Defining Rape: the Crippled Body As a Site of Power

(Re)Defining Rape: The Crippled Body as a Site of Power

By Sukshma Vedere B.A in English, November 2007, Sri Aurobindo Internation Centre of Education M.A in Engish Literature, June 2010, The English and Foreign Languages University

A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

May 19, 2013

Thesis Directed by

Kavita Daiya Associate Professor of English

Table of Contents

Introduction: Understanding Rape ...... 1

Chapter 1: The Structure of Torture ...... 4

Chapter 2:Bandit Queen: Recasting Rape as Agency ...... 16

Chapter 3: Recasting Rape in Draupadi ...... 32

Chapter 4: Conclusion: Performing Sexual Violence ...... 39

Works Cited ...... 41

Introduction: Understanding Rape

“Rape is a form of social performance. It is highly ritualized”, argues Joanna

Bourke in Rape: Sex, Violence, History. She argues that the script of violence includes both the sexual brutality of the perpetrator and the (un)articulated anguish of the victim.

Rape and sexual violence spawn from “specific” political, economic, and cultural milieus. Drawing upon this I argue that the two components defining sexual abuse, i.e. sexed bodies and coercion, are created through a combination of discursive practices.

There is nothing natural or permanent about the body and its sexuality. The “sexual” is constructed through a host of discourses including the legal, penal, medical, psychological and linguistic practices. Similarly, abuse has its own evolving history. I argue that the script of rape involves a flux of transforming masculinities and femininities, which destabilize the national rhetoric of gender. Rape shatters the sociological construct of gender to foreground the biological components of sex. Some of the questions which I intend to explore in my thesis are: How does physical violence translate into psychological trauma? How do women recast rape to acquire agency? How does is the representation of rape translate a theatrical feat?

Taking the discursive notions of rape into consideration, I discuss the theoretical framework of rape and the social construct of the body and pain, the violated body as a site of pain and of shame, representation and spectatorship. I will pitch my work on genres in fiction and film to analyze the social and cultural scripts written over the body and the violence of representation and spectatorship. This thesis is a study of the life of

Phoolan Devi and her representation in Shekar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen (1994) and in her autobiography entitled I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen.

I hope to explore how in each text, Phoolan recasts rape as an agency to overcome patriarchal structures. I also study Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” to underscore how in the story, the raped female body exudes a power that displaces the male gaze. I wish to uncover the multiple voices of traumatized and traumatizing subjects, to revise the definition of rape through the specifics of cultural representation and individual histories.

In the first chapter I introduce the theoretical perspective on sexual violence while deconstructing the familiar conceptions of the body, suffering and gender. I explore how the violated body becomes a social disgrace and examine the nationalistic implications of the body and its peculiar affinity to femininity. Elaine Scarry, Javier Moscoso and Joanna

Bourke are some of the key critics who deconstruct the body, torture and pain, by tracing the history of violence. They sketch how subjective suffering is objectified with time and how subject hood is a constructed self. Some of the questions that I look into include:

How is rape different from non-sexual assault? What are the dynamics of sexuality and nationalism? What are the discourses that sustain a politics of shame?

In the second chapter I examine the assaulted woman’s body through the lens of disability and trace how the violated body transforms itself from a site of shame to a sign of power. I place the Bollywood movie Bandit Queen in conversation with Phoolan

Devi’s autobiography and analyze how the mutilated female body becomes an embodiment of power that defies the structure of patriarchy. I also examine how certain representations of raped victims can empower women. The third chapter discusses

“Draupadi” by Mahasweta Devi and explores how the gang-raped victim defies her perpetrators with her mutilated/crippled body. It also illustrates how nudity can be a spectacle of resistance displacing traditional conceptions of nation, woman and able- bodiedness. The concluding chapter analyses the representation of rape as a theatrical performance. This chapter discusses the representations of rape in Bandit Queen and

“Draupadi” and provides concluding thoughts on volatile bodies and transforming identities which recast violence to acquire agency. It underscores how gender, violence and performativity are connected to the politics of power.

Chapter 1: The Structure of Torture

Rape is a social performance that abuses the construct of the female body either as a property, or an “object of trespass”. By invading and striving to conquer the female sexual terrain, the rapist expands his sexual agency. (Bourke, 6) In order to examine the structure of violence, it is essential to analyze first the construct of physical pain, its

“political and perceptual complications”, and the fictionalization of the experience.

(Scarry, 3) Scarry argues that the discourse of pain bridges private experience to the shared public realm. She elaborates, “the interior facts of the bodily sentience out of the inarticulate pre-language of ‘cries and whispers’ into the realm of shared objectification”.

(Scarry, 11) Pain is directly related to power. Verbal representation of pain directly influences its political image. Scarry also argues how often verbal strategies describing pain revolve around the weapon which serves as a language of agency, and how the weapon invoked coaxes pain into visibility. (Scarry, 13) The weapon objectifies violence and becomes the referent for “attributes of pain”.

Scarry underscores the import of interrogation in the context of corporeal punishment and traces the translation of the physical act into a voice. She argues how the questioning and answering process in the interrogation is often mistaken to be “the motive” and “the betrayal” respectively. Violence becomes the motive to elicit an answer, which foregrounds the import of the voice over the pain:

The first mistake credits the torturer, providing him with a justification, his

cruelty with an explanation. The second discredits the prisoner, making him

rather than the torturer, his voice rather than his pain, the cause of his loss of self

and world. These two misinterpretations are obviously neither accidental nor

unrelated. The one is an absolution of responsibility; the two together turn the

moral reality of torture upside down. (Scarry, 35)

The distance between the physical realities of the torturer and the prisoner is immense.

The utter lack of pain of the torturer distances him from the shredded world of the prisoner, making verbal realities an important link to connect disparate phenomenological experiences. The absence of pain in the torturer affirms a “presence of the world”, while in the prisoner the presence of pain leads to an absence of the world. Across these inversions, pain becomes power. Subsequently, the greater the prisoner’s pain, the larger the torturer’s world. The perpetrator strives to eliminate the sentience of the prisoner, crushing all that he/she lives for; the self-amplifying process of the torturer is dependent on the prisoner’s absence of world. (Scarry, 37)

Violence is an unmaking of civilization and the world, which often becomes itself the cause of pain to the victim. This pain gets objectified as power through verbal medium. The body transforms into voice in part through a dissonance of the two, and the consonance of the two. The victim experiencing the body and pain, and oblivious to the voice, world and the self, is separated from the perpetrator who is insensible to the body and pain but who has access to voice, world and self. These oppositions highlight the distance between the body of the violator and the violated. Interrogation is the only verbal medium that connects the two bodies. (Scarry, 46)

Scarry discusses how pain is a complex experience which is real, subjective, and invisible to anyone else. Pain engulfs the violated individual, but is unsensed by the world. Although the victim’s internal pain may be identical from one who is suffering from a stroke or cancer, it is unlike any disease, and objectifies itself in unique ways.

