After independence they found they were not entitled to any Government benefits like job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates, because officially, [they were] casteless. It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or, worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
This chapter begins where the previous one ends: with the end of World War II in 1945, India’s independence in 1947, and the birth of Mahasweta’s character Douloti in 1948. After hundreds of years under British domination, liberation from colonial powers was finally accomplished. But, was it? Looking back from a contemporary perspective, Mahasweta Devi’s story “Douloti the Bountiful” (1995) clearly shows that decolonization and independence have only touched those in the superstructure. For a majority stuck at the base, independence never occurred.
In 2011, a reporter from the Guardian noted that with India becoming an ever-stronger world player—“a country rapidly developing into an economic super-power”—it may look surprising to read that “India is the fourth most dangerous country” in the world for women to live (Bowcott).1 The journalist observed that India’s appearance on the infamous list “was unexpected” (Bowcott). But while India’s elites are certainly enjoying the fruits of unparalleled development, for an overwhelming number of poor women (like Douloti in Mahasweta Devi’s story under analysis), the country has become “extremely hazardous because of the subcontinent’s high level of female infanticide and sex trafficking” (Bowcott). In fact, “India’s central bureau of investigation estimated that in 2009 about 90% of [sex] trafficking took place within the country and that there were some 3 million prostitutes, of which about 40% were children [my emphasis]’” (Bowcott).
That India keeps the dirty work of sex trafficking mostly “at home” does not significantly alter the circumstances for the girls caught in it; some details vary, but the essence—slavery, torture (and often death)—remains the same. As will be analyzed in the following chapter, when trafficked women leave their countries, they automatically become illegal residents involved in prostitution, in other words, criminals subject to prosecution and deportation. Yet when trafficking occurs within national boundaries, the dynamic is as perverse, if not more so, because the crime tends to be carried out with complete impunity when government officials or the police are involved. Sociological data prove that the police often participate in the exploitation of trafficked victims, either by utilizing their services for free in exchange for ignoring the illegal activities of pimps, or through lack of proper knowledge of how to deal with a victim of sex trafficking, persecuting the woman (a prostitute) instead of the real criminals. Often, corrupt police officers return the girls to their local pimps when they escape, and their betrayal does not go unpunished (reputable sources describe the actual tortures inflicted on such women, which explains why they often stay).2 Trafficking victims themselves contribute to their invisibility by their reticence to come forward and ask for help because the traffickers generally threaten to harm them or their families. Yet the presence of these sex slaves is not unknown to local governments. Quite the contrary, since the government, “eager to join the globalization bandwagon, makes use of existing norms of female subordination in society in order to provide cheap labor demanded by new forces of globalization”—as Mahasweta’s story unambiguously shows—”thereby implicitly or explicitly aiding and abetting [ … ] sex trafficking” (Samarasinghe 57).3
The case of Cambodia offers a telling example. The boom of tourism, fostered by the World Bank and the IMF, has generated an extremely lucrative industry around sex tourism and sex trafficking. While prostitution is illegal in Cambodia, the “monitoring of the movements of sex offenders [and] their apprehension and prosecution [have] low priority since any aggressive action on the part of the government would have an effect in slowing down nearly one quarter of sex tourists resulting in loss of revenues for the government” (117). In cultures “where commercial sex with under-age girls does not seem to register many raised eyebrows or shock,” Samarasinghe explains, “the predominantly male law makers, judicial officers or the police may not give priority to ensure that effective laws are passed and implemented to curb sex trafficking” (117). The researcher observes that “high officials are also known to be customers, making a mockery of the system that expects the government to effectively take action against those who use victims of sex trafficking” (117). To this day, patriarchy remains one of the biggest barriers to curbing sex trafficking; its “stubborn resilience [ … ] over time and space has been instrumental in creating new spaces for the continuous supply of women and children to feed the streams of trafficking into the commercial sex industry” (163). Granted, this silencing of the illicit activities does not involve everybody in a government, but sex trafficking presents so many inherent complexities that even if some well-intentioned local authorities try to combat it, the approach has frequently failed because the laws seem contradictory at best—for instance, forbidding prostitution on the one hand, but demanding health checks for women working in prostitution on the other. Much of the work, then, stays in the hands of NGOs, but, in spite of their acknowledged efforts, the helpfulness of some of their rescue operations has been questioned. At times, some “saviors” have shown more concern for imparting the religious or political ideologies espoused by the organization than for the actual well-being of the survivor; other times, the noble intentions end up diluted by excessive government bureaucracy and no dramatic improvement occurs (as in the story under analysis). The reality is that, for each rescued victim, there is a pool of thousands to be trafficked as replacements, which highlights the importance of addressing structural causes rather than resorting to temporary palliatives—and here the role of the national government comes to the forefront.
