Bonded Slavery and Gender in Mahasweta Devi's "Douloti the Bountiful"

Abstract

This paper explores the ways tribals are entrapped in and exploited as bonded laborers and prostitutes in Mahasweta Devi's "Douloti the Bountiful" by the deep-rooted socio-economic evil of debt-bondage. Tribals, once lived in forest and mountain areas with distinctive cultures and self-sufficient economic systems, were displaced and dispossessed from their forest lands/homes by the British Empire's large-scale deforestation and the independent Indian government's projects of forest clearing and land conversion. Catapulted without preparation into the patriarchal, capitalist society, they are frequently lured by landowners/moneylenders into the debt trap: Once in debt, escape is nearly impossible because of high compound interest rates, leading them to work for their moneylender as bonded slaves. These changes in social and economic relations transform tribals' social status from freemen to wage laborers, debtors, bonded laborers, bonded prostitutes, and ultimately bonded slaves. This transformation in turn destroys their familial and communal relations, preventing them from performing their parental roles as breadwinners and caregivers. This paper investigates these changes in identities and roles of tribals through an exploration of Devi's fictionalized villages, and the gendered division of labor represented by the exploitation of tribal men and women in the novella. Finally, dealing with the significance of Douloti's death as the abject, this paper considers possible antidotes to this modern form of slavery.