232

Chapter 5

Conclusion: A Symbiotic Interface

233

Contents

5.1. A Recap 234

5.2. Spivak‘s Current Concerns 235

5.2.1. Fault Lines in Spivak‘s Critique 243

5.2.2. Response by Women Critics 245

5.3. Mahasweta: A Writer with a Mission 248

5.4. A Symbiotic Exchange 254

5.5. Something to Look Forward to 261

Notes 262

Works Cited 264

234

5.1. A Recap

Furthering the study of modern/global literatures and initiating fresh

'sites' of enquiry into the corpus of discourse called ‗postcolonial studies‘, are

the current interpretive and translational practices in Literature. It is not just 'the

empire writing back', but 'the empire translating back' and even ‗the empire

theorizing back‘, who are the major players in postcolonial studies. Impacted by

the birth of a new world order, and informed by the radical literary and cultural

theories in vogue, scholarly translators and elite ‗readers‘ like Gayatri Spivak,

have through their erudite English translations and interpretations of Third

World texts, transposed those texts and their authors from the margins to the

centre of current literary discourses and from the regional/local to the global

stage.

Spivak‘s translations, radical interpretations and theorizations on/of the

fiction of Mahasweta Devi have been the site of this study geared to examine

how far Spivak‘s translations and their embedding in the current elite discourses

of the West are a crossing over between the First World and the Third World

and across the divides of socio-politico-cultural and linguistic differences,

besides being ‗a most intimate act of surrender‘. Spivak‘s careful analysis of the

inner dynamics of translated texts most effectively gets at the process(es) of

cultural transference and construction - an urgent task in an age riven with the

competing and conflicting demands of nationalism, neo-colonization and

globalization.

Almost auguring or anticipating the powerful but subtle forces of

exploitation and oppression of the poor and the indigenous peoples of the world

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by the mainstream (often outsiders) under the new inter/nationalist dispensation,

Devi‘s fiction creates a realistic, yet universal cartography of the historical and

political location of the indigenous peoples and documents the urgency of their

predicament in a post-independence, neo-colonial, globalised world. In her

writings on Devi‘s stories, Spivak ―consistently engages with the singular

histories and lives of ‗Third World‘ subaltern women in order to disrupt the

pieties and philosophies of colonial (Western) knowledge and the maintenance

of imperialism‖ (Morton 47). In fact, Spivak‘s translations and commentaries on

Devi‘s stories that forcefully articulate the material reality of postcolonialism

from the embodied standpoint of tribal subaltern women, have greatly informed

and influenced the rethinking of superior theories and enlightened benevolence

of radical First World feminism. According to Stephen Morton in his analysis of

Spivak‘s works:

... one of the most important contributions that Spivak has made to

contemporary feminist thought is her consistent demand that

feminism seriously consider the material histories and lives of

third world women in its account of women‘s struggles against

oppression. (71)

5.2. Spivak’s Current Concerns

As Mark Sanders, Spivak‘s former student and research scholar under

her guidance has remarked: ―From the outset, as a critic Spivak has been

occupied with the transformation of the self. Her choice of title for her first

book, Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats, is an early

marker for this occupation, drawing its title from Yeats's late poem, ―An Acre of

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Grass" (Myself 167). In Spivak's more recent writings, the theme of soul-making

and imaginative self-transformation (that she had employed to frame the life and

work of Yeats) has inclined her to be ‗other-directed‘, not only in her activist

engagements, but also in her teaching. This early orientation finds Spivak's

attention turned to the project of changing the mind and desires of the reader as

student of literature. In this project the imagination becomes the link to the other

and the place where the ethical relation is activated (Sanders 22). For,

. . . the goal (in the literature classroom) is at least to shape the

mind of the student so that it can resemble the mind of the so-

called implied reader of the literary text, ... Literature buys your

assent in an almost clandestine way, and therefore it is an

excellent instrument for a slow transformation of the mind., for

good or ill. . . . The goal of teaching such a thing as literature is

epistemic: transforming the way in which objects of knowledge

are constructed. . . . The problem of the teaching of English

literature is not separated from the development of the colonial

subject. (qtd. Sanders 23)

In her interview with Elizabeth Grosz titled, ―Criticism, Feminism, and

the Institution‖, Spivak has stated her case as a postcolonial quite explicitly:

Perhaps by the accident of my birth and my production - being

born British-Indian , and then becoming a sort of participant in

the de-colonisation without a particular choice in the matter and

then working in the United States, floating about in Europe,

Africa, Saudi Arabia, Britian and now Australia . . . I avoided in

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some ways becoming someone who takes on a master discourse

… ( and ) what I like about Derrida‘s work is that he focuses his

glance very specifically at his own situation as an intellectual who

questions his own disciplinary production. He tries in his latest

work to see in what way, in every specific situation when he is in

fact being an intellectual – being interviewed, being asked to

lecture, being asked to write – being asked to do all these things

which an intellectual continues to do whether he wants it or not-

he sees in what way he is defined as a ‗foreign body‘. (6)

Spivak further clarifies her transformation as a migrant intellectual in the West

thus:

