“Someone called India”: Urban Space and the Tribal Subject in Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful”

In recent years, scholarship in both the humanities and social sciences has positioned urban space as the site of cosmopolitan, transformative experience for women. In an interdisciplinary study of gender in urban space, Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker note that “although women, the poor, children, and minorities in most cities have not been granted full and free access to the streets-they are not complete citizens-industrial life has brought them into public life” (2). Women, Ali and Rieker suggest, “may use the urban space for mobility, transgression, and different pleasures that they seek, in the process navigating the everyday in favorable and unfavorable terms,” a process that allows them to “survive and ourish in the interstices of the city” (2) as they “negotiate” the “tensions” of “contemporary urban landscapes” (2-3). In these assertions, there is a signicant slippage between capitalist production (“industrial life”), political discourse (“public life”), and physical space (the urban). As this account of urban experience unconsciously associates spatial mobility with the advent of industrialization, it also presumes a cosmopolitan mobility based on a privileged relationship to industrialization. In other words, the subjects who seek out “different pleasures” are already able to navigate urban space with relative autonomy; a similar view of urban mobility has also surfaced in notable examples of contemporary South Asian ction.1 Absent from these discussions, though, is the tribal subject’s relationship to the cosmopolitan narrative of Indian development. Drieskens and Mermier, for example, argue that “[t]he specic cosmopolitism of each city becomes a universal characteristic of cities in general” (17), without putting much pressure on the potential exclusions of such a formulation.2 If public life is contiguous with industrial life, what are the consequences of such a formulation for tribal subjects who lack the material resources and cultural capital to negotiate the industrial urban environment on equal terms?