Ideology and Aesthetics in Literary
Writings:
Critiquing the Portrayal of Sexual
Violence in Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi
Suparna Sengupta
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Jyoti Nivas College Autonomous
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Abstract: Postcolonialism’s project to
deconstruct the canon and the canonical author has enforced re-readings of
texts and their narrativization. In its interaction and engagement with power
structures, gender as a social formation is thus vulnerable to violence, coercion
and oppression-both overt and covert. Literature, at the intersection of
Liberal Humanities and Social Sciences, has a unique role of intervention. As a discipline, it not only explores
narratives and aesthetics of representing gender; literature must also ask
questions about politics and ethics of the said representation. The literary
writer, hence, is neither ‘third person’, nor ‘objective’, nor are they
politically neutral. The ideological
position of the literary writer informs the aesthetics and ideology of what
they represent. Portrayal of violence and the gendered nature of violence fall
within this purview of literature as ethical activism. Thus, literary
authorship works within a field of ideological construct, which goes on to
shape the reader's outlook towards a social issue. This paper looks into
Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi to
explore how literary authorship engages with the portrayal of gender-based
violence. Devi has also been an activist in various causes of social struggle,
her work and political views informing her writings and her attitudes towards
writing. The paper intends to examine the ways through which Mahasweta Devi has
engaged with the question of gender, violence and indeed literary authorship.
Keywords: Gender
based violence, Literary authorship, Power structures, Ideology, Aesthetics
Introduction
and Method
Literary
authorship is an ideological enterprise. Authorship’s relation to processes of
power has been central to understanding the construction and motive of a text.
Within the tradition of canon-formation, objectivity of authorship is suspect,
for it disguises manipulative concerns of morality and virtue. From Paradise
Lost to Culture and Anarchy, from The Faerie Queene to The
White Man’s Burden, the ‘third person omnipresent’ author is a bystander
working towards preserving the superstructure. Marxist critic Theodore Adorno
in his essay Culture Critique and Society (1951) laid bare the
establishment’s ideological collusion with intellectuals, promoting reification
of belief systems. According to Adorno, culture must be subjected to scrutiny
for it produces everything from philosophy to art to science to criticism of
poetry and of course literature. In Adorno’s reading, the Holocaust was a
culmination of a series of civilisational practices, where genocide and silence
around genocide is normalised. Literary silence falls within this ambit too. He
famously states:
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric…Absolute
reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is
now preparing to absorb the mind entirely.”
(Adorno as cited in Schmidt, 2013)
He is drawing attention to authorial accountability in
humanitarian crises. The modern writer is therefore a witness, documenter,
participant, memory-keeper. This brings Plato’s argument on the status of the
poet to a full circle. The literary author is no longer to be outcasted-they
are now the ethical and political citizen with the capacity to mediate the
relationship between history, politics, literature and philosophy.
Postcolonialism’s project to deconstruct the canon and the canonical author has
enforced re-readings of texts and their narrativization. The author in this
post-colonial/postcolonial context is shifted from his third person role to
being a witness or a bearer of truth. The literary author as a witness endures
exile, censorship, political persecution, arrest, conflict and violence. Act of
writing for such an author is an existential choice of self-expression and
self-transformation. The author’s act of witnessing problematizes their own
understanding of an event, it’s impact on their consciousness and the
responsibility they bear to narrate the truth. The text -in aesthetics and in
politics -thus becomes a necessary historical archive for readers who now
emerge as new witnesses, as new modes of storytellers. My paper attempts to
explore this existential and political dimension of literary authorship as
represented by Mahasweta Devi. Through a select study of Draupadi, I
have tried to examine, how literary authorship defines victims of gender-based
violence, tackles questions of ethics and authenticity, interprets social
injustice and captures their own subjectivity as historical agents. Devi has
blurred lines of canonical genres and narrative patterns-fiction,
documentation, protest, sloganeering, memoir and historiography have merged
into one another in their writings. Hannah Arendt’s provocative report The
Banality of Evil (1963) speaks about the dangers of normalising violence,
preventing enquiries into injustices of any kind. Mahasweta Devi employs
authorship with anger, despair and at times, with faith for change.
Survey
From the classical author as a figure of inspiration to the digital-era
author working in cognisance with AI tools-the role and identity of the author
has been much problematised. While the canon as a concept existed since
medieval times, till the Enlightenment, the canon mostly consisted of texts
with a theocratic worldview. The secular canon constituting of literary texts
has resulted from the rise of the middle class, a bourgeois economy and the
growing importance of the literary author in promoting cultural capital. In a
post-Industrial Revolution society, the author became part of a process of
canon-formation-The Victorian literary author worked on behalf of the empire to
glorify national language and identity. The author became part of a process of
canon-formation, where qualities of ‘literary merit’ and ‘timelessness’ also
bound them to power. The literary author was in several ways a suitable
candidate for this ideological enterprise. As part of a liberal, ‘humanizing’
pursuit, the author could provide ‘universal human values’, ‘eternal truths’
and ‘beauties’ (Eagleton, 2000). The Victorian literary author was imperialist,
nationalist and a liberal humanist. He worked on behalf of the empire to uphold
literature that glorified the empire. It would give the reading public a pride
in their national language and identity. The writings of Arnold and Kipling
bear testimony to this. Thus to be a literary author was to be a part of the
elite establishment.