. . . Becoming more European in European matters than

Europeans, because of survival necessity mixed with certain kinds

of post-colonial pride, first generation of young intellectuals after

independence, all of that Marxist training which is slowly

transforming from the first internationalist waves, having left and

then lived through the American sixties, first as a student and then

as a teacher, and so on. I find that I am still learning and

unlearning so much that the earlier things that I‘ve written become

impenetrable to me in new ways . . . (Ingram 75)

In fact she confides quite honestly to Ingram in the same interview: ―Citizenship

is a difficult burden especially for those of us who are not very patriotic‖ . . . I

am an unpatriotic citizen of India‖ (75), says Spivak, the post colonial diasporic,

alluding to her growing foreign status. In fact from her many ‗talk essays‘ one

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gathers that Spivak is quite nostalgic about her outsider status among the

Bengali intellectuals and not being allowed a voice in the elite academy in West

Bengal, even though she was an alumna of Presidency College, Calcutta. In

Spivak's picture the position of the ‗migrant intellectual‘ corresponds roughly to

that of members of the elite in the country of origin.

The general allegations against Spivak are difficulty, elitism and lack of

research. Spivak‘s commentaries and explications, like Bhabha‘s work, are

sophisticated to the point of impenetrability. Hence the critique that the Western

trained native intellectual is in danger of identifying more with the insights of

poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan and her own writing displays

much of the slipperiness with the language associated with their deconstructive

texts (McLeod 183).

The sophistication is not merely for appearance sake. Spivak‘s attention

to detail, the range of her scholarship and her remarkable ability to expose the

limitations in various forms of knowledge are enabled by her semantically

compact prose style. Yet, inevitably, this is at the cost of a certain clarity and

accessibility, especially for the beginner, and she cannot escape the charge that

she sometimes presumes her readers will be as theoretically expert as herself.

Spivak is most famous for her critical theoretical engagements with

postcolonial literature as a counter- discourse that can challenge the authority of

colonial master narratives in classic English literary texts such as Charlotte

Bronte‘s Jane Eyre and Daniel Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe. However, Spivak is

increasingly sceptical of the radical potential of all postcolonial fiction to

effectively challenge the condition of subaltern groups living under

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contemporary conditions of global exploitation. But in Devi she finds a

postcolonial writer who is unlike her scene and writes against the current of

nationalist literary conventions of her times. Spivak‘s translations and

commentaries on Devi‘s stories emphasize the significance of such writings in

articulating the unwritten histories of tribal, subaltern women and groups and

―to at least begin to imagine an alternative to contemporary conditions of global

exploitation social, political and economic oppression‖ (Morton 134).

For the postcolonial critic Bhabha, critical theory‘s emphasis on the

silence and passivity of non-western subjects in relation to Western knowledge

―is part of western theory‘s ‗strategy of containment where the Other text is

forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of

articulation‘ (Bhabha 31). Spivak shares the belief; however, she has challenged

the radical potential of all postcolonial fiction to effectively challenge the

condition of subaltern groups living under contemporary conditions of

exploitation under a new world order in the inescapable grip of globalization.

Spivak‘s critical/theoretical imagination is continually at work

unsettling pieties and philosophies, ruthlessly and inexorably exposing the soft

underbelly of cherished and newly won academic radicalisms in literary

criticism and history (Marcus 23). At the same time her penchant for diversity

of reading or retroactive reading in interpreting finds her shifting from one

problematic to another relying on a range of theoretical models developed out of

tensions within their respective paradigms.

Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the communist bloc in

the late twentieth century, and the subsequent integration of many socialist

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states into a global capitalist economy, many commentators have concluded that

Marx‘s analysis of capitalism was wrong. But Spivak points out in her

interview to Sara Harasym that this conclusion ignores the rhetorical nuances of

Marx‘s later writing on value and its continuing relevance to the contemporary

international division of labour between the ‗First World‘ and the ‗Third World‘

(Morton 100). By relating Marx‘s theory of value in the nineteenth century to

the contemporary international division of labour between the ‗First World‘ and

the ‗Third World‘, Spivak insists on the continuing importance of Marx‘s labour

theory of value to contemporary readings of culture and politics (Harasym 96).

Spivak has explicitly criticised the privileged position of poco

intellectuals in the Western academy because it can be mistaken for the real

political and economic oppression suffered by disenfranchised, subaltern

populations in the ―Third World‖. Instead of assuming this mistaken identity,

Spivak has developed a self-conscious criticism of the class- privileges enjoyed

by diasporic intellectuals living in North America. This aspect of Spivak‘s

thought has generated an important critical interest in the cultural histories of

new immigrants in North America, and has informed works such as Lisa

Lowe‘s Immigrant Acts (1997), Rey Chow‘s Writing Diaspora (1993) and

Ethics After Idealism (1998), and Amitav Kumar‘s Passport Photos (2000)

(Morton 137).

The political economist Saskia Sassen has praised ―the intricate

labyrinth‖ that Spivak constructs through ―transnational cultural studies‖

(Spivak, Critique blurb) and the Marxist literary critic Peter Hitchcock cites

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Spivak as one of the few intellectuals of our time to rethink the body within the

space of contemporary transnational capitalism (15).

