Voice of the outcasts: Mahasweta Devi was a rare combination of artistry, activism
I went to see her. To say goodbye, in a sense. Seeking closure, perhaps. I didn’t recognise her. Lying in state, coddled in flowers, swathed in white, face turned away from the hushed reverence surrounding her.
If this had been one of her own stories, there would no doubt have been irony, a scathing reference to the hypocrisies that attend such occasions, some darkly humorous aside in her trademark style. But her voice is gone. What we have left is the legacy.
So what made hers such a unique voice?
As a writer of fiction, she carved a distinct space for herself, inhabited by the outcast and the downtrodden, the marginalised and dispossessed: tribals, migrant workers, landless labourers, men and women both. Characters hewn from people she had met in her travels through the rural hinterland, living in the villages she wrote about.
She told their stories – of utter destitution, of unceasing exploitation, of structures of power at the village panchayat and district administration level, of struggle and resistance, of survival.
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| Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016). |
Her major contribution to lndian literature was to include in its imaginary this otherwise invisible strata of our body politic, not only as brute fact but as complex, layered human beings.
In terms of style, she had a way of infusing the harsh reality of which she wrote with an epic, mythic imagery, with a symbolic complexity, that lifted it into the realms of true literature.
A dry, sardonic tone, dark humour, an elliptical syntax that worked the reader hard, slippage from one register of Bengali to another including dialect, were typical of her fiction.
Equally important to her was her journalistic work – reporting on incidents of injustice and abuse, writing a regular column - and her activist, organising role.
She edited a journal, Bortika, which featured those otherwise denied a voice; she helped form organisations to fight for tribal rights; she sued and testified, spoke out in protest.
It is this combination of creative artistry and social activism that made Mahasweta Devi unique. This is her legacy.
Witness this extract from her "Draupadi", in a translation by Gayatri C Spivak:
"Dossier: Dulna and Dopdi worked at harvests, rotating between Birbhum, Burdwan, Murshidabad, and Bankura. In 1971, in the famous Operation Bakuli, when three villages were cordoned off and machine
gunned, they too lay on the ground, faking dead. In fact, they were the main culprits. . . In the morning, at the time of the body count, the couple could not be found. The blood-sugar level of Captain Arjan Singh, the architect of Bakuli, rose at once and proved yet again that diabetes can be a result of anxiety and depression. . . .
Dulna and Dopdi went underground for a long time in a Neanderthal darkness. The Special Forces, attempting to pierce that dark by an armed search, compelled quite a few Santals in the various districts of West Bengal to meet their Maker against their will. By the Indian Constitution, all human beings, regardless of caste or creed, are sacred.
Still, accidents like this do happen. Two sorts of reasons: (1) the underground couple's skill in self-concealment; ( 2 ) not merely the Santals but all tribals of the Austro-Asiatic Munda tribes appear the same to the Special Forces. […]
Draupadi Mejhen was apprehended at 6:53pm. . . . At 8:57 Senanayak's dinner hour approached, and saying, 'Make her. Do the needful,' he disappeared. . .
Then morning comes. . .
Senanayak walks out surprised and sees Draupadi, naked, walking toward him in the bright sunlight with her head high. The nervous guards trail behind.
What is this? He is about to cry, but stops.
Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds.
What is this? He is about to bark.
Draupadi comes closer. Stands with her hand on her hip, laughs and says, The object of your search, Dopdi Mejhen. You asked them to make me up, don't you want to see how they made me?
Where are her clothes?
Won't put them on, sir. Tearing them.
Draupadi's black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins laughing. Draupadi wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is as terrifying, sky splitting, and sharp as her ululation, What's the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?
She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak's white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, There isn't a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, counter me - come on, counter me -?
Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid."
Can one think of another writer who can achieve this particular, distinct, voice?