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Chapter 4

First World - Third World Interface

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Contents

4.1. Introduction 177

4.2. Three Worlds Theory 178

4.3. Postcolonial Condition 180

4.4. Subaltern Discourse 183

4.5. Western Academia and Third World Writers 189

4.5.1. Impact of Third World Writers on Elite Theory 192

4.5.2. Centre in Search of the Margin in Devi‘s Fiction 194

4.6. Translation – ‗Site‘ of Cross-Cultural Interface 200

4.6.1. Spivak – A First World Translator? 201

4.6.2. Mutuality of Interface 204

4.7. First World Feminism and Third World Women 206

4.7.1. Spivak, Devi and Third World Women 208

4.7.2. Western Feminist Thematics 212

4.8. Implications of Globalization 216

4.9. Conclusion 220

Notes 222

Works Cited 225

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4.1. Introduction

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Homi K.Bhabha has expressed a

concern about the political ramifications of a general movement of translations

from Third World languages into English (Bose 258), in order to cater to ‗the

ravenous hunger‘ in the First World for Third World texts in English translation

(Breast Stories 95) which has led to a hike in the number of migrant or ‗native‘

elite ―peddlers of Third World literature in the Western academia‖, to quote

Aijaz Ahmed (Bose 257). In the words of Ahmad, a significant component of

Third World literature consists of ―literary utterances, printed or not, in the

indigenous languages which are not translated into the metropolitan ones. These

do not belong to any unified archive; many, in fact, have no archival existence

at all‖ (80). Ahmad has in mind ―genres which are essentially oral and

performative, sites of production located at great remove from the great cities,

entire linguistic complexes as yet unassimilated into grids of print and

translation‖ (81). It is such as these ―other kinds of cultural productivities - not

archival, but local and tentative, generated by histories more older, more local,

more persistent, more variegated and prolix, more complex and viscerally felt,

with its own systems of genres - than those produced by colonialism‖ (80), that

Devi and in turn Spivak has translated into the grids of print and translation,

enabling its entry into mainstream ―World literature‖. At the same time it is

good to bear in mind that Spivak considers it catachrestic to include Devi‘s

fiction in the Third World category, because she says: ―it should be mentioned

that Mahasweta Devi‘s work is by no means representative of contemporary

Bengali (or Indian) fiction and therefore cannot serve as an example of

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Jamesonian ―Third World Literature‖ (Critique 141n). But ―. . . people like me

(Spivak), from the post war generation, think of the third world as a very

specific collection of self-styled non- aligned people who had some solidarity

and therefore could make statements in a divided world (Other Asias 264).

Hence Spivak‘s praxis of translation and reading of Devi‘s works can justly be

subjected to a theoretical discussion under the rubric of the present study.

4.2. Three Worlds Theory

Alfred Sauvy is the self-declared originator of the term ―Third World‖

in1952, modelled on the concept of the French ‗Third Estate‘1

(Ahmad 294).

Citing from Jameson‘s essay, ―Third World Literature in the Era of

Multinational Capital‖, Ahmed draws upon his plea ―that the teaching of

literature in the US academy be informed by a sense not only of ‗Western‘

literature but of ‗world literature‘‖ (95) so that the so called literary canons be

based not upon dominant Eurocentric taste alone but also upon an ‗other-

centred‘ and opulent sense of heterogeneity. Jameson defines the so called,

Third World in terms of its experience of colonialism and imperialism and

hence in his ‗Three Worlds Theory‘ (99), the globe has been divided into the

capitalist first world, the socialist block of the second world; and the countries

that have suffered colonialism and imperialism - the third. In the course of his

study, Ahmad finds Jameson (re)invoking Hegel‘s famous description of the

master-slave relation to encapsulate the First World - Third World opposition

(100).

Ahmad, scanning the Indian panorama with its current socio political

and economic trends, concludes that the binary opposition which Jameson

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constructs between a capitalist First World and a presumably pre- or non-

capitalist or transitional Third World is empirically unfounded (101). In the

interview with Yan Hairong in Spivak‘s In Other Asias, it has been noted:

The formation of the Third World then in the 1960‘s presumed

two things: the first condition was that we had two opposing

camps, the socialist camp and the capitalist camp, and the space

this opposition created for the third world; and second was the

strong sense of sovereignty, right after national struggles. And

today, these two conditions are not there anymore. Yet there are

intellectuals today still interested in reviving and invoking it and

keep using the word ‗third world‘. (246)

The definition of the ‗three worlds‘ was thoroughly revamped by the

Maoists2. For them the First World comprised of the US and the USSR, the two

equally dangerous imperial powers; the Second World was composed of other

industrialized countries, and the third was composed of the predominantly

agricultural and poor countries. It was the Chinese version of the Three World

Theory which had the widest global currency (306). According to Spivak, the

Third World was an economic label that had to do with the reparceling out of

the world after the Second World War, after the long first face of industrial-

capitalist imperialism (Reader 26), and adds ―Third World Peoples in the First

World Claiming that title has to be treated with some caution. Perhaps even

because, in the very locus of their struggle, they have an interest in dominant

global capitalism‖ (27). Today there is the new world order – ―the North - South

divide‖3 and as Mohanty points out:

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Certainly, there are problems with the term ―Third World.‖ It is

inadequate in comprehensibly characterizing the economic,

political, racial, and cultural differences within the borders of

Third-World nations. But in comparison with other similar

formulations like ―North/South‖ and ―advanced /underdeveloped

nations‖, ―Third World‖ retains a certain heuristic value and

explanatory specificity in relation to the inheritance of colonialism

and contemporary neocolonial economic and geopolitical

processes that the other formulations lack. (Mohanty, ―Women

Workers‖ 324)

So, though ―First World‖ and ―Third World‖ are problematic terms that have

lost its defining or explanatory power and are fast turning into politically

incorrect ones, as critical signifiers in postcolonialism, they are still being used

to draw attention to both the problems and concerns they undeniably raise, and

one finds Spivak, the incorrigible deconstructivist, bringing to crisis conceptual

categories such as ‗First World‘ and ‗Third World‘ by exposing their limits,

shortcomings and blind-spots in her prolific critical deliberations, particularly

on Devi‘s stories.

4.3. Postcolonial Condition

Dirlik, one of the insightful writers on the postcolonial discourse, begins

his enlightening and thought provoking essay, ―The Postcolonial Aura: Third

World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism‖, by quoting Ella Shohat‘s

question: ―When exactly... does the ―postcolonial‖ begin?‖ and gives a partially

facetious answer: ―When the third world intellectuals arrived in First World

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academy‖ (29). This answer is reminiscent of Spivak‘s comment: ―Anything

that‘s related to any kind of migrating skin color is suddenly called post-

colonial . . . In this country (US), it‘s distinguished from Afro-American, Native

American and so on, but it really just means new migrants. (―Setting‖ 167)

While intellectuals (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmed, Leela

Gandhi, etc.) who hail from one part of the Third World, India, have played a

conspicuously prominent role in its formulation and dissemination that, the

appeal of ―postcoloniality‖ would seem to cut across national, regional and even

political boundaries, which on the surface at least would seem to substantiate its

claims to globalism (Dirlik 29). In the last few decades it has opened up new

vistas for critical inquiry and addresses a range of issues such as:

(a) Nation, identity and hybridity

(b) Community and agency

(c) Diasporic representations: migration, exile, and multiculturalism

(d) Cultural /Area Studies, Gender in culture

(e) Internal colonization, Neo-colonization/Financialization of the globe

(f) Globalization

In the context of First World – Third World interface it is rewarding to

examine why the so-called postcolonial intellectuals, themselves seemed to

acquire an academic respectability they did not have before. Dirlik, pointing to

the ascendancy in the First World of intellectuals of Third World origin and to

the role they have played in the propagation of ―postcolonial‖ as a literary-

critical orientation, reveals why they and their intellectual concerns and

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orientations have been accorded the respectability that they enjoy in the First

world academy. He pertinently notes that,

. . . the themes that are now claimed for postcolonial criticism,

both in what they repudiate of the past and in what they affirm for

the present . . . resonate with concerns and orientations that have

their origins in a new world situation that has also become part of

consciousness globally over the last decade. I am referring here to

that world situation created by transformations . . . that ha(ve)

―disorganized‖ earlier conceptualizations of global relations,

especially relations comprehended earlier by such binarisms as

colonizer/colonized, First/Third Worlds, or the ―West and the

rest‖, in all of which . . . the nation-state as the unit of political

organization globally was taken for granted. (30)

Dirlik and other less famous yet significant poco4 critics have alleged that the

neo-colonial imbalances in the contemporary (new) world order have, in fact,

not been engaged with enough by most postcolonial critics who have dealt

mostly with the hangover from the colonial past much more than with the

difficulties of the postcolonial present. In this context it is worth noting that

among the holy trinity of postcolonial critics it is mostly Spivak‘s theories that

address directly these imbalances and her praxis is very much in accordance

with Loomba‘s suggestion:

If postcolonial studies are to survive in any meaningful way it

needs to absorb itself far more deeply with the contemporary

world, and with the local circumstances within which colonial

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institutions and ideas are being molded into the disparate cultural

and socio-economic practices which define our contemporary

‗globality‘. (256-57)

As for Spivak,

When some of us used the word ‗post- colonial‘ . . . we really

meant the beginning of economic colonialism, fully fledged. . . .