Another significant political impact that Spivak‘s work has had is in the

area of women‘s writing and feminist theory. Judith Butler invokes Spivak‘s

discussion of ‗strategic essentialism‘1 to elaborate a theory of gender

performativity. Spivak‘s criticism of Western feminism‘s complicity with

imperialism has also been taken up by the Canadian feminist critic Julia

Emberley, Laura Donaldson and Kamala Visweswaran. In ‗French Feminism

Revisited‘ and ―Feminism and Deconstruction Again: Negotiations‖ Spivak has

revised her earlier critiques of French Feminism to focus instead on the

political, historical and theoretical rethinking of recognizably ‗French

feminisms‘ in the fiction and critical writing of poco women writers like the

Algerian feminist writer Assia Djebar (Morton 138). Furthermore, Spivak has

been increasingly vocal in her criticism of global development policies which

focus on exploitation of women workers in the Third World. In her

commentaries attached to her translations on Devi‘s fiction Spivak emphasizes

the importance of Devi‘s literary and activist writing to articulate the unwritten

saga of the ongoing denial, deprivation and dispossession of tribals, subaltern

women and the poor throughout history that at least begin to imagine an

alternative to contemporary social, political and economic oppression.

One of her recent essays, ―Righting Wrongs‖, expresses her concern that

the postcolonial subject, the member of the elite representing itself as the native

informant, is disconnected from the local underclass that ―there is a real

epistemic discontinuity between the Southern human rights advocates and those

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whom they protect‖ (527). This is particularly apparent in India, where a ‗class

apartheid‘ (533) separates a local elite from the rural poor. This is the milieu of

Devi‘s tribal historical fiction where the rural poor are mostly indigenous

‗tribals‘ – sharing neither mother tongue nor religion with caste Hindus, for

whom they are untouchables. Under the circumstances the gulf separating the

local elite from the tribals gets even wider. Yet, according to Spivak, indigenous

peoples are in touch with a responsibility-based ethics that can supplement

human rights and, ultimately, even turn capitalism toward redistribution

(Sanders 23). As Spivak explains:

. . . for a supplementing of human rights to take place . . . the real

effort should be to access and activate the tribals‘ indigenous

―democratic‖ structures to parliamentary democracy by patient

and sustained efforts to learn to learn from below. . . . Activate is

the key word here. (548)

This can happen by means of what Spivak terms a ‗suturing in‘ of ‗the

ethical impulse that can make a social justice flourish‘ (534). Towards this end

Spivak believes that the academic scholar must be taught to inquire not what

they can do for them (Third World) but what they can do for them (First World).

In the interview to Sanders she reveals her project for the future:

And today, there is another disarticulation, between the main

theatre of capital, finance – and the hopelessly fragmented

working class, riven by nationalism and racism, as the disputes

over outsourcing clearly show. As a supplement in the strongest

sense to the functioning of this reinvented state in a world

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economy where the state does not have any redistributive

capacities, one looks at the disruptive politics of ‗social

movements‘, . . . disruptive politics that would again and again

turn capitalist globalization into redistribution. One might call it

socialist globalization rather than capitalist globalization. This is

the project for the future (emphasis added). (115)

5.2.1. Fault Lines in Spivak’s Critiques

Quite in line with the proverbial truism ―the personal is political‖, is

Bose‘s statement that ―there is a politics inherent in all acts of translation‖

(266). In Spivak‘s translatorial praxis can be detected ―an all encompassing -

self-reflexivity, so much so that the issues raised within the original story often

end up simmering on the back burner‖ (266).

Measuring her by her own yardstick, critics allege that at times, Spivak‘s

emphasis on the complicity of Western intellectuals in silencing the voices of

oppressed groups by speaking for them may also appear to repeat in the reverse

direction the very silencing that she critiques. Indeed, as Morton notes, critics

like Benita Parry argue that Spivak effectively writes out ‗the evidence of native

agency recorded in India‘s 200 year struggle against British conquest and the

Raj‘ with phrases like ‗the subaltern cannot speak‘ (32). Like Parry‘s reading of

Spivak‘s work on the subaltern, many critics have tended to oversimplify

Spivak‘s argument for the sake of clarity.

Far from being completely pessimistic about the histories of

subaltern resistance and the possibilities of political agency,

Spivak‘s refusal to simply represent non-western subjects comes

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from a profound recognition of how the lives of many

disempowered groups have already been damaged by dominant

systems of knowledge and representation. And it is deconstruction

that provides Spivak with a critical strategy to articulate this

recognition. (Morton 32-33)

The commodification of postcolonial theory in general and Spivak‘s

thought in particular has been harshly critiqued by Dirlik in his essay ―The

Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism‖. In

his view, the success of Spivak‘s critical thinking in the US academy is

symptomatic of how postcolonial intellectuals are ‗beneficiaries ‗rather than

‗victims‘ of global capitalism (353). Along with Said and Bhabha, Dirlik

contends that Spivak has contributed to a postcolonial theory that diverts

attention away from global capitalism by focusing on questions of culture (347).

