The chilling portrayal of the “dismembered” and physically “torn” heroine Dopdi in Mahasweta Devi’s1 short story “Draupadi” passes beyond the allegorical significance of mutilation and apportionment. This miniatures not only the case of violence enacted by men on women but also of postcolonial nation-states on their own citizens, armed forces on civilians, canonical on noncanonical cultures, classical norms on folk practices, and those in power on those who offer resistance. Representations such as these by non-Dalit writers were rejected as “upper caste” paternalism by Dalit thinkers. As Christopher (2012, 9) observes, “Despite the sense of solidarity that informs the work of non-Dalit scholars . . . their representations are nevertheless paternalistic and tend to preempt Dalit responses.”
There had been a categorical shift in the twentieth century verse in Indian languages, which Dharwadker (1992) accounts for. Three contexts had gained prominence of expression: “the history of various local, regional, and national literary movements; the web of Indian and foreign influences which provides the intertextual basis for poetic writing; and the social backgrounds of the poets and their audiences, including their involvements in some social movements on the subcontinent.” Referring to his argument with an extended view, in 1993, K Satchidanandan—a major Malayalam poet and also a former editor of Indian Literature, the official journal of the Sahitya Akademi, India’s highly revered body of letters—centers four kinds of “poetic nations” that broadened the Indian literature of the times. The first one was the poetry of the 1950s and the 1960s which asserted the individual identity against the commodification of the individual; the second was that of women’s movement which, by all means, subverted the phallocentric order; the third was the “insurrectional poetry” of the Dalit movement in Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the Bandaya movement in Karnataka; and the fourth was the “still-emergent . . . uttar adhunik kavita,” the postmodern poetry in Bengali, Kannada, Oriya, and Malayalam which sought to provide an indigenous alternative to the “Eurocentric modernism” of the fifties (quoted in Dharwadker 1992). |
