Bodies that Bleed, Resist: Abjection in Mahasweta Devi's 'Breast Stories'

What happens when society seeks to exclude the female body on which it depends? This paradoxical situation is repeatedly staged in Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories. Translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Breast Stories is a collection of three seminal stories by Mahasweta Devi. It includes “Draupadi”, “Breast-giver”, and “Behind the Bodice: Choli ke Pichhe”. These stories interrogate the politics of the female body under the conditions of social oppression. They foreground the female body as an archive of violence and resistance. Milk, diseased and wounded flesh, and nakedness are crafted as forces that expose the fragility of the dominant social order. This makes Breast Stories a powerful exploration of abjection in literature. The account of abjection that Devi develops reveals the fate of the female body excluded by society.

What is Abjection?

Julia Kristeva offers an account of abjection in the book, Powers of Horror. Kristeva states that what “disturbs identity, system, order” causes abjection. She elaborates on this using several examples, including bodily fluids such as saliva. When water and saliva mix inside the mouth, it quenches thirst. By contrast, if saliva is spat into a glass of water, it elicits disgust. The same bodily fluid evokes different reactions depending on whether it is inside or outside the body. As long as saliva was part of the body, it was accepted as self. The moment it was spat out, it was othered. In this way, saliva becomes the site where boundaries collapse. The distinction of self from the other is disturbed the moment the ambiguity of saliva surfaces. The boundary between pure and impure, and inside and outside, also dissociates. The logic of abjection challenges the very order through ambiguous meanings. The boundaries that help understand and sustain reality are broken by ambiguity. Horror arises out of such ambiguity, not because the boundaries are broken, but because their fragility and temporariness are highlighted.  

Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories can be read as a meditation on similar boundary collapses because it repeatedly presents the female body as a site where abjection emerges. The stories note that the female body nurtures society, but the female body is discarded once it goes beyond the expectations and idealisations of the social order. Devi’s stories present milk, diseased and wounded flesh, and nakedness as manifestations of abjection. These bodily realities destabilise the social order by refusing stable meanings. So, the female body in Devi’s stories moves between motherhood and labour, desire and violence, and vulnerability and power. By occupying such an ambiguous position, it produces horror in a society that understands and tames women through categorisation. This ambiguity excludes the female body from the social order that consistently depends on it. In what follows, I examine the manifestation of abjection in Devi’s stories.

In “Breast-giver”

One of the clearest articulations of Kristeva’s abjection appears in the story, “Breast-giver”. The story centres on a brahmin woman, Jashoda. After her husband is disabled in an accident, she becomes a wet nurse for the Haldar family. Jashoda’s body becomes the primary means of survival for her family as well as the Haldar family. In this story, motherhood is idealised and celebrated as a sacred duty. However, it becomes commodified labour as the story progresses. Jashoda’s breasts are valued not as a part of her personhood but as productive instruments or as milk-making machines. Devi captures this contradiction of motherhood in a capitalist patriarchy when she describes Jashoda as a “professional mother”. 

Kristeva’s theory helps illuminate the contradiction between mothering and labour. Maternal matter, here, milk, participates in the logic of abjection because it traverses boundaries of self (mother) and other (child). Milk occupies an ambiguous position between intimacy and alterity. This ambiguity is more pronounced in Jashoda’s case because the children she nurses are not her biological offspring. Her lactating body destabilises the distinction between motherhood and wage labour as Jashoda’s breast becomes the site where the categories that society seeks to separate collapse.

The story’s most powerful moment of abjection arrives as Jashoda’s breast becomes cancerous. Her body, which was once a sacred source of nourishment, is now expelled as it becomes diseased. Bodily decay confronts society with mortality and vulnerability. The cancerous breast exposes how quickly the reverence around motherhood vanishes when the productive body begins to fail. Abandoned by the families that once worshipped her as the “Mother”, Jashoda becomes an exemplification of the logic of abjection – the body that sustained society is excluded as it begins to shed light on the fragility of the idealised social order.

