Feminine Sensibility in The Selected Works of Kamala Markenday And Mahashweta Devi

Shweta Jha

- Feminine sensibility, inner topography, mystifying life, male dominance, post colonial, tribal

The present paper is an attempt to throw light on feminine sensibility in the select works of Kamala Markandaya and Mahasweta Devi. kamala Markandaya and Mahasweta Devi both won name and fame all over the world as a novelist in Indo- Anglian literature. They are novelist with an extraordinary vision of life. Their Sense of involvement in social life of India their keen observation combined the feminine sensibility brought fame all over the world as writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, they have projected the inner topography of their female characters. The portray the exciting and mystifying life situations of women characters in their works. Both Kamala Markandaya and Mahasweta Devi have raised the voices of women against male dominance in their literary works. MahaSweta Devi produced over one hundred novels and over twenty collections of short stories. All are written in Bengali. Some of her works have been translated Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a post-colonial scholar and other translators. I have selected Maha Sweta Devi's "Draupadi" Which appeared in English translation as Agni Garbha (womb of mother) and Kamala Markandaya's major novels," Nectar in a Sieve"," A Hand Ful of Rice" & "Possession" As we find that many of Mahasweta Devi's stories are based on focusing tribal fighting and resisting exploitation Here an attempt will be made to explore into Mahasweta Devi's venture of rewriting an episode from the great epic "Mahabharata" as a feminist response to the myth of Draupadi. She reinvents a cultural history and shows how this deconstructs the representation of women in cultures, images, stereotypes and archetypes. Significantly enough, the politics of interpretation has most often been the politics of gender.in this story, Draupadi is a tribal revolutionary for whom her sexuality becomes the means of a harsh indictment of an exploitative social system. After being gang raped in custody, she quickly turns the terrible wounds of her breast into a counter offensive. Mahasweta Devi has chosen her from the plethora of renewed images of mythic women whom she recreates. After undergoing the third degree in violence, she musters up courage to speak if not for herself at least for her comrades. A subaltern like the tribal, Draupadi spears out and reclaims a cultural identity that re-inscribes her oppressed position in the patriarchal society. Even after being gang raped in custody, her indomitable spirit remains intact. It seems as if a phoenix like Draupadi dies in the rape and a new figure comes out of the Ashes.

Volume 13 Issue 11, November-2025

Pages : b781-b784