Literature Library study guide
Breast Stories
Three stories—Draupadi, Breast-Giver, and Behind the Bodice—show women confronting state violence, domestic exploitation, poverty, and the public consumption of their bodies.
- Literary form
- Short-story collection
- First published
- 1997
- Literary period
- Twentieth-century Bengali literature in translation
- Region / tradition
- India
- Original language
- Bengali
What happens in this work?
Breast Stories brings together three works by Mahasweta Devi in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translation: Draupadi, Breast-Giver, and Behind the Bodice. They were written at different times and do not form one continuous plot. The collection places them together because each examines how a woman’s breasts are turned into an object by a powerful system. The body may be targeted by the state, used as labor within a household, or converted into a photograph and public spectacle. The repeated focus is deliberately uncomfortable. Devi refuses language that would make exploitation distant or polite.
Draupadi follows Dopdi Mejhen, an Indigenous rebel pursued by security forces. Her name recalls Draupadi in the Mahabharata, but Devi rewrites the older rescue story. After Dopdi is captured and sexually assaulted in custody, she refuses the command to cover herself and confronts the officer responsible. The ending does not undo the violence or turn suffering into an easy victory. It changes the direction of the gaze: the authority that treated her body as proof of power can no longer control what her nakedness means.
Breast-Giver centers on Jashoda, whose family’s poverty becomes more severe after her husband is injured. She earns food by becoming a wet nurse for a wealthy household and feeds many children in addition to her own. Her ability to nurse is praised as sacred motherhood while being consumed as labor. When age and illness make that labor unavailable, the people who depended on her disappear. Her breast cancer and isolation reveal the cruelty of honoring a role while abandoning the person who performed it.
Behind the Bodice follows Gangor, a migrant laborer photographed by Upin, a professional image-maker. His attention turns her body into a picture that circulates beyond her control. The story moves among Gangor, Upin, his wife Shital, his associate Ujan, the police, media, and popular culture. Upin imagines himself as witness or rescuer, but his obsession cannot protect Gangor from violence and may help expose her to it. Taken together, the stories ask readers to distinguish seeing suffering from taking responsibility for the structures that produce it.
What was happening when it was written?
Devi was a Bengali writer and activist whose fiction often focuses on Adivasi communities, land, labor, gender, and state violence. The three stories first appeared separately before Spivak translated and grouped them in the 1997 English volume. Spivak’s accompanying essays are part of that edition’s interpretive frame, but students should first track what each story itself does. Content warnings are necessary: the book includes sexual violence, custodial torture, cancer, abandonment, and exploitation. Reading carefully means neither hiding those events nor describing them for shock. Use precise language, center the women’s choices, and connect individual harm to the institutions around it.
Who matters, and why?
Dopdi Mejhen
Dopdi is an Indigenous political fighter who knows the land, the risks of capture, and the state’s methods. The officers try to reduce her to a target and then a damaged body. Her final refusal denies them control over the meaning of what they have done, without pretending that courage cancels trauma.
Jashoda
Jashoda’s care is real, but the household turns it into a resource. Religious praise for motherhood hides an economic exchange in which her body supports many people while she receives little lasting security. Her illness exposes the difference between valuing milk and valuing the woman who provides it.
Gangor
Gangor is first presented through Upin’s camera and desire, so readers must work against his framing to recover her position as a laborer facing poverty and police power. Her later confrontation forces the photographer to see consequences that his dramatic images could not contain.
Upin
Upin wants to believe that photography reveals truth and that concern makes him different from exploiters. His fixation on Gangor’s body shows how easily witness can become possession. The story tests whether an image-maker accepts responsibility for what happens after an image circulates.
Big ideas to track
The body as labor, evidence, and battleground
Each institution assigns a use to a woman’s body: the state marks an enemy, a household buys nurture, and the media sells an image. Devi makes those uses material so that abstract words such as oppression have visible agents, benefits, and costs.
Resistance without comforting resolution
Dopdi and Gangor confront observers, while Jashoda’s story ends in abandonment rather than triumphant reversal. The collection does not require every harmed person to become an inspiring symbol. It asks what resistance can mean when the larger system remains powerful.
Myth, motherhood, and public stories
Names and roles connect the women to familiar stories: epic Draupadi, sacred mother, desirable photographed body. Devi reworks those stories to show how reverence can coexist with violence. A culture may praise womanhood in general while exploiting actual women.
How the writing works
Repetition across three separate stories
The shared bodily focus changes meaning from torture to nourishment to visual commodity. Comparison is therefore part of the form. Readers should not flatten the stories into one message; the repeated image becomes powerful because its social function changes.
Mythic names and broken expectations
Dopdi’s name recalls a heroine divinely protected from public stripping, but Devi removes miraculous rescue. Jashoda’s maternal role receives sacred language without sacred protection. These reversals expose the gap between cultural ideals and material treatment.
Shifts in gaze and narrative distance
Officials, families, photographers, and readers look at the women from positions of power. The stories sometimes follow that gaze and then break it by changing perspective or forcing a confrontation. Reading ethically requires noticing who is looking, who is displayed, and who can answer back.
Moments to notice while you read
Draupadi: the pursuit and capture of Dopdi
What to notice: Track the official language used to identify Dopdi as a target and compare it with the practical knowledge and relationships through which she understands herself.
Why it matters: The state tries to turn a person into a file and an operation. The contrast establishes why naming, perspective, and control over the story are political.
Draupadi: the final confrontation
What to notice: Focus on Dopdi’s decisions after the assault and on the commander’s inability to make her respond according to his expected script.
Why it matters: The ending relocates fear without erasing harm. Its force comes from refusal and from a changed gaze, not from a false claim that the violence has been repaired.
Breast-Giver: Jashoda becomes a professional wet nurse
What to notice: List the economic pressures, family expectations, religious praise, and material exchanges that transform Jashoda’s capacity to nurse into paid work.
Why it matters: Care is both intimate and economic. The scene shows how language about sacred motherhood can hide who benefits from a woman’s exhausting labor.
Breast-Giver: illness and abandonment
What to notice: Compare the number of people who once depended on Jashoda with the people present when cancer makes her unable to continue serving them.
Why it matters: The contrast reveals that the household valued a function more than a person. It turns the story’s maternal imagery into an indictment of disposable labor.
Behind the Bodice: photograph, circulation, and confrontation
What to notice: Follow the steps by which Upin’s photograph leaves Gangor’s control, then compare his idea of rescue with what Gangor has actually experienced.
Why it matters: The sequence asks whether exposure produces justice or another kind of use. It also forces the observer to face consequences that an aesthetic image left outside the frame.
Questions to test your understanding
Answer in your own words. Then point to a specific moment in the work that supports your answer.
- How does the meaning of the breast change across the three stories, and what remains constant?
- Why does Devi revise the Mahabharata rescue pattern in Draupadi rather than repeat it?
- How does praise for Jashoda's motherhood help the household avoid recognizing her as a worker?
- At what point does Upin's witnessing become a form of possession or exploitation?
- Which story offers the least comforting ending, and how does that discomfort strengthen its criticism?
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The stories and translation remain protected. Read them in a lawful publisher or library edition; this guide reproduces no passage from the book.