Aversion and negation is one of the major traits of pain. It is viewed as an alien element, as something other than oneself. This alien element is projected on the perpetrator who is dehumanized of all his psychological characteristics to become “the rapist/the animal”.

Scarry also elaborates how pain is a double experience of agency. When the violated has been hurt by an external weapon, the pain is apparently an external agency where one feels acted upon. Conversely, even in the absence of an external weapon, there often arises a pain which is stabbing, searing or grinding; the weapon is the prosthesis to pain and helps in objectifying it. Ultimately, both the internal and external pain merge with one another and the conversion of the physical world into an instrument of torture is a reflection of pain on human consciousness. (Scarry 53) The elusiveness of the boundaries that demarcate the internal from the external foregrounds the role of the private and the public sphere in the context of torture. The solitude of privacy and exposure is underscored over the shared experience of the public sphere. Physical pain gets associated with humiliation. The victim’s most intimate and interior parts of the body are exposed brutally, and he/she becomes the object of surveillance, deprived of privacy.

Pain also destroys language, resiting expression and obliterating the capacity for speech, making the victim speechless when the pain is most acute/real. Pain erases consciousness and destroys the capacity to perceive; it consumes the victim in its totality where it goes

beyond the realm of the physical body. Pain is a subjective reality which needs a weapon to be objectified. These translated elements of pain become objects of power:

As an actual physical fact, a weapon is an object that goes into the body and

produces pain. As a perceptual fact, it lifts the pain out of the body and makes it

visible or, more precisely, it acts a sa bridge or mechanism across which some of

pain’s attributes-its incontestable reality, its totality, its ability to eclipse all else,

its power of dramatic alteration and world dissolution-can be lifted away from the

source, can be seperated from the sufferer and reffered to power, broken off from

the body and attached instead to ther regime. (Scarry, 56)

Subsequently, it is the not the pain but the system that is real, total, and capable of destroying the world. Scarry argues that the act of civilization is directly related to the act of transcending the body. Boundaries and relationships are conditioned sites that make the body feel stable and safe. Torture is a form of overcoming the body, where the perpetrator experiences himself in terms of extension, while the victim experiences herself in terms of sentience. Power bases itself on another’s pain and prevents the recognition of a possible “other”, thereby trapping itself in its own solipsism. Pain is far more than simply a medical problem. It goes beyond the ruture of nerves and neurotrasmitters. The experience of pain is shaped to a great extent by cultural, religious and social structures. It is reinforced by psychological and emotional states of being such as guilt, fear and depression. (Morris, 20) Pain is most often an undescribable experience.

Pain truncates language and interpreted always needs to be assigned meaning and explanation. It is an experience of isolation, where the world is oblivious to one’s suffering. While tracing the history of pain, Moscoso foregrounds the idea of the human

being as an “entelechy”, a transient being with Aristotelian “potentiality”, “whose veins do not flow with blood, but rather with the diluted residue of reason”. (Moscoso, 1) He argues how the history of pain is directly related to the history of experience which is a product of the body, the emotions and the mind and how the experience of harm has been historically constructed. Pain resulting in shame, depression and humiliation is a psychological disorder which is more traumatizing than the physiological wound.

Wittenberg, the Austrian philosopher discusses how pain is a state of consciousness which is learnt through the experience of others: “You learn the concept of ‘ pain’ when you use language. Moscoso underscore pain as a social drama which situates the individual in a “borderland”, in a liminatlity which segregates him from the rest of the world:

Pain’s drama appears in a sequential form; it displays a dynamic structure that

includes a moment of rupture that demands reparation. This shares the basic form

of a rite of passage; the person in pain lives in a liminal space, in an indeterminate

region; as long as the suffering does not cease, the sufferer wanders between

seperation and reconciliation. The majority of those who sufer, even in solitude,

consider their pain this way: in a transitory form, which sooner or later should

stop or be remedied. Here experience takes on its most dramatic and literal sense,

which implies displacement and peril, (Moscoso, 6)

Pain theatricalizes harmful experience. By expressing pain through rhetorical forms the persecuted make their suffering public. Their cries, words and actions transform certainty into truth through persuasive elements. The repetative objectification of pain through rhetoric validates its social existent. The rhetoric and images of violence over the years

that triggered certain bodily behaviors and expressions served as indicators to construct harm as a cultural phenomenon. Moscoso lists historical iconographic elements that kindle the memory of pain, by theatricalizing recollections of passions and martyrdom.

(Moscoso, 10) He traces the discourse of the assaulted body as a site of shame to the religious texts of the middles ages where “dishonor is insinuated through the humiliation of the flesh” and disfiguration is “a sign of moral depravation”. The perpetrator on the other hand was often dehumanized and portrayed as a brute. Facial expressions, movements, positions and attitudes shaped “a regular set of expressive signs” that helped unfold the narrative of violence. Thus, the representation of suffering was first inscribed into an imaginary context composed of visual and narrative elements. It is a narrative that brings together “the quotidian and the extraordinary, the private and the public, the distant and the close, the historical and the fabled” (Moscoso, 18).

Just as pain is a form of sentience devoid of self extension, imagination is a form of self-extension without the capability of sentience. In retrospect, often times the raped victim cannot recall the event due to the excruciating nature of pain which makes her unconscious to the world, which results in a fictionalization of the experience. Bourke discusses how the act of rape is determined on what is defined as sexual. She argues that bodies are sexed through discursive practices and that parts of the body or practices become sexual through a certain classification. She notes that the parts of the body labelled as “sexual” change over time and that sexual violence as its own evolutionary history which ought to be taken into account. (Bourke, 12) Sexual violence usually triggers from a (fictionalized) motive according to the perpetrators who seek to integrate their actions with a narrative of the self. Bourke underscores the importance of analyzing

the construct of sexed bodies which frame individuals, and strives to see the sexed body as a ‘becoming’ or a “rendered meaning”, always in the process of change. She looks at rape cases through a historical lens and argues how forced sex is a common practice in certain cultures while it is a violation in imperial cultures. She traces how the language of rape as violence permeated the world with the advent of modernity and the ideology of a civilized society. (Bourke 97) Bourke also argues how the conception of masculinity affects our perception of violence. She voices the need to revise the definition of masculinity from its association with sexual aggression. She argues that sexual predators corrode the category of man and its “imaginary phallic edifice” . Heterosexuality, marriage vows and the gendered division of labour have become means of controlling womenfolk. The fear of being raped has restricted women to the domestic sphere, thereby helping the masculine government to assume the mantle of a benevolent protector who “secretly” desires the subjugation of women. (Bourke, 414) Bourke believes that the rhetoric of violence bounds women at home for their own security. Violence subsequently inscribes gender performance and validates masculine aggression and feminine submission . Bourke traces male aggression to prehistoric man:

Discovery that his genetalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as

one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of

fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe,

rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious

process of intimidation by which all mean keep all women in a state of fear.