The two world wars, fascism and anti-colonial movements forced a
re-examination of the role of the literary author. Theodore Adorno subverted
the liberal humanist role of the literary author and their complicity in the
processes of power. Opposition to established literary canon became a leading
concern among critics of diverse viewpoints- deconstructive, feminist, Marxist,
postcolonial schools. These views laid down the theoretical premise of
re-looking at the figure of the literary author. Barthes’ Death of an Author
(1967) proposes a new definition of literary reading liberated from the
psychological, social and biographical references of an author. He argues that
since literature is part of a discursive game, the actual author of this game
is always in question. The author is nothing but the effect of the action of
reading, wherein the reader becomes the author-scriptor. This decentring of the
author and privileging the reader’s role as meaning-producer revolutionised the
way we look at the literary author. Foucault’s What is an Author (1969)
proposed the concept of ‘author-function’, whereby author is not an
individual but a social function assigned to texts. The personal identity of
the author is not important, but legitimacy of a work is. In fact, Foucault says,
the author is not only a subject within a network, but also a subjective
function-he is the producer of and participant in the discourse. Therefore, the
literary author cannot be ‘dead’. In The Duty and Involvement of an African
Writer, Chinua Achebe enlists the reasons behind Africa’s subjugation by
white imperialists and by black neo-colonialists. He argues that the role of
the literary author must therefore be that of a historian and critic (Achebe,
1968 as cited in BLACKPAST, 2009). Since literature has been complicit in
colonialism, literary authors from post-colonial societies must also exorcise
the ghost of colonialism. In the post-colonial era, we increasingly shift
towards a non-Eurocentric idea of authorship-the author is no longer connected
to establishments, but engaged in challenging power structures. Gayatri
Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak (1988) can be a good entry
point to understand the post-colonial thinker’s position as a literary author.
In her essay Spivak argues about the possibility of subalterns speaking in a
way that is truly autonomous and unmediated by the privileged writer. She
critiques the positions of those intellectuals who assume that they can
represent the subaltern as subject. This intellectual creates a political and
cultural gap in the portrayal of the subaltern, who are trapped within alien
knowledge frameworks. Thus indigenous episteme is often silenced, as the
subaltern is spoken for, rather than actually having the agency to speak.
Spivak therefore calls for ethical representation, especially in literary
authorship, which must be self-critical and self-aware of their own privilege.
In usage of language, voice, narrative style, emplotment and characterization,
literary authors must explore the nuances of power and control in their own
role (Nayar, 2023). The Subaltern Studies Collective have repeatedly emphasized
on this location of privilege, or lack of it, in our reading of history and
subjectivity. The Subaltern Studies, an important off-shoot of Postcolonial
Studies brought about a new revisionist lens for the literary author to look at
history, anthropology, race studies and cultural studies. Historians like
Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman gathered new modes of
researching ‘third world’ history. Inspired by Marxist and Post-structuralist
thought, this group of thinkers looked at South Asian historiographies and
their representation of the subaltern, in contexts of gender, caste, ethnicity.
Chatterjee’s The Nation and its Fragments (1993) became critical
in revising literary authorship from the point of view of ordinary women and
their accounts of their everyday lives. The literary canon was exposed to
privilege only select humanist portrayals, thus silencing alternative modes of
storytelling. My approach in this paper is thus dual-to explore the idea of
literary authorship and then to converge it with portrayal of gender-based
violence in literary works.
Context
and Purpose
Within
a post-colonial context, when question of authorship has been repeatedly
connected to power and ideology, the intersectional nature of a literary work
has come into focus. Issues of race, gender, and ethnicity are important lenses
through which the location of an author and indeed the text can be understood.
Writers like Mahasweta Devi has shaped public discourse, provoked political
changes, addressed existential issues and have fostered a legacy of ethical
integrity. Her works have created complex conversations around equity and moral
responsibility.
