Writers Editors Critics (WEC): Vol. 6, No. 2 (Sep. 2016)

By K.V. Dominic and Mahasweta Devi

Writers Editors Critics (WEC) An International Biannual Refereed Journal of English Language and Literature
Volume 6 Number 2 (September 2016)
ISSN: 2231-198X

Special Issue: a tribute to Indian poet Mahasweta Devi (14 January 1926 - 28 July 2016)

• A Poetic Tribute to Mahasweta Devi - K. V. Dominic
• Mahasweta Devi: Death cannot Claim a Valiant Soul - Ketaki Datta
• Mahasweta Devi: Fourth World Literature for Indigenous People--An Obituary - Ratan Bhattacharjee
• Charting the 'Subaltern' Terrain--The Outsider-Insider: Mahashweta Devi's "Pterodactyl" in Perspective - Poonam Sahay Aarti to Maha Shakthi - P. Gopichand & P. Nagasuseela
• Mahasweta Devi: Voice of the Deprived Millions - Manas Bakshi
• The Mourners of Mahasweta Devi: A Critical Analysis of Rudali - J. Pamela
• The Subaltern Woman and Woman as Subaltern: A Study of 34 Selected Works of Mahasweta Devi - Anisha Ghosh (Paul)
• A Critical Analysis of Mahasweta Devi's "Bharsaa" - Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya
• The Plight of Tribal People in Mahasweta Devi's "Shishu" (Children)

Writers Editors Critics (WEC) is a research journal in English literature published from Thodupuzha, Kerala, India. It is the main product of Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics (GIEWEC), a non-profit registered society of Indian English writers, English language professors as well as PhD research scholars. The publisher is hence GIEWEC itself and editor is its secretary Prof. Dr. K. V. Dominic, a renowned English language poet, critic, short story writer and editor who has to his credit 27 books. It is truly a refereed journal which has got a screening committee consisting of eminent professors. The articles are sent first to the referees by the editor and only if they accept, the papers will be published. The journal is international in the sense each issue will have contributors from outside India.
The singularity or specialty of this journal is that it has no thrust area. It is hence so accommodative that it publishes papers on all types of literatures including translations from regional languages, literary theories, communicative English, ELT, linguistics etc. In addition, each issue will be rich with poems, short stories, review articles, book reviews, interviews, general essays etc. under separate sections. WEC has print version as well as kindle version.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern History Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781615993154

Book preview

A Poetic Tribute to Mahasweta Devi

K. V. Dominic

Mahasweta Devi literally means Goddess Saraswati

Her mother’s name Dharitri meaning Earth

Yes, Mahasweta Devi who departed us on 28th July

was Saraswati to millions of tribals, dalits and marginalized

who were lifted from doom and darkness to resurgent light

She was indeed proud daughter of Mother Earth

committed to protect Earth and her inhabitants

from all kinds of exploitations and maternal assaults

Didi, you were the loving compassionate sister as well as

mother of the millions of helpless miserable fellow beings

Even at ninety you were eager to fly to wipe out tears

You could hear the scream of tortured people and

neither health nor distance could stop your incessant flights

Didi, you were the crusader of the downtrodden,

tribals, dalits, women, landless, migrants, prostitutes

You were savior of denotified tribes Lodha and Shabar

You were their mouthpiece—spoke for them, raised funds for them

legally fought for them, and organized them to fight for their rights

Didi, you are role model to all writers in the world

Unlike others writing from mansions full of luxury

and shedding crocodile tears at the plight of the poor

you lived among them, ate from their plates and

braved all dangers supporting their noble survival cause

Gandhi and Mother Teresa influenced you a lot

Practised in your life what you wrote and preached

And your social life and literary life merged into one

Your writings created an Everest in literary world

More than hundred novels and over twenty books

of short fiction all dealing with human sufferings

And your priority was for content than to form

Didi, you wanted to work for ever for your people

And hence told I don’t want to die. I want to live forever.