In India, violence against women, particularly those from the lower strata of society, continues to be condoned by some sectors of the government. As Arundhati Roy forcefully denounces, “Every ‘democratic’ institution in [India,] has shown itself to be unaccountable, inaccessible to the ordinary citizen, and either unwilling or incapable of acting in the interest of genuine social justice” (qtd. in Lazarus 32). But it would be impossible to analyze sex trafficking outside cultural parameters such as the caste system with its rigid hierarchies, religions that assume the lower status of women, or the impoverishment that those at the base still suffer. Andrea Di Nicola argues that it would be a mistake to assume “that poverty is the sole cause of the supply of sexual services” (5). During the early 1990s, South Asia experienced rapid economic growth because of the neoliberal policies promulgated by the IMF and incorporated by the local government (privatization of state companies, cuts in government expenses in public health, education, social welfare, etc.), all measures that directly affected the underprivileged (Kara 29).4 In this respect, Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze “warned as early as 1995 that reforms that boost growth, though important, were not enough to improve the living conditions of the poorest, let alone dismantle caste and gender hierarchies and generate employment” (Mishra 52). According to a frequently cited report by the Harvard University economist Michael Walton, “the quality and distribution of India’s rate of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] growth are structurally ‘disequalizing,’ i.e., causing more inequality,” while India is “developing all the ingredients necessary for a Latin American-style oligarchy” (52). “It is hardly surprising,” the eco-feminist scholar Vandana Shiva observes, “that as GNP [Gross National Product] rises, it does not necessarily mean that either wealth or welfare increase proportionately” (408):
The UN Decade for Women was based on the assumption that the improvement of women’s economic position would automatically flow from an expansion and diffusion of the development process. Yet, by the end of the Decade, it was becoming clear that development itself was the problem. Insufficient and inadequate ‘participation’ in ‘development’ was not the cause for women’s increasing under-development; it was rather their enforced but asymmetric participation in it, by which they bore the costs but were excluded from the benefits[.] Economic growth was a new colonialism, draining resources away from those who needed them most. (406)
In turn, the chasm between rich and poor widened to an extreme, creating the perfect scenario for slave traffic to flourish locally: while many to this day barely survive on less than $2 a day, the incomes of the middle and upper classes “have soared,” with India boasting more billionaires than the United Kingdom (Di Nicola 30). Of course, not only Indian women suffer the consequences of poverty, so corruption becomes a viable option for some local individuals (men and women) to exploit them. Local pimps then sell the girls to those men who can afford them, proving that sex trafficking thrives in such uneven economies where women and children end up trapped in “deathly brothels” because of their loan obligations, while “males have more money than before with which to buy sex from slaves” (30). It is not surprising that given Mahasweta’s deep commitment to social causes in her native India, one of her stories in Imaginary Maps (1995) openly addresses female sex traffic.5
As an author and activist, Mahasweta plays a central part in today’s Indian literary circles, having received both national and international awards for her “closely intertwined” creative writing and social action (Bhattacharya 1003). Her work springs from her careful research and acute empathy with the situation of the oppressed in India, thus local critics have called her “that lone voice of conscience which plays such a crucial role in a weak society like ours” (1003). The writer has maintained an uncompromising socialist agenda throughout her career in the hopes of improving the lives of the subaltern group she writes about because she wants to help the tribals unite and organize to better their situation: according her, “solidarity is resistance” (Chotti Munda xiii). Mahasweta finds parallels between the Indian tribals and Native Americans in the US, both groups deprived of land and rights by those in power and, reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s radical Marxist position, she argues that “as far as the tribals or the oppressed are concerned, violence is justified. When the system fails in—justice, violence is justified” (Imaginary xviii).6
Regarding her reception outside India, despite Mahasweta’s well-established trajectory as a Bengali writer with undeniable talent (best exemplified in the dialogic quality of her short stories), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s role as the most recognized of the translators and critics of her work is arguably the reason for the author’s welcome to the World Literature canon taught in Western universities. Mahasweta’s frequently anthologized stories “Breast-Giver” and “Draupadi” (analyzed in Spivak’s In Other Worlds) have brought her name to Westerners’ awareness together with postcolonial favorites such as Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, whose writing styles have made the postcolonial Other more palatable to Western tastes.7
While Mahasweta’s intended audience is primarily local, her dedication at the beginning of Imaginary Maps (“For all the Indigenous people in the world”) acknowledges the possibility of “worlding” her work transnationally, and explains Spivak’s interest in disseminating it in Western academia. Spivak’s interpretation of Mahasweta’s writing differs from the author’s own nationalistic take on India’s tribal struggles, yet her examination of “Douloti” is fruitful for the purpose of this analysis of sex trafficking in a global context characterized by inequality, debt, and usury because of the critic’s acknowledged interest in “looking at [the] women who are being shafted by post-modern capitalism” (The Postcolonial Critic 11).
The tribals in India, who constitute one-sixth of the total population of the country, encompass one of the most vulnerable communities, with few or no options to survive. They are treated as virtual pariahs in Indian society; they remain outside the caste system and, as Spivak explains, their animism “does not even qualify as a religion” (“Woman” 109). Deprived of land for their sustenance after the land reforms, they have no other alternative than to become bonded laborers, since bond-slavery remains to this day the only means of repaying debts. But “[b]elow this,” Spivak remarks, “is bonded prostitution, where the girls and women abducted from bonded labor or kamiya households are thrust together as bodies for absolute sexual and economic exploitation” (Outside 82). Such practice has become commonplace among destitute tribals, Mahasweta explains. “Women after or before marriage are taken away when husband or father has borrowed money from the money-lending upper caste. They are taken straight to brothels in the big cities to work out that sum. And the sum is never repaid because the account is calculated on compound interest” (Imaginary xix). As Spivak argues, “[w] oman’s body is thus the last instance in a system whose general regulator is still the loan: usurer’s capital, imbricated, level by level, in national industrial and transnational global capital” (“Woman” 82).