Gender-based
violence is identified as any act of systemic violence-physical, sexual,
psychological, economic, social-targeting any individual. Gender Studies and
Women’s Rights Movements have long debunked that gender-based violence
-especially violence against women-is a private matter and has located the
systemic factors that have led to perpetration of this violence. Gender Studies
has also laid down the importance of other social markers-race, ethnicity,
class, religion-as a mode of understanding structural collusion in acts of
gender-based violence. Stigmatisation of survivors/victims, lack of sensitivity
towards consent and deprivation of systemic support makes gender-based violence
compound the vulnerability of the survivor/victim. Thus most cases of
gender-based violence normalises a culture of silence, for speaking
against/about it is a matter of taboo (Chipao, 2021). Literary representations
of gender based violence-especially sexual violence-have been problematic in
dealing with codes of honour and dignity. Literary authorship has been
complicit in institutionalising taboo and prejudice of this issue. Rapes and
abductions of Helen of Troy, of Leda, of Medea are read as heroic acts of
valour within the literary canon (Erik, 2023). Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and
Thomas Hardy’s Tess turn the victims into abstract symbols of female suffering
and endurance, thus whitewashing the political and personal violations of
women. The portrayal of gender-based violence in canonical literature
essentializes male sexuality and female suffering. Depiction of gender-based
violence in these narratives is the result of women’s supposed weakness or a necessary
act of discipline for their moral transgressions. The ideological positions of
these literary authors were complicit with patriarchal structures and worked
towards re-instating moral status quo. If post-Renaissance literary authorship
stood for autonomy and liberty-such values need to be re-examined within the
discourse of gender- based violence and female agency (Spampinato, 2020). Rare
exceptions include Rossetti’s Goblin Market which calls for a movement
of sisterhood to lay down the autonomous claims of a woman’s body. It was Black
Feminist literature which broke grounds in terms of literary representation of
sexual violence committed against women. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora
Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou changed the outlook of readers in the way sexual
violence was to be approached. Works like The Bluest Eye, The Colour Purple,
Their Eyes were watching God, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings centered
sexual violence as an experiential reality of Black women’s lives. Questions on
power, control, trauma, recovery, resistance and agency were thrown into these
narratives where protagonists wrestled with multiple levels of oppression-race,
gender, class. Black Feminist Literature gave a new format for post-colonial
and ‘global south’ voices to explore marginality and resistance within the
context of gender-based violence. Memoirs, autobiographies, journals, dystopian
accounts challenged canonical codes of honour and sexuality, even as different
literary techniques were adopted to represent gender-based violence. In
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Hosseini’s The Kite Runner gender-based
violence is a turning point for character growth and plot development;
Allende’s The House of Spirits or Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun integrate
gender-based violence into a larger study of inter-generational trauma.
Narratives of gender-based violence were now emerging to be post-colonial,
psychoanalytic, Marxist and eco-critical critiques of attitudes,
representations and discourses. Literary authors could no longer be
fence-sitters-as public intellectuals engaged in subverting the canon, they had
to assume literary and civic accountability for what they wrote and how they wrote.
Discussion
An
activist, a field researcher, a journalist, a civil society mediator-Mahasweta
Devi combined all of these roles into her writing. The text was the site of her
struggle, recording a
“sense
of duty …. an obsession …(that I) must remain accountable to myself …”
(Devi
as cited in Dutta-Asane, 2016)
As a
journalist who travelled through the length and breadth of indigenous
territories in Eastern and Central India, Devi blurs the line between social
literature and investigative journalism. She was a committed Marxist, and her
engagement with writing drew out of this ideological commitment. Motivated by
the subaltern perspective of history, Mahasweta Devi worked towards
visibilisation of indigenous life in post-colonial India. Santhals, Sabars,
Kols, Bhils and other indigenous communities formed the subject matter of her
journalistic and literary study for more than 25 years. She stayed with tribal
groups and researched on land rights, bonded labour, developmental displacement,
economic and gendered exploitation and systemic oppression of different kinds.
Her interviews repeatedly record her anguish against neo-colonial power
structures, viz the Indian state which exploited indigenous people in the guise
of development. She has questioned the systemic exclusion of communities from
education, healthcare and other basic social rights-as a public intellectual
she has organized protests, filed petitions, fought court cases and mobilized grassroots
organizations like West Bengal Oraon Welfare Society and the All
Indian Vandhua Liberation Morcha. Her writings-fiction, essays, journals,
editorials- were extensions of this activist labour and as such was part of her
existential identity. She was a witness, an engagee, a documentarian and a
mobiliser-her writings were an intrinsic part of her advocacy and call to
action for justice and equity. Rights of the Forest, Rudali, Bashai Tudu,
Dust on the Road are just a few examples of her activist writings. She
edited and published a Bengali language journal Bortika, where articles
were written by farmers, tribals and daily wage laborers. While she approaches
gender oppression through the lens of class, the lived reality of her woman
characters renders authenticity to their selfhood. Thus, customs, community,
daily routine, religion, food, attire establish both the collective and the
singular. This prevents objectification and stereotyping and restores ethics in
representation (Katyal, 2017). Gender-based violence is a recurrent theme in
Devi’s work, where woman protagonists are mostly seen as victims of class and
caste. Exploitation and violence of different kinds mark their experiences in
labour and sexuality. Standayini, Rudali, Bayen, Douloti, The Hunt critique
gender-based violence at the intersections of economy, labour and caste. In
these writings, Devi’s protagonists confront structural violence of family,
community and institutions and display agency in self-effacing ways and at
times in subversive ways. Draupadi (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, 2008) is one of her most stringent stories where portrayal of
sexual violence becomes a critique of the state and indeed of normative code of
female virtue. Sexual violence has been weaponized against women and children
in conflict zones for the longest time in human history and currently is a
critical focus of Gender Studies. The story portrays the Naxal Movement and its
repercussions from the point of view of Dopdi Mejhen, a Naxalite, who is
arrested, tortured, raped by the police as a punishment for being a defiant
woman revolutionary. Portrayal of Naxalite protagonists in contemporary Bengali
literature mostly romanticized the revolution and its masculinist idealism and
honour. Even failure of the revolution would be glorified through its male
heroes, sanctified and canonized. In this canon, Dopdi Mejhen is an exception.