In a certain sense, this transnational stuff is a reconstellation of

Marx‘s object of study (capitalism and imperialism). In that

context, post-colonial was used by us as a name for the

inauguration of neo-colonialism in state context. Now it just

means behaving as if colonialism didn‘t exist. (―Setting‖ 167)

Spivak dismisses postcolonialism as outdated and says: ―I must say that this

word (postcolonial), like ‗subaltern‘, has really bitten the dust. I don‘t know

what to do with it any more. I still use it, just as I use the word subaltern‖

(―Setting‖ 167).

4.4. Subaltern Discourse

Under the impact of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak‘s

engagement with subaltern discourse highlights the plausible political

achievements of the collective in their radical attempt to recover the histories of

peasant rebellions and resistance before and after India‘s independence from the

British. Yet as a feminist she finds that their classic Marxist methodology elides

reading the histories of women‘s resistance in India, which she finds highlighted

in Devi‘s historical fiction.

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I like the word ‗Subaltern‘ for one reason. It is truly situational.

‗Subaltern‘ began as a description of a certain rank in the military.

The word was used under censorship by Gramsci: he called

Marxism ‗monism‘, and was obliged to call the proletarian

‗subaltern‘. The word, used under duress, has been transformed

into the description of everything that doesn‘t fall under strict

class analysis. I like that, because it has no theoretical rigor.

(Harasym 141)

Morton notes that for Spivak the term ‗subaltern‘ is useful because it is

flexible: it can accommodate social identities and struggles (such as women and

the colonized) that do not fall under the reductive terms of ‗strict‘ class-analysis

(45). With reference to Devi‘s work Spivak observes that,

Conventionally, this space (subaltern) is described as the habitat

of the subproletariat. Mahasweta‘s fiction focuses on it as the

space of the displacement of the colonization- decolonization

reversal. This is the space that can become, for her, a

representation of decolonization as such. (Outside 78)

In fact her fiction powerfully delineates the failure of decolonization and

highlights the paradigm shift to ‗internal colonization‘ and neo-colonization for

the subaltern. It is a fact that,

Over the last decade of the nineties Edward Said and Gayatri

Spivak have had a complicated and uncertain relationship with

post-colonial studies. Both, for different reasons, have come to

reject the post-colonial: Said from an aversion to any systematic

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theory (all of which he regards as ‗theological‘), and Spivak in

favour of what she regards as the more inclusive term subaltern.

(Ashcroft 198)

According to Ashcroft, Spivak incorporated all the original ideas behind

post-colonialism into the term subaltern. Spivak‘s overtly political commitment

to champion the cause of the ‗minority groups‘/the subaltern, or her political

aim to articulate the voice and political agency of oppressed subjects in the

Third World has provoked her theoretical mind to churn out arguments that

exhort the First World to pay heed to their agency with ethical responsibility.

And her arguments have been reinforced and substantiated quite convincingly

by her readings of women writers‘ fiction such as Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean

Rhys, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and the stories in Breast Stories and

Imaginary Maps by Mahasweta Devi.

In her famous essay, ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖, Spivak elucidates

Marx‘s double meaning of ‗representation‘5

and makes the provocative

assertion that there is no space from which the sexed subaltern can speak

(Morton 10). Spivak is particularly critical of contemporary theorizing of

Delueze and Foucault which, while bent on the deconstruction of the sovereign

subject, resurrects the same (essentialist construct) in political rhetoric that,

―when it comes to discussing real historical examples of social and political

struggle (they) fall back on a transparent model of representation in which

‗oppressed subjects speak, act and know for themselves‘‖ (Morton 57). The

subaltern, as Spivak insists, only ever ―speaks‖ via the intervention of another.

Like Delueze and Foucault, to deny otherwise, for her, is to deny both the

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structural effects of imperialism and the ethical responsibilities implicit in any

form of representation. The benevolent First world activist should, Spivak

asserts, instead of speaking ‗for‘ them should speak ‗to‘ them and unlike the

anthropologist who learns about them, should try to learn from them.

The ‗Subaltern Studies‘ group of intellectuals provided a new-

historiographical perspective; the employment of recent Western theory for

discussing non-Western positions. Devi‘s stories – translated by Spivak – if

placed in the arguments from Western ‗high‘ theory can show us some of their

limits and limitations as having implications for the current and continued

subalternization of ‗Third World‘ literature.

Spivak‘s ongoing discussions of disempowered subaltern women serve

to highlight the limitations of applying European theories of representation to

the lives and histories of disempowered women in the ‗Third World‘. Unless

Western intellectuals begin to take the aesthetic dimension of political

representation into account, Spivak argues that these intellectuals will continue

to silence the voice of subaltern women. McCleod attempts to enter the heart of

the matter when he says:

Their muteness is created by the fact that even when women

(subaltern) uttered words, they were still interpreted through

conceptual and methodological procedures which were unable to

understand their interventions with accuracy. It is not so much that

subaltern women did not speak, but rather that others did not

know how to listen, how to enter into a transaction between

speaker and listener. The subaltern cannot speak because their

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words cannot be properly interpreted. Hence, the silence of the

female as subaltern is the result of a failure of interpretation and

not a failure of articulation (195).

Spivak‘s critics have predicated their critiques of her assertion that ―the

subaltern cannot speak‖ on the level of the micropolitical where ―Linguistic

utterances by women obviously do occur in ‗everyday‘ life‖ (―Can Subaltern‖

308). But ―There is no virtue‖ she adds, ―in global laundry lists with ‗woman‘

as a pious item‖ (308). Spivak‘s comment is rather leveled at the structural

effects of the international division of labour, caste and class hierarchies in

which the voice of the subaltern woman can only be produced either as a literal

absence or in the shadows. As Devi‘s translator and reader,

… Part of the complexity of Spivak‘s position lies in their

insistence that the subaltern‘s voice can be no more than a

theoretical fiction and that any representation of such a voice can

only be heard through the necessary mediating role of the elite

intellectual, artist or political activist, with all its contradictory

potential for orientalization and reification. (Bose 251)

It is in order here to take a look at Arrojo‘s critique of Hélène Cixous‘s

reading of the ‗subaltern‘ Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector‘s works, wherein

Cixous, to her great delight, finds the right stuff for the explication of her own

feminist theories, in other words, ―Lispector‘s text is made to mean that which

Cixous sees in it‖ (Arrojo 152), Spivak, too, to a good extent is complicit in

such a manipulation with respect to her readings of Devi‘s fiction, and makes

them mean that which her theoretical mind sees in them. Even so Spivak reads

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into the gaps and indeterminacies of the author‘s own readings of her tales that,

borrowing Roland Barthes‘s theorization, one could say that Spivak‘s

productive reading not only involves ―the death of the author but turns her into a

ghostly guest that is rarely invited to the scene of interpretation‖ (qtd. Arrojo

154). Here one may read that the voice of the subaltern woman can only be

produced either as a literal absence, in the shadows or as the ―orientalized‖

ethnographic subject of a Western colonial discourse. However, even though

any act of reading necessarily implies appropriation and the double bind of

transference, what is peculiar about Spivak‘s readings of Devi, as in the case of

Cixous with Lispector, is the circumstances which have brought together an

influential, academically powerful reader and an author who had hardly been

read outside the limits of her marginal context and language (156).