Mahasweta’s carefully researched story “Douloti the Bountiful” (from now on referred to as “Douloti”) provides a raw account of the struggles of tribal women after India’s independence, unambiguously highlighting the complicity of political and economic institutions in trafficking and profiting from them.8 In her strong and defiant language, Mahasweta makes it clear to the audience (an Indian audience, she insists) that decolonization after independence in 1947 never touched those at the bottom of society, the tribals, as the new local governments continue to disregard and exploit their situation. In fact, liberal economic measures in West Bengal with their “structural adjustment [plans have] left locals poorer than they were before the reform began in the 1980s” (Marx 10). In an ironic move, Mahasweta objects that, after independence, the “government of India,” rather than help, “has pauperized” the tribals—sex trafficking of their women and children thus followed as a matter of course (Imaginary x).
“I was born the year after independence”: Whose?
The author crafts this tale after actual events she witnessed in Palamu, one of the poorest districts in the state of Bihar, where she met a bond slave whose back had been crushed by a cart after he was forced by his landlord to pull it in place of an animal. During her research, Mahasweta questioned the landlord about his decision, only to hear him respond: “‘A man can be wasted, a bullock cannot’” (xix). This incident and her meeting of a “skeletal girl in the local hospital who could only pronounce the name of her village and nothing else” prompted the narrative (xx).
In this story, Douloti is Crook Ganori Nagesia’s fourteen-year-old daughter. Like all the tribals in the village, Crook Ganori Nagesia is indebted for life to his landlord. After Crook Ganori Nagesia becomes crippled and therefore useless—that is, no more surplus value can be extracted out of his body—Douloti turns into the only means of repaying his bonded debt. A procurer pretending to be a philanthropist from an upper caste (Paramananda), in complicity with Ganori’s landlord, deceives the family through a suspicious marriage proposal to Douloti. He pays Crook Ganori Nagesia’s debt, removes the girl from her community, and traffics the unsuspecting victim to the city as a sex slave. The tribals can smell the dangers of such a dubious miracle (“When does a Brahman marry a Nagesia girl?”), but, in a world without options or justice, it matters little (50). In this way, a debt of three hundred rupees is transferred to the daughter, who will have to pay it through her enforced prostitution as a “kamiya whore.” Douloti thus becomes uprooted from her support system to be raped daily because of an impossible balance. For the first couple of years, the girl starts with one regular customer, which helps her maintain her health, but she ends up servicing about forty men a day once her single customer loses interest in her exhausted body. After consistent, brutal rape, Douloti’s first customer complains to the brothel’s manageress: “These goods are thread bare now,” implying that her body should be disposed of and replaced (77). Later on, Douloti will be consumed by countless men who break her spirit and destroy her health. She wonders, “Can a kamiya woman leave? Never” (70). The only way out seems destitution or death, as another sex slave warns her, “I am a kamiya-whore, I’ll of course be kicked out when my carcass shrivels” (68). Through these characters, Mahasweta reflects the situation of countless “superexploited” Indian women, symptomatic prey of an economic system driven to extract unlimited profit even at the expense of human bodies.
But even though Douloti is daily brutalized and trapped by ever-proliferating debt, looking closer at her depiction readers can see that the author grants her main character dignity, intelligence, and strength. Without ever resorting to obvious sentimentality, Mahasweta gracefully imbues her story with fleeting moments of understated poise and compassion, and for brief instants readers could picture Douloti as a protagonist in one of Satiajit Ray’s most endearing films. The young girl initially manages to (minimally) play the system to her advantage. One day she asks one of her clients for some regular extra money which she begins to hide for herself in the hope of gathering enough to pay for her freedom and come back to Seora Village with her family. She then gets some control over her meager finances, yet, later on, that money will buy bread to feed another sex slave’s son in one of the most poignant scenes in this tough and unsentimental world, exposing Douloti’s inherent generosity and communal values. Douloti also offers money to her uncle Bono in a random encounter between the two, which moves her uncle to tears. But those are among the few glimpses of light in “Douloti.” In keeping with the real-life scenario Mahasweta witnessed, the young sex slave finds no “Sadamu-like” savior or outlet. Instead, what readers feel for the most part is hopelessness within a world dominated by social injustice and violence against women. Like Soon-ah in the previous chapter, the girl endures unbearable violations, but, unlike Park’s female protagonist, for Douloti there is no escape.
