Author: Krittika Das, Dr Koyel Chanda

Abstract: Motherhood has continually been contextualized in the cultural discourse as the place of purity, sacrifice and emotional abundance. These idealizations, nevertheless, tend to mask material and ideological ways in which the maternal identities are manufactured, disciplined and consumed. This article presents a revisionist feminist interpretation of the story of Breast-Giver by Mahasweta Devi that the text challenges the sacrificialized notion of motherhood by revealing its intimate alignment with labor, stratification of classes, as well as paternalism. Although the previous academic research on the story has been productive in terms of discussing not only subalternity but also female misery and the exploitative nature of the body, it has failed to consider enough the aspects of lactation as an extractive labor or motherhood as an ideological framework by the dependence of the economy. Methodologically, the research takes a qualitative, textual and theoretical form that is premised on revisionist feminism, feminist materialism, postcolonial criticism, intersectionality, and womanist intuition. The paper reveals how the maternal body is turned into a place of use-value, biology capacity redefined as a social and economic activity through a close analysis of Jashoda as a wet nurse. The physical aging and ultimate desertion of Jashoda is a gradual process that discloses the expendable nature of the system of mythifying motherhood but forecheseeably overloading women who give birth to babies. The pivotal contribution of the paper is to rebrand Breast-Giver as a rethinking of sacred motherhood. It suggests that Devi does not just depict the ailing mamma; it questions the social and political framework that transforms the motherhood nurturing into marketable commodities. Through this the study will contribute to existing arguments on reproductive labor, feminine embodiment, as well as politics of care in the postcolonial and global feminist debate.

Keywords: Commodified Motherhood, Revisionist Feminism, Female Body Politics, Maternal Labor, Postcolonial Feminism, Subaltern Motherhood

Article Info: Received: 28 Mar 2026; Received in revised form: 23 Apr 2026; Accepted: 26 Apr 2026; Available online: 30 Apr 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.112.97