In what could be read as a response to Dirlik‘s criticism, Spivak has

recently dissociated herself from the group by rejecting the label ‗postcolonial‘,

on the grounds that the term has lost its explanatory power. One of the reasons

for this is that ‗Colonial Discourse studies [...] can sometimes serve the

production of current neocolonial knowledge by placing

colonialism/imperialism securely in the past‘ (Spivak, Critique 1).

5.2.2 Response by Women Critics

An impartial critic of Spivak, Bose warns the readers of Spivak‘s

translations to be cognizant of the politics of her praxis.

The received text (translation), the mediated text becomes a

powerful agent of control if the receiver is careless about the role

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of the mediator. On the other hand, a careful and discerning

reception of a text such as Spivak‘s translations of Devi‘s may

yield a rich knowledge not just of Devi‘s work and milieu but of

the practices of academia today. (279)

Spivak‘s most famous subaltern theory that the subaltern cannot speak,

self-reflexively impinges upon her own praxis. Spivak‘s standing as an

international intellect, and the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities

at Columbia University, the number one university in the US, situates her

apposite to the First World intellect than with the Native Informant, and

therefore she, too, is complicit in the silencing of the Third World subaltern.

Jane Marcus, yet another, but first world, critic of Spivak comments on

her supposed intellectual arrogance: ―A champion of theory, Spivak names the

anti-theoretical as ignorant or politically conservative and invents withering

names and labels for the unwittingly aberrant, or the naive or clever heretic (22).

She goes on,

There is also a disconcerting use of the word ―high‖ to modify

theory, and it keeps the reader strongly identified with the

outlawed ―low‖. The reader is placed ―below‖ or outside a small

privileged group. Spivak lectures in a powerful, authoritative

voice which is intimidating to the reader, allowing no space for

dissent or even friendly discussion. The essays are marked by a

brilliant individualist mastery of cultural problems in a dazzling

solo display, conscious of and always pointing out its superiority.

(22)

246

All the same Marcus is not unmindful of the merit and worth of Spivak‘s

work and declares: ―My purpose in the long argument which follows is

precisely to bring new readers to these texts in the hope that they may be

presented to a larger readership, that more of Mahasweta Devi‘s work may be

translated and published in this country (27). A further positive perspective

reveals to her another radical aspect of Spivak‘s works on Devi; ―If Spivak‘s

treatment of these texts was yet another strategy for challenge and response,

then she has succeeded. Good criticism generates discussion. It does not close of

discussion‖ (27). And so ―It may take readers a long time to catch up with

Gayatri Spivak but I predict that we shall be arguing with this book for a long

time‖ (33); not with this book In Other Worlds alone but with all her other

works as well, for

. . . one of the most important contributions of Spivak‘s

intellectual work to contemporary critical theory and public

intellectual culture is her relentless ability to revise and rework

earlier concepts and debates about postcolonialism; or the cultural,

political and economic legacy of colonialism, in a way that is

directly related to the contemporary conditions of global

capitalism. (Morton 135)

Appreciatingly, yet resentfully, First World feminists like Marcus finds

Spivak intimidating.

Spivak lectures in a powerful, authoritative voice which is

intimidating to the reader, allowing no space for dissent or even

friendly discussion – her work is marked by a brilliant

247

individualistic mastery of cultural problems in a dazzling solo

display, conscious of and always pointing out its superiority. (22)

Commenting on Spivak‘s critique of French feminism and its champions

Kristeva and Cixous, and others like the American critic Terry Eagleton,

Marcus facetiously says: ―Spivak often acts as a post-conference Grand

Respondent sitting in judgment on folly‖ (26).

Even though ―the task of the translator is to be a beacon guiding the text

across the divides of difference (Simon 292), Salgado suggests that it is

imperative that Spivak's rewritings, like the works of Devi's other translators,

are critically assessed on a comparative basis. This is to prevent the current

tendency to see Spivak as Devi‘s dwarpalika (a tendency Spivak herself

welcomes), because as Salgado argues, ―there are many doors to a text and the

doorkeepers can also be prison-warders, barring us entry to aspects of a text that

resist their hegemonic control‖ (142).

There is a distinction between Indian translations written for the

international market and those written for a national readership. Several of

Devi‘s stories have been translated into English for national consumption within

India and for international consumption abroad. According to Salgado these two

markets, the national and international are in fact discrete, largely due to the

huge publishing industry to be found in India. It is the second readership, the

international one, that is central to the subject of this study; for the relocation of

oral, tribal stories into the overwhelmingly scribal world of international

academia raises issues that are fundamental to our understanding of the way in

which the "Third World" in general and "India" in particular, come to be

248

constructed globally‖ (132). Though controversial, it is an undeniable truth that

Spivak not only just translates Devi, but she does so much more in her own

interests and in the interest of Third World literatures.

5.3. Mahasweta: A Writer with a Mission

―Here was a no-pretence, no-rhetoric, no-nonsense person, whose

compassion and clarity were an invitation for action. Perhaps Mahatma Gandhi

alone among great Indians spoke like her‖, says Devy in his evaluation of Devi

in the documentary Journeying with Mahasweta Devi.