Thus, in “Douloti,” Mahasweta addresses the contested issue of third-world female agency provocatively, since the author mainly targets the exploitative social and economic web in which Douloti is entangled without offering readers a postcolonial heroine. Unlike other strong female characters she has developed in stories like “Draupadi” or “The Hunt,” where Dopdi and Mary Oraon (the main protagonists) end up claiming their power in one of Homi Bhabha’s moments of “ambivalence” that subversively destabilize the subjugator, Douloti’s environment is so constrained that she cannot move beyond her limited circumstances, perhaps disappointing Western audiences’ expectations of encountering an empowered third-world woman (I utilize this general definition—third-world woman—with awareness of Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s cautioning against any monolithic representation of them).
In “The Hunt,” Mary Oraon is harassed by (yet again) a government contractor who demands sex with her. Mary manages to deceive him by deferring the encounter to the night of a tribal celebration in which the women hunt for animals. During the hunt ritual, Mary kills the contractor with her knife and saves her honor, in this way escaping an assured rape. But readers should note that Mary still lives among the tribals, which grants her the protection of her group. Mary kills her potential rapist in her territory, through the celebration of her tribal customs. In Douloti’s case, her kin could have offered her the possibility of some protection, but, as Spivak points out, “Mahasweta moves us further [ … ] to a space where the family, the machine for the socialization of the female body through affective coding, has itself been broken and deflected (“Woman” 111). In “Draupadi,” Dopdi has been captured by the military for her involvement in allegedly subversive activities against the government (ironically, the conflict revolves around the tribals’ lack of access to a basic human right, water). After a seemingly formal interrogation, an intelligence specialist orders her brutal rape as a way to “break her,” while remaining at a safe distance during the execution of the dirty work.9 When, at the end of the story, Dopdi finally meets the officer who ordered her desecration, she refuses to wear clothes, compelling the man to see his “work” and feel fear for the first time in front of a naked woman.
Of course, one could contend that, in Dopdi’s representation, female agency comes from a literary device utilized by the author, rather than from genuine empowerment of the female peasant. After all, Dopdi’s last display of agency while confronting this officer shows her in a clear position of moral superiority, but readers cannot miss that it is the author who manipulates Dopdi’s agency by ending the story where she does because, probably, Dopdi would continue to be tortured to death, especially after defying and humiliating her captor. Yet it could be argued that this character fulfills a different political aim. In Dopdi’s case, Mahasweta depicts her as a fighter immolated for the pursuit of social justice. By closing the story where she does, Mahasweta highlights the dignity of her mission: Dopdi stands before the officer bravely and, in that very act, she strengthens the legitimacy of her cause. Sex-trafficked Douloti, on the other hand, represents a wasted life. Unlike the other two characters, Douloti remains a victim from every angle, at all times.
Mahasweta’s narrative purposefully reinforces that Douloti is trapped and has no Ulises to save her from exploitation like the other fourteen-year-old sex slave represented in Latin American literature in Gabriel García Márquez’s tale of sex trafficking, “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” (1978). Here, in stark contrast with Mahasweta’s direct writing style, García Márquez resorts to high doses of magic realism to dilute in the narrative the outrageous treatment of a sex slave. In this story, the narrator describes a young orphan, Eréndira, who lives in the custody of her grandmother. When Eréndira accidentally sets fire to her grandmother’s house, the woman forces the child into bonded prostitution until the girl can repay the cost of the damages. One of her clients, Ulises, falls in love with the girl (like Sadamu in the previous chapter), so she convinces him to murder her grandmother. After a failed attempt, Ulises manages to kill the grandmother, while the girl escapes alone with all the gold she has earned to live forever blissful and free.
Noticeably, the liberties of magic realism allow the Colombian writer to craft a visually exuberant and aesthetically beautiful (albeit occasionally shocking) sex trafficking story where good fortune prevails. García Márquez’s description of Eréndira’s first rape, for example, despite making it clear in the narrative that this is a brutal violation, showcases a fantastic pictorial scene: the girl “[ … ] shouted in silence again, but he [the rapist] replied with a solemn slap which lifted her off the ground and suspended her in the air for an instant with her long Medusa hair floating in space” (9). That the girl shouts “in silence” together with the captivating image of her serpent-like hair “floating” for seconds detracts readers from the violence that suspended her in the air in the first place and, more significantly, of the rape that follows. Compare this to the way Mahasweta describes Doloti’s first rape: “Douloti is bloodied many times all through the night. Finally her sobbing and entreaties could no longer be heard. But the ‘grunt grunt’ of a rooting pig [her rapist’s] could be heard” (58). As Elizabeth S. Anker suggests in her analysis of in Salman Rushdie’s fiction, stylistic techniques such as magic realism tend to “divert attention from [ … ] depictions of abuses of human rights” (“Narrating Human Rights” 149). Like García Márquez in this sex trafficking tale, “Rushdie’s style distances one from the horrors it describes, making his description of them not only bearable but even enjoyable” (150). Rushdie’s writing, Anker continues, “mute the affective fabric of his characters’ encounter with suffering and loss” (150)—precisely what Mahasweta averts in “Douloti.” Mahasweta’s readers are forced instead to witness harshly realistic accounts of violence and exploitation, without romantic saviors or happy endings. In blatantly highlighting Douloti’s abjection and not giving her an escape, not even the type of moral retaliation the author grants to Mary Oraon or Dopdi, Mahasweta compels her reluctant audience to “see” the abuse. Thus the suggestion that the tribal girl has become a dehumanized object to be consumed until exhaustion leaves a sour taste in readers’ mouths. Unambiguously, her death is a shame.