(Bourke, 415)

Subsequently, all men become “potential” rapists. But Bourke also clarifies that the stigma attached to being a rapist varies from community to community. She adopts the scientific method to analyze how rapists are diffident aggressors and how penile rape is an unstable form of torture in terms of performance (erectile dysfunction). She argues that the penis is an unstable organ of power with “indeterminate set of possibilities” and writes the male body as an anxious instrument of agency and identity, where the stereotypical relation of sexuality with masculinity is exposed as a failure. Masculinities have been constructed through social structures, and ought to be deconstructed in order to erase male sexual aggression. People are “not born male; they become men”. Masculinity is a human invention, not a typical biologial characteristic. Certain pleasures become associated with parts of the body, and form the sexed body. Subsequently, pain and trauma too are experiences which have been categorized by knowledge to facilitate cognisance. Our understanding of the body and its pain is conditioned by a range of dicourses, which need to be deconstructed in order to uncover new possibilities and perceptions. Similarly violence too is a discourse that is constructed by hegemonic structures.

O’Toole, Schiffman, and Edwards argue how violence is a social construct which is embedded in the foundation of communities and nation states. (Laura L. O'Toole, 7)

Hegemonic masculinity is reproduced by male-dominated institutions such as the military, sports teams, politics, and science. Kaufman underscores how violence is an institutionalized form encoded in physical and socio-economical structures. Personalities, sexualities and fear are created by socio-political structures. (Kaufman, 37) Masculinity also exists as an ideology that needs to be constantly nourished and affirmed in order to

exist. Sexual violence is an instant of masculine affirmation which confirms the anxiety of impotence inherent at the core of masculinity. (Kaufman, 45) While discussing the motive of gang rape O’Toole underscores the performance of rape as an assertion of hypermasculinity. She discusses how a masculine brotherhood is formed to defile a woman. Gang rape is a collective phenomenon enabled by the loss of individual identity.

The masculine brotherhood is formed on the assumption of the purified male body and violence is preceded by a dehumanization of the woman through verbal abuse. I argue that it is imperative for the rapist to look at his victim as an object and dehumanize her in order to violate her. This moment of objectification is crucial for the rapist who views his victim as a property. The masculine desire of ownership resides at the crux of rape.

Peggy Sanday examines rape incidents amongst tribes and notes that tribal women are often looked upon as property or objects in an elaborate barter system amongst men. In tribal societies women are equated with fertility and growth while men are associated with aggresion and destruction. When there is a dearth of resources and a struggle to acquire food supply, the role of men becomes prominent as bread winners capable of controlling adverse environment. Necessity assigns behavioral patterns and attitudes that distinguish the sexes. (Sanday, 70) Thus, sexual violence foregrounds gender performativity by foregrounding the violability of women and the invincibility of men. The rhetoric of sexual violence also gives rise to rape myths which define the domestic sphere as a “safe’ place for women thereby ascribing traditional performance to them.

In the 1970s various researchers defined rape myths as prejudiced, stereotypical, and false beliefs about the rapist and the rape victims. Some of the major rape myths

include: a) blaming the victim for the rape, accusing her attire or her behavior, b) expressing a disbelief in claims of rape with the argument that women tend to exaggerate sexual violence, c) exonerating the perpetrator, saying that men are “over-sexed”, d) alluding that only “certain type” of sexually promiscuous women get raped. (Gerd

Bohner, 19) Rape myths are attitudes that are generally false but which are widely accepted as promoting male sexual aggression. Rape myths provide the illusory feelings of domestic safety to the women while offering reasons for the existence of male sexual violence.

Embodiment:

Cahill negates Browmiller’s argument that violence is a cultural product and sexuality is a natural phenomenon. She underscores the various ways in which power is inscribed on the biological body and the mind. She voices the need to rethink rape as a developmental experience in the life of women, where each woman experiences sexual violence differently, while being foregrounded as different from men:

…If we understand power as producing possibilities, abilities, and identities- then

women are not fundamentally outside culture, but implicated in it. As a moment

in that culture, rape needs to be rethought as a pervasive, sustained, and repetitive,

but not ultimately defining, element of the development of women’s experience;

as something that is taken up and experienced differently by different women but

also holds some common aspects; as a factor that marks the women as different

from men; as an experience that perhaps begins with the body but whose

significance does not end there. (Cahill, 5)

Cahill argues that the biological body cannot be changed but that its cultural significance can be altered. However, recent analysis of factual claims of biology has revealed that there is nothing natural about sexed bodies. This threatens the category of “woman” whose body serves as a site for traditional ideology and notions of self/other and intellect/emotions. Cahill emphasizes how these oppositions are reversibilities whose

“elements adhere to each other even…as they differ from each other.” (Cahill, 6) She voices the need for a perspective on women as embodied beings and rejects universal claims on femininity. For this, the body must be understood as culturally and historically contextualized. Embodiment is a site of both sexual difference and power, which is central to a woman’s identity. The effects of rape echo the experience of female embodiment.

Cahill elaborates how the phallocentric model of sex privileges penetration alone as sexual, and how rape is penetrating the body of the other without consent. She highlights the binary nuances of rape, which are both a cultural construct and a physical violation. If we understand the female body as a socio-cultural site with patriarchal inscriptions, we can address rape as an assault without over determining women as victims. But by defining rape merely as an assault we overlook the sexually specific meanings and social functions of rape; understanding rape as an “embodied experience” preserves the complexities of sexuality. (Cahill, 13) Subsequently rape is a subjective experience that necessitates an objective definition which is socially coherent.

Rape has a fundamental role in the construction of female behavior; it constructs bodily meanings in specific ways to assign gender. Rape is a violation of identity and integrity which are necessarily connected to embodiment, which is marked by sexual

difference. Sharon Marcus argues how rape can be viewed as a linguistic fact that is structured as a language that shapes the verbal and physical personality of the woman and her rapist. She elaborates how the language of rape solicits women to position themselves as endangered and violable targets. This language shapes gender performance and empowers the man while paralyzing the woman. (Marcus 171) Thus rape is a complex narrative that involves spatial, social, verbal and physical interaction. It is a representation of how violence inscribes gender performativity and promotes fixed identities. Subsequently violence can be viewed as a hegemonic narrative used to discriminate and classify identities. I concur with Marcus and underscore that violence is an attribute of alterity and that its hegemonic linguistic structure endorses traditional characteristics/ categorization. Therefore the narrative of violence helps the nation sustain its boundaries of normalcy.

