Woman and the Narratives of Resistance: Introspecting the Re-creation of Draupadi through Dasgupta

Abstract

The ‘politics of silence’ around the body of women has always been an issue addressed with complexly designed patriarchal structures of negotiation. The concept of women when interrogated with an intersectional lens can be found as a pattern created through the process of a forceful ‘bhava’ (emotion or feelings), that they are meant to perform based on the culture and social structures. The interconnected yet distinguished lines of definition between femininity, feminine, feminism and feminist often provides an echoing vacuum of voice(s) that generates many questions to the inclusive structure of ‘what constitutes a woman’. The primordial view to the presentation of a woman in India draws the burden of endurance, love, self-sacrifice, servitude, silence and reproduction. These roles frame the identity of what a woman should be and the Sati women are generally held as the symbols and markers of such qualities. The cultural diplomacy of India has always re-structured the organization of women in relation to the mainstream male narration(s) in the form of ‘his-story’, making the story of ‘her’ absent and such absence as Simone De Beauvoir regards in her work The Second Sex is the creation of why males are left unmarked and women are marked. Henceforth, this paper shall attempt to re-situate Draupadi (a Sati character from Ancient India) within the political constructs of the definition of women by deconstructing the popular notions of what a woman should be, following post-structuralist feminist theory and an empirical and theoretical methodology