As for the demand side, unlike the other narratives analyzed in this work, Mahasweta follows an uncommon (and bold) direction: she names it. Douloti’s customers in the brothel are mainly government contractors, inspectors, and the police—an array of state-sanctioned heterosexual masculinities who draw the life out of her body with impunity. Her first client “Latia,” for example, becomes a pseudo-Shakespearean remorseless lecherous villain developed in ample detail. He is a corrupt but “highly trusted government contractor. All the bridges that he has built on the Kurunda, Seil, Kora, Rohini, the little rivers in the area, have collapsed about twice. Latia leaves the scene of action with the money and finally another contractor builds the bridge” (65). At the brothel, he has killed a sex slave before, forcing her to have sex during her convalescence from an abortion and then bribing the police to evade the law without consequences. Often, Mahasweta refers to Latia’s actions in animalistic terms, casting the image of a sexually potent “rooting pig” who rapes Douloti mercilessly and at will (58). Mahasweta’s controlled but angry tone in the story reveals her impatience with these individuals who take advantage of the tribal women subjected to their exploitative businesses.
Above all, the author reinforces the scale of the government’s corruption and impunity with which officials operate. When a friend of Douloti’s procurer admonishes, “There will be a change of government and the police will get you,” the procurer (Paramananda) is quick to respond: “Who will get me brother? The police officer, the railway inspector, who can stay away from Rampiyari’s house [the brothel]?” (Imaginary 53). The perversity of Douloti’s predicament, then, is double because not only is she helpless before her daily rapes, but those committing the crimes keep her abuse in the shadows when they in fact belong to the state apparatus expected to protect her. When the contractor needs more money for his land projects, he readily brings government officials to the whorehouse to “consume” sex slaves, thus forcing the girls to lubricate the smoothly functioning engine of local agri-capitalism. In the afterword to Mahasweta’s Imaginary Maps, Spivak calls these individuals “the worst product of post-coloniality, the [Indians who use] the alibis of Development to exploit the tribals and destroy their life-system” (203).The girls have become a physical space subject to men’s abuse: “The boss has turned them into land. The boss plows and plows their land and raises the crop. They are all Paramananda’s kamiya” (59). The author resorts to the land trope in connection with the tribal girls’ bodies, suggesting that their youth, just like India’s resources, has turned into a commodity ready for unlimited appropriation.
Interestingly, in this story, the race of the abusers does not play a major role in the exploitation itself, as those who pay for sex in “Douloti” are men from a different social class, not a different race. In Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (2000), Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks observes that in Indian society “the physical ideal functions as a form of preference, as an aesthetic choice, without the ontological and legal significance it has acquired in the West[.] Differences are marked rather by economic status, but even more by one’s last name and regional and linguistic affiliations”; the critic further explains that “caste difference is always marked by cultural accoutrements such as clothing, dialect, and one’s name, but rarely, if ever, by bodily marks” as opposed to “wholly racialized” societies such as the US or Europe (1). In “Douloti,” the sexual violence tribal women endure from Indian men coincides, for example, with the representation of sexual abuse that will be explored in the next chapter through Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995), where a black sex slave is “consumed” by white men who project onto her their fantasies of raping orientalized “exotic” colored women (brutality, mutilation, humiliation), suggesting that in India both patriarchy and class play a key part in the impunity with which girls like Douloti are violated. Societies with strong patriarchal values foster abuse against women since it becomes normalized by cultural traditions, making it harder for women to escape or seek any compensation through legal means. For them, too, the oppression becomes natural.
Regarding the representation of sexual violence, despite their very different writing styles, when facing the challenge of describing rape, Mahasweta, like Therese Park, depicts Douloti’s violations through tropes of torture, pain, and detachment revealed from the point of view of the girl. Akin to Soon-ah’s initial rapes, the first time Douloti is brutalized, she has an out-of-body experience: “Are the spectator Douloti and the tortured Douloti becoming one? What is Latia [her first customer] doing now? What is this? The two Doulotis became one and a desperate girl’s voice cracked out in terrible pain” (Imaginary 58). Noticeably, rather than showcasing any parts of Douloti’s body for the reader to see, the author foregrounds her feelings of extreme pain. By focalizing the scene through Douloti’s distanced gaze, and not her abuser’s or a third party’s, the author avoids delving into what could easily become borderline erotica or pornography. Mahasweta utilizes free indirect discourse, weaving together the omniscient narrator’s and Douloti’s perspectives on the scene, thus plunging the reader into the ordeal the girl is experiencing and not allowing her audience to sit as mere voyeuristic spectators. At the same time, this strategy allows the author to represent a traumatic event that would probably be impossible for Douloti’s consciousness to formulate in words, given that she has no previous memory of sexual abuse (or sexual experience at all) and she seems to be in a state of shock, pain, and horror. What we witness is torture, not sex.
