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Ideology and Aesthetics in Literary Writings: Critiquing the Portrayal of Sexual Violence in Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi

 


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

Primary Sources:

Devi, Mahasweta. Breast Stories. Seagull Books, 1997.

Secondary Sources:

Schmidt, James. Poetry After Auschwitz – What Adorno Didn’t Say. Persistent Enlightenment, 2013. https://persistentenlightenment.com/2013/05/21/poetry-after-auschwitz-what-adorno-didnt-say/

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes. Abacus.1995

Eagelton, Terry. Literary Theory. Maya Blackwell. 2000

Nayar, Pramod. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Ecocriticism. Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd., 2023

Achebe, Chinua. “The Duty and Involvement of the African Writer” (1968). Black Past, 2009.https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/1968-chinua-achebe-duty-and-involvement-african-writer/

Chipao, Lawrence Prisca. Gender-Based Violence. Feminist Action Lab., 2021. https://feministactionlab.restlessdevelopment.org/gender-based-violence/

Erik. Sexual Violence in Ancient Myth. SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE, 2023. https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2023/07/09/sexual-violence-in-ancient-myth/

Spampinato, A Erin. Awful Nearness: Rape and the English Novel, 1740–1900. City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works, 2020. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4644&context=gc_etds

Katyal, Anjum. Mahasweta Devi GFP Interview .YouTube, uploaded by Global Feminisms Project U-Mich, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGtLEIPgp84&t=4231s

Kishore, Naveen. Talking Writing - Four Conversations with Mahasweta Devi. YouTube, uploaded by seagull books, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENc-cUabRdk