Postcolonial Reading of Mahasveta Devi’s ‘Draupadi’ or ‘Dopdi’ as Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak   JAHNAVI RAVISHANKAR College

Frantz Fanon, in his book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, states, “Decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: The “thing” colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation” (Fanon 2). For him, colonialism not only exploits, but also creates categories like the ‘colonized’ who can be dehumanized and disempowered. Classical Marxist theory talks about the economy determining a ‘superstructure’ and that fundamental divisions of race, gender and culture are caused by economic inequalities. For Fanon, these divisions no longer apply in the colonial context. A new context arises- race, a division that the colonist makes between the colonizer and the colonized. This unequal division is black and white. And while that may largely hold true, as colonizers prevail across continents and expand their reign, all the other aspects of caste, class and gender conveniently factor in as well. Thus the colonized party eventually suffers oppression from all fronts. If one happens to be a black, low caste, poor woman- each of these characteristics almost derive from and give rise to the other. The colonized subject is almost then as treated lesser than dirt.

Mahasveta...