Draupadi by Mahasweta Devi

 Translation Project:

 The mythological character of Draupadi is reinvented to produce a counter-narrative by deploying the female body and sexuality as the locus of resistance. While translating this piece written by Mahasweta Devi, Gayatri Spivak Chakraborty may have been influenced by her own subaltern discourse in her groundbreaking essay, Can a Subaltern Speak?  In her essay, Spivak substantiates her answer to the question using Marxist theory and Derrida’s deconstructionist methods. Spivak’s essay challenges the notion of colonial subject and exemplifies the boundaries of the capability of Western discourse, in order to interrelate with incongruent cultures. Spivak justifies the fact that this project is destined to fail, not because the subaltern cannot speak words or produce sentences. The subaltern cannot speak because her speech lacks authority, and it is not heard or accepted politically and socially. In the translator’s forewords, she declares, that it appears to her that the Senanayak’s character has the ‘closest approximation to the First World scholar, in search of the Third World.’ Not only he is the instrument of First World life degrading a woman from the Third world, but, most importantly he is a ‘careful representation’ of a pluralist aesthete.’ He is the willy-nilly participant in the production of an exploitative society. He uses terror as an instrument to gain authority. After Draupadi’s capture, his response is a strange combination of sorrow and joy, and our reaction is, as Spivak states,-‘ we grieve for our third world sisters; we grieve and rejoice that they must lose themselves and become as much like us as possible in order to be ‘free’.

 Language remains at the core of the resistance. Language is basically a symbolic system. It represents something concrete to define the abstract. More precisely, it is an auditory symbol. Language is society-specific, that’s why different societies and races have different languages. Ferdinand de Saussure promulgates the fact that in structural linguistics language is a sign and it consists of two ideas, signifier and signified. Signified is the actual concept of the thing, while signifier is the sound or letters we use to denote what we are talking about. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. In this story, Senanayak’s project is to interpret the language of the rebels. He struggles to decipher Dopdi’s song, as the previous leader Captain Arjan Singh was desperate to know the meaning of ‘maho’. The repeated failure on Senanayak’s part to decipher Dopdi’s language as well as the misinterpretation of her war cry-like ululation is indicative of a failed communication between the hierarchy and the subaltern; it also echoes Spivak’s observations in Can a Subaltern Speak? Marxism elucidates the fact that since the dawn of time, the only voice that was dominant and had authority in a society, was the voice of those people who occupy the apex position in the hierarchy. On the other hand, the voice of the people, who are rather marginalized in the society, had been either suppressed or remained unheard. The protagonist, Dopdi belonged to that marginalized strata of her society. Therefore, when she finally raises her voice, after silently enduring tortures from the officials in the camp, it is very significant due to two reasons. First, a subaltern is speaking, and second, this time it is not only heard but also capable of instilling fear in the mind of the Senanayak, the representative of the dominant class.

 Spivak identifies the theme of class deconstruction with reference to the young revolutionaries in the story. Senanayak remains the perennial symbol of his authoritarian class, and similarly, except for the voice of their leader that is heard in Dopdi’s rumination, the rest of the revolutionaries remain underground. Spivak also points out that the language of war has been used as ‘offense and defense is international’, in the case of language. The part of undoing the opposites, like intellectual-rural, tribalism, internationalism in the language is conspicuous. Spivak also experienced challenges that are usually encountered by every translator, like, the peculiar Bengali spoken by the tribal. Dopdi’s use of the word ‘Counter” an abbreviation for extrajudicial killings by armed forces. She used the word as a code for ‘Death”. It is surprising that without knowing the English language, Dopdi uses the word ‘counter’ correctly. The readers are actually on the side of the Senanayak, in the opposite situation of Dopdi. Therefore, we are alienated from her and the meaning of her song remains undisclosed to us.

    The Army Handbook is very significant in the sense that it implicates established disciplinary codes. It is the rule book for the First World rulers to rule the savage, rebellious and uncivilized Third world denizens. It is mentioned in the Handbook that, the most despicable and repulsive form of warfare is guerilla warfare with primitive weapons. Annihilation of the practitioners of such form of fighting (like Dopdi and Dulna) is the sacred duty of every soldier. The binary opposition is also plausible in this context, as guerilla/fusillades, scythe/ guns, and illiterate/ sophisticated way. Following the rules of The Army Handbook is not everyone’s cup of tea. Prior to the Senanayak, Captain Arjan Singh was in charge. After multiple failed attempts to subdue the rebels, he took prematurely and forced retirement. At that time, Senanayak stepped into his shoes and proved to be a formidable opponent to the opposition. He presents an encomium on the military genius of the Sikhs. The speeches, he delivered helped the army to regain their confidence in the Army Handbook.

 In this project, the third world object does not speak, does not mimic the original but threatens to dislodge the centrality of the original tongue by replacing it with pluralities, like Saussure’s theory of Langue and Parole. . He defined Langue as the abstract system of languages such as syntax or phonology and Parole, on the other hand, is the use of the language, which is an individual matter. Not willing to speak or divulge secrets of the compatriots is an act that is, in, itself an act of resistance. Dopdi recalls how one of their compatriots bite off his tongue to ensure that no one can make him spill out anything by atrocious physical torture.