The author makes it clear that Douloti is powerless against these rapacious violations by the “lust-struck animal [Latia] that digs and tears her every day” (60). Other sex slaves keep “getting burnt by cigarettes” and the men “eat their flesh in a crazed way” (66). But in a seventy-five page story, these graphic descriptions could not fill together one page because Mahasweta’s lens focuses primarily on the structural violence of these tribal women’s situation, while she carefully manipulates “the ethics of seeing” for her audience (Sontag, On Photography 3). The writer meets the difficult challenge of representing rape with a few powerful scenes of brutal torment, but, consistent with her style, avoids melodrama completely and always presents the violence from the point of view of the desecrated woman. With little ambiguity, Mahasweta calls attention to the root causes that enable the exploitation to continue underground in India, thus forcing readers (her Indian audience above all) to consider a local cultural context that must change if bonded labor and prostitution are to be actually ended.
Sex Trafficking and the National Government: When the Sow Eats her Own Farrow
While the obvious exploiters in this tale are Indian men, Mahasweta’s story can transcend national boundaries. The author not only points fingers at the corrupt government, but her context is also global since it becomes clear that the economic measures imposed on postcolonial India have bred this patriarchal state elite perpetuating old colonial practices (the bondslavery system is in fact a legacy of the British administration, apparently abolished but conveniently tolerated). In “Douloti,” the government’s responsibility and foreign capital’s complicity are visibly exposed because those who brutalize Douloti’s body are the government’s contractors working under the new capitalist reforms that will supposedly aid in India’s development.10 When Douloti wonders where all her clients come from, another sex slave informs her: “New roads are being built around Madhpura, and the cement work is going up near the river. There are a thousand contractors and workers there” (Imaginary 77). The narrator denounces: “The social system that makes Crook [Ganori] Nagesia a kamiya is made by men” (61)—and those men who carve Douloti’s commodified anatomy stand for an economic system that extracts surplus value out of “disposable” female bodies while acting in the interest of preserving local and foreign capital with the blessings of the “development” mantra.
The inconsistencies of this free market model have been analyzed by critics of capitalism such as Eric Hobsbawm and Noam Chomsky, who argue that countries in the global North actually maintained some degree of state intervention and protectionism, especially in the nineteenth century, to allow their own economies to thrive while unbounded free market policies were imposed on third-world countries, destroying their abilities to compete—of course, all with the help of (corrupt) government elites in the third world. As Samarasinghe observes, “it is the governments who enthusiastically embrace economic aspects of globalization while either conveniently ignoring the negative impact of such policies and/or being reluctant to redress such problems because they happen to [affect] mostly women who do not have a voice” (117). In this story, the women do have a voice, but Mahasweta hints that the government does not care to listen.
Let us not forget that the Indian government Mahasweta describes represents a continuation of state power after hundreds of years of colonial exploitation at the hands of England. In this respect, Shelly Wright explains that “Third World countries, while given apparent political self-determination, are increasingly caught in neo-colonialism of global capitalism and militarization” (207). Wright further contends that the “decolonization process has not improved the lives of most [people] in the developing world arguably because the concept of self-determination that was adopted is geared towards servicing First and Third World male elites and their own goals of political, military and economic ascendancy” (207). As Frantz Fanon or Ngugi Wa Thiong’o would argue, these servile puppet leaders maintain the psychological structures of the old colonial regime, so that exploitation has only changed hands and bourgeois inequality remains intact. “When the British left,” Mahasweta stresses, “they left our brains colonized, and it remains like that” (Chotti Munda xiii). The men here depicted represent a net of endemic corruption so pervasive that readers may be left wondering how any social change can possibly be achieved when the system seems decayed to its very foundations.
The counter-hegemonic representatives of the corrupt democracy Mahasweta describes (embodied in this story in the Catholic Father Bomfuller, the abolitionist school teacher Mohan, and the tribal-turned-socialist Bono) blatantly fail Douloti. The priest only manages to collect data and compile a report on the magnitude of bonded labor, providing more information for a government that already knows about the problem. Bomfuller and Mohan then perform the joke of a democratic system ineffective at best. Žižek would argue that, in fact, their ideological counter-narrative actually invigorates the current capitalist model by allowing some apparent room for opposition (as in a real democracy) but maintaining deep structures untouched, which Mahasweta’s rhetorical question at the end of the story leaves very clear. “Douloti” shows that these women, kept invisible because of the nature of their work (prostitution), are sucked into a capitalist machine benefitting those lucky participants in government projects, from which the poor will probably not see a single benefit—quite the contrary, because this “development” comes at the expense of their environment, their health, their bodies.
More worryingly, Mahasweta’s story uncovers that the government of India knows of Douloti’s injustice, but policy-makers intentionally and conveniently keep her invisible, so even if she tried to speak her abuse, this subaltern woman would not be heard. She is allowed no escape and, once evicted from the whorehouse, her prospects will not improve. Contemplating her future, Douloti thinks: “A three hundred rupee loan becomes infinite in eight years. The boss has raised more than forty thousand rupees wringing this body of mine. Still I owe. There will be a loan as long as my body is consumable. Then I’ll leave as a beggar” (Imaginary 87). But she never gets that far. With her body “thread bare” and without any money, not even for the bus fare to get back home, Douloti is thrown out of the whorehouse, so she walks in the hope of seeing her family again before dying. On her way back to her village, Douloti collapses at a school, ironically, over the map of India the school teacher has drawn to celebrate the anniversary of India’s Independence:
Filling the entire Indian peninsula from the oceans to the Himalayas, here lies bonded labor spread-eagled, kamiya-whore Douloti Nagesia’s tormented corpse, putrefied with venereal disease, having vomited up all the blood in its desiccated lungs.