Since both Devi and Spivak practice a Marxist-feminist politics of

writing, Bose wonders ―(i)f in one‘s appropriation or projection of the other, one

can find a furtherance of a universal cause. Or does one detect traces of a

ubiquitous First World – Third World power structure in which one ‗speaks for‘

the other?‖ (264). Spivak, as a subalternist, is of course aware of the problems

of representation, and is wary of the ―tokenism‖ that she is subjected to in the

First World academy as an accepted ―voice‖ of /from the Third World (264).

And so she cannot escape the same allegation in her reproduction of Devi for

‗other worlds‘ as that which she raises against the First World feminists in her

iconoclastic essay ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ that problematizes subaltern

silence.

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4.5. Western Academia and Third World Writers

Yet another significant factor begging attention is that, most postcolonial

writers, translators and critics who have achieved international repute, with

Spivak being a very good instance, are located at metropolitan centres,

particularly in the US and UK. A risk inherent in such a condition is that the

necessity of international patronage/readership will compromise the form,

content and perspective of the postcolonial works themselves and will determine

the parameters of what to be written/translated and what to be published. But

literary merit by Western standards is the only criteria for foreign language

audience acceptance. It has been observed that in the case of postcolonial

writers writing for an international audience, a marked trend towards the

internationalization of literature is noticed, and this is more marked in the case

of translations into English - the language of globalization. In the cultural and

economic hegemony of America, the modern Mecca of literary studies for

international intelligentsia, is implicit the suggestion that to succeed as writers

they must either write in English or be translated into English. Being marketed

into the US is also seen as an index of international success which in turn boosts

an author‘s reception back at home. This fact has been adduced by the case of

Devi who, though quite by chance is selected for being translated into English,

is pleasantly surprised, under the circumstances, at none other than Spivak‘s

initiative to translate her stories.

Spivak: I hope you will approve of the fact that I don‘t translate

for the Indian reader who doesn‘t read any Indian languages. I

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translate for the readership in the rest of the world. I would like

you to say something, if you would, for the international reader.

Mahasweta: Gayatri, you surprised me. I never expected that you

would translate my story, and I‘d become known to the non-

Indian reader. (―Telling‖ xix)

As Marcus points out, ―(Spivak‘s) mind 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‖ (23). In fact Spivak‘s work has been ―at the critical centre of the

proliferation of Third World Cultural studies in the West, and it would be an

exercise of self-defeat if the Third World in question attempted to resist this

burgeoning interest in their literature and culture (Bose 274) because their ―be-

littling befriending‖ (Imaginary xvii) has been an enabling violation that has

enabled the Third World to write back, translate back and even theorize back.

Said, Bhabha, and Spivak, the foremost exponents of postcolonial writers

from the Third World based in the US, are self- consciously concerned about

their privileged situation in the First World academy. Spivak herself, ―easily

given to attacks of quasi-existentialist intellectual angst, has not only been

vociferous in repeatedly expressing her awareness of, and discomfort with, her

(privileged) position, but has been able to convert this persistent anxiety into

formidable theories of translation (Bose 275). Spivak is highly conscious of the

precariousness of her position between two worlds, with each one of them

believing her to be, in turn, privileged as well as exploitative. Spivak‘s

intellectual insight, particularly her remarkable self-reflexivity, is exactly what

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makes her intellectualism formidable. In her ―Politics of Translation‖ she

blatantly asserts:

I cannot see why the publisher‘s convenience or classroom

convenience or time convenience for people who do not have the

time to learn should organize the construction of the rest of the

world for Western feminism… People would say, ‗you who have

succeeded should not pretend to be marginal‘. But surely by

demanding higher standards of translation, I am not marginalizing

myself or the language of the original? (187)

But, as Bose points out, ―it is because she has succeeded‘ that she can demand

anything . . . and ironically enough it is by ‗pretending to be marginal‘ . . . that

she has succeeded (277). She finds Spivak admitting almost as much:

In the old days, it was important: for a colonial or postcolonial

student of English to be as ‗indistinguishable‘ as possible from the

native speaker of English. I think it is necessary for people in the

Third World translation trade now to accept that the wheel has

come around, that the genuinely bilingual postcolonial now has a

bit of an advantage. But she doesn‘t have a real advantage as a

translator if she is not strictly bilingual, if she merely speaks her

native language. (―Politics‖ 187)

The high, inter-textual theoretical discourses that are churned out by the

radical scholars in the Western universities necessitates a good amount of

apprenticeship and orientation in order to meaningfully decode their

significance and so are often described by anti-theory activists and students as

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ivory tower theories that have no touch with the real world. But as Spivak notes

in her reading of ―Breast-Giver‖, ―a Foucauldian or, in this case, a

deconstructive position would oblige us to admit that ‗truths‘ are constructions

as well, and that we cannot avoid producing them‖ (83). Leistyna‘s view on the

need for theory in the ideologically embattled new world order is enlightening

in this context:

. . . Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested,

localized, conjectural knowledge, which have to be debated in a

dialogical way. But also as a practice which always thinks about

its intervention in a world in which it would make some

difference, in which it would have some effect. (1)

4.5.1. Impact of Third World Writers on Elite Theory

The growing significance of ―cultural studies‖ within global academia in

the past few decades is indication enough of the increasing significance and

contentious nature of the dimension of ―culture‖ in modern life and society. Ien

Ang has observed: ―For most people ‗culture‘ is extraordinary, set apart from

daily life. It is either synonymous to art, something elevated and lofty, or refers

to ‗other people‘ such as migrants or aborigines. In other words, culture is either

aesthetics or anthropology‖ (477). But, as she elaborates, ―Culture is integral to

and constitutive of social life, not something outside of or a mere addition to it‖,

and ―to speak with Raymond Williams, culture is not only very ordinary, it is

also fundamentally practical and pervasive to social life‖ (477). Which is to say,

culture is neither institutions nor texts, nor behaviours, but the complex

interactions between all of these. Under the circumstances, many a poco critic

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and writer, like Spivak, has turned more and more to Cultural Studies or its

American supplement ‗Area Studies‘6.

In general a sense of cultural crisis is evident everywhere around the

globe, as societies and lived experiences change within shifting social

landscapes, under the impact of various cultural phenomena such as the

deepening of cultural divisions along lines of class, caste, race, gender, region,

religion, money and power, as also the proliferations of all forms of violence

and exploitation, the unlimited growth of the Internet, the looming uncertainty

about the shape of the new world (dis)order in the new millennium as the

hegemony of the US is challenged by rising Third World/non-Western nations,

and so on. In short ―culture‖ has become a ‗warring‘ and multidimensional

―site‖ of discourse in todays globalized world (Leistyna 478).

Leistyna responsibly opines that, ‗Cultural Studies‘ requires grounding

theory in tangible life experiences and struggles for social justice around the

globe (2). Sharing the belief, Spivak deploys what she calls ‗interventionist

cultural studies‘ (―Can Subaltern‖ 305) to chart the constitution of the

ideological subject in a politico-economic context with special attention paid to

the Third World/Global South. Being a teacher in an academy, the form of

cultural study that Spivak promotes is that which takes seriously the connection

between the university and everyday life, one that understands that the projects

that drive Cultural Studies should be established in light of how the larger social

order affects people‘s lives, and not just inspired by the imperatives of

disciplinary professionalism (4), a premise consonant with Ien Ang‘s view in

support of University/public partnerships:

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I do firmly believe that the world needs cultural studies more than

ever. But if so, then we will have to find practical ways of

convincing others that the intricate knowledge and understanding

we are capable of producing have some relevance to them. (qtd.

Leistyna 5)

Devi‘s stories carry castigating critiques of Native ‗elite‘ scholars and

anthropologists whose interest in indigenous culture studies or ethnography is

only a hogwash professionalism lacking in ethical responsibility or genuine

benevolence. As Spivak notes,

The dominant radical reader in the Anglo-US reactively

homogenizes the third world and sees it only in the context of

nationalism and ethnicity. In the prestigious Indian institutions,

literary pedagogy is impacted by the so called radical teaching of

literary criticism and literature in the US and perhaps UK too.

