Abstract
This article reads Mahasweta Devi’s 1978 short story “Draupadi” alongside the long history of (post)colonial governmentality in India, as articulating an insurgent tribal feminist politics of refusal that functions in the wake of and in opposition to the state’s militarized occupation of tribal land. By contextualizing this story within scholarly work on subalternity, forms of colonial and postcolonial counterinsurgency, and the territorial securitization of national interiors, this article argues that the postcolonial state animates its authority in tribal people’s everyday existence in the form of counterinsurgent military operations. These operations develop persecutorial knowledge apparatuses around tribal and Indigenous life-worlds and produce the categories of “terrorist” and “insurgent” in order to render dissenting bodies violable. In response, Devi animates how tribal historical subjects devise guerrilla forms of knowledge that resist capture and intelligibility by the state and stages a feminist politics of protest that jeopardizes the state’s bureaucratic-epistemic, and counterinsurgent, capabilities. Devi’s “Draupadi” therefore offers both a critique of the long durée of postcolonial militarism by exposing the routinization, through bureaucratization, of dispossessive violence meted out by the state onto Indigenous peoples and lands as well as a resistant poetics of Indigenous survival in the shadow of the military occupation.
