Volume II, Issue VI, July 2026
Volume-II, Issue-VI, July, 2026 |
Received: 10.07.2026 | Accepted: 22.07.2026 | ||
Published Online: 31.07.2026 | Page No: | ||
DOI: 10.69655/atmadeep.vol.2.issue.06W. | |||
দোপদি
মেঝেনের প্রতিরোধ: মহাশ্বেতা দেবীর ‘দ্রৌপদী’ গল্পেসাব-অল্টার্নসত্তা ও নগ্নতার রাজনীতি
লাবনী
আক্তার, জ্যেষ্ঠ প্রভাষক,
বাংলা ভাষা ও সাহিত্য বিভাগ, ইউনিভার্সিটি
অব লিবারেল আর্টস, বাংলাদেশ |
Dopdi Mejhen's Resistance: Subaltern Identity and the Politics of Nudity in Mahasweta Devi's 'Draupadi' Laboni Akter, Senior Lecturer, Department of Bengali Language and Literature, University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh | ||
ABSTRACT | ||
Mahashweta
Devi's short story ‘Draupadi’ (1978) stands as a seminal subaltern text in
Bengali literature, locating the intersection of caste oppression, gender
violence, and indigenous resistance within the turbulent Naxalite political
landscape of 1970s West Bengal. This paper undertakes a subaltern reading of
‘Draupadi,’ examining how Dopdi Mejhen a Santali tribal woman and insurgent
combatant transforms her violated body into a site of radical political protest
after gang-rape at the hands of the state military apparatus. Drawing
principally on Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, Ranajit Guha's
formulation of autonomous subaltern consciousness, and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak's critical intervention in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), the
article interrogates the politics of nakedness and the power relations encoded
in state violence against marginalised women. Situating the narrative within
the historical continuum of Bengal's subaltern uprisings the Fakir-Sannyasi
resistance (1760–1800), the Santali Hul (1855–56), the Tebhaga movement
(1946–47), the Tonko agitation (1946–50), and the Nankar revolt (1946–50) the
paper argues that Dopdi's corporeal defiance constitutes a deliberate inversion
of the patriarchal script that renders the female body passive. It further
draws on Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity to analyse Dopdi's
rejection of socially prescribed bodily conduct as an act of counter-hegemonic
resistance. Mahashweta Devi's narrative strategy counterposing a cold
administrative dossier against the visceral humanity of Dopdi's agency is read
as a formal enactment of subaltern counter-discourse that simultaneously
affirms and complicates Spivak's question of subaltern speakability. | ||
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