Dismantling Theory? Agency and the Subaltern Woman in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi”

Abstract

Thus asserts Gayatri Spivak in her essay “Can the Subalterns Speak?” According to the general thrust of Spivak’s argument in this essay, her final assertion that the “subaltern cannot speak” denies the gendered subaltern the ability to represent herself and achieve voice agency. Spivak’s contention that “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” also precludes the possibility of others re-presenting the subaltern woman save as a blank or empty space. Hence the “circumscribed task” Spivak envisions for the female intellectual is to merely foreground the “space” or “absence” that according to Spivak, is the subaltern woman in discourse—Colonial, Western or Native Elite. This presentation of the gendered subaltern as completely inaccessible, and more crucially, incapable of agency or resistance leads to a problematic conclusion: colonialism in collusion with (native) patriarchy effected a complete “erasure” of the (subaltern) woman. This is however a clearly untenable proposition (Mani 1992: 403). The 1889 description of the plight of the Hindu widow written by a widow and a potential sati herself,2 as Ania Loomba points out, is testimony to the fact that subaltern women, such as the figure of sati that Spivak alludes to, did in fact “speak” (1998:237). I would therefore like to argue that the subaltern woman can be re-presented3 in imaginative writing and further, that she can be portrayed as an “agent”4 particularly at certain specific historical junctures. The depiction of the gendered subaltern as “an (empty) space, an inaccessible blankness” (Moore Gilbert 1997:102) is problematic on several counts.