When the Subaltern Speaks: Subverting Power Structures in Mahasweta Devi’s “Dhouli”

This paper reads Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Dhouli” as a text that brings a silenced, subaltern subject into the field of representation and thereby challenges the power structures that sustain her marginalization. Using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theoretical idea of the “subaltern”,the paper argues that Devi not only uses narrative perspective, characterization, and social detail to make Dhouli’s suffering visible,she also complicates the idea that the subaltern can be simply “given a voice” by elite discourses. The analysis shows how Dhouli documents everyday injustices (rape, abandonment, starvation, social ostracism) and stages small acts of resistance that unsettle the logic of caste, patriarchy, and class. The story performs a kind of ethical witnessing as it refuses to reduce Dhouli to a passive object of pity and compels readers to recognise the structural causes of her suffering and the agency she exercises in survival and refusal.