The postcolonial intervention in culture and ideology is often enacted through reclaiming certain lost, elided over, previously unrepresented subjects of history. The site of this transformative endeavour, which seeks to put new subjects on the discursive map of nations, is often the act of revisionist historiography in both history and literature. Mahashweta Devi's short story Draupadi is a brilliant act of revisionist historiography in which she places a tribal woman – a subaltern – centre stage and casts her in a role that is both traditional and revolutionary. Resistance is an unstructured response to repression and it is a counter hegemonic move which is the core of Mahashweta Devi's writings. Draupadi is a defiant militant heroine who confronts and challenges her oppressors even when unarmed. This paper attempts to analyse Mahashweta Devi's Draupadi as a text representing the heroic resilience and resistance of a "gendered" subaltern, that brings out an entire paradigm shift