In the Sixties when I had just begun to study the contemporary theatre scene in Kolkata and was already reaching out to connect with the theatre practice in the rest of the country, I was also forming a lifelong friendship with the veteran playwright Bijon Bhattacharya. His play “Nabanna” that he had co-directed with Sombhu Mitra (and in which he acted in the lead role of a farmer driven to a Lear-like madness by the Bengal Famine of 1943-44 with an intense authenticity that made his theatre image a symbol for starvation), marked the historic beginning of the IPTA and its theatre idiom. His son Nabarun would in the 1980s and 1990s identify himself as the most powerful voice in his language –– in both poetry and fiction –– for the militant critique of reckless neo-liberal consumerism nurtured and promoted by the State and a media apparatus in collusion that was growing among a marginalised youthful generation emerging as a Cultural Left, outside the pale of the organised political Left. In my closeness to father and son, unknowingly and almost unconsciously, I had been developing a kind of judgemental resistance to Mahasweta Devi, who had “left” her husband and “abandoned” her little son!
The attitude started changing slowly only when I found myself collaborating as editor (as one of my first big assignments as the newly appointed Regional Editor of Oxford University Press in Kolkata) with Mahasweta on a four-year-long project that was accomplished with the publication of a whole series of 27 titles in all –– covering a complete course in Bengali for ten years for the English medium schools in West Bengal, with readers, workbooks, supplementary readers, anthologies, a Bengali literary classic adapted for younger readers, as well as grammar texts. Originally, OUP had engaged an ELT expert with a long experience in teaching English in schools in Africa, to use his pedagogical expertise to produce a similar methodology for teaching Bengali to students for whom English was prioritised as the medium of communication and daily exchange. The expert, a Bengali by birth, was not quite comfortable with Bengali, and proposed Mahasweta as a co-author, but left the city for personal reasons.
As I collaborated with Mahasweta on the “Ananda Path” project, it proved to be a learning process for both of us. Mahasweta, engaged through the late fifties and sixties with a pet project of hers, creating a body of fiction that would document from deep within the social history of pre-colonial Bengal and neighbouring regions of eastern India. Particularly in the times when Mughal authority was cracking up and degenerating and the European adventurers were looking for fresh pastures, teasing out of the poetic/ balladic narratives of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries – she created a Bengali that was all her own, carrying the peculiar strains of the changing history.
History had become her fictional space already in 1956, when she published her first work to appear in print –– “Jhansir Rani” (The Queen of Jhansi) in 1956, as her distinctive contribution to the historical, critical literature produced as part of the commemoration of the centenary of the Revolt of 1857 in 1956-57. Mahasweta’s distinction lay in her approach to history; as she would recount to me later, she studied laboriously all the archival, historical material available on the Rani and the Revolt, under the guidance of the scholar, Praful Chandra Gupta. She later managed it herself, travelling extensively through the territory, primarily desert-bound, that the Rani ruled over. As Mahasweta collected songs and apocryphal anecdotes circulating through the terrain, she would reconstruct a history in which recorded history and popular imagination passed through the sieve of a visionary writer before converging into a dense, yet ebulliently flowing narrative; creating a genre of historical fiction that Mahasweta would later enrich with a more complex negotiation with her language.
As a matter of fact, something that has not been noticed as yet by Mahasweta Devi scholars is her passionate and dedicated involvement in the “Ananda Path” project with language, probing into the resources of the language and its possibilities, that gave her in the early 1970s a new possibility to explore on the level of language. This surfaced in her next masterpiece “Hajar Churashir Maa” (Mother of 1084), in 1974.
In her personal life, Mahasweta Devi was moving out of her second marriage at the time, and would soon set up her new home in a small, two-roomed flat near the Ballygunge station, that one had to climb up a winding iron staircase to access. Her estrangement from her son, charged her more strongly as she was “alone” again, and that is what went into the making of “Hajar Churashir Maa”, popularly read as a text valourising the Naxalites! It was the urban Naxalites who were the first to complain against the superficial, romanticised portrayal of their movement. Rather than go into a defensive mode, Mahasweta chose as her new agenda an independent study and exploration of the phenomenon of Naxalism at its origins as a revolt of the marginalised tribal communities demanding their right to the forest that was being forcibly snatched away from them. It led to her next major work of fiction –– “Aranyer Adhikar” (Right to the Forest) –– in 1977.
As with her “Jhansir Rani”, so with this new work, she began with a close reading of K. Suresh Singh’s “Dust Storm and Hanging Mist”, a closely researched history of the turn of the century revolt led by Birsar Munda, followed again by an extensive tour of the territory, collecting memories and narratives still circulating among the tribals of Chhotanagpur. It was this exposure to a reality that she had ‘discovered’ that opened up the fictional world of her great short stories and novellas /novelettes –– “Bashai Tudu”, “Draupadi”, “Aajir”, “Bayen”, “Master Saab”, “Donlati”, “Stanadayini”, “Pterodactyl”, “Puran Sahay” and “Pirtha”, “Chotti Munda O Taar Teer” –– where lived experiences and revolutionary fantasies were woven together to create yet another genre (with a tribal revolutionary in Bashai Tudu dying again and again and being ‘identified’ every time by a committed and idealistic witness; or a battered, mangled, raped tribal woman Draupadi confronting the police officer in a state of determined nudity that spells terror to the representative of a repressive State) of protesting realism, where the real generates a provocative and antagonistic energy in a deliberate extension of the real.
As she felt the horror of the situation, she took upon herself the mission of working with the denotified tribes of Jharkhand and West Bengal, setting up an organisation under her leadership. As an activist, she was soon turned into an icon, an image that she relished. Her creativity languished. In the later years, one sadly saw her being co-opted into official governmentality and she would dry up as a writer, with not a single significant piece of literary production in the last 16 years. As the sad story unrolled before my eyes, I moved away from her, still cherishing memories of a friendship that gave me the rare privilege of observing a major contemporary writer at work through a spell of radical creativity. Also of my continued collaboration with her on that illuminating experiment of teaching Bengali, to translating three of her works, “Mother of 1084”, “Bashai Tudu” and “Five Plays” (I was instrumental in pushing her to dramatise her stories to reach a larger constituency); and also taking pride in the fact that she dedicated her work that marked a change of direction –– “Aranyer Adhikar” –– to me. She did a rough translation of that entire work to help me translate it. My translation remains unfinished as I lost interest in the project when she turned into a strange territory, and like many others, I too felt betrayed in a way.
(The author is a seasoned art, theatre and film critic and an acclaimed editor.)