Chapter 2:Bandit Queen: Recasting Rape as Agency

In this chapter I examine the representation of rape in Shekar Kapur’s Bandit

Queen (1994). In the first section, I argue that bodies are socially constructed and that the female body in particular has been construed as property or territory that needs to be conquered and subdued by patriarchal imperialism. In the second section I examine representations of the assaulted body of Phoolan and trace how the violated body transforms from a site of humiliation to that of power. I also explore how the feminine body traverses the boundaries of gender in order to be empowered. I highlight that female disembodiment exudes a power that subverts and displaces the authority of patriarchal imperialism; the woman achieves “womanhood” by transcending the body. Finally, I foreground that representations of the abused Phoolan help us revise the traditional notion of embodiment. The texts I consider here suggest that we rethink rape in the larger context of queer/disability studies, where mutilated/disabled/violated bodies undermine the structure of the national body to redefine the body as a volatile object/subject that is constantly defying the barriers of safety and violence that are subscribing it to normalcy.

I argue that safety and violence form part of the national rhetoric that constructs the body socially and that the raped victim’s body troubles the national discourse by undermining its ideologies. The raped body of Phoolan not only displaces the traditional conception of the body but acquires agency by embodying divinity. Some of the questions I will explore include: How is identity mapped on to sexuality? How does the woman experience rape and recast it in order to claim agency?

Phoolan Devi (1963-2001) was an Indian dacoit and later a politician. After being abused by her husband, Phoolan was estranged by her family and was gang raped by the upper caste villagers. An outcast in her village, Phoolan joined a band of dacoits and became their leader along with her lover, a bandit who respected and adored her as a goddess, a “devi”. To avenge her upper caste rapists, Phoolan conducted the 1981

Bahmai massacre where 22 people of high social standing were slaughtered along with two witnesses, who saw her rape but did not actively participate in it. She eventually became the notorious “Indian-low caste-woman-underdog” (Weaver 89) and was deified as the avatar of goddess Kali, the Destructive One. She surrendered to the police later and was tried for over 30 crime cases. The government withdrew all cases against her on the insistence of the Indian socialist party. She was released after 11 years of imprisonment and contested elections as the candidate of the socialist party. She was elected to parliament but was shortly murdered by rivals. (Weaver 90-91)

Bandit Queen is a 1994 Indian film based loosely on the life of Phoolan Devi till

1983. Starring Seema Biswas and directed by Shekar Kapur the film has been criticized by both Phoolan Devi and critics like Arundhati Roy. Phoolan protested against many of the scenes that showed her naked in the film and disputed the accuracy of the story, threatening to immolate herself if the movie was screened in theatres. However, she withdrew her objection when a channel offered her to pay £40,000. (A. Roy) Arundhati

Roy strongly criticizes Shekar Kapur for his representation of Phoolan Devi and objects to his statement “I had the choice between Truth and Aesthetics. I chose Truth, because

Truth is Pure”. (Roy). Roy argues that Kapur’s protagonist suffers from “legenditis” and

that the film only represents partially the life of Phoolan Devi. The film has been made to evoke sympathy and to drive home the narrative of the retribution of rape:

Phoolan Devi (in the film version), has been kept on a tight leash. Each time she

strays towards the shadowy marshlands that lie between Victimhood and

Brutishness, she has been reined in. Brought to heel….I would have thought that

this was anathema to the whole point of the Phoolan Devi story. That it went way

beyond the You-Rape-Me: I'll-Kill- You equation. That the whole point of it was

that she got a little out of control. That the Brutalized became the Brute. (Roy)

Roy sums the film up: “Rape is the main dish. Caste is the sauce that it swims in.” (Roy)

She condemns Kapur for the representation of half-truth, and for highlighting sexual violence over all other skills that make Phoolan a leader. She underscores that the film does not do justice to Phoolan Devi’s autobiography which it claims to represent.

According to Shekhar Kapur's film, every landmark - every decision, every

turning-point in Phoolan Devi's life, starting with how she became a dacoit in the

first place, has to do with having been raped, or avenging rape. He has just

blundered through her life like a Rape-diviner. You cannot but sense his horrified

fascination at the havoc that a wee willie can wreak. It's a sort of reversed male

self absorption. (Roy)

Bandit Queen is the narrative of the protagonist Phoolan who survives rape and subsequently subverts patriarchal structures with her crippled/ deified body. Phoolan the

“Bandit Queen” is a victim of sexual abuse from childhood. She is raped first by her husband as a child, by policemen as an adolescent and by bandits as an adult and because of her low caste and social standing; Phoolan accepts sexual violence as a form of

patriarchal and class oppression. When Phoolan falls in love with the bandit Vikram

Mallah, she is surprised that he is not aggressive while making love. I argue that Phoolan takes charge of her sexuality for the first time and is revered as a “devi”, a goddess by the bandits. By becoming a goddess, all social taboos that mark her as a whore are erased and she becomes the quintessential woman unsoiled by her corporeal sexuality. With her gang of dacoits Phoolan avenges all her upper caste rapists by killing them. The village

Thakurs plan a gang rape to avenge this violence, and attack her while she screams aloud saying that she cannot be abused because she is a goddess, a “devi”. I argue that deification deconstructs the body and its social implications by foregrounding a narrative of exception. Phoolan yearns for godly status in order to expunge the scars of sexual abuse from her body.

The autobiography of Phoolan Devi illustrates how Phoolan associates herself with Durga, the goddess of destruction, from childhood. She notes that she was a curious child who questioned the existence of God at a young age. (Phoolan Devi 13) While her mother explained to her that the quest for God was a waste of time as God favoured ony the rich, her father explained to her her social standing as an underpriviledged “mallah”:

“A rich man can give orders, he can beat you and punish you, because he is a landowner, he has the power of life or death over us. He owns the fields and gives us work. If he didn’t, we would starve”. (Phoolan Devi 19). This social discrepancy angered Phoolan who defied social norms. She revolted to be submissive and to serve the rich. She was a rebel at the age of eight and didn’t understand the patriarchal system which viewed women as property. Despite her sister Rukmini warning her not to interact with men and against the risks of being violated before marriage, Phoolan questions the system. She

finds it ridiculous that a woman becomes public property if a man violates her before marriage and she finds it equally amusing that a girl should be beaten by everybody, and belong to everybody, just because she interacted with a man before her wedding.

(Phoolan Devi 25)

After repeatedly being sexually assaulted Phoolan eventually realizes the status of a lower caste woman in society: “A girl didn’t exist without her father, her brother, her uncle or her husband-or any man at all belonging to her family or her caste. She couldn’t even walk without fear between the village and the river.” (Phoolan Devi 35) A woman was recognized only as a unit in patriarchy; she had no identity of her own. This reality dawns upon her when her husband Putti Lal forces her to sleep with him and rapes her on their wedding night. The infuriated Phoolan decides to avenge herself and make him pay back for all the pain that he caused her. She makes up her mind to survive and have her revenge like “the goddess Durga who drank the blood of demons”. (Phoolan Devi 119)

Phoolan empowers herself by associating herself with the goddess of destruction.

She uses her destructive powers first to teach a lesson to her father’s employer who didn’t pay him his wages on time. She demolishes his half built house with her sister’s help and feels powerful for the first time: “I felt that I had a physical power over something for the first time in my life, the power of destruction, the dark force of Durga, the goddess. It had taken eight days to build the walls and two hours to demolish them”.

