Canonizing the Drapaudis in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi”

Abstract

Draupadi, the classical heroine of the Mahabharata, in an unavoidable way, forms the praxis of reference, comparison, and contrast with Mahasweta Devi’s tribal heroine Draupadi. As part of the collective mytho-cultural memory, the ancient lady invokes a process of analogy, and “deconstruction,” to use Spivak’s phrase, as does Mahasweta Devi’s  Santal  Draupadi against the backdrop of the West Bengal government’s anti-Naxalite campaigns and military operations in the late 1960s and early 1970s (383).  This article will initially examine the comparative and contrastive aspects of the two Drapaudis, then attend to Spivak’s notion of complementariness of the latter Draupadi—her being “at once a palimpsest and a contradiction” (388). Finally, it will reach the conclusion that Veda Vaysa’s Draupadi remains a canon like the epic itself while Mahasweta Devi’s unorthodox Draupadi, despite growing under the overpowering shadow of the earlier, canonizes herself in a prototypal way simultaneously recognizing her classical namesake.