Devy, who has had long and close association with Devi as co-activist

and as her literary critic and reviewer, describes her as ―more a woman of the

film songs than of the ragas‖ (Journeying). Hailing from a family of

humanitarians, she has been one of the earliest sympathizers and exponents of

the Marxist ideology but has dissociated herself from Party politics since long.

She has categorically stated that ―I don‘t understand theory much but this I

understand. I am Left. I will remain Left‖ and adds, ―I always say that all I have

read is man. I have seen him, I have known him, and out of that I have written

my stories‖ (Collu 144). But by and by, there has set in a total disillusionment

with the leftist government in West Bengal that Devi has become one of its

most vocal critics.

We were very happy when the Marxists came to power in 1977.

We supported them wholeheartedly. But our dreams were

shattered soon after. Villages have been neglected for thirty-two

long years – like electricity, safe drinking water is a dream in

many villages; the government has done nothing to ensure proper

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irrigation for farmlands; Indira Housing Scheme also failed. The

Left Front government has proved itself a conglomerate of

failures. (Devi, ―I Love Kolkota‖ 2 of 4)

In an interview in October 2009, to Ghosh‘s request to her to describe the

present condition of the tribal in West Bengal she states:

I‘d say that poor people, irrespective of their religious, cultural or

communal allegiances, are deprived in West Bengal. There‘s

rampant corruption in BPL card distribution. The same is the case

with the rationing system. The governance is corrupt, and the poor

have to bear the brunt of this racket-driven system.

The tribal communities have always been neglected. It‘s true that

the state government created Paschimanchal Unnayan Parishad

for the welfare of the tribals in Birbhum, Burdwan, Purulia and

West Midnapore. But the parishad has done nothing for the

development of the tribal districts. (―I Love Kolkota‖ 1 of 4)

An ardent and farsighted critic of globalization and its attendant

exploitation of the poor and the environment/ countryside, Devi lashes out at the

West Bengal Left front government‘s land acquisition policy.

We are being branded as regressive and anti-industry, but our

point is, if land is indeed required for industrialisation, the

government should focus on those areas where land lies fallow

and farming is not the primary means of living. But Singur is a

multi-crop area that produces all major types of rice grains

throughout the year. It also produces wheat and many types of

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vegetables. The Nano factory in Singur would have snatched

livelihoods from thousands of farmers. Moreover, an assembling

plant can‘t be called industry in the true sense of the word. I wrote

as early as 2006 that car parts made at a factory in Rajkot, Gujarat

were supposed to be assembled in the proposed Singur plant. Such

a factory wouldn‘t create a lot of new jobs.

Since Trinamool Congress won from the Singur constituency in

two Assembly elections in a row, the state government wanted to

―punish‖ the people of Singur. Industrialisation was an expression

of their political vengeance. (1-2 of 4)

As is Devi‘s practice, these facts and political events are sure to serve as

fodder for her forthcoming historical fiction. In her insightful essay, ―Under

Western Eyes‖, Mohanty argues that Western scholars often locate ―third

world women‖ in terms of the underdevelopment, oppressive traditions, high

illiteracy, rural and urban poverty, religious fanaticism, and ―over population‖

of particular Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries (5-

6). But the tribal world that Devi discovered from long and personal study and

contact is contradictory to the Western Orientalist construct. She does not

exoticize or romanticize the tribal. Unlike the Western-oriented anthropologists,

Devi‘s empathy or, in the deconstructive jargon, ‗ethical responsibility‘ reveals

to her the noble primitive‘. Products of a tribal culture in which women hold a

place of honour, rape is virtually unknown among them and is considered a

grave crime deserving death penality. The system of ‗bride-price‘ rather than

‗dowry‘ is the sanctioned tradition, and widow remarriage is customary. A

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learning from below has revealed to her their superior culture and civilizational

graces that has been lost to the modern mainstream man.

Juan Jr. sees ―globalization, the neoliberal-ideology of the free market,

the capital market of exchange values, as the only way to economic growth and

social progress everywhere‖ (94), and is acutely aware of its exploitative, anti-

poor, anti-women machinations that makes her believe that ―even if we ignore

globalization, it will not ignore us‖ (96). Adducing the truth in Juan‘s statement,

Devi‘s fiction deals with the various forms of exploitation that globalization has

set in motion, especially in those parts of the world occupied by the indigenous

Third World people and the poor. Her story ―Pterodactyl‖ is a veritable treatise

on tribal India in which Devi dwells upon the tribal question from different

perspectives. Spivak‘s readings have made explicit what Devi‘s stories have

implicitly suggested. Taking inspiration from Devi and her work, Spivak

launches on a literary mission to examine the possibility of a socialist

globalization in the place of an anti–poor and anti-woman capitalist

globalization.

The Leninist insight of capitalism turning into imperialism under

globalization is shared by both Devi and Spivak. Devi, who in her fiction

astutely critiques the exploitative and oppressive structures of neo-colonialism

and internal colonization that followed in the wake of decolonization and

nationalism in the Third World, particularly in India, thus provides Spivak with

the right fodder for theorization on the nascent field of globalization and

international division of labour that has inveigled itself into the world of the

subaltern.

