Colonial Images, Neo-colonial Realities: Unpacking the Construct of the Tribal Woman in Mahasweta Devi’s Outcast

Abstract

The critical perception that colonial structures of thought and its various intellectual disciplines were, far from being transparent, strongly entrenched in questions of power, ideology and utilitarian governance is, by no means, new. However, recent postcolonial discourse has argued that colonial scholarship as an apparatus of surveillance was no independent body of knowledge enforced on the natives but an epistemology intimately related to and built upon hierarchical local knowledges of the colony. In its consciousness of the complex processes by which dominant local knowledges such as religious, particularly Brahmanical scholarship combined with so-called scientific colonial disciplines to produce official versions of the colony’s native population and its cultures, this paper seeks to undertake a reading of the colonial construction of the tribal woman in India, the perpetuity of that image in post-colonial times, and Mahasweta Devi’s literary attempt at unpacking it in her four short stories in Outcast. Doubly marginalized by virtue of her race and gender, the tribal woman, this paper argues, is a figure whose cultural representation has remained static till of late. A historical construct that strongly contests her lived identity as an individual, the image of the tribal woman transmitted through pre-colonial and colonial times must be deconstructed in order to arrive at a socio-political understanding of her victimization and subalternation – a project which Outcast determinedly takes up.