Reading Mahasweta Devi's "Stanadayini" (Breast-Giver) in the Light of Gayatri Spivak's Theory of the Subaltern

Abstract

This paper critically examines Mahasweta Devi's short story "Stanadayini" ("Breast-Giver") through the theoretical framework of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's concept of the subaltern. While Spivak's seminal essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) articulates the structural impossibility of subaltern consciousness achieving authentic expression within dominant discursive frameworks, her subsequent translation of and critical engagement with Devi's fiction presents a paradoxical case: the subaltern appears to speak, yet the terms of that speaking remain mediated by the intellectual's representational labor. This paper argues that Jashoda, the professional wet-nurse protagonist of "Breast-Giver," occupies a subaltern position that is multiply determined by class, gender, caste, and the ideological construction of motherhood within Hindu patriarchy. Through close textual analysis of Devi's narrative strategies and Spivak's translational interventions, the paper demonstrates how the story stages the very impossibilities of representation that Spivak theorizes, while simultaneously enacting a literary subaltern speech that refuses quietism. The analysis reveals that "Breast-Giver" does not simply present a subaltern voice but rather performs the structural conditions that simultaneously enable and disable that voice, thereby offering a literary instantiation of Spivak's theoretical paradox.