Indigenous Feminisms and Mongrel Theoretical Discourses: Rereading MahaSweta Devi through Eastern and Western Paradigms

This article offers an extended, theoretically layered re-reading of MahaSweta Devi’s oeuvre through the intersecting lenses of Indigenous feminisms and what is here conceptualized as mongrel theoretical discourse. It argues that Devi’s literary and activist practice unsettles the epistemic divide between Eastern and Western paradigms by producing a hybrid feminist imaginary grounded in Adivasi lifeworlds, anti colonial struggle, and gendered subaltern agency. Drawing on close readings of Draupadi, Stanadayini (Breast Giver), Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, Chotti Munda and His Arrow, and Aranyer Adhikar, the essay demonstrates that Devi’s representations of Indigenous and marginalized women cannot be adequately interpreted within either Western liberal/postcolonial feminism or essentialized cultural nationalism. Instead, her texts demand mongrel hermeneutics attentive to relational ontology, land based identity, oral memory, and embodied resistance. By bringing Eastern philosophical traditions (Shakta imaginaries, dharmic ethics, animist cosmology) into dialogic tension with Western theoretical frameworks (subaltern studies, intersectionality, Marxist feminism, decolonial theory), the study situates MahaSweta Devi as a foundational figure in global Indigenous feminist thought whose work theorizes plural feminist modernities beyond East/West binaries.