(Phoolan Devi 143) Phoolan believed that her destructive actions were a form of justice to revolt against “the power of men, the power of privileged castes, the power of might”.

Faced with power and money, Phoolan resists patriarchal hegemony for the first time.

This is the first act of defiance which marks her as a rebel.

The Thakurs hound Phoolan consistently and get her arrested under the false accusation of being a dacoit. Phoolan is raped and abused by the Thakurs and the policemen while in custody, in front of her hepless father. This humiliation and horror terrifies her as she is treated inhumanely, losing all the dignity of being human. But she resolves that suffering in silence is far worse than being beaten and humiliated. She makes up her mind to survive despite all odds and attributes her gift for survival to the

Goddess Durga (Phoolan Devi 185). Survival seems to raise the stature of Phoolan from the human to the divine.

Although the entire village looked down on Phoolan as a fallen woman, Phoolan never shies away or feels ashamed of herself. She has no more fear; she tells her parents that their daughter was dead. (Phoolan Devi 206) By defying and abandoning all social bonds Phoolan asserts herself. She maintains her self-respect despite all social abuse. I argue that by subverting the patriarchal structure with her rebellious nature Phoolan becomes an outcaste. She finds freedom only when she places herself outside the social stratum. Rage and vengeance drive her to persecute all men who harrass her. She realises that all it took for survival is courage and the threat of violence. Pholan behaves as if she owned a rifle and kept all her enemies away with the “phantom rifle”. The rifle gave

Phoolan power to defend herself against men, jackals who wanted to eat her, cut her into pieces, and who lurked in the dark like tigers slavering for her flesh. (Phoolan Devi 210)

The rifle becomes the weapon which safeguards her sexuality.

Karen Gabriel notes how Indian cinema projects the image of sexual ownership and propriety with regard to Bandit Queen. She argues that this spectacular performance highlights the “zones of control” which are monitored by patriarchy-zones which check

and silence the subjectivity and interiority of a woman. Although the victim’s ordeal is reported, recorded, and interpreted the female victim is looked upon as a visible object rather than a speaking subject. (Gabriel, 1) A woman is raped /abused and violated while a man is injured/victimized/ hurt and oftentimes the woman emerges as a form of masculine honor, community honor or national honor.

Such visible invisibility and denial of narration are some of the mainstream characteristics of popular Indian cinematic representations of women’s sexuality. Gabriel further argues that female vulnerability is presumed to be an ontological condition; in this sense, Bombay cinema represents the helplessness of the woman but for the timely intervention of god/ the hero. (Gabriel 7) However, in Bandit Queen the female identification of Phoolan with the goddess Durga empowers her to avenge her rapists.

Although Kapur does not make Phoolan speak much, he sustains the representation of her empowerment by the act of deification. The vulnerability of the woman naturalizes violence and makes rape a zone of male pleasure and control. The vulnerability of

Phoolan is enabled by the impassive eye of the camera argue Gabriel. The gaze of the camera in the movie is neutral and anonymous and does to reflect any subjectivity:

His (the director’s) camera neither announces itself as omniscient, nor does it

problematize its narrative by grounding itself in the corporeal limits of any one

body; not even that of the protagonist. In this seeming insubstantiality neutrality-

anonymity achieved by minimizing traces of its own presence in the narration, the

camera seeks to ‘fictionalize’ itself – as if by doing so it could close the gap

between its own (and by implication the viewer’s) historical moment and that of

Phoolan’s – a gap that inevitably fictionalizes any history that chooses to ignore

it. In thus attempting to fictionalize itself, to simulate authenticity in its

representations, however, it engages in a significant and deliberate duplicity

which paradoxically, serves to enhance the effect it seeks, rather than subvert it.

(Gabriel, 12)

The spectator is invited to see the intimate details of the life of Phoolan while the eye of the camera promotes a spectatorship that includes both witnessing and participation in the ordeal of the protagonist. The intended spectator of this movie is masculine as Phoolan flings the epithet “sister-fucker” to the viewer in the opening and ending scenes of the movie. The spectator is jolted out from the anonymity of his gaze by the sexually abusive language that is directed towards his masculine sensibilities. Gabriel argues that the

Bandit Queen is a movie of the gaze and perception in many ways. The movie does not attack the man in the audience but mocks at his gaze: “It is the gaze itself that is implicated by Phoolan as rapacious, appropriative, and intrusive”. (Gabriel 13)The camera records no perspective in particular but diffuses the central image by bringing in other elements such as scenery in the picture. Phoolan’s gaze is often obscured behind mammoth pillars and closed doors like the rapist’s gaze and this partial perception is generalized as the “true” story of Phoolan. Through this partial vision the camera strives to construct objectivity and represent it as “the truth”:

The camera steadily refuses to work its way around these objects that partially

obscure the scene being shown – almost as if unwilling to engage with or immerse

itself in anything in its totality. One reason for this holding back could be to affect

objectivity, to maintain the sense that the camera’s gaze is impartial, engaging in

the scene multi-dimensionally, unwilling to distort the ‘truth’ even slightly by a

full display of its object, or reveal itself as ‘interested’ in actively seeking to

reveal the total object. It ends up, curiously enough, as a secret, spying eye,

peering through bars in windows and chinks in walls, gaps in curtains. (Gabriel

14)

The camera’s objectivity lies in its refusal to focus on any particular angle and its perspective is an accomplice to the violent masculine situations it records. While recording rape, it is doubtful whether the camera is recording it “objectively” or “whether it is a voyeur, enthralled by the spectacle of rape, celebrating its tragedy”. Subsequently the “truth” represented in Bandit Queen is flawed due to a deficiency of perspective argues Gabriel. However, the voice of Phoolan is more audible in her autobiography where she recounts her transformation from an abused woman to an abusing bandit.

After joining the bandit group of dacoits headed by Vikram Mallah, Phoolan feels calm and secure for the first time in her life. Mallah makes Phoolan his wife and confers respect and self-esteem to her. Phoolan eventually stops feeling ashamed and accepts the godly status which has been bestowed to her; she becomes the incarnation of the goddess

Kali, the slayer of demons. (Phoolan Devo?? 257). She returns to her village to avenge her husband, Putti Lal, who abused her all childhood, and beats him unconscious: “For the first time, I beat someone the way they beat me. I had the power. All the men were behind me, cheering me on.” Thus Phoolan, supported by bandits avenges her rapists.

