Can the Subaltern Speak? Voice, Representation, and Adivasi Agency in Mahasweta Devi's Chotti Munda and His Arrow

Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow is a powerful postcolonial novel that centres on Chotti Munda, a tribal person whose resistance to the symbols and institutions of authority becomes a powerful critique of colonial and postcolonial structures of domination. Through Chotti’s memory, collective consciousness, resistance to landlords and state power, and changing relationship with history, the novel suggests that while the subaltern may be structurally and institutionally prevented from speaking, subaltern communities still produce alternative forms of knowledge, memory, resistance, and collective speech. This paper examines Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and its interrogation of subalternity, representation, and epistemic exclusion. The paper investigates the conditions under which subaltern speech becomes socially, politically, and epistemically intelligible. The paper concludes that Chotti Munda and His Arrow both confirms and complicates Spivak by demonstrating that, although subaltern voices remain mediated by structures of representation, subaltern communities still manage to generate alternative forms of knowledge, memory, resistance, and collective agency.