Today, on the fifteenth of August [India’s Independence Day], Douloti has left no room at all in the India of people like Mohan [the abolitionist schoolteacher] for planting the standard of the Independence flag. What will Mohan do now? Douloti is all over India. (93)
The conclusion explicitly links Douloti’s exhausted body with third-world physical space in the service of national and transnational capital: “The last sentence of the story,” Spivak argues, “pushes us from the local through the national to the neocolonial globe,” as the narrative ends with Douloti’s body over the physical space of the map of India, and, by implication, the nonspace of global capital with its diffused seat in the global North (“Woman” 128). Spivak further claims that “global feminization of superexploitated labor is determined precisely by the gendering of sexual difference all over the world[,] and Europe [just like other Western powers] gains from it” (Outside 113). By looking at Douloti, whose name coincidentally (or not) can be interpreted to mean “traffic in wealth,” Spivak suggests that “the traffic in wealth [douloti] is all over the globe” (95). By the end of the story, the girl’s metamorphosis from human being to consumable object is complete. As the news article mentioned in the introduction of this chapter reveals, perhaps the most sinister side of this exploitation lies in the fact that today there are countless Doulotis in the margins all over India who remain purposefully unseen, unimportant, and disposable, suggesting that, because of sex trafficking, poor, racialized women are paying with their lives the hidden costs of their nation’s “development.”
Conclusion
Like Therese Parks’s novel about “comfort women” during World War II, Mahasweta’s story unmasking the prevalence of sexual slavery in post-independence India compels analysis. One may wonder about the reason why Western readers have so readily embraced Mahasweta into the literary canon, or the reaction that sex trafficking narratives like Douloti’s generate in first-world audiences. Do they, coinciding with the author’s intention, mobilize empathetic social change, or do they reinforce Western cultural hegemony by presenting such a bleak and hopeless portrait of reality that it merely reminds those in the global North how blessed we are? Indeed, Mahasweta’s portrait of gendered violence and exploitation is shocking. On a related note, one could extrapolate what Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) or Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) have claimed about shocking images: that showing atrocity does not necessarily translate into political action. In Can Literature Promote Social Justice? (2006), Kimberly A. Nance suggests that when the problem represented seems unavoidable and does not offer readers a subtle (never accusatory) opportunity for intervention, the narrative could actually distance audiences (73). Donna M. Bickford, among others, notes that “characterizing traffickers [and consumers] as evil villains [ … ] is unlikely to lead to the systemic and structural changes necessary to end trafficking” (134). Sankaran Krishna, for his part, observes that many scholars object that the “dominant mood produced by postcolonial theory is one of ironic resignation and apathy, rather than militancy and third-world solidarity” (118).
If this is the case for “Douloti,” the reason we read or teach this story in a Western classroom should at least be suspected. For many well-intentioned readers, a vague sense of guilt over indirect complicity with industries that rely on third-world exploitation (most of them nowadays) may have a numbing effect. On another note, one finds exclusively Indian elements enabling sex trafficking in this tale: the caste system with its rigid social divisions that have kept the tribals as outsiders; religion, especially Hinduism, which assumes the inferior role of women in the family and society; a history of colonialism where women have been doubly oppressed by colonizer and colonized men—the pervasive patriarchy Spivak eloquently addresses in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Thus sex trafficking like Douloti’s could be interpreted by Western readers as a distant reality happening mainly because of local corruption (which Mahasweta clearly shows) and unscrupulous traffickers (which books like Kristof and WuDunn’s Half the Sky would lead one to assume), with Western audiences projecting their anxieties over these orientalized foreign men. Yet, after examining the issue more closely, readers can understand that the global economic context plays a major role because Western economies need and profit from weak, militarized governments servile to their profit-seeking demands.11 Through disregarding the responsibility Western capitalism has in the trafficking of third-world women (however apparently remote and removed), any analysis may lose its potential for truly significant change or, worse, turn into a justification for financial, cultural, or military domination as analyzed by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978). At the same time, the complicity and liability of the local governments in power cannot be dismissed merely by blaming global finance capital: sex trafficking cannot exist without national governments enabling it in some form or another, as Mahasweta powerfully proves. Government officials disregard these women’s plights precisely because their exploitation, ultimately, increase national revenues.
