Mahasweta Devi's Documentary/fiction as Critical Antidote: Rethinking Bonded Labour, 'Women and Development' and the Sex Trade in India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that Mahasweta Devi's meticulously researched documentary/fiction, which moves fluidly between history, ethnography and reportage, provide a crucial antidote to three vexed problems in South Asian studies: bonded labour, and development and sex trade. Researchers have treated bonded labour, women's and prostitution as separate discourses. Yet Devi's women characters include wives, sisters and daughters of bonded labourers, women who as bonded labourers, and bonded prostitutes. By using fictional modes of irony and satire, Devi's documentary / fiction invites multiple readings of sociological critical frameworks and defies neat conclusions about subalternity that reader might be tempted to make. I believe in documentation. After reading my work, reader should face truth of facts, and feel duly ashamed of true face of India. --Mahasweta Devi, An Outsider and an Insider at Same Time Sometimes Crook imagines some bespectacled town gentleman who has come by car, and listening to him, is writing down everything.... No such conversation has taken place. Crook has thought it all up. If such a thing had happened, if some bespectacled gentleman had come, words like this are what he would have heard from Crook Nagesia. --Mahasweta Devi, Douloti BountifulMahasweta Devi's(1) meticulously researched documentary / fiction, which moves fluidly between history, ethnography and reportage, provides a critical antidote to three problems in South Asian studies: bonded labour, and development, and sex trade. Researchers have treated bonded labour, women's and prostitution as separate discourses, in isolation from one another. Yet Devi's women characters include wives, sisters and daughters of bonded labourers, women who as bonded labourers, and bonded prostitutes. Most studies on bonded labour focus on men working in agricultural sector before 1976, year in which debt-bondage was officially abolished in India. Devi's stories show that forms of indenture have continued well beyond 1976, and have especially exerted their force on 'invisible labour sectors, such as women, who perform casual or unpaid labour, and prostitutes, who off debts at compound interest in brothels. Devi's stories contest those studies that have consistently naturalized and rendered invisible women's bonded labour. By using fictional modes of irony and satire, Devi's stories subvert easy assumptions about subalternity and the modes of oppression (Bardhan, 1990) that tribal, low- or out-of-caste women in sex trade are subject to.Studies on bonded labour in India tend to assume a gender-neutral perspective, thereby focussing on men's debt-bondage to exclusion of women's (Tripathy, 1989; Prakash, 1990; Bose, 1993; Lerche, 1995; Brass, 1998; van der Linden, 1998). In these studies, relations within family become subsumed under discussions of family labour relations. As a result, women's unpaid becomes naturalized as part of traditional structures of family labour. Women and development studies in India, which cover a range of feminist perspectives, foreground how analytical category of work renders invisible women's subordination as wives, sisters or mothers (Mukhopadhyay, 1984; Sen, 1985; Lessinger, 1990; Saran and Sandhwar, 1990; Kabeer, 1994; Himmelweit, 1995). However, these studies tend to universalize figure of Third World woman worker, thereby eliding questions of class, caste and ethnicity (Mohanty, 1991, 1997; Kannabiran and Kannabiran, 1997; Shohat, 1997; Olsen and Murthy, 2000). Furthermore, as Gayatri Spivak has shown, and development studies tend to depict the broad spectrum of women's issues...as subsumable under feudal mode of production without articulating impact of colonial-capitalist economies on women (Spivak, 1993, p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".