Reversing Sovereignty: Deconstructing State ‘Rights’ and ‘Welfare’ in Jacinta Kerketta’s Poetry

In the prefatory remarks to her translation of Mahashweta Devi’s Draupadi, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that the self-fulfilling premise of knowledge regarding the objects of critical discourse colours Western observations on the Other, although the text of Draupadi is potent enough in showing its blatant inadequacies and thus rendering the character of Dopdi Mejhen as neither completely understandable nor ‘translatable’. Translation, in critical discourse, therefore transcends the literal definition of the term as change of diction or language and encapsulates the idea of discursive readjustment as well. Jacinta Kerketta’s poems highlight the politics of ‘translation’ adopted by the modern welfare state in postcolonial India vis-à-vis the plight of Adivasis. While constitutional guarantees and safeguards constitute the benevolently sovereign nature of the postcolonial state, the complexities involved in the execution of these guarantees render them fallible in co-opting the demands and rights of the Adivasi in the narrative of national progress and other statist goals and objectives. On the other hand, Kerketta’s poems serve to offer a literary resistance to the complaisant presumptions of politico-legal discourse and create unprecedented fissures in concepts that are held to be self-explanatory and integral features of the modern welfare state.