbs the voice of the people who dare to
resist evil and violence.
Devi thus brings in legends, mythical figures into contemporary setting in order to
showcase the continuities and parallelism between the past and the present. Mahasweta Devi also
highlights the brutal treatment the landlords and moneylenders impose upon the tribals. When
they try to break the shackles of oppression by voicing against the inhuman treatment, their act is
defined as violent. The upper class atrocities towards the tribal are never considered as an
aberration and is permissible keeping in view the norms of law and society. But a tribal's sheer
act of voicing against this oppression is considered as a criminal offence in the eyes of law.
Draupadi is the new woman who rises above her violators to challenge the male
dominated world. Dopdi becomes a symbol of womanhood standing against the patriarchal
society by making her dignity and identity felt. Dopdi debunks the socially constructed image of
a submissive, docile woman to emerge as an agency of change. She audaciously resists her
oppressors and has the courage to subvert the entire system.

Dopdi voices out against the upper class autocracy and violence, a voice which is felt and
cannot be easily shrugged off. Draupadi is doubly marginalized one for belonging to a lower
class and other by being a woman. Draupadi, from this marginalized space weaves power and
asserts her triumph over her oppressors and makes her voice felt.

Works Cited
Bagchi, Jasodhara, Ed. Indian Women: Myth and Reality. Sangam Books (India) Private
Limited, 1995.
Devi, Mahasweta. Draupadi, Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), In Other Worlds. New York,
Methuen, 1987: pp. 179-196
Rajagopalachari,P. Mahabharata.Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 2006. Print
Sharma, Sadhana. Mahasweta Devis Outcast: Four Stories: The Subaltern do Speak. The
Criterion: An International Journal in English, Vol. 5, Issue-II (April)