Only your body has departed and your spirit remains immortal

And like the mahuva tree which grows on your grave,

the values and messages you have sown in the minds

will germinate and spread all over the world and

bower aching minds from terrible burning issues

PAPERS AND POEM ON MAHASWETA DEVI

Mahasweta Devi: Death cannot claim a Valiant Soul

Ketaki Datta

Mahasweta Devi’s death came as a blow at the point of time when the whole world was being rocked by incendiaries and violent acts of terror. I am an avid reader of Mahasweta Devi’s works, not for her bare style and scintillating vocabulary, but for the underlying responsibility of making the youths aware of their existence on this earth. The youths cannot remain zombie by reading her works, they feel like working for all around them, for leaving a better universe for tomorrow! And, my own reaction on hearing the news of her abrupt demise was a journey to the days in the past, when I was dealing with Mother of 1084 as a college text and asking the students to feel the plight of Brati’s mother, who was a bereaved mother of a dead son, bearing the identifying number: 1-0-8-4. The whole class fell silent when the corpse of the mother’s son, who died during Naxalite uprising, in the ‘70s, waited to be identified by his mother. Being a teacher, delving deep into the sad event and taking it as an issue to be judged in the light of critical theory was next to impossible for me. I shed tears, not always silently, and my students shared my grief by falling silent for some moments. No doubt, literature has a certain power to stir the inmost feelings, but, the work that weds fact to fiction has a strength of its own, that can hardly be gainsaid.

Mahasweta Devi is a name of a movement, which never ends, never will end. The tribals of Purulia lost their ‘mother’ on the day when the writer-activist-humanist breathed her last. Such a soul cannot breathe her last, such a messiah cannot have an end. Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane had an inkling of his imminent crucifixion and Mahasweta Devi had an inkling of a universe being crisscrossed by valueless strife and altercations, violence and bloodshed, betrayal and apocalypse. Christ had resurrected himself and Mahasweta would resurrect herself through the conscience of each individual of modern times, who feel her absence within and gets a spur to go out on a mission to change the society.

The genius of all times, started off her writing career with the tale of Rani of Jhansi. And, even she had to take a stint of an English teacher for a length of time too. But her real call came when she began to pay visits to Purulia where the tribal people—Khedia and Shabar found a ‘mother’ in her. We, the so-called sophisticated arm-chair thinkers, cannot even imagine in our wildest dreams how Mahasweta Devi used to pay regular visits to the illiterate, un-reclaimed populace, who needed an exposure to the wider world. And, Mahasweta Devi came to their aid.

After short stint as a teacher of English in a local school, Mahasweta Devi devoted her life to writing fiction and fighting for the cause of the downtrodden. In the stories like Stanadayini [The Breast-Feeder] and Draupadi, the plight of women, especially those belonging to the lower rung of the society, come to the fore. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak translated these stories and felt as though the bare style, the powerful, un-ornamental diction, direct and straight approach to the problem the women face usually, are natural attributes of the stories, bearing stamp of a compassionate heart, weeping within.

Aranyer Adhikaar, Rudaali are just a few novels which had been filmed by eminent directors, as Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa. The voice of the have-nots, the hoi polloi got heard through her mighty pen. The wails of Draupadi, the suppressed sobs of Brati’s mother, the professional breast-beating cries of the professional crying women–all speak of the struggle of the women who were treated shabbily, since aeons.

The recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award, Jnanpith Award, Ramon Magsaysay Award and Padma Vibhushan never stood aloof from the ordinary men, the individuals who mattered the most to bring viable changes in the society. The present writer, too, had several chances to run into the gracious writer/activist in numerous programmes, either at Bangla Academy or Jibananda Sabhagriha or Rabindra Sadan. Everywhere she greeted this present writer with a smile saying, . . . Just teaching in a college will not do. Come, stand beside those who have no spokesperson to tell their stories to the people who matter. This writer used to smile back and nod in the affirmative but never took any initiative to that end save teaching one or two poor students free of charge at her residence. The remarkable progress in tribal education, improvement in the lifestyle of the tribals, financial grants for the tribal children who come out with flying colours in different board examinations—all owe to incessant efforts she had put in, to better their deplorable plight. Such was the enlightened lady, who thought of her ‘children’ before all. Nabarun was her own son, but she had even million sons apart from her own. Mahasweta Devi, the wife of Bijon Bhattacharya [her first husband], hailed from a family of talents. Ritwik Ghatak, the renowned filmmaker was her relative, Bijon Bhattacharya created stir in the theatrical scene of Bengal by writing his epoch-making play, Nabanna. Hunger, poverty can change a person to a strange one, Buddhadev Dasgupta, in his film of the eighties, Neem Annapurna had also pointed that out.

But topping all, the depiction of Sujata, Brati’s mother in the film Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa stands nonpareil. The turbulent times of the seventies had been brilliantly, rather flawlessly portrayed by Govind Nihalani on the screen. The present writer feels tempted to dwell on this novel, which had been translated brilliantly by Samik Bandyopadhyay in the form of a play and it served as the basic text for Nihalani. While this present writer had been asked to contribute to the prestigious volume on Naxalites in Cinema by Prof. Pradip Basu, an eminent academic [presently Professor of Political Science, Presidency University, Kolkata], who rose like a phoenix from his ‘Naxalite’ past, she could not but think of contributing on Mother of 1084 as a document of the turbulent times—the seventies.