Her gender and her tribal identity makes her an easy target-Devi’s naming of
the protagonist as Dopdi is also a subversive reference to Mahabharat’s Draupadi,
who herself endured the stigma and dishonour of a public rape. But unlike the
classical heroine, Dopdi is not to be subdued by questions of honour,
respectability, virtue and decency. Dopdi turns her battered and bruised body
into a weapon against the state, overturning the code of conduct within victim-perpetrator
bondage. In the climactic scene, as Dopdi walks towards Senanayak in her
bloodied naked form, she is a metaphorical suicide bomber, willing to
relinquish her female dignity, virtue and even her life. The site of
violence-her body-is turned into her medium of defiance. Dopdi’s naked body not
only confronts her oppressors but also the practices where female nakedness is
coded in shame and fear of loss of honour. This is counter-canonical and
anti-literary in the way ugliness and abuse of female body is depicted. There
is a deliberate horror, grotesquesness and crudity meant to destabilise
mainstream readings of gender-based violence often masked in abstraction, pity
and exoticisation. Devi’s literary authorship draws from her ideological
compulsion to speak and to speak up. Here the subaltern speaks and speaks
through her body.
Conclusion
Both the personal and the political constitute and construct the
category of literary authorship. In the history of Western literary culture and
production, the word ‘author’ is implicated within a domain of authority or
power-someone who has control over his production. This makes the person and
the idea of ‘author’ different from a ‘writer’, which does not imply ownership
or possession. The Middle English word auctoritẹ̄1 points to someone
who cannot be violated and has authority over interpretations or claim to
originality. Within a theocentric society, the author was someone who had
control over meaning and message of the content, analogous to a
god-figure-‘omniscient’, ‘omnipotent’. In this sense, the figure of the
‘author’ was also a male-constituted figure, embedded within certain power
structures, with the agency to wield authority over texts and meanings. The
tradition of authorship- and theories associated with it- thus explore the
nature of an author’s identity, role and relationship to their texts. Within
this tradition, the author has transformed from being an individual creator to
being a public entity entrenched in political, cultural and historical
structures. From being the Aristotelian moral guide to being post-colonial
voice of resistance, the figure of the author as a public intellectual has
evolved. The literary author thus not only connotes autonomy, creativity and
inventiveness but also ideology, positionality and point of view. Aesthetics
and ethics of the literary text is informed by this subjective agency, shaping
and often controlling a reader’s response towards it. Gender-based violence as
a literary theme falls within this purview of investigation. As a
socio-political issue within the discipline of literature, it encompasses a
dualistic approach-a humanist subjective one, as well as a scientific objective
one. The representation of gender- based violence in literary texts depends on
the personal and historical context of the author as well as on the agenda and
intent of the narrative construction. Intersectionality has thus been a chosen
vantage point in critiquing and portraying gender-based violence in literature.
Writers have depicted survivors and their stories from intersectional
standpoints of race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, geo-politics and many
other dimensions. This paper attempts to look at the evolution of the literary
author and the positions they assume in portraying gender-based violence. I
have selected three literary authors whose body of work has been the direct
outcome of their activism and their ideologies. Mahasweta Devi has written,
spoken and acted on causes surrounding land rights, women’s empowerment and
indigenous struggles. Her life-long striving to speak ‘history from below’, has
decentred traditional representations of literature and given new narrative
formats to the issues they speak on. I have discussed Devi’s Draupadi as
a text that captures sexual violence from the ideological standpoint of the
author and the narrative experiments she devises, thereof. Employing her
position as a literary author and as a public intellectual, Devi has explored
various aspects of gender-based violence- systemic oppression, institutional
complicity, selfhood of the victims, their trauma, their silences and their
speeches.
Works Cited
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Sources:
Devi,
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