Finally, a trafficking victim like Douloti does not offer “feel-good” instances of subaltern female empowerment: the girl’s structural situation does not allow for her to escape alive—which does not mean that Mahasweta depicts Douloti as a passive, “helpless animal” (Joyce, Dubliners 32). The author unmistakably shows that bonded prostitution, so prevalent among the most vulnerable populations in India, can and often does translate into death. This girl is raped for years, becomes sick, and dies when her body cannot take any more, while, one can imagine, another young Douloti will quickly replace her at the whorehouse. Mahasweta’s focus, nonetheless, does not seem to engage readers at the level of rescue work (in the story “rescuers” actually prove most ineffective), but invites a critique of society and the economic context instead. The clients the author names are not “random johns” but directly implicate the state, which allows her story to generate room for civic debate and, she hopes, intervention. In choosing to represent Douloti as a victim, the author then stresses the material realities of countless sex-trafficked tribal women and sheds light on such an injustice.12
By having analyzed Mahasweta’s “Douloti,” I am not implying that all third-world trafficked women are doomed to victimhood and death like the protagonist of this chapter. In fact, sociological research shows that many women choose to become trafficked for prostitution (leaving open the question as to whether or not that is a real choice), and, in the case of those freed through NGOs mediation, several arrange their re-trafficking voluntarily. A more fruitful way of looking at this story, then, would deconstruct the silences and contradictions that allow Douloti’s exploitation to remain underground in her own society and analyze the circumstances of Douloti’s constraints nationally in terms of gender and class within the current globalized economy that necessitates inequality to perpetuate itself and grow, on its most basic level, at the expense of third-world women’s exploitation and invisibility. The next chapter will show how trafficked victims’ invisibility is actually heightened once the women leave their home countries: unlike Douloti, whose government knows of her presence and, basically, ignores her, those women trafficked across countries will be forced to hide their mistreatment from the legal institutions, or face worse consequences.
NOTES
1. The devastated, war-ridden, Afghanistan predictably leads the ranking (Bowcott).
2. In Female Sex Trafficking in Asia: The Resilience of Patriarchy in a Changing World (2008), Vidyamali Samarasinghe explains that “[t]he Human Rights Task Force on Cambodia (1995) has listed several types of torture and inhumane treatment perpetrated on sexually exploited young women in Cambodia,” but traffickers’ modus operandi is relatively similar everywhere (114). “Such maltreatment includes beatings with wires and sticks, electric shocks, torture with acid, forced confinement in locked rooms, forced intake of drugs, forced sex and lack of access to medical treatment for sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV/AIDS” (114). The researcher further argues that “female prostitution is a virtual death sentence to sex workers because of the threat of HIV/AIDS,” or severe depression and suicide (114).
3. The media’s fascination with uncovering high-profile cases where judges or politicians are implicated in sex trafficking (by funding it, overlooking it, consuming sex from trafficked women or children, etc.) reflects the degree of awareness of the issue the public has reached. In fact, trafficking in many societies has become an open secret, a repressed symptom constantly threatening to come to the surface, so many governments prefer to look the other way and tolerate it because it allows the economic system to continue to reproduce itself. To disregard ethical issues revolving around sexually exploited subaltern women becomes easier, even “necessary.” One can mention the Philippines, whose situation is comparable to other South Asian countries where the “[p]atriarchy of the state seems to intersect with gender and class. The elitist attitude of the patriarchal state, at best seems to be only marginally concerned about the plight of women of the underclass who are the most likely to seek employment in risky work overseas” (Samarasinghe 158). Research shows that sex trafficking across Asia tends to move from impoverished countries such as Nepal and the Philippines to those that have experienced rapid development accompanied by vast inequality such as India. In this country, therefore, the “contradictions” become more blatant since the extremes meet within national borders, as the 1998 Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze persuasively explore in An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013).
4. Also see Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen in this bibliography.
5. In the body of this work, I will refer to the author as Mahasweta, echoing Spivak’s calling her such in accordance with the Indian tradition of referring to public well-known figures by their first names.
6. For an analysis of violence and the ethics of resistance, see Robert J. C. Young’s “The Right to Resist” (2011). Also, see Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (2004) and Slavoj Žižek’s Violence (2008) in this bibliography.
7. See Graham Huggan’s Chapter 2, “Consuming India.”
8. This is the second story in Mahasweta’s Imaginary Maps (1995), translated by Spivak.
9. As explained in Chapter 3 through the analysis of sex trafficking and the military, Mahasweta’s “Draupadi” reflects how rape is often utilized as a war weapon. It is worth noting that during military armed conflicts, war rape has been utilized as a systematic weapon against men, more than against women; societies that regard women the property of men consider rape a violation of men’s status above all, as it was the case in Serbia and Croatia.
10. As Samarasinghe explains:
Women or men cannot be incorporated into the processes of globalization without the cooperation of the respective states[.] Mittleman (2000) asserts that while no state is untouched by globalization, the majority of states in the South play a ‘courtesan role’ to global capital, by pandering to the demands of those who are willing to invest in their countries, especially in order to have access to cheap labor. Hence, it is becoming increasingly evident, that [the] economic power of the state in the South is boosted by its partnership with global capital (Chin, 2000). (52)
11. See anything by Cynthia Enloe’s in this bibliography for an analysis of the relation between economic globalization and militarism.
12. India, in fact, has several laws in place designed to protect and support the tribals, but Mahasweta shows that the problem has to do with government corruption and not lack of legislation.