(―Breast-Giver‖ 82)

4.5.2. Centre in Search of the Margin in Devi’s Fiction

Spivak finds in Devi‘s fiction characters who offer typical parallels to the

first world‘s (pre)conception of the third world and sees in the characters of

Senanayak in ―Draupadi‖, Puran in ―Pterodactyl‖, Upin in ―Behind the Bodice‖

and Amlesh Khurana in Chotti Munda, the prototype of the benevolent First

World scholar in search of the ‗native‘. The issues that Dingwaney raises, on the

violence perpetrated by the West while constituting the ‗third world‘ as an

object of its study, become all the more significant in the context of representing

the Fourth World or the indigenous peoples and their cultures.

195

The third section of Spivak‘s In Other Worlds is titled ―Entering the

Third World‖ and in the translator‘s foreword to Devi‘s, ―Draupadi‖, Spivak

theorizes,

I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the

sake of its villain, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi).

Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation to the First

World scholar in search of the Third World, I shall speak of him

first. . . . The approximation I notice relates to the author‘s careful

presentation of Senanayak as a pluralist aesthete. In theory,

Senanayak can identify with the enemy. But pluralist aesthetes of

the First World are willy-nilly, participants in the production of an

exploitative society. Hence in practice, Senanayak must destroy

the enemy, the menacing other. (1)

Spivak chooses to employ the figure of Senanayak to parallel that of the First-

World Scholar in search of the Third – and does indeed, present this paralleling

as a unique Derridean ―provisional starting point‖

7 for her deconstructive

analysis. For Spivak: ―The entire energy of the story seems, in one reading

directed toward breaking the clean gap between theory and practice in

Senanayak‖ (Other Worlds 185).

A reading of Devi‘s story will clearly reveal ―that the anxiety of

representation the writer herself explores is situated not at the First World –

Third World intersection, but at the point at which leftist intellectual meets the

tribal/subaltern worker‖ (Bose 270-71), wherein Devi interrogates this aporia in

her own activism and creative work. ―It is not that she can offer any alternative

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solution, but she does continuously suffer the guilt of a social worker who is

also a writer , and who feels, always ,the terror of the shadow that falls between

thought and action‖ (Bose 272). But what Spivak sees as the project of the story

is ―to break this bonded identify (Senanayak‘s) with the wedge of an

unreasonable fear‖ (Other Worlds 185). Here one may choose to differ, for it is

plain that the break between theory and practice in Senanayak is not caused by

an isolated ―wedge of unreasonable fear‖ in his head, as in the case of Arjan

Singh who was superstitiously afraid of Dulna and Dopdi‘s black bodies and

ululations and held them responsible for his diabetes, ―but is provided in the

living, breathing, bleeding body of a woman terrorist who creates fear but fears

nothing (Bose 273). By directing her analytic focus on Senanayak - the figure of

the First World scholar, Spivak forgets to factor in the force of Dopdi‘s struggle,

her subalternity and caste highlighted by her blackness, a serious omission in a

subalternist critic that it justifies Bose‘s charge: ―Spivak‘s feminism suffers at

the cost of justifying theoretical scholarship‖ (273).

Puran in ―Pterodactyl‖, another representative of the mainstream in

search of the subaltern, can be equated to the benevolent but misinformed

elite/western scholar / anthropologist in search of the Third/FourthWorld8.

Spivak has defined somewhere, ‗the anthropological is by definition not

learning to learn, but learning enough in order to transcode for another audience,

generally anthropologists‘. Puran the journalist, has a revelation at the end of

the story, after his soul-stirring, conscience-raising encounter with the

Pterodactyl and experience of assisting Bikhia in the funeral rites for the pre-

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historical bird, and addresses the absent friend for whom he has to prepare a

report on Pirtha and its tribal community:

Harisharan, Harisharan! We have not understood, because we

didn‘t want to and now it is evident that Bikhia‘s people are

finally much more than civilized, holder of the ancient

civilization, and so finally they did not learn our barbarism, there

is possibly no synonym for ‗exploitation‘ in their language. Our

responsibility was to protect them. That‘s what their eyes spoke.

(―Pterodactyl‖ 197)

Spivak finds it telling that Puran decides to prepare two separate reports;

one for his friend, the anthropologist, and a public one for the newspaper, and

―there is also a report not (to be) ‗sent‘ to the extent that it is available in the

literary space of the novella, that challenges each claim of the colonizing state

with a vignette from these hills‖ (Critique 143). Like in the case of the First

World benevolent anthropologist, due to the unavoidable impact of his

ideological and cultural training, Puran finds that there is no point of contact

with Bikhia, the tribal, their worlds run parallel and ‗never the twain shall meet‘.

Yet another example is Upin, the ace free-lance photo journalist/activist

in ―Behind the Bodice‖, who, in spite of his political correctness, brings disaster

to the ‗native‘ by his anchorless ‗consciousness-raising‘ without shouldering

any responsibility (Breast Stories xiii). Devi observes at the end of her story that

Upin could have known the consequences of his irresponsible benevolence:

―There is no non-issue behind the bodice, there is a rape of the people behind it,

Upin would have known if he had wanted to, could have known‖ (157). Spivak

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points out that there is no figure of violence in such cases to make the disaster

immediately visible. She finds in the story, the running commentary Shital

offers, on the etymology of the name Gangor, has rather little to do with the

name suggested. But it gives a vitriolic critique of the fact that ―the

documentation of ‗ethnic‘ India (is) in the hands of intellectuals who know no

Indian language?‖ (―Behind‖ 159).

Another allegorical representation of the mainstream elite migrant

intellectual in the first World academy is Dr. Amlesh Khurana in Chotti Munda.

He is designated to visit Chotti village and to assess what is necessary for its

economic development.

His days pass in flying from town to town, from university to

university, and from seminar to seminar on the globe. It is India

he hasn‘t seen. This is precisely why he is well known as an

Indianist expert in social economics. He believes in theory and

statistics, not in the reality of the situation.

. . . The Government of India always loves these statistics-based

paper theories, on the basis of which it is possible to construct a

completely unrealistic project – in the implementation of which

millions of rupees can be given to unsuitable persons – which are

never implemented or came to naught even if they are. Therefore

Amlesh has been brought to India with an incredibly large sum of

money. Here it is necessary to say that there is no evil intent

behind the theory – construction of an academician such as

Amelesh and the support given by the Government of India to

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such a theory. Behind both is present a desire to transform India

into something as beautiful as the gardens of the Lutyens model

Teen Murti House in New Delhi. (Chotti 285)

Amlesh says:

. . . And I want a few Munda villages, a few Oram villages, some

Villages with mixed Munda-Oraon population, some Dusad

villages, some Dhobi and Ganju villages, some Rajput villages

and some villages with mixed Rajput and Brahman population,

and some leper-majority villages.

. . . The helpless S.D.O makes him know: ‗I‘ve been here for three

years. I‘ve visited nearly every village because of the drought.

I‘ve never seen such villages. . . . I don‘t know what your work is.

But I can take you around actually existing villages. Amlesh says,

how can that be? My work is to survey the projected economic

necessity. . . . this is the work of surveying by scientific

methodology. The government will build projects on this basis

for the development of the area. . . . ‗You have actual experience.

But Shukul (who prepared the report) is a theoretical-academician.

This report is much more reliable. Because it‘s made by a

scientific method‘‖ (289).

In the S.D.O. who is amused to see the intellectually arrogant project

theorist, who will cast aside reality and solve national problems on the basis of

theory can be seen Devi, the bitter critic of the National Government and its lop

sided policies. Through the mouth of the Magistrate, too, Devi expresses her

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contempt for the likes of Amlesh: ―…but the government depends on theorists,

and modern education prepares the theorists by removing them from the

country‖ (290).The case of Amlesh is an echo of Spivak‘s critique of First World

or Western trained feminist scholars.

