by NIVEDITA MAJUMDAR
IMAGE/Amazon
The effacement of women’s agency when it takes organized, collective form is on display again in Spivak’s commentary on Mahashweta Devi’s “Draupadi.” The story is set in the context of the Naxalite movement in India, which emerged in 1967 as an armed insurgency by peasants against landed classes in rural Bengal. After the movement spread to the cities, the state unleashed a brutal counteroffensive, empowered with draconian antiterrorist laws, that succeeded in suppressing the insurgency’s first phase. Against this backdrop, Mahashweta Devi narrates the story of the capture of a young woman, Draupadi, an indigent tribal and a militant in the movement. She is on the run after participating in the assassination of a landlord; her husband, a fellow activist, has been killed by the police. Draupadi is good at hiding in the dense forests, home to her but almost impenetrable to the law enforcement teams. Ultimately, however, she is outwitted by a particularly ruthless and efficient army officer, Senanayak.
Unlike the officials who worked for him, Senanayak is something of an intellectual, having steeped himself in revolutionary literature in order to better analyze the Naxalite movement. He views Draupadi’s capture as a signal achievement for himself; once she is in custody, he initiates the inevitable process of interrogation. Once it becomes clear, however, that the young revolutionary is not going to make any revelations, Senanayak’s methods become ever more drastic. He eventually orders his minions to “make her” and disappears from the scene. Draupadi is brutally and serially raped all night long. In the morning, she’s ordered to clean herself, get dressed, and appear before Senanayak. Draupadi does go out to meet Senanayak, but does so naked, having refused the soap and water that were offered her. She appears before him with her mangled and mutilated body in full view and challenges him: “You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? . . . What more can you do? Come on, counter me.”31 The story ends with Senanayak unable to move or answer, paralyzed by the terrible specter of this woman standing before him, brutalized but utterly defiant.
“Draupadi” is a key text illuminating both the brutality of the Indian state’s suppression of the Naxalite movement and the heroism and solidarity of the youth who comprised its political cadre. Draupadi joins the movement with her husband; she is clearly trusted and valued by her comrades, as evidenced by her inclusion in a political assassination; and she values the movement itself enough to withstand inhuman torture and rape at the hands of the police. But if we turn to Spivak’s commentary, these political and organizational dimensions of Draupadi’s agency are strenuously pushed to the background.
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