Abstract

Spivak focuses on Draupadi, the protagonist in the short story by Mahasweta Devi published here in the English version. Oppressed, Draupadi is capable of rebellion, of resistance to the death. She does not seek compassion. Naked before the enemy, she resists : her last act is an act of resistance in which she defies her enemy with the force of an counter. For the first time, her enemy Senanayak feels fear, the fear of facing an « unarmed objective ». But who is Senanayak ? In the story, Senanayak is an army officer for the government of Bengal who orders the arrest and humiliation of Draupadi, the woman who led the tribal revolt in the Naxalites’ struggle for agrarian reform during the 1960s. Significantly, Spivak relates the figure of Senanayak to that of the first-world intellectual, complicit in spite of himself in the regimes of exploitation and domination in the Third World. Her point of view concerning the commitment of Western feminists is clear : « we will not be able to speak about women over there if we depend entirely on conferences and anthologies of informants educated in the West »