When we speak for ourselves [as academic feminists] we urge

with conviction: the personal is political. For the rest of the

world‘s women, the sense of whose personal micrology is difficult

[though not impossible] for us to acquire, we fall back on a

colonialist theory of the most efficient information retrieval. We

will not be able to speak to the women out there if we depend

completely on conferences and anthologies by Western trained

informants. (Draupadi 382)

4.6. Translation – ‘Site’ of Cross - Cultural Interface

In the globalized/glocalized9 world culture of today, it is a fact that most

people inhabit ―translated‖ worlds, and can even be called ―translated beings‖ in

Rushdie‘s

or any other sense that explicates the impact of contact with

heterogeneous cultures. However, in the Indian ―postcolonial‖ context there

arises the need to confront the threat of linguistic/cultural hegemony in

translation praxis. The evolving importance of and demand for translations into

English and the increase in the number of migrant/native elite scholars engaged

in the enterprise, puts one in mind of Sanders‘s view that one can discern a

context of multiculturalism in the metropoles in which the migrant plays the

role of national-cultural broker (9).

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―Translation, Colonialism and the Rise of English‖, Niranjana‘s well

known treatise on colonialism and translation, foregrounds the argument that

―Translation produces strategies of containment‖, and ―in creating coherent and

transparent texts and subjects, translation participates – across a range of

discourses – in the fixing of colonized cultures...‖ (125). She has in mind the

translation that was part of the colonial enterprise and the translators who were

‗orientalists‘ in the Saidian

sense, inevitably paving the way for a

―homogenized‖ culture (Bose 233).

In the introduction to a collection of essays on cross-cultural translation

that she has edited, Dingwaney writes. ―The process of translation involved in

making another culture comprehensible entails varying degrees of violence,

especially when the culture being translated is constituted as that of the ‗other‘‖

(4). To support her view Dingwaney quotes Talal Asad who locates this

violence in a specific exercise of power . . . the power of the west as it seeks to

constitute the ―third world‖ as an object of study (4).

4.6.1. Spivak- A First World Translator?

It is through the exercise of a similar power in her praxis that Spivak‘s

translations of Devi have achieved much popularity in the West. In such

undertakings, a somewhat different, albeit related, exercise of (Western) power

has to do with, not how non-Western cultures get translated but rather with

what and who gets translated. That means ―(it) has to do with certain voices,

certain views, certain texts – by publishing industry… and by reviewers and

critics – that are then constituted as a putative ―canon‖ of ―Third World‖ texts

and/or authors (Dingwaney 4-5). In the matter of Spivak‘s translation of Devi,

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. . . There can be no discounting the fact that it is the power of

such a cultural violence that determines the reception that the

original text is accorded by the world at large. ―Who- international

academy – reads what - Devi – is directed by the power of a well

known First World scholar – Spivak – who thus, without

intervention, has constituted a putative canon of Third World

literature for other worlds far more powerful than ours. (Bose

274)

Translation, taking place in the contact zone, a place where previously

separated cultures come together, traditionally a place where cultures met on

unequal terms, is now a space that is redefining itself , a space of multiplicity,

exchange, renegotiation and discontinuities. Spivak, highlighting her First

World status and Devi‘s Third World condition, self-reflexively comments on

her particular translation of Imaginary Maps: ―Here in can be seen the drama of

colony and colonizer or the author and cultural establishment being played out

for arbitration on an American stage, the contact zone (Imaginary xi). Spivak‘s

praxis as a translator of subaltern literature can be well defined by borrowing

the words of Tymoczko. ―By defamiliarizing the language of the receptor text

(translation) the translator can bring the readers face to face with the reality of

difference and challenge the supremacy of the standard language‖ (14). Indeed,

it is a much critiqued but generally acknowledged fact that:

Spivak‘s stark and defamiliarizing translations of Devi‘s stories

carry an extraordinarily powerful charge, bringing the work of the

Bengali writer, Mahasweta Devi, through the authority of

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Spivak‘s name and her erotics of translation, into the ongoing

conversations of and on translational culture. Here contrary to

usual practice, the name of the translator carries significant

weight. This creates a privileged channel through which this

foreign work makes its way towards ready readers. (Bose 275-

276)

All the same Spivak is cautious not to repeat the very tendencies that she

critiques in First World readers and translators and her caveat is,

The translator has to make herself, in the case of third world

women‘s writing, almost better equipped than the translator who

is dealing with the Western European languages, because of the

fact that there is so much of the old colonial attitude, slightly

misplaced, at work in the translation racket. (―Politics‖189)

At the very outset of her preface to Imaginary Maps, Spivak makes it

clear: ―This book is going to be published in both India and the United States.

As such it faces in two directions, encounters two readerships with a strong

exchange in various enclaves‖ (Imaginary xvii). Though not professedly

intended for simultaneous publications in the First and Third Worlds, the other

stories translated and compiled by Spivak, and published by Seagull Books,

Calcutta, is all the same Janus faced and she believes her mission to be one of

consciousness- raising :

I am convinced that the multiculturalist US reader can at least be

made to see this difference (US is US, India is India) at work, and

it is the expatriate critic who can make the effort. I also remain

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convinced that the urban radical academic Indian reader can be

made to question his or her complicity with keeping the US as

demonized other while reaping or attempting to reap the benefits

of its ‗be-littling befriending‘. (Imaginary xvii)

Spivak has always stressed the double bind in which she, as a migrant

intellectual who has made it good in the US academy, finds herself in. She does

not consider America or the West as always ‗the exploiter‘ and the East or Third

World as always ‗the victim‘, as some enthusiastic ‗postcolonials‘ make them

out to be. Even while championing the rights of marginalized people of the

global South or the Third world, she wants to be considered as an American

writer and teacher with a commitment to read the world and teach the scholars

in privileged academies to read the world with ethical responsibility.

4.6.2. Mutuality of Interface

In the translator‘s preface to Imaginary Maps, Spivak welcomes Surjit

Mukhurjee‘s description of her as a dwarpalika (female door-keeper) of Devi in

the West and wishes to perform the doorkeeper‘s obligation by commenting

briefly on any misapprehensions (e.g. Sara Suleri‘s diagnosis of ‗Pterodactyl‘ as

a case of exoticization or a migrant academic‘s dismissal of the story ―Douloti‖

as an exercise by a pessimistic and jaded post-colonial middle class), which are

part of the risk taken by work such as Devi‘s (xxi). The uncritical enthusiasm in

the radical fringe of the humanistic Northern (First World) pedagogy for the

Third world makes a demand upon the inhabitant of that Third World to speak

up as an authentic ethnic fully representative of his or her tradition (Breast

Stories xvii). Well aware of her ethical responsibility, Spivak bases her theory

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of translation on it and exhorts the translator of Third World literatures to be not

only a genuine bilingual but also familiar with the actual terrain of the original,

besides expecting a thorough knowledge of the literary history of the literatures

concerned.

In the act of translating and reading Devi‘s stories, Spivak, the First

World scholar not only comes into a fertile union with the Third World author

but also with the Fourth World and its natives, both fictional and real. She gets

to meet and learn from the organic intellectuals not only by way of Devi‘s

characters such as Birsa Munda, Dhani Munda, Chotti Munda, Bashai Tudu,

Mary Oraon, Shankar , Gobindo and et al, but in flesh and blood as she testifies:

By way of Mahasweta‘s political generosity, I have had the good

fortune of encountering a handful of contemporary tribal

intellectuals among whom two have seemed to me to have

traversed the hardest road: Chuni Kotal and Jaladhar Sabar. (xxi –

xxii).

In spite of the impossibility of resisting the hegemonic sweep of Western

practices in the literary translation industry, translations into hegemonic

languages should not be resisted because even while translations are corrupted

by power politics, it is both important and necessary, and Lefevere explains

why in his essay ―The ‗Third-World‘ Translated‖:

It is only if enough translations are made from the Third World to

the First, that the Third World will fully exist for the First World,

or at least as fully as possible, since it is a fact of literary life that

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what is not translated or rewritten in another way quite simply

does not exist. (135-136)

Hence it is accepted ―that translation is a necessary - and in fact, worthy

cross-cultural practice‖ (Bose 276), even when predicated on Spivak‘s theory

that valorizes translation praxis as a most intimate act of love, thereby lending

the activity a greater glamour and charm, but she is skeptical of Spivak‘s second

‗posture‘ and says, ―extensive critical intervention in the name of intellectual

responsibility - is however, somewhat dangerous‖ (276). It is feared that such

interventions adversely affect Devi‘s reception by non- Bengali readers and that

they have been appropriated to serve Spivak‘s own intellectual pursuits for the

enhancement of her academic career and status as an international intellectual.

