"Tears, what does it represent?
Poverty or sadness?
Hurt or femininity?
Or is it the representation of
Age old suppression?
Or of minds way to find a release.
But what of those
With none to shed
Be it for their loved ones
Or for their own self."
‘Rudali’ by Mahasweta Devi is about those
unshed tears of the lower caste, and the tears that are sold for the sake of
survival. It is the story of Sanichari,
the protagonist, about her fight for survival, in a world which is divided in
the name of caste. It is the story of the survival of the fittest. Happiness in
her world belongs to the upper class, the ones who possess all the fortune and
continues to gain more with time. Misfortune is her constant companion throughout-abandoned
by her mother upon her father’s death, an alcoholic husband, a mentally
retarded son who leaves her early to the next world and a daughter-in- law who becomes
a whore. In spite of these situations she never sheds a tear until she is
enticed into being a rudali (a mourner), and those suppressed tears become a
source of income for her. The only support she received was from her childhood
friend Bikhni and their relation gives the readers a break from the class
barriers, which is the main theme of the story. ‘Rudali’ points a sharp finger
at the socio economic system in India.
Gayatri Spivak speaks of ‘white men
saving brown women from brown men’ in her controversial essay ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’. Rudali is also about the subaltern, where the women’s as
well as the men’s voice is suppressed in a smaller context. Mahashweta Devi
speaks of the exploitation of lower caste men and women by the upper class men.
On the other hand, Spivak speaks of the exploitation of the subaltern by the
colonial power. Both portray how the brown women are exploited, their inability
to raise their voice unless through a representative to speak for them, namely,
a western intellectual or Dulan(a moneylender) respectively. Be it the British
raising their voice against the sati system and helping the Indian women thereby
degrading the indian men or Sanichari being able to exploit the patriarchal
system, the end result is that there is no change in their situations. They
tend to go in full circle, ending up right where they started off. For in the
end, Spivak reaches the conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak, and as for
Sanichari, she meets her misfortune yet again with the death of her best friend
Bikhni. This is also the result of the construction of the ‘other’ as mentioned
in Edward Said’s orientalism.
