Reading Notes W 17:Mahasweta Devi "GIRIBALA" Part B

Giri is only 14 years of age when she is married off to the abusive Aulchand and indoctrinated into the patriarchal dictum: “A daughter born. To husband or death. She’s already gone” In this property exchange in which Giri’s father paid Aulchand “eighty rupees and a heifer before he married her,” Giri is cast into the patriarchal bargain for exchange “After the birth of her fourth child, a daughter she named Maruni,¹ she asked the doctor at the hospital, where she went for this birth, to sterilize her”. Her request for sterilization raises questions of reproductive control and incurs the wrath of her husband. When Aulchand terrorizes her to tell him why, it becomes apparent that Giri chooses to preclude her reproductive system from any further patriarchal control in a society where, “having a daughter only means having to raise a slave for others” . Giri’s uterus goes permanently on strike from further patriarchal intrusion in a country that devalues daughters as disposable second skins.
Giri’s Bela had become another victim of a duplicitous business venture of “procuring girls on the pretext of marriage”. Devi observes that the police do little to help the mothers and young girls in these circumstances. Instead, they blame it on the father and the fact that “Poor Bela had this written on her forehead”; she was a girl after all. Giri’s first response is to bang her head against a patriarchal ceiling that positions men as owners and women’s as oppressed producers. It is a determining logic that sustains gendered subordination, as “A daughter, until she is married, is her father’s property. It’s useless for a mother to think she has any say”. Here, we co-witness how young girls have become alienated commodities to be bartered, bought, and sold as instruments of sexual labor.It is not until Giri has been duped into marrying her almost ten-year old daughter, Pori, off into what she believed at the time was a way to protect her from the same fate of her first daughter Bela that Giri begins to find another way out of her predicament. Unfortunately, the mother and father have been swept away by the desire to marry their daughters. Trusting Mohan, a family friend, to find her daughter a mate before Auchland intervenes, Giri, unknowingly, delivers her second daughter into a large-scale prostitution ring. It is for this reason, that Giri sterilizes herself and removes any future daughters from her womb to this fate. For the commodity Giri produces, “unlike all other commodities, is unique to capitalism: the living human being”—the pubescent sexual laborer herself. By taking control over her body, “Giribala” directly subverts her husband’s domination over her reproductive organs and contests the transformation of her daughters into surplus labor to feed male sexual appetites. Because Giri’s fertile womb is essential for Auchland, Giri’s refusal to reproduce is the ultimate form of social power and resistance. Auchland’s chastisement of Giri’s actions confirms his economic motives: “Foolish woman, you shouldn’t have done that operation. The more daughters we have, the more money we can have”. Giri precludes her womb from begetting more fetishized commodities to be sold into sex bondage, for “no matter what euphemism is used, nobody ever sets up home for a girl bought with money”. Motivated by survival, Giri leaves Auchland “to work in other people’s homes in order to feed and raise her remaining children”.