But Devi is not worried as it has not lessened her reputation nor prospects as a

creative writer, on the other hand has drawn the attention of the activists and

scholars throughout the world to her and her works, bringing her international

acclaim and support.

4.7. First World Feminism and Third World Women

The label feminism, because of its obvious Western orientation, is

anathema to many Third W orld women as writers and activists. Feminist

movements have been challenged on the grounds of cultural imperialism and of

short-sightedness in defining the meaning of gender in terms of middle-class,

white experiences, and in terms of internal racism, classism and homophobia.

Despite the fact, Third World women have always engaged with women‘s

condition and the need for socio-politico attitudinal change towards gender.

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It (Third World women) is a sociopolitical designation for

people of African, Caribbean, Asian and Latin American descent,

and native peoples of the United States. It also refers to ‗new

immigrants‘ to the United States in the last decade. . . But what

seems to constitute ―women of colour or third world women‖ as a

viable oppositional alliance is a common context of struggle rather

than colour or racial identifications. Similarly, it is Third World

women‘s oppositional political relation to sexist, racist, and

imperialist structures that constitutes our political commonality.

Thus, it is the common context of struggles against specific

exploitative structures and systems that determines our potential

political alliances. (Mohanty, Third World Women 7)

It has been said that ‗Third World women‘ is an ‗effect of discourse‘

rather than an existent, identifiable reality. In fact, as Mohanty asserts: ―The

practice of scholarship is also a form of rule and resistance, and constitutes an

increasingly important arena of Third World feminisms (31). But “gender

discrimination is neither the sole nor perhaps the primary locus of the

oppression of Third World women‖ (Johnson–Odim 314).

Johnson-Odim has discerningly elaborated that, in the decade of the

1970s, when feminist movements were coming into existence, many women in

the Third World (Spivak‘s generation) were fairly recently emerging from

colonialism, and many Third World women in the West were emerging from the

most important civil rights movement of the twentieth century. ―Neither the

advent of independence in the former colonies nor the legislation passed as a

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result of the civil rights movement was to prove immediately victorious in

improving the quality of life for the overwhelming majority of Third World

women‖ (316). These factors played a decisive role in shaping Third World

women‘s concept of feminism as a philosophy and a movement for social

justice and sought to address the racism, economic exploitation, and

imperialism against which they continued to struggle. Their concerns were

inclusive of their entire communities, in which they were equal participants and

it is the very reason why Devi, the Third World woman writer is not specifically

interested in feminism.

4.7.1. Spivak, Devi and Third World Women

Spivak‘s rearticulation of subaltern women‘s histories in ―Can the

Subaltern Speak?‖, ―The Rani of Simur‖, and her commentaries on Devi‘s

fiction have radically transformed the terms and focus of Western feminist

thought and in particular challenged the universal claims of feminism to Speak

for all the world‘s women. Together with other poco/Third World feminist

scholars Chandra Talpade Mohanti, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Nawaal El

Saadawi and Kumari Jayawardena, Spivak has generated an important

rethinking of feminist thought (Sanders 71-72). Her major contributions to

radical feminist discourse include essays on contemporary French feminist

theory, nineteenth century English women‘s writing, Marxist feminism and

feminist critiques of political economy. In her essays ―French Feminism in an

International Frame‖ and ―Feminism and Critical Theory‖, Spivak gives original

and telling commentaries on the French feminists Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous

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and Luce Irigaray who had very greatly influenced the American Feminists and

paved the way for an ‗International feminism‘.

Unlike Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Spivak is more concerned with the

condition rather than the location of third world women as workers in a global

economy. Like Mohanty, she too writes from her discontinuous locations: as a

South Asian anti-capitalist (Marxist) feminist in the US committed to working

on a truly liberatory feminist practice which theorizes the potential for a cross-

cultural, international politics of solidarity (and responsibility), and as a Third-

World feminist teacher (and activist) for whom the psychic economy of ―home‖

and of ―work‖ has always been the space of contradiction and struggle; and as a

woman whose middle-class struggles for self-definition and autonomy outside

the definition of daughter, wife and mother mark an intellectual and political

genealogy, that too has led her to analyze and theorize on Third World

women‘s condition. She trains her theoretical mind on the politics of

exploitation of the woman‘s body under national development, internal

colonization, neo-colonization or globalization, mostly based on Devi‘s

empirical study of the subaltern women‘s condition so faithfully and sensitively

portrayed in her fiction and also supplemented by Spivak‘s ‗radical‘( in the root

sense) personal activism.

Devi, whose fiction with its powerful, individual woman protagonists,

has drawn many a feminist scholar to her fiction, yet has categorically asserted

that she is an Indian writer and wants to be known just as that. Devi‘s concerns

spread beyond the sphere of the subaltern woman to embrace the issues of the

whole community of which she is an integral and equal part and it is Alice

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Walker‘s category ‗womanist‘10

that is more appropriate to describe her sort of

activism. According to Walker ―a womanist is committed to survival and

wholeness of entire people, male or female.‖ (Mohanty, Third World xi).

Walker‘s comment underscores the feelings among Third World women that

their struggles as feminists are connected to the struggles of their communities

against racism, economic exploitation, sexual exploitation of women, denial of

human rights, etc. At any rate, the category of Third World women have

challenged white feminists‘ autonomy in dealing with racism and classism,

arguing that if feminism is all about the empowerment of all women, and

change in the conditions of all women‘s lives, change is needed within the

women‘s movement itself (xi).

It is fruitful to take a look at the list of concerns in Third World women‘s

writings in view of a study of Devi‘s work and her concerns as a woman writer

from the third world:

Third World women‘s writings on feminism as consistently

focusing on (1) the idea of the simultaneity of oppressions as

fundamental to the experience of social and political marginality

and the grounding of feminist politics in the histories of racism

(casteism) and imperialism (patriarchy); (2) the crucial role of a

hegemonic state circumscribing their daily lives and survival

tactics; (3) the significance of memory and writing in the creation

of oppositional agency; and (4) the differences, conflicts, and

contradictions internal to Third World women‘s organizations and

communities. In addition they have insisted on the complex

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interrelationships between feminist, antiracist, and nationalist

struggles. In fact the challenge of Third World feminisms to First

World (white, Western) feminisms has been precisely this

inescapable link between feminist and political liberation

movements... Thus, Third World feminists have argued for the

rewriting of history based on the specific locations and histories of

struggle of people of colour and postcolonial peoples, and on the

day-to-day strategies of survival utilized by such people.

(Mohanty 30)

It is easy to identify most of the above mentioned themes and concerns in

Devi‘s fiction predicated on both the past and present history of the subaltern.

Spivak, who describes her own orientation/training in ―International Feminism‖

as the aggregation of feminist thinking from England, France, West Germany,

Italy and Latin America, in her critical explication attached to the story ―Breast-

Giver‖, titled – ―‗breast-giver‘: for author, reader, teacher, subaltern, historian . .

.‖11

(sic), sees a scope for accommodating some ‗elite‘ thematic approaches

such as deconstructive structuralist, semiotic, structuralist-psychoanalytic,

phenomenological, discourse-theoretical; though not necessarily feminist,

reader-responsist, intertexual, or linguistic (Breast Stories 84) in its

interpretation. Spivak finds Devi‘s readings of her own stories too simplistic

and conventional that she subjects them to deconstructive/contrapuntal readings,

eliciting from them rare and radical insights into existing social mores, beliefs

and theories.

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4.7.2. Western Feminist Thematics

Third World feminists charged even Marxist feminism with being insensitive to

difference, increasingly so since 1980, and it came to be regarded as the product

of academic elite - the white, middle class, heterosexual intellectuals. Feminists

working out of different locations have questioned the extent to which Western

or ‗First World‘ feminism is equipped to deal with the problems encountered by

women in once colonized countries or those living in Western societies with

origins in these countries. Black Marxist feminists were quick to point out that

black women writers had to cope not only with biases based on gender, but also

with an equally crippling racial bias, applicable to women writers from the

Third World, especially those writing in vernacular languages.