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The novel Chotti Munda, written in 1980, touches upon vital issues such

as the place of the tribal on the map of the national identity, land rights and

human rights, the entry of global finance, into the tribal world through the

agency of Non Governmental Organizations, ‗museumization‘ of ethnic

cultures, environmental conservation, destruction of biodiversity and the

justification of violent resistance as the last resort of a desperate people, issues

that have in recent years grown into ‗sites‘ of urgent literary and socio-cultural

concern and debate.

It is befitting and supportive of the above premise to quote at length

Spivak‘s insightful observation on the novel:

When, in the conversation at the head of this book, Mahasweta

proposes subaltern solidarity as resistance to globalization, I am

not ready to situate the remark as benevolent Luddism. World

trade and the trade-related measures of ‗development‘ are

altogether dependent upon detail, and much of this detail is still

located in large aboriginal, subaltern, and sub- proletarian areas.

More than the visible disruption of large-scale international

meetings, as in Seattle (30 November – 3 December, 1999),

Naples (March 15- 17. 2001), Genoa (20 - 21 July 2001) or indeed

the material destruction of the temple of world Trade (September

11, 2001), subaltern disruption in detail can throw the global

machinery of world trade out of joint. I am not suggesting that

Chotti Munda is predicting this in 1980. I am suggesting that the

novel can prefigure this for the canny activist reader. (Chotti 367)

253

Paradoxically, Devi does not encourage armed struggle in the arena of tribal

self-development and constitutional rights. Her creative writings are oriented to

this purpose of self-empowerment through constitutional rights. Very recently ,

to be exact: October 5, 2009, Devi was accused of supporting the tribal leader

and rebel Mahato Chhatradhar2

who was arrested by the C.B.I. and her response

to the charge is in order here:

‗I am not supporting him alone. We will bring out a big rally in

Kolkata. We will fix the date and time,‘ . . .

She said she had met Mahato on a number of occasions and

"during these meetings, I used to advise him to campaign against

Special Economic Zones or to demand ration cards for the poor".

"But I am always against the politics of bloodshed and never

asked him to do such politics," (emphasis added). (Devi,

―Intellectuals to Rally‖ 1 of 1).

Landry has noted: ―She is so involved in the immense labour of making

known and helping implement the sanctions for the tribals and outcastes written

into the constitution of 1947-1949, that the fine tuning of her writing is

beginning to suffer‖ (162-63). But Devi scholars beg to differ for she is a

natural story teller, eventhough her mission of social critique and historicization

may seem to interrupt the flow of her narrative. And Spivak feels that ―the sheer

quantity of Mahasweta‘s production, her preoccupation with the gendered

subaltern subject, and the range of her experimental prose – moving from the

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tribal to the Sanskritic register by way of easy obscenity and political analysis –

will not permit her to be an isolated voice‖ (Outside 77).

5.4. A Symbiotic Exchange

Spivak is discerningly conscious of the political risks involved in

translating Devi‘s fiction for a largely Western trained readership. One of the

dangers inherent in Spivak‘s translations is that the narratives could be taken out

of context to represent ―a tragic stereotype of postcolonial victimhood‖ (Morton

133). By employing the critical tools of deconstruction, Spivak judiciously

resists the temptation to represent the fictional but ‗typical‘ subaltern characters

in Devi‘s writings as transparent objects of knowledge for the Western scholar.

Instead, as Morton notes:

Spivak traces the linguistic and rhetorical nuances in Devi‘s texts

where tribal, subaltern women characters like Jashoda, Draupadi

or Douloti articulate an embodied knowledge that cannot be

accounted for in the dominant terms of western knowledge and

representation. (133-134)

In this context of a symbiotic interface between translator/reader and

original author, it is rewarding to note the parallel between the pairs Cixous -

Lispector and Spivak - Devi, the elite translator/reader – subaltern writer

combination. Arrojo has insightfully noted that,

As she (Lispector) has been given prominence in Cixous‘s

writings and seminars, Lispector has began to share a very select

world, together with Kafka, Rilke, Rimbaud, Joyce, Heidegger,

Derrida and even Freud, among other writers that she has,

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nevertheless, ‗surpassed‘ since she had the advantage of writing

‗as a woman‘ and has presented Cixous with an exemplary

illustration of a feminine approach in her dealings with difference.

In a recent interview, Cixous even compares Lispector‘s use of

‗Braziliam‘ (Portuguese) to Shakespeare‘s use of English. (147 –

148)

Even so by mentioning the name of Devi in the same breath with Derrida,

Marx, Freud, and Melanie Klein, as for example when Spivak says that ―the

same habit of mind - a vision of impossible justice through attention to

specificity, may draw a reader to Marx, to Mahasweta and to Derrida in

different ways‖ (Imaginary 200), she has by the power of her voice transposed

Devi from the margin of literary subalternity to the centre sphere of ‗high‘

literature alongside prominent international intellectuals. Once again the

similarity is too apparent when Arrojo says:

As in her ‗therapeutical‘ encounter with Lispector‘s work, Cixous

invests the Brazilian writer with the authority and prestige of ‗the

subject presumed to know‘, of the one whose writing harbours all

the answers and all the insights that could validate the defence of a

feminine way of spending. (152)

In the case of Spivak, she finds Devi‘s writing furnishing novel insights and

answers to her Marxist feminist inquiries into a feminist subaltern discourse. In

short both Cixous and Spivak have turned their selected authors into emblems

of the care with which one is supposed to handle difference while in fact they

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have been violently absorbed by the elite feminists‘ challenging readings and

translations.

