A queer indigenous response: Reading Mahasweta Devi's angry women with Spivak and Lugones

In India, the resource-rich Adivasi (indigenous) forestlands are long-standing theatres of Adivasi women's resistance against state-sanctioned sexual violence, ecological extractivism and economic exploitation. Reading Mahasweta Devi's short stories ‘Draupadi’ and ‘The Hunt’, this article considers the creative usage of Adivasi women's anger and its painful translation into action for a strengthening and liberating act of clarification resisting settler heteropatriarchy. In Devi's work, Adivasi women's angry nakedness and their annihilation of the settler become two crucial sites for calling into question settler definitions of the human. I look to the divergent approaches of decolonial and postcolonial feminism via Gayatri Spivak and María Lugones to examine how Adivasi women's anger enables a queer Adivasi response to settler colonialism. Not only does such a response debunk settler frameworks that interpellate the Adivasi within gendered caste/class ideologies of shame and terror but also, through Adivasi cultural recoding of shame/terror – inaccessible to the settler – we can disrupt the foundational Western myth of the settler as human and the Adivasi as subhuman.