In the chapter ‗French Feminism in an International Frame‘ in Other

Worlds, Spivak analyses the experiences of Third World women as being

shadowed by the doctrines of French high feminism and problematizes the

relationship between ‗Third World‘ women and their representation via ‗First

World‘ scholarship (141). Such a point of view ignores the crucial differences in

culture, history, language and social class. She challenges Western scholarship‘s

suitability to contexts which are culturally divergent. A good example is her

critique of Julia Kristeva‘s deployment of Chinese women in her work that

provokes Spivak to comment: ―The appropriation of ‗Third World‘ women to

serve the self-centered ends of ‗First World‘ feminists (is) a compelling

example of the inbuilt colonialism of First World feminism towards the Third‖

(153). Spivak does not exculpate herself of this charge; on the other hand,

realizing her mistake with more experience and knowledge, she self-corrects

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and revises her earlier notions. Helped by self-reflexive critical questions,

Spivak realizes the error of her early feminist approach to the Third World and

their problems. The younger Spivak, like the benevolent First World feminist,

believed that she could complete meaningful work on the behalf of oppressed

women. Her privileged situation as a well educated woman made her feel

empowered, that she was in a position to help less privileged women.

Toeing a Marxist feminist line in her reading of Devi‘s ―Breast-Giver‖,

Spivak observes that in order that Devi‘s parable of Mother India in her story be

disclosed, what must be excluded from the story is precisely the attempt to

represent the subaltern as such. Spivak takes the risk involved in her

deconstructive approach, ―of putting to one side that all too neat reading, and

unravel the text to pick up the threads of the excluded attempt (79). Stanadayani

as a site for critical deployment of Marxist-feminist thematics, Spivak finds that

the text reverses the US Marxist feminist generalization that ―it is the provision

by men of means of subsistence for Women during the child rearing period, and

not the sex division of labour in itself, that forms the material basis for women‘s

subordination in class society‖ (Vogel 147). The protagonist, subaltern Jashoda,

is the wet- nurse in a wealthy household and her repeated gestation and lactation

support her crippled husband and family. Spivak argues:

By the logic of the production of value, they are both means of

production. (. . .) One of the most important Marxist- feminist

critiques of the labour theory of value is that it does not take

sexual reproduction into account when speaking of social

reproduction or the reproduction of labour power. The political

214

economy or the sexual division of labour changes or is reversed

considerably by the sale of Jashoda‘s ‗labour- power‘ which is

specific to the female of the species. (―Literary Representation‖,

85)

Spivak brings the focus on the mothering female and shows how it fetishizes the

family at the level of total social reproduction, by representing generational

replacement as the only source of renewal of society‘s labour force (86). She

thematizes the emergence of (exchange) value as follows:

The milk that is produced in one‘s own body for one‘s own

children is a use – value. When there is a superfluity of use value,

exchange value arise. That which cannot be used is exchanged. As

soon as the (exchange) value of Jashoda‘s milk emerges, it is

appropriated. Good food and constant sexual servicing are

provided so that she can be kept in prime condition for optimum

lactation. The milk she produces for her children is presumably

through ‗necessary labour‘. The milk that she produces for the

children of her master‘s family is through ‗Surplus labour‘. (86)

Spivak‘s reading sets in motion a rethinking of the conventional male centered,

European definition of the working class subject in Marxist theory. She makes

this more explicit in her reading of Devi‘s story ‗Douloti the Bountiful‘, the

story that harrowingly depicts the tragedy of a subaltern girl‘s exploitation in

bonded labor and subsequent bonded prostitution during the period of

colonization and subsequent national independence in India.

215

Shifting the thematics to liberal feminism, Spivak notes that there is a

tendency in the U.S towards homogenizing and reactive critical response to

Third World literatures and another tendency to ―pedagogic and curricular

appropriation of third world women‘s texts in translation by feminist teachers

and readers who are vaguely aware of the race-bias within mainstream

feminism‖ (Breast Stories 95). Identifying the problems with these basically

benevolent impulses and her own complicity in it, Spivak confesses:

The ravenous hunger for Third World literary texts in English

translation is part of the benevolence and the problem. Since by

translating this text I am contributing to both, I feel obliged to

notice the text‘s own relationship to the thematics of liberal

feminism. This will permit me also to touch directly the question

of elite approaches to a subaltern material (emphasis added). (95)

Posited on liberal feminism, the theorization by Spivak of ‗Stanadayini‘ and

the other woman oriented stories of Devi not only unravel covert inherent

themes but also reveal the explicit themes in a radical perspective:

The lack of fit between Devi‘s neat narrative (Stanadayini as a

national allegory) and the bewildering cacophony of Stanadayini

permits us to ask: why globalize? Why should a sociological study

that makes astute generalizations about sex/ affective production

in the United States feel obliged to produce a ‗cross- cultural

constant‘? Why should a study that exposes gender- mobilization

in Britain purport to speak on the relationship between

imperialism and motherhood? Why, on the contrary, does

216

Stanadayini invoke the singularity of the gendered subaltern?

What is at stake here? How are these stakes different from those

of imperialism as such? (94 - 95)

She attempts to answer these inquiries in her astonishing readings of Devi‘s

stories, particularly in her essays: ―A Literary Representation of the Subaltern‖,

―Women in Difference‖ and ―Who Claims Alterity‖. Spivak‘s ‗elite‘ readings of

Devi‘s short stories that center around singular female protagonists, Jashoda,

Draupadi, Gangor, Douloti and Mary Oraon are instances that help to examine

whether concepts drawn primarily from Western scholarship are suitable to texts

which are culturally divergent. In fact by drawing attention to the complicity

between hegemonic (here US) and orthodox (here Indian) readings, Spivak has

drawn attention to the continuing subalternization of Third World material and

says: ―At this point, I hope it will come as no surprise that a certain version of

the elite vs. subaltern position is perpetuated by non- Marxist anti-racist

feminism in the Anglo-US toward third World women‘s texts in translation

(97).

4.8. Implications of Globalization

In the preface to Imaginary Maps, Spivak has asserted that she looks for

postcolonial women writers cognizant of the aporias or ethico-historical

dilemmas in women‘s decolonization (xxiii). She finds in Devi‘s stories the

subtle portrayal of the impact of the new world order wherein global capitalism

develops and wage-labor becomes the hegemonic form of organizing production

and reproduction making class relations within and across national borders more

complex and less transparent. In the words of Naval El Saadawi:

217

It‘s important for us to identify the new victims and the new

victimizers in the neocolonial era – for we do not live in a

postcolonial era as the postmodernists claim. We must struggle

together both locally and globally. The local struggle must be

combined with the global or international struggle or solidarity.

We must fight on all fronts . . . We must carry on a continuous

resistance, a continuous dissidence, which will forge the way to a

better future for all the peoples of the world. (qtd. Juan Jr. 93)

Globalization, how it impacts the life of the subaltern (women, the poor,

the peasants, the contract labourers, the tribal and the low castes) is a pervasive

theme in Devi‘s fiction, besides her other urgent concerns in the context of the

failure of decolonization which is their usual experience under nationalism. Her

stories ―Breast-Giver‖, ―Douloti the Bountiful‖, ―Behind the Bodice‖, ―The

Hunt‖ and Chotti Munda and His Arrow are a few of her very stringent critiques

of neo-colonization and globalization. She cherishes the faith that these

wretched of the earth can defeat their oppressors and exploiters through rural

togetherness or subaltern solidarity. In her interview with Devi on Chotti

Munda, Spivak makes note of this factor: ―. . . one of the astonishingly

powerful things about the novel, is that you actually show, not just Mundas

acting, but Mundas and outcaste Hindus coming together‖ (xiv). In spite of her

burning anger at the unjust miserable lot of the underdog, Devi tirelessly strives

to empower and enable them to fight for themselves and to unite against the

agents of oppression and exploitation and even of extermination. In the

introductory interview ―Telling History‖ in Chotti Munda Devi explains:

218

It is my firm belief in the last phase of my creative years (of) my

life, that this solidarity is resistance. This is the only way to resist

globalization. Globalization does not mean that someone from

America, some white man, is coming and doing something. When

the British left, they left our brains colonized, and it remains like

that. If we have to know about tribals, we have to go back in

tradition, in oral tradition, re-read something that is not written, or

written in human beings, generation after generation. But we also

celebrate its changefulness in the name of solidarity today.