If it was chance that made Spivak translate Derrida, it was a deliberate

choice that prompted her to translate Devi, and she has explicitly stated, she was

on the look out for poco women writers cognizant of the aporias or ethico-

historical dilemmas in women‘s decolonization (Imaginary xxiv). And if

translating Derrida had fundamentally changed the course of her career,

translating Devi, it can be argued, had radically changed the course of her

purpose in life as a teacher and writer. This change is witnessed in her switching

of interest from the discipline of English literature to Comparative Literary

studies, and from Comparative to Cultural and Area Studies, and to concerns

embracing a vast terrain of interdisciplinarity and globality in her intellectual

pursuits.

Spivak finds the documentation in both Devi‘s journalistic and creative

writings a very interesting research novelty, and wants to make Devi accessible

to the non-Indians. As one of the well established and very important culture

critics of her generation, she has stated her purpose in her translator‘s preface to

Imaginary Maps.

...but then Mahasweta must not be commodified as a ―rational,

cultural, artefact, only accessible to ‗Indians‘, a seamless national

identity after all, when her entire effort focuses on what has been

left out of such a definition; for that feeds that transnational US

multiculturalist hunger on both ‗right‘ and ‗left‘. Add to this the

fact that cultural studies in the US today is also fed by the migrant

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academics‘ desired to museumize a culture left behind, gaining

thus an alibi for the profound Eurocentricism of academic

migrancy. (Imaginary xvii-viii)

A noticeable fact is that like Toni Morrison, Ngugi Wa Thiong‘O, Jean

Rhys and other renowned fiction writers Mahasweta Devi was not a writer well

versed in contemporary literary theory, yet like their works Devi‘s stories have

been plausible springs of ‗high‘ theory. Hence it has been observed that

Spivak‘s translation of Devi‘s fiction is not merely into English, but also into

the established discursive game of First World academy. All the same, ―the

relocation of Mahasweta‘s oral, tribal stories into the overwhelmingly scribal

world of the international academia‖, as Salgado with other postcolonial critics

fears, ―raises issues that are fundamental to one‘s understanding of the way in

which the Third World in general and India in particular come to be

constructed globally‖ (132). Devi‘s texts are thus not only of substantial interest

to migrant scholars but may be a critique of their academic practice referring to

―the complicity or strong connection between the bourgeoisie of the Third

World and migrants in the First World – the traffic-line in cultural studies‖

(Imaginary 201).

Lefevere is of the opinion that people like him,

. . . scholars of literature, should translate where they can and what

they can, and if they can and not leave the work to others, since

they are, at least in theory, most aware of the constraints under

which all translations take place, has to take place... Since they

are aware of constraints such as epistemological constructs,

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poetics, taste and the like, they not only know that there is no one

definite and specific way to overcome them, but also that they

need not be overcome, but worked with. It would seem to me..,

that the production of translations by people in the know, would

be of much more value than the production of yet another

interpretation of some work of literature nobody has ever heard of

outside its own system. (137)

Today, Devi is not just known to the non-Indian reader, she is of

substantial interest to migrant scholars and elite research scholars and is even

included in anthologies and in the syllabi of the universities in the metropoles.

Her international fame is such today that, besides English, she has been

translated into other European and non- European languages (French, Italian

and Japanese) and ―for their model, they turn to Spivak‘s translations‖ (Kishore

Int.) Naveen Kishore, her publisher who has undertaken to bring out the English

translations of the selected works of Mahasweta Devi, and has published all the

translations by Spivak, on being asked the nature of interface between

Mahasweta and Spivak had no hesitation in conceding that it was a symbiotic

one, mutually beneficial in every sense intellectual, literary and even material.

Indeed enhancing to their literary careers and literary impact.

Jharna Sonyal, an academician, writer/translator and a Professor of

English teaching in the University of Calcutta, locally known as a ‗Mahasweta

expert‘, says that there is no doubt that the interface between Spivak and Devi

has been a mutually enhancing one, and laments that there are other equally

good woman writers as Devi in West Bengal but they are not known outside the

259

state because they did not have a Spivak to translate them. She concedes that

Spivak‗s translations are good but is nostalgic for that local Bengali flavour that

she finds missing (Personal conversation).