Being mother of Brati, it is really surprising when, Sujata confesses at last that she knew her son hardly! She knew not her son, inside out! She was madly fond of her son, even though, the family with materialistic demands and aristocratic background was absolutely nonchalant to the presence of her youngest son in the cocoon of their household itself. Brati proved himself rebellious of the ideals of this family, by joining a group of young adults who felt deprived, outcast, who had only dreams galore in front of their eyes, like the surging tides of the sea. They dreamt of ushering liberation of thoughts, of ideals, of the political framework of the nation, of everything and all. It was the decade of LIBERATION, as the appellation ran. But, in reality, these rebellious youths were hounded out of this state, were butchered, were stamped as anti-socials. Brati, just a day before his birthday, on the sixteenth of January that year, had gone to Somu’s place, where in the dark of the night all these brats were called out by a group of boys who opposed their ideals and had been brutally hacked to death. Somu’s father, running amuck, seeking justice from pillar to post, died immediately after, leaving the family in the lurch.

As the story ran, Sujata, a bank-employee, went from one acquaintance of her dead son to the other, for sharing the inconsolable grief, in search of solace. But at the end of the day, she came back home for her daughter’s engagement, and finding all pretences reaching their heights in the so-called elite social circle, she felt lonely, absolutely cooped up in her own world with the threadbare remembrances of her dead son, Brati, all around. The picture of the sham and pretension has been faithfully etched by Mahasweta Devi. Saroj Pal, the cop, who refuses to hand the corpse of 1084 to Sujata came to Tuli’s engagement on invitation, though he dared not come upstairs to avoid direct interaction with the mother of corpse No. 1084, to whom he had been harsh and irascible. He congratulated the newly-engaged couple, however. After all, HE HAD BEEN ON DUTY!!! Dibyanath, who loathed the ways of his son’s life, kept pining for him in front of all, feigning as if he were the best father, and Brati, the best son of this world. Though he had to hush up his ‘unruly’ son’s case, though he had to take all possible care to see his son’s name not figuring in the eminent dailies! All pretence, all sham! It was only Hem, the maid, who kept weeping all day long, silently, as on this day, Brati’s existence had been snuffed out from the face of earth! It was only Sujata, the mother, who kept dropping by at the places of Brati’s friends and dear ones, sharing memories of that ill-fated day when her son’s existence stood nullified, just as they suffered the same lot, losing their dearest one, perhaps the only breadwinner of their family. Sujata re-explored her dead son in their company, in Somu’s room, in Nandini’s place, where Brati used to whisper words of endearment in her ears. Back home, while the merrymaking was on, she saw Brati in a blue shirt, getting ready to leave, halting a while beneath the stairs, throwing a long look at her! Sujata fell on the ground, her appendix being suspected to be burst! It is not stated by the author whether she came home after the surgery or succumbed to the long-nursed vermiform appendix that turned sore!

When the novel had first come out in a Bengali journal, Prasad, it moved all and sundry to tears, though detractors called it ‘sob-stuff’. Nihalani has done his job well, save the display of a serene ambience in the last scene, where Dibyanath shared mirth with his family and friends, while Sujata’s musings kept running on the screen in the background, though her ‘oneness’ with her dead son seemed in no way interrupted, rather went parallel to the din and bustle of the party, that was on!

The film had won rave reviews, had won many a heart. But I feel like losing a ‘mother’, who was not a mother of only one thousand and eighty four, but millions and millions of sons and daughters, who, loved her, revered her as their mentor, loved one and a pillar of strength!! Who says she has ‘passed away’? She is there with us, at the crack of dawn, in the serenity of gloaming, in the stillness of the night!!

References

Datta, Ketaki. ‘Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa’: A Faithful Document of the Turbulent Times on the Silver Screen in Pradip Basu, ed. Red on Silver: Naxalites in Cinema, Setu Prakashani, Kolkata, 2012.

Devi, Mahasweta, Mother of 1084, Trans. Samik Bandyopadhyay, Seagull Books, Kolkata, 1997.