In “Behind the Bodice”

The story “Behind the Bodice” extends the concern of exclusion from the social order into the realm of visual representation. This story revolves around a migrant labourer, Gangor, who becomes the object of photographer Upin Puri’s fascination. Her breasts are aestheticised and fetishised through the male gaze that operates from behind the camera. At first, Upin believed he could capture and preserve Gangor’s beauty through photography. Later, Gangor’s body reveals itself to be wounded by male violence. This revelation rejects the aesthetic framing of Gangor’s body. Overtly, this story critiques voyeurism and the commodification of the female body. However, the lens of abjection reveals a deeper structure. 

Gangor’s body follows the logic of abjection as it exposes the violence of the male gaze that depends on her image. Her violated body disrupts the distinction between aesthetic object and social reality. Her desirable yet mutilated body exceeds the categories on which the male gaze seeks to aestheticise it. Gangor’s body cannot be successfully represented because the reality of gendered violence it holds cannot be contained within the symbolic order of photography. Upin fails to capture it, and abjection emerges through this failure of representation. The terror arising from this abjection is “a terror that dissembles” in the words of Kristeva. Such abjection terrorises as it does not appear openly, but is hidden behind ways of looking at a woman that are acceptable in photography. 

In “Draupadi”

This story is titled after its central character, Dopdi Mejhen. Dopdi is a tribal revolutionary captured by state forces and subjected to custodial rape. The narrative culminates in a powerful scene in which, when asked to clothe her brutalised body, Dopdi refuses. Instead, she confronts the Senanayak with the declaration, “You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?” A scene of political resistance, it also emerges as a scene of radical abjection. 

Dopdi’s violated body follows the logic of abjection by disrupting the order upon which the state seeks to dominate. She refuses to become a passive object that endures acts of violence. Dopdi does so by embracing the very act that seeks to destroy her. She accepts her corporeality, that is, her gory nakedness, and wears it like an armour. The authority of Senanayak, the representative of the state in this story, relies on strict binaries of ruler and ruled, civilised and primitive, and masculine and feminine. Dopdi’s refusal to feel shame questions his authority, civility and masculinity, thereby destabilising the binaries. This highlights the fragile and temporary distinction between protector and violator.

Mahasweta Devi’s Abjection

Unlike Draupadi’s dis-robing episode from the Mahabharat, there is no divine intervention that saves Dopdi from Senanayak and his men. It is her own gory, wounded, and naked body that becomes the source of her defiance and her protector. Dopdi actively weaponises the horror emanating from abjection into resistance and refuses the imposed exclusion. In a similar vein, Gangor’s angry confrontation holds a mirror to Upin’s advances. Her “screaming, talking, kicking the corrugated tin walls with abandon” embodies her resistance against the male gaze that seeks her body and then tries to exclude her as a ‘whore’.

The resistance conceptualised in Dopdi and Gangor’s story extends Kristeva’s abjection. For Kristeva, abjection is primarily a psychic experience. It is characterised by horror and boundary collapse. Kristeva’s abjection threatens reality by destabilising the symbolic order. Devi, on the other hand, extends this logic. She presents abjection as a source of reclaiming political agency. She presents Dopdi and Gangor resisting with their bodies. The very thing society seeks to exclude becomes the source of their resistance.

Hence, in Breast Stories, abjection is psychic, social, and political. The logic of abjection is that it destabilises the social order, reveals structures of oppression, and can result in political agency. The abjection in Devi’s stories emerges whenever the female body reveals what the social order depends upon while seeking to disavow it. Jashoda’s milk exposes the commodification of motherhood, Gangor’s wounded breasts expose the violence hidden behind representation, and Dopdi’s naked body exposes the brutality underlying state authority. While Jashoda dies questioning the social order that expected from her but offers nothing in return, Dopdi and Gangor resist. Mahasweta Devi’s fiction, therefore, transforms Kristeva’s psychic theory of abjection into a political critique of a society that seeks to exclude the female body on which it depends. And what happens when society seeks to exclude the female body on which it depends? Resistance.

Note: Academic readings of Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories that consider it from the lens of psychoanalysis are plentiful. This essay serves as a beginner-friendly, non-academic reading for those looking to explore the field.

References

Devi, Mahasweta. Breast Stories. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Seagull Books, 2020.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Sugandhaa is a prize-winning artist and writer who maintains a creative practice at the intersection of aesthetics and feminism.