“Can the Subaltern Resist?”: Resistance and Collective Memory in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Story

Abstract

Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016), a Bengali activist-writer, explores nuanced ethnocultural singularities of the “subaltern” groups such as Santal, Oraon, and Munda in her short stories. She represents their inhumane exploitation in a Brahmanist socio-cultural landscape. In addition, she overtly shows that the bodies of women from these ethnic groups have been used as a site of exerting power and sexual violence by the upper class as well as the government officials for long. Her staunch critique of gender oppression deconstructs disciplinary representations of those “subaltern” women. She creates a literary space where several “Other” women can castigate the “collective memory” of exploitation, gender violence, and atrocities to subvert the customary habitus of tolerating oppressions against them. Introducing various facets of violence against the “subaltern” women, this paper explores Mahasweta Devi’s representational politics and her use of “resistance” as a literary tool to critique the prevalent socio-cultural epistemology as well as the “taboo” around women’s body. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, argues that subaltern-as-women “cannot be heard or read” because of some representational block from the privileged intellectuals’ end. This paper extends the argument to examine Mahasweta Devi’s representations of her female characters, who rebelled against their exploitation to rewrite their history both as an “Other” and as “women”. It further seeks to investigate in which ethical and aesthetic grounds the literary realm of an activist-writer like Mahasweta Devi liberates her female protagonists from the burden of socio-cultural codes that define their identity as the “Other”. In short, exploring the socio-historical ontology in which these women-subjects are repeatedly pushed back to the periphery, this paper unearths the forms of resistance that deconstruct both the sexual difference and ethnic subject position of those women in Mahasweta Devi’s short stories