She feels more comfortable with the dacoits than with her people in the village. She realises that these bandits, social outcastes, behaved more respectfully towards her than the villagers:

They were bandits. There were no laws or restrictions to stop them, yet

they never tried to lure me aside or molest me. They had never said anything dirty

to me. They behaved respectfully. In the villages there were all kinds of customs

and duties, but the men there behaved at times like dogs. I decided I liked the

jungles and the hills. (Phoolan Devi 267)

Phoolan realises that civilization is not a a safe haven for her. She decides instead to live in the wild, as an outcaste, as she feels more secure among a group of bandits as an outlaw. She confesses that it was to these unwritten laws and customs that she owed her life to. However, she eventually learns that her place amongst the bandit group was always inferior to the leader as she was a woman. She had no place is the hierarchy of caste, she was of the lowest caste and determined to persecute men, whatever caste they belonged to. Phoolan’s aversion to the upper class Thakurs eventually grew to become a loathing for masculinity. She realized that a man would flee her if she was armed with a rifle and that it was th only means of justice which would avenge masculinity faster than words, screams or tears. (Phoolan Devi 279) Phoolan had become a criminal; what society called crime, she called justice.

Eventually Phoolan becomes a terror in the villages and people give her respect because of the rifle she carries.They praised her as a goddess; even those who were her enemies once got down on their knees to seek her blessings. The little mallah girl who was tortured, humiliated and driven from her village, had vanished in silence and shame to return now as a goddess, the incarnation of Durga. For once, Phoolan’s father is proud of her. “He stood up, proud for once in his life to be the father of Phoolan Devi, the goddess honoured by the whole village. For the very first time in his poor mallah’s life,

the entire village was paying tribute to him.” (Phoolan Devi 283). Phoolan eventually realized that people started respecting her for fear of her rifle, they had no genuine regard for her. They feared her power and worshipped it. (Phoolan Devi 288).

Phoolan’s physical personality changed as well in the company of bandits. She dressed like a man and was treated like one amongst them. She disguised her femininity in order to feel secure among men. She decided to act like a man and destroy masculinity.

By erasing her gender, Phoolan subverts both femininity and masculinity. Her alterity as a raped woman, a bandit, and as a “manly” woman places her on the margins of the heteronormative society. Feminism has for long been connected to female corporeality and has questioned the naturalness of the body. Feminist critics have posited the textual fluidity of the body and its volatile investments and meanings while striving to establish an equality of gender which goes beyond the biology of the body. They underscored the female body as a fluid and irrational site as opposed to its male rational and static counterpart:

The very fact that women are able in general to menstruate, to develop another

body unseen within their own, to give birth, and to lactate is enough to suggest a

potentially dangerous volatility that marks the female body as out of control,

beyond, and set against, the force of reason. In contrast to the apparent ordered

self-containment of the male body, which may then be safely taken for granted

and put out of mind, the female body demands attention and demands regulation.

(Price, 3)

Lynda Birke suggests that the complexity of biology and its narrative which strives to trap people in its physiological jargon. She observes that biology is a study that straddles

both culture and science by establishing standard narratives of health and homoeostasis.

(Birke, 45) Culture shapes our internal experience of the body while mapping out the medical definitions of pathological functioning. Sex is one of powerful biological features which has demarcated and controlled bodies culturally in the history of mankind.

Butler argues that sex is not only a norm but a “regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs”. It demarcates, circulates and differentiates the bodies that it produces by acquiring social implications. “Sex assumes its value at the same time that it assumes its social character”-there is nothing natural about sex. Gender is the social construction of sex and makes it intelligible through its structure. Subsequently, if sex is absorbed by gender, that “sex” becomes a myth, a fiction which becomes inarticulate without the rhetoric of gender. (Butler, 238-39) Bandit Queen illustrates how Phoolan undergoes a crisis of gender once she joins the band of dacoits. She is shown wearing male attire and sporting a bandana around her head, which gives her a masculine sexual appeal. She assumes an androgynous role to persecute her rapists. She strives to abolish patriachy with the help of gunpowder and wants to switch the dynamics of power: “I needed to make them suffer. I beat them between their legs with my rifle butt. I wanted to destroy the serpent that represented their power over me…” . (Phoolan Devi 369). Phoolan believed that the penis, the epitome of masculinity, was the weapon which hounded and oppressed women. The destruction of the “serpent” would subsequently result in the abolition of masculinity. Her notion of justice entailed crippling the male body through castration. (Phoolan Devi 385)

Even after Vikram Mallah’s death, when she surrendered to the police, her opinion about men never changed. She detested men and saw them as demons and

recalled the abuse she had to suffer since childhood. Her identity as a woman had been displaced because of the ruthlessness of men. “I was a stone in the jungle, a stone without feelings or regrets. I was no longer a woman. A stone couldn’t marry a man when it was a man who had made the stone”. (Phoolan Devi 455). By giving up her humanity, Phoolan is able to avenge her rape. She hints at how gender is also a construct of patriarchy and how fluid identitties, like hers, receive no justice in society and therefore are compelled to look for it outside established social structures. She underscores how society lacks humanity and ridicules civil society for its hypocrisy. She overcame her suffering by associating herself with divinity, but she confesses that she actually wants to be recognized as a human being, nothing more. The struggle of Phoolan is eventually the struggle to be recognized as human. (Phoolan Devi 465)

Sunita Peacock observes how women and goddesses in Indian scriptures too are portrayed as a power of the male and lack an independent autonomous status. (Peacock

196) Gabriel also argues that Bandit Queen is an exercise in mythography. The narrative focuses little on the Phoolan who has relinquished victimhood to become a leader of bandits. It highlights a fetishized imagination of rape which highlights the status of woman as property. Phoolan disappears in the process of becoming the bandit queen by turning violent. By turning violent she became a bandit and then the Bandit Queen. She is spoken of as the reincarnation of Kali; she becomes the indomitable, indestructible

Woman. Violence transforms Phoolan the victim to Phoolan the Woman. By becoming the goddess, Phoolan enters the realm of the violable. While masculine violence seems self-evident in the film, feminine violence needs to be explained in terms of sexuality and femininity in order to be comprehensible. (Gabriel 16) Phoolan’s violence is

mythologized, compelling her to transcend historicity to escape violence and achieve quintessential womanhood. It is only though her “Kali avatar” that Phoolan is understood and accepted. This movie underscores the inseparability of representations of violence from the notions of gender. Representations of violence are facilitated by the subject of pain, the context of rape, the body and voice of the raped woman which become modes of validating masculinities that produce violence. The transformation of the female corporeality from visceral experience to an ideation, and from action to metaphor underscores the patriarchal usage of rape:

The transformation of (feminine) body into dematerialized site, subjectivity into

compliant void, history into myth and action into metaphor which is achieved

through the transformation of the visceral experiential into the ideational and then

the ideological, signals the patriarchal uses of rape. The consequent paradoxes

that ensue include a conflation between female pleasure and female pain, a

conceptual predicament that only guarantees the continuance and eroticization of

violence. (Gabriel 17)

Peacock concurs with Gabriel and remarks that feminine sexuality directly speaks to the reproductive organs. She notes that the erasure of the female body makes it apparent that female sexuality is no more a private entity but one that is constructed within public discourse. The spectacle of female nudity in the film emphasizes the visibility of shame which secures the role of men. The woman’s body can then be viewed as a surface where sexual attack serves as a metaphor to map the nation’s assault on it. Peacock elaborates how Phoolan becomes the goddess of the oppressed and becomes the metaphor of the

nation and its history. Through the metaphor of Phoolan’s body we see Phoolan as a subaltern figure that can stand both for nationalism and anti-nationalism:

…the woman’s body then becomes the embodiment of the nation and can

function in one of the two ways-“either as pure (and synonymously maternal)

body, spiritual, inviolable, and intact or as bruised, ravaged, raped, and violated

by invaders” (Peacock 198)

As a godly figure, Phoolan arouses national respect and admiration but is condemned and belittled when viewed as a human being. The broken body of Phoolan speaks to the gaps and conflicts inherent in nationalistic and patriarchal rhetoric. Her crippled body becomes a weapon used to defy patriarchal structures; she draws on violence to assert her interest and displaces the notion that women are defined by their vulnerability.

