Notes On Re-Reading Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi In Today's India

In the literary and political landscape of India, few voices have been as fearless and unflinching as Mahasweta Devi. A writer, journalist, and lifelong activist, Devi spent her life documenting the brutal realities faced by India's most marginalised communities, particularly Adivasis, Dalits, and landless labourers. Her work was never confined to the page; it bled into the streets she walked, the lives she fought for. Her stories, especially Draupadi, written in 1978, remain vital because they don't seek to console the reader; they ask us to reckon with what we choose to ignore.

Reimagining Resistance: Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi and the Politics of the Female Body

Set against the backdrop of the Naxalbari movement, Draupadi isn't a retelling of the epic Mahabharata; it's a dismantling of it. The protagonist, Dopdi Mejhen, is a tribal woman, illiterate and poor, but politically alert and fiercely resistant. She, along with her husband Dulna, becomes an informer-activist for the Naxalite rebellion, a revolution led by peasants and tribal communities against oppressive landlords and state forces.

Dopdi isn't just resisting systemic exploitation, she is hunted, captured, and tortured for it. She refuses to confess, to submit, or to collapse. In a final act that is both brutal and radical, she confronts Senanayak, the state's military representative, naked and bloodied after rape, and refuses to clothe herself. Her nudity, in this moment, is no longer a mark of shame; it becomes an act of defiance.

From Epic Victim to Modern Rebel

In the Mahabharata, Draupadi is publicly disrobed but saved by divine intervention. She is wronged, but justice is delivered by others, by men, by gods. In Mahasweta Devi's story, there is no divine hand. Dopdi is raped, yes, but she does not cry. She does not beg. She stands naked because she chooses to. In doing so, she strips the act of rape of its power over her. She refuses the script assigned to her. There is no saviour. She is the disruption. 

Where the epic Draupadi is consumed by shame, Mahasweta's Dopdi weaponises it. Her body, usually reduced to a site of male control, becomes her last language of revolt. It's a confrontation that leaves Senanayak, the man, the system, terrified, not of her violence, but of her refusal to be explained. He knows war, he knows insurgency, but he cannot understand her resistance.

The Body as Battlefield, the Silence as Speech

What Mahasweta Devi does with Dopdi's body is significant. She doesn't glorify her suffering; she refuses to let it be interpreted through the lens of victimhood. Rape, in patriarchal systems, is often a way to humiliate and silence. But Dopdi's silence isn't submission. Her refusal to put on clothes is not symbolic of defeat, it is her declaration of war. Critic Rajeswari Sunder Rajan observes that Dopdi's act is a refusal of the shared semiotics of shame, fear, and defeat. She does not let her body be narrated by male violence. She reclaims it by standing still, naked, defiant, and beyond comprehension.

Subaltern, Speaking

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" grapples with whether those at the margins, women like Dopdi can represent themselves within systems designed to silence them. Ironically, Spivak herself translated Draupadi into English. While her theoretical answer to that question is "no," Mahasweta Devi's story complicates that refusal. Dopdi does speak, not in the language of the state or the courtroom, but in the rupture she causes, in the discomfort she provokes.

She doesn't speak for permission. She exists, fully, outside the grammar of the State, outside caste, outside class, and ultimately, outside male comprehension. Reading Draupadi today is no less urgent than it was in 1978. The questions Mahasweta Devi forces us to confront remain unresolved: What does resistance look like when you're erased from mainstream imagination? What power does the body hold when stripped of language, when reduced to violence? Can one still reclaim it?

Dopdi is not a metaphor. She is not a symbol of some abstract feminist ideal. She is the flesh and bone of rebellion, a body that doesn't just survive but undoes the very structure that tried to contain her. And that is where Mahasweta Devi leaves us, not with answers, but with an image too stark to look away from, a woman, beaten, violated, unarmed, and still terrifying to those who thought they had won.

Views expressed by the author are their own.