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The present research endeavour sheds some light on the radical reimagining of Draupadi, a mythological figure, in Mahasweta Devi’s groundbreaking short story "Draupadi." Devi, by shifting the tale from Mahabharata to the 1970s, a brutal landscape of the Naxalite movement, changes a figure of royal victimhood into Dopdi Mejhen, a tribal rebel. The paper utilizes Michel Foucault’s theory on power/knowledge, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of the subaltern as a theoretical framework. Applying Foucault’s lens, it examines "the micro-physics of power" used by the state apparatus upon Dopdi’s body, taking it as a site of surveillance and discipline. The argument here, however, shows how Dopdi’s ultimate resistance—as she refuses to clothe her naked and raped body—shakes the state’s disciplinary mechanisms.
Dr. Vikram Singh, and Aditya Dhull. “Reimagining Draupadi in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi”.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 719–733. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.47.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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