Priyamvada Gopal cites Sharon Marcus while acknowledging that “rape is a gendered grammar of violence” and that refusing to take it seriously would enable us to rewrite the script. She also suggests that women should learn how to use their bodies as weapons like Phoolan, learning to fight back verbally and physically. (Gopal 306) The female body here is represented as rapable but it is also capable of resistance. Marcus also asserts how a man is a potential rapist, however he underscores that rapists ‘“do not prevail simply because as men they are really, biologically, and unavoidably stronger than women” but because they follow “a social script and enact conventional, gendered structures of feeling and action which seek to draw the rape target into a dialogue which is skewed against her”’. (Gopal 308) He argues that rape is a constrcuted violence and that aggression is a subjective affect which has been objectified as brutality.

In Phoolan’s transformation as a bandit, she is represented as a female body capable of violence, thereby altering the definition of female-ness itself. She uses her body as a weapon and subverts gender by occupying the middle space as a bandit and by abandoning her “womanhood”. She transforms from the whole, pure and ideal woman to the ravaged, raped and immodest slut. However, she feels more human with this displaced identity than with the stereotypical conceptions of womanhood. Phoolan recasts rape to her advantage and rewrites the script of violence as a means of escaping heteronormativity. Rape then becomes a social script which can be uncoded and recoded as an act that spawns new possibilities of being and becoming.

Chapter 3: Recasting Rape in Draupadi

A woman has always been defined in relation to a man; she is not regarded as an

“autonomous being” argues Simone de Beauvoir. Women have been classified by their sexuality and Beauvoir explores the possibility of a woman’s identity independent of her sexuality or her biology. (Beauvoir 14) In this paper I examine Mahashweta Devi’s short story Draupadi, and argue that violence blurs gender. I argue that when women challenge patriarchy, they come up against biology, psychology, anthropology, history and the concept of productivity. The whole notion of respectability, virtue and morality rest on the female body and limit the woman’s role in society, prescribing a dress code and controlling her body. I examine the body of Dopdi Mejhen, a tribal woman, and highlight the conflicting attractions and threats that her body exudes. I claim that Dopdi uses her nudity to recast rape/ violence as an agency to assert her sexuality. She exposes her rapists by displaying her “broken” / “crippled” body. Some questions that I explore in this paper are: How does the nude, crippled feminine body subvert the clad, able bodied male? How is sexuality recast to highlight female identity? How is Dopdi recast as the mythical Draupadi; how does she overcome her victimhood? I underscore that Draupadi overcomes the violence of rape by redirecting the social and moral implications of shame associated with rape from herself to the perpetrators and by using her naked mutilated body as a weapon against the army officer who ordered her rape.

Draupadi is a lower-caste protagonist, named by her upper-caste mistress. She is named after Draupadi from the Mahabharat and we’re told that she can’t even pronounce

her name. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains that the Dalit tongues and dialects simply don’t form those syllables, and she is called “Dopdi” instead—and we’re told the regional police are after her since she is suspected of being a rebel. This narrative underscores the tensions between the colonial morality (the police force) and the Subaltern. The tale ends with the rape of Dopdi by the police officers. Unlike the Draupadi in the Mahabharat,

Dopdi displays her nude, bleeding body to the officers; naked and defiant, she asks them to rape her again, and they turn their eyes away in shame. Dopdi uses her crippled body to resist and retaliate against the patriarchal structures of morality, dignity and shame. In the translator’s note Spivak discusses how law enforcement is a body that replaced colonization where power simply changed hands between the colonial masters and the ruling elites of today. However, the nature and location of power has remained the same.

Devi’s Draupadi underscores how a lower caste protagonist subverts the Hindu/colonial regime. Dopdi resists the empire at the cost of her survival.

"Draupadi" first appeared in Agnigarbha ("Womb of Fire"), a collection of short political tales. Mahasveta Devi, a middle-class Bengali leftist intellectual penned the story. Devi is known best as a novelist and is recognized internationally for her work

Hajar Churashir Ma ("No. 1084's Mother"). The story takes place in the year of 1971 when India “won the war” against West Pakistan. The Indian government issued strict warning to arrest all Naxalites influencing the rural areas, especially the tribals, to revolt.

“Draupadi” captures the tensions and oppositions between the intellectual and the rural struggles. (Spivak 7)

Dopdi Mejhen had been warned by Mushai’s wife that the police were looking for her as she would be one of their key informants to tell the whereabouts of other

Naxalites. She refuses to run away from the police and is determined to face them if the need arises. She is aware that they will “kounter” her, but she is undaunted. She knows how one could deal with torture; biting off the tongue would curtail all information from being revealed. She knew that “when they kounter you, your hands are tied behind you.

All your bones are crushed; your sex is a terrible wound”. (Devi 103) Nonetheless, she chooses to stay while the rest of the rebels flee. Draupadi is arrested on her way into the forest and is interrogated for an hour by Senanayak, the chief of police. When no information could be retrieved from her, Senanayak orders, “Make her. Do the needful”, and disappears. (Devi 107) Draupadi is subject to gang rape. Initially a tear of pain, shame and self-pity trickles down her cheek on looking at her ravaged body which is bitten and sore:

In the muddy moonlight she lowers her lightless eyes, sees her breasts and

understands that, indeed, she’s been made up right…Her breasts are bitten raw,

the nipples torn. How many? Four-five-six-seven-then Draupadi passed out…

Only the dark remains. A compelled spread-eagled still body. Active pistons of

flesh rise and fall, rise and fall over it” (Devi 107-108)

Draupadi tears the cloth given to cover herself up into pieces and frightens the guard with her strange behavior. She walks naked, holding her head high, to meet the chief:

“Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds. She stands close to him and says “You asked them to make me up, don’t you want to see how they made me?” (Devi 108) Draupadi displaces the stereotypical reactions to violence like shame and humiliation and underscores them as hegemonic affects. Her reaction to rape is most unexpected. Her lips bleed as she starts

laughing at the bewildered chief and mocks at them when they try to cover her up. She asks, “What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again?

