RETRACING THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE NATIVE INFORMANT THROUGH GAYATRI SPIVAK, MAHASWETA DEVI, AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Abstract

This thesis attempts to trace an aetiology of the ‘native informant’, a term Gayatri Spivak borrows from anthropology, and its trajectory across the face of postcolonial studies. Spivak defines this figure through various Derridean schemas in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), though it is primarily an (im)possible perspective captive to the neocolonial forces of global capitalism; in other words, a subservient, compromised position. In chapters two and three, this thesis will place its exegeses in conversation with the stories of Mahasweta Devi (as Spivak herself does), towards enunciating these intricate forces. This thesis first interrogates the figure of the postcolonial informant, and the problems it poses for the postcolonial academy (which, as Neil Lazarus reminds us in the Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), arises at the intersections of capitalism and decolonisation). We then move into disentangling the complex relationship between the native informant and the subaltern in order to get a critical handle on both, while drawing on the works of the Subaltern Studies group (Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak), in conversation with Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha” (1989). This allows us, in chapter three, having isolated the two, to reconstellate the ethical relationship between postcolonial informant and subaltern as a fundamentally chiasmatic one: a figure-eight critical motion in which both are implicated in each other’s ontologies. This is enunciated in three instances: Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful” (1985), Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1974), and Spivak’s own exegeses on the Rani of Sirmur (Critique) and Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri (“Subaltern”). We then, finally, turn our findings onto Spivak herself, and consider her implication in the problematics of native informancy.