ABSTRACT
In discussing Mahasweta Devi's story ‘Douloti the Bountiful’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes the story's ending. Douloti, the daughter of an Indian tribal bonded worker, is sold into bonded prostitution in order to repay her father's loan. Devastated by venereal disease, she dies walking to hospital, having lain down on the comfort of the bare earth where the local schoolmaster had drawn the map of India in order to teach his students nationalism in preparation for Independence Day. The next morning the schoolmaster and his students find Douloti on the map (Spivak, 1992,a). This tension between the assertion of national identity in the postcolonial nation and the presence of the female subaltern, can be paraphrased as a problematic relationship between the map and the body. The map in Devi's story stands as a symbol of the national territory, the geographic outline both constituting and symbolizing the ‘imagined community’ of the nation (Anderson, 1983).