As the biblical text goes ― No prophet is accepted in his own country‖,

much less if it is a ‗prophetess‘, Spivak, as mentioned earlier, is not accepted as

a good or reliable translator of Devi by most Bengalis. Many an Anglophone

Bengali intellectual has taken issue with Spivak‘s esoteric translations of Devi‘s

fiction and accused her of commodifying Devi for a mostly elite Western

readership hungry for Third World ethnic ware. In fact, even Spivak‘s publisher

Kishore has insinuated the market-interest in her politics of translation, making

a special allusion to the title of her most famous translation-collection of Devi‘s

stories, the Breast Stories. The same premise is shared by Subhendu Sarkar, the

other bilingual Mahasweta scholar interviewed, who has carried out a

meticulous comparative study of the translations of Devi‘s stories by three of

her famous translators – Gayatri Spivak, Samik Bandyopadhayay and Ipsita

Chanda against the stories in the original. Picking out discrepancies from the

Spivak collections; Breast Stories, Imaginary Maps and Old women, Sarkar

infers that Spivak is a careless and not so faithful a translator of Devi and she

shares the reputation with Ipsitha Chanda. In his opinion, of the three

translator‘s, Bandyopadhyay is the best and he has done justice to Devi‘s

stories. At the same time Bandyopadhyay, in his editorial introduction to the

collection Bashai Tudu, has assured the reader of Spivak‘s fidelity to the

original in her translation of ―Draupadi‖, the other story in the collection, except

for very few corrections. Hence it can be seen that Spivak‘s translations and

260

readings of Devi‘s fiction has attracted mixed response and as Marcus has

shrewdly observed: ―If Spivak‘s treatment of these texts was yet another

strategy for challenge and response, then she has succeeded. Good criticism

generates discussion. It does not close of discussion‖ (27).

―The instructive strength of that embrace‖ in the course of translating

and reading, has seen Spivak progress from her engagements with literature

(teaching and writing) to literary activism (teaching and translating with ethical

responsibility) to political/social activism (teaching the teacher trainees at the

grass roots level in aboriginal West Bengal, Bangladesh and China). Spivak‘s

‗quasi-existentialist intellectual angst‘ – ‗the persistent anxiety‘ and ‗the kindred

urge‘ that she shares with Devi has enabled her to convert them into formidable

theories of translation, philosophy and culture. But theories may come and

theories may go, but the text goes on forever. Naturally through the elite critical

commentaries attached to her translations of Devi‘s stories Spivak‘s literary

immortality is ensured even as the after life of Devi‘s fiction is assured through

Spivak‘s translations.

5.5. Something to Look Forward to

The tasks of the translator and the critic are united in Spivak‘s endeavour

to read against the author‘s interpretation of her work in the cause of resisting

the homogenization of Third World literature by women. Spivak‘s translations

of Devi‘s texts represent enlightening reading for students and scholars of

postcolonial literatures and postcolonial studies in the elite institutions

throughout the world, thanks to globalization of literature. Being initiated into

reading Devi‘s powerful yet highly poignant tales of man‘s cruelty to man, the

261

reader is beckoned to Devi‘s other works, even to those translated by other

bilingual translators so as to judge by difference and to know by difference.

Spivak‘s radical engagements with Devi‘s stories have no doubt roused

the interest of those in the elite institutions of literary and cultural studies who

are after intellectual adventure and academic novelties. In the event, to grasp

the theorization of Devi‘s tales by Spivak, they need to be quite familiar with

her Marxist, Feminist, psychoanalytical and neo-colonial theories and have to

keep track of her ever receding intellectual progress, because, as already cited,

Spivak says: ―I find that I am still learning and unlearning so much so that the

earlier things that I‘ve written become impenetrable to me in new ways…

(Ingram 75). So prone to self-revision and self-correction, Spivak keeps

churning out her astonishing observations and interpretations which will inspire

the radical readers in the universities to gleam (from Devi‘s fiction) new

meaning that are more appropriate for the times.

Devi, too, in spite of her old age and physical frailties, is till an avid

writer and a tireless and vehement political activist, in the forefront of tribal

protests. For her, it is an ongoing process. Although her political activism

leaves her little time for writing, she finds time everyday to write pages and

pages in her steady handwriting, putting on record, both in interventionist

journal articles and in creative writing, the saga of the tribal's fight for

citizenship, dignity, and livelihood.

Both Devi and Spivak are as creative as ever. Spivak had ended her

translators foreword to Chotti Munda with the desire to translate more of Devi‘s

work, especially those that tell of exceptional women fighters/ warriors and

262

Devi has not yet written her promised novel on the story of Laro Junko, the

fantastic tribal activist and leader currently based in Jharkand. So, with Devi

and Spivak, there is always something to look forward to.

Notes

1 ‘Strategic essentialism‘- a term coined by Spivak for the ―strategic

use of a positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest‖

(Outside 3). She has now dissociated herself from it. She first used it when she

thought that the ―Subaltern Studies‖ group of theorists were essentialist about

consciousness and she did not want to be too critical in the colloquial sense and

so she coined the term, which in itself was a strategy.

2 Mahato Chhatradhar: A tribal leader, Mahato was arrested on

September 26 by a CID team which posed as journalists to get close to him.

Newspapers reported that the West Bengal government‘s veiled warning to

supporters of tribal leader Chhatradhar Mahato had evoked strong reactions

from a section of intellectuals here with noted writer Mahasweta Devi saying a

big rally would be held in the city in his support.

263

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