Changing their tradition, indeed. You have seen the Sabars,

cultivating their field, just this triumph, they have dug a well and

water is coming up, they have never done agriculture but they are

doing it, this changefulness is resistance against globalization.

Globalization is not only coming from America and the first

world, my own country has always wanted to rob the people of

everything. The tragedy of India at Independence was not

introducing thorough land reform. A basically feudal land system

was allowedto stay. feudal land system can only nurture and

sustain a feudal value system.A feudal value system is anti-

women, anti-poor people, against toiling people. (xiv-xv)

The stories in the volume Imaginary Maps that Spivak reads are not only

linked by the common thread of profound ecological loss, the loss of the forest

as foundation of life, but also by the complicity, however apparently remote, of

219

the power lines of local developers with the forces of global capital. For

example in ―The Hunt‖, the oppressor Tahsildar is a contractor,

. . . the entire administration is behind him, because this illegal

deforestation, which continues all over India is done with great

skill, and always the tribals are condemned. . . . There are bosses

in the cities felling the sandalwood in Karnataka. All over the

world Governments protecting the environment is nonsense. Thus

through Mary Oraon I have narrated events that are true of India

today. (Imaginary xii)

In ―Douloti‖, Devi narrates how, even after the Indian Government

abolished the bonded labour system, Douloti is a victim of this vicious system

and highlights the super-exploitation of women in the unorganized sector of

casual workers. In the context of internationalism and transnationalism, Spivak

bemoans the fact that the benevolent First World women are clueless about this

and addresses them: ―You have to get into it (transnationality) to see how much

development is an alibi for exploitation, how much it‘s a scam: the

responsibility for the entire world‘s ills is between the legs of the poorest

women of the South (―Setting‖ 168). Colin MacCabe in his foreword to

Spivak‘s In Other Worlds comments on the theoretical potential of her fiction in

almost similar words:

The force of Mahasweta‘s texts resides in its grounding in the

gendered subaltern‘s body, in that female body which is never

questioned and only exploited. The bodies of Jashoda and Dopdi

figure forth the unutterable ugliness and cruelty which cooks in

220

the Third World kitchen to produce the First World feasts that we

daily enjoy. (xvi)

Spivak finds the documentation in Devi‘s journalistic and creative

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

to the non-Indians. Spivak – one of the well established and very important

culture critics of her generation in the international academia– has selected Devi

as the foremost Woman writer in Bengal and perhaps throughout India whom

she wants to translate and teach or make available to the western scholars.

4.9. Conclusion

Acknowledging Paul De Man and Derrida as mentors, Spivak also claims

the influence of Edward Said, Ranajit Guha and the ‗Subaltern Studies‘

collective, Mahasweta Devi, Marx, Freud and more recently the influence of

Melanie Klein and the Afro/Anglo/French writers Fanon, Achebe, Ngugi, and

Coetzee. As a feminist too, she claims a wide Euro-Anglo-US orientation.

Indeed, Spivak the scholar epitomizes the interface between the worlds, the

First, Second and Third worlds. Though Spivak has been one of the most

successful and influential theorists in the US, even like Said and Bhabha, she is

deeply engaged in concerns related to her Third World identity. She has

commented in the appendix to Imaginary Maps:

. . . since the general tendency in reading and teaching so called

‗Third World‘ literature is towards an uninstructed cultural –

relativism, I am learning to write on Devi, as if an attentive

reading of her texts permits us to imagine an impossible undivided

world, without which no literature should be possible. This is

221

learning because such a permission can be earned only by way of

attention to specificity of these writings. (199)

. . . This for me is the lesson of Mahasweta, activist, journalist and

writer. This relationship: a witnessing of love and a

supplementing collective struggle is the relationship between her

‗literary‘ writing and her activism. Indeed in the global

predicament today, such supplementation must become the

relationship between the silent gift of the subaltern and the

thunderous imperative of the Enlightenment to ‗the public use of

Reason‘, however hopeless that understanding might seem, one

filling the others gap. (205)

She finds in the reading and teaching of the so called ―Third World‖

literature by Western scholars ―a general tendency towards an uninstructed

cultural relativism‖, to forestall which, in the case of her translations, she

has supplied companion essays with each of her translations. In her

translations she has endeavored to be faithful to the specificity of the

language, theme, and history of the original and has attempted ―to

supplement hegemonic notions of a hybrid global culture with this

experience of an impossible global justice‖ (199)

It is generally acknowledged and accredited that the first international

outreach for Devi has been through Spivak‘s translations and elite readings, and

ever since, Devi‘s international standing has only waxed. The latest

international recognition was her nomination for the Man‘s International Booker

222

Prize, 2009 along with contemporary Nobel laureates and long popular writers

of global standing. And again, to the great pleasant surprise of her admirers

Times of India had reported:

Bookies put Mahasweta Devi ahead of Rushdie in Literature Nobel

race‘. India‘s Mahasweta Devi is a long shot at 50/1, surprisingly

ahead of Salman Rusdhie who is languishing at 66/1. You can put

your money on Bob Dylan too, but the odds on him are a daunting

150/1(Sen, Times of India 8 Oct. 2009).

It is not the winning of awards but the fact that Devi is today included in the

pantheon of International is writers what tells upon Spivak‘s service to her.

Notes

1 French Third Estate: France under the Ancient Régime (before the

French Revolution) divided society into three estates: the First Estate (clergy);

the Second Estate (nobility); and the Third Estate (commoners). The king was

considered part of no estate.

2 According to Ahmed the true prestige of the Three World

Theory came with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when the definition of

the World was thoroughly revamped.

3 ‗North – South‘ divide: the new code name for the Third World after

the fall of the Soviet Union; the ‗North‘ standing for the Eurocentric, white,

rich, advanced nations situated in the Northern hemisphere of the globe , while

223

the ‗South‘ standing for the coloured, poor, exploited, underdeveloped and

developing countries in the Southern hemisphere.

4 Poco: An abbreviation or short hand for ‗postcolonial‘ as used by

Spivak and few others.

5 ‗Representation‘: Spivak makes a crucial distinction between

representation as proxy (as in speaking for, e.g., a political representative) and

representation as portrait (re-presentation in art or philosophy).

6 ‗Area Studies‘: It was established to secure US power in ‗the Cold

War‘ that necessitated American experts possessing sophisticated language

skills with in-depth knowledge of languages and cultures of the various areas of

the world. By and by ‗Area Studies‘ have come to transform Comparative

Social Studies and Culture-Studies and supplement the discipline of

‗Comparative Literature‘ in American Universities.

7 ‗Deconstructive provisional starting points‘ - Speaking on her

deconstructive practice, Spivak has said that ―the aspect that interests me most

is, however, the recognition within deconstructive practice, of provisional and

intractable starting points in any investigative effort. . . (Other World 180).

There is no doubt that deconstruction provides a sophisticated method of

looking beyond the obvious structures of the text for complexities, as Spivak

asserts, that yield richer returns.

8 Fourth World – By ‗Fourth World‘ is meant the world‘s aboriginal

people who were literally pushed to margins for the contemporary history and

geography of the world‘s civilizations to be established.

224

9 ‗Glocalization‘: the newer coinage for globalization, a term that

connotes the linking of the local to the global.

10 ‗Womanist‘:

Alice Walker, an Afro-American writer, has chosen to

use the term womanist rather than feminist. It describes a ‗Black feminist or

feminist of color‘ and discriminates the two as, ―womanist is to feminist as

purple to lavender.‖

11This is a slightly modified version of a longer essay titled ―A

Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman‘s text from the Third

World‖, attached to her translation of Devi‘s story ―The Breast-Giver‖, included

in Spivak‘s In Other Worlds.

225

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