Mahasweta Devi's "Breast Stories": The Emergence of Women as Symbols of Resistance and Creator of New Myths

Mahasweta Devi's "Breast Stories", the collection of three powerful subaltern narratives, questions the hypocrisy of social systems by investing female body with symbolic significations. The thread that ties the three stories, "Draupadi", "Breast Giver" and "Behind the Bodice" is the abuse and subjugation of women - women who stand at the centre of disruptive social structures, change, protest and rebellion, women who are tortured yet do not know to accept defeat. Besides, all three stories are marked by Devi's attempt to deconstruct the old myths to critique hypocritical, authoritative patriarchal society, to unmask the contemporary situation and to understand the position of the marginalised women in the larger social framework. The purpose of the author here is to understand how in Devi's "Breast Stories" women, though brutally abused, can convert their bodies into weapons to register their protests. The author through critical analysis of the three stories, finds that to present these women, suffering human beings who try to protest, Devi not only deconstructs old myths but she in actuality constructs new ones to portray the contemporary counterparts of graceful women of classical myths, thereby giving rise to the dialectics of margin versus centre.