Mahasweta Devi: Fourth World Literature for Indigenous People—An Obituary

Ratan Bhattacharjee

The fourth world covers all ethnic, racial, caste, linguistic, gender, even socio-political and economic marginal. Many universities including Srimata Vaishno Devi University are coming up with International Conferences on Fourth World Literature for deliberation on the prospects and challenges. Earlier Pune Higher Education Research Society organised conferences on fourth world literature. In India among the writers who wrote for the people of the Fourth World the name of Mahasweta Devi comes first and foremost. She had a long six-decade long writing career and her heart bleeds in her golden inking for the marginalised people, subalterns and the Dalits of the un-notified areas of Indian hilly region. Mahasweta Devi never changed her writing table and not the style of her writing too as she lived all her life to depict the sorrows of life and anguished existence of the oppressed sections of society, sometimes the Kurmi, Dusad or Bhangira of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh or sometimes the Santals of Bengal. On the one hand she brought Jim Corbett Lu Xun Verrier Elwin in translation. For her writings on the indigenous people she is now regarded as one of the earliest writers of Fourth World Literature which emerges as a powerful literary front after Post Colonial literature.

In 1967, Mbuto Milando while in a conversation with George Manuel of Canada used the term, ‘fourth world’ and defined it: "When native people come into their own on the basis of their own cultures and traditions, that will be the fourth world. The horizons earmarked are much larger and it is inclusive of the larger sections of the marginalized including the refugees and immigrants or transgender peoples of the world besides the native and the aborigines. Thus the fourth world as an Indian reality is envisaged. It is not a challenge against the third or the first world, but a protest against an age old attitude ingrained in the society about the marginalized of the fourth world. With the advent of globalization, it would be a blunder to drag all the oppressed sections under the same portmanteau term. Even feminism has multiple offshoots nowadays. Given the above deliberation of the indigenous nations one could now say that women are ‘triply colonized’ (to take humble liberty with Gayatri Spivak’s term doubly colonized). Besides literature and culture, deliberation can occur upon the other aspects of the fourth world which demand some attention from the disciplines like Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Dalit and Tribal Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Post-colonial Studies, Class Relations, Economics, International Relations, Anthropology, Area Studies, Sociology, Linguistics etc. Even in the First world this sub population can live but with the living standards of those of the third world and below that. Deliberate marginalization of the sub population in a state is discussed which has made the malady worse. The non-recognition and exclusion of the vast populace, Romani People, Sami, Assyrian, Kurds, and other indigenous of the first nations are to be included in the fourth world. Aboriginal Australians, Native Hawaiians, Maori of New Zealand or the Jaroas of Andamans should be given their own room in literature.

In Mahasweta Devi’s writings too, it is thus ‘re-christening of literature’ after post colonialism. Her writings reflect a shift towards a new literature which is a quest for a new space in literature for the marginalised and it gains a new momentum with novels like Mother of 1084. The laxmanrekha of literature created by the non–marginalised and by the privileged class is to be crossed globally in literature. It is like a deconstruction of the third and first world narratives which smother differences and plurality. Thus the traditional myths of literature are demolished in the perpetual engagement of the researchers in the quest for a space of the Marginalised and Mahasweta Devi emerged as the doyen of dalit literature in nearly all her writings.

She was an eminent litterateur and as a zealous activist she reached beyond the Third World life of poverty and oppression in the society to voice a loud protest against the upper caste dominated social hierarchy. Mahasweta Devi was a leftist Bengali middle class intellectual in the fifties and she herself describes the motif of her writing in Draupadi: Life is not mathematics and the human being is not made for the sake of politics. She loudly protested against all forms of social injustice even against people living in the plains such as Singur and Nandigram.

She took her creativity beyond mere writing as her heart in real bleeds for the tribal, the downtrodden, the have-nots, the deprived and the oppressed ones wherever they lived on this planet. She used her golden pen to scribble the bronze stories of barren plains that lead to no bright dawn of a new millennium. In the 6o-year long career as a writer, she penned more than one hundred novels, twenty collection of short stories and authored innumerable articles nearly all on tribal life.

Mahasweta Devi’s novels and short stories are a marvel for readers and researchers all over India, nay the world as they comprise a large chunk in postcolonial literature. Unlike many writers living in the ivory tower, she led an exemplary life of an activist and gave vent to her personal conviction and writings without ever for a single moment wavering from her firm faith. Her masterpiece was written in 1998—the Mother of 1084. It was screened and it may be called the most remarkable political novel in which we see the portrayal of a mother from a psychological point of view which is given a new dimension. She wanted to know the reasons behind her son’s participation in the Naxalite movement. This novel was inspired by Maxim Gorky’s Mother