Are you a man? There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, kounter me-come on, kounter-me?”

(Devi 109) Her questions unsettle the ideology of masculinity and subvert the hegemony of patriarchy. Her ravaged nude body becomes a weapon to defy her oppressors. Her bruised/bleeding sexuality renounces shame and exudes power that displaces the structure of torture. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan remarks how this unashamed display of nakedness shouldn’t be read as heroism but as “a refusal of shared sign-system:

Dopdi does not let her nakedness shame her, her torture intimidate her, or her rape

diminish her. But this refusal is not to be read as a transcendence of suffering, or

even simply as heroism. It is instead simultaneously a deliberate refusal of a

shared sign-system (the meaningness assigned to nakedness, and rape; shame,

fear, loss), and an ironic deployment of the same semiotics to create disconcerting

counter-effects of shame, confusion and terror in the enemy (what is a “man”?). (

Rajan 353-354)

Zoe Brigley Thompson and Sorcha Gunne discuss Dopdi’s body is treated as raw meat in Devi’s narrative and how she refuses to eroticize rape and grant a grand narrative of power to the rapists. By speaking from Dopdi’s perspective, her ravaged body is invested with agency even while being attacked. She is the subaltern woman who can speak. Devi denies the rapists the power to humiliate their victim. Dopdi “re-appropriates her raped body” as she pushed Senanayak with her two mangled breasts. She transforms her bleeding body into a weapon, inspiring fear in her oppressors and stopping him from

accessing the power attributed to rape. Dopdi reinforces the subversive power of her crippled body and rouses terror in her enemies with her black, racialized body. (Zoe

Brigley Thompson 9)

Spivak observes that Draupadi is an ambiguous character. She is introduced with two names Draupadi and Dopdi, the latter being a tribal form of the former. She is on the list of wanted tribals, but her name is not listed in the agenda of tribal women. Spivak outlines the role of Dopdi in relation to the mythical Draupadi and argues that the colonial conquest is a modern version of the ancient Aryan’s struggle to consolidate a

“sacred geography”. Draupadi was exceptional in terms of her singularity, her oddity and her unpaired/uncoupled state, despite having five husbands. Mahasveta Devi's story explores this "singularity" by displacing Dopdi from a monogamous marriage to a situation of gang rape. (Spivak 387)

Mahasveta Devi rewrites the story of Draupadi and underscores how easily men can strip Dopdi naked. Dopdi flaunts her nudity publicly disregarding modesty and shame instead of praying for some divine intervention. Unlike Draupadi who was viewed as male property in the Mahabharat and was sold by her husband in the game of dice,

Dopdi is viewed as a source of information and is subject to being raped when she refuses to undisclose information about Naxalites. Rape takes the form of punishment in this story. Spivak calls Dopdi a “palimpsest” of colonial hegemony. (Spivak 388) The story traces the transformation of Dopdi from a domestic and virtuous woman to a sexual object. Spivak notes:

It is when she crosses the sexual differential into the field of what could only

happen to a woman that she emerges as the most powerful "subject," who, still

using the language of sexual "honor," can derisively call herself "the object of

your search," whom the author can describe as a terrifying super object-"an

unarmed target." (Spivak 388)

The response of Dopdi to sexual violence is remarkable in this narrative. The way Dopdi repositions her sexuality and transforms from the oppressed to the attacker switches the power dynamics of patriarchal hegemony. She recasts sexual punishment as agency and underscores new possibilities of embodiment.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty notes how narrations of the self suggest a conceptualization of agency that is often multiple and contradictory, and which is rooted in the history of specific struggles. In “Draupadi” agency works not through the logic of identification but through the logic of opposition. Resistances spawn in the very gaps and fissures of hegemonic narratives. The notion of the “personal is political” must be revised if we seriously consider the challenges that subversive agency that non-teleological narratives pose. Historical memory and writing by women of color and the Third World women entails an expression of multiple consciousnesses at the crossroads of race, colonialism, sexuality and class. This “mestiza consciousness” referred by Gloria

Anzaldua is one that spans across borderlands: “a plural consciousness in that it requires understanding multiple, often opposing ideas and knowledge’s, and negotiating these knowledge’s”. It is an effort to transcend duality, and healing the split marked by differences of culture, language and thought. (Mohanty 290) Draupadi/Dopdi is one of those who need to be understood through her oppositions and resistance. She rewrites the script of violence to reveal a novel perspective of embodiment and identity- a stance which curbs all hegemonic signs and significations. I argue that by refusing to react

“normally” to the sexual assault Dopdi undermines violence. Dopti displaces the script of hegemonic violence and uses her mangled body as an instrument of defiance. She troubles the traditional conceptions of femininity and recasts rape as an empowering agency. She transcends the fixed feminine identity subscribed by violence to discover a novel way of embodiment.

Chapter 4: Conclusion: Performing Sexual Violence

I hope to conclude my thesis by underscoring how representations of rape are dependent to a large extent on the values/ social scripts inscribed on the body. I am particularly interested in examining how rape is an act that includes multiple consciousness and perspectives. I argue that sexual violence is not as transparent as it seems and that the language of violence entails hegemonic ideologies that define it as an

“unsafe” act. I wish to focus mainly on the following questions: How are bodies and identities mutually constructed through performance? What counts as performing the body? Is masculinity a performance of violence? I examine Bandit Queen and

“Draupadi” as texts that rewrite the script of violence and recast rape as an agency to displace the power of patriarchy.

While discussing the body politic Butler affirms how gender is socially constructed through performative acts, words, gestures and desires which come together to shape an identity. She elaborates how hegemonic ideologies are inscribed on the surface of the body and subtly shape the inner core which we often credit as “true identity”. Genders are created through performance and are shaped by repeated actions:

That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitutes its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer,

and so institutes the ‘integrity’ of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. (Butler 417)

I argue that Phoolan and Dopdi subvert their gender by becoming violent

“weapons”. They displace womanliness by transcending its boundaries of subjection and shame. They escape their femininity by being embodied but gender resistant female subjects. The claim is not that a woman’s body is outside the power structure of knowledge, but that there is a slippage between what is possible for them and what is required of them by a patriarchal state. (Margrit Shildrick 438). Therefore it is imperative that the experience of the “broken” body is a transgressive one where we need to rethink the boundaries of the body, and the fissures that outline sameness and alterity, the self and the other. However, these stable binaries indeed help in giving us a sense of definition about the self, safety, bodily integrity and identity.

The raped woman is a transforming/ shifting/developing identity shaped by a resistance to existing norms and through the incitement of new norms. The process is never complete as the body does not have any teleological goal. By deconstructing the regulatory processes of normalization we rethink difference in terms of diversity, and advocate a radical openness to the disruptive otherness that we call “identity”.

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