Female body an onslaught terrain in mahasweta devi's ‘breast stories’

Mahasweta Devi's provocatively potent and satiric fiction “Breast Stories”, translated by Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak has women's breast as its focus. Bringing women protagonists from diverse backdrops of life Devi questions the unfathomable realities of third world social systems bringing into account the breast of a woman as a body part with different symbolic elucidations. This cluster of short fiction comprises three stories namely ‘Draupadi’, ‘Breast Giver’ and ‘Behind the Bodice’. The thread that cords these three stories is: the Breast. This research involves reflecting on the female body as an onslaught terrain. In “Draupadi ”the protagonist Dropdi Mejhen is a tribal revolutionary whose breast becomes a symbol of brutal sexual assault. Next, ‘Breast Giver’ is a story of Brahmin wet-nurse Jashoda whose breast become a denotation of food and livelihood for her children and a crippled husband. Unlike the above women's mythical counterparts these women meets their ruinous ends. The final fiction in this collection is ‘Behind the Bodice’ where the migrant laborer Gangor's breast fall for a symbolic fascination for an itinerant ace-photographer which finally becomes the reason of her own victimization. The proposed paper seeks to respond to the normative sign system where the women and their body parts provide dynamic figurative especially the breasts as a part of body that completely engulf the identity of women bearing it. The breast acts both as an object of strength and of attack in the above fables. The argument shall endure to critique the notion of body parts as erotic objects that transmogrify into objects of torment. Further dissecting the ‘wholes and parts ’of the female body, this paper also aspire to reflect on the final condition of the ‘breast ’portrayed in every story of each female protagonist of Devi's collection as it provides an image that help to unravel the harsh verity of the lives of a subaltern in a phallocentric social order.