The Significance of a Feminist Geopolitical Analysis in Mahasweta Devi’s The Hunt and Douloti the Bountiful

Abstract

In the inspiration of bringing alternatives to Critical Geopolitics and Subaltern Geopolitics, Feminist Geopolitics has been employed in this paper. Feminist geopolitics traverses upon the discriminated, marginalized community’s lives and events as well as it connects their exploitation with power production. This feminist geopolitics’ analytical approach demonstrates connections of geopolitics power production with everyday life of Indian tribal people. While reading Indian Tribal community as a subaltern in the works of Mahasweta Devi, through feminist geopolitics we have analyzed violence, displacement, and resistance of tribal women. In geographical imaginaries, the land of tribal protects and strengthens women; simultaneously the tribal land displaces and destroys. The article investigates two questions, 1. What is the role of land in the lives of tribal women? 2. What is the need of mother land for tribal women? It also focuses on two women, whom the dominant geopolitics had marginalized once, but then, the research gap states, how one (woman) could survive through epitomic influence on geography and another could not survive due to displacement. Moreover, the gap insists on how the power relation operates inside and outside the tribal border as well as the interest, knowledge and power of elite’s invades the tribal community after the independence. The qualitative method (textual analysis) is used for research analysis, and Arya (2020) defines that “textual analysis is a type of qualitative analysis that focuses on the underlying ideological and cultural assumptions of a text” (Arya, 2020, p. 173). Hence, this method utilizes the theoretical approaches of the feminist geopolitics theory for the study of the two short stories of Mahasweta Devi. In this article, Imaginary Maps (1995) a collection of short stories by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from which The Hunt (1995) and Douloti the Bountiful (1995) (two stories) have been analyzed for discussion.