Remembering Mahasweta Devi, a voice for the marginalized, in her centenary year

In July 2016, the government of Jharkhand issued an order to remove manacles from all statues of the tribal leader Birsa Munda (1875-1900), starting with the one that stands on Birsa Chowk in the state capital, Ranchi.

“Birsa Munda is a guiding light for the youth of Jharkhand,” said the then chief minister Raghubar Das. “Showing him in chains casts a negative effect on the minds of youth.” That same month Mahasweta Devi, the iconic Bengali writer and activist who had won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1979 for Aranyer Adhikar (Rights to the Forest, published in 1977), a fictionalised account of Birsa Munda’s life and struggles, died at the age of 90.

A decade later, in her centenary year, her work remains urgently relevant, resonating beyond Bengal, among scholars and in the popular domain. Her short story, Rudali (1979), was adapted by Kalpana Lajmi for the screen in 1993, and her novel Hajar Churasir Maa (The Mother of 1084, published in 1974) was made into a movie by Govind Nihalani in 1998.

A few of her shorter fiction works were translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, though many remain unavailable in English. Long before the rise of “subaltern studies”, Mahasweta Devi had been listening carefully to voices from the margins and hinterlands of India. She spent a large chunk of her life working with, learning from, and fighting for the rights of the tribal people.

Mahasweta Devi came from a family of luminaries. Her uncle was Ritwik Ghatak, the filmmaker. Her first husband, Bijon Bhattacharya, was a dramatist and a member of Indian People’s Theatre Association. Nabarun Bhattacharya, her son, became a leading writer and public intellectual in his own right.

Coming from a Savarna background, Mahasweta Devi could have succumbed to the temptation of being the mouthpiece for the downtrodden. Instead, she joined the Communist Party, led an intrepidly peripatetic existence, living for long spells among the tribals of Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.

All her life, she remained an unsparing critic of her own class, the educated elite, calling out its bourgeois hypocrisy and champagne socialism. In The Mother of 1084, for instance, she distilled her rage, disappointment and frustration with the Bengali upper crust at the height of the Naxal Movement, when the revolution was not only tearing through the social fabric but also destroying filial relationships.

After she took over editing Bortika, a periodical published by her father Manish Ghatak, a poet and writer, Mahasweta Devi especially solicited pieces from those living in the margins, men and women who had been oppressed, suppressed, exploited and erased by the dominant classes and systems of power. She opened up the platform to the poorest, be it a manual labourer or a homemaker. It was in Bortika, in 1981, that now acclaimed Dalit writer Manoranjan Byapari, who was a rickshaw-puller at the time, published his first writings.

The following year, Mahasweta Devi carried a piece by a young woman called Chuni Kotal from the Lodha-Sabar community. The first ever member of this denotified tribe to earn a graduate degree, Kotal died by suicide in 1992 at the age of 27 after allegedly suffering discrimination at the hands of a faculty member at Vidyasagar University, where she was a postgraduate student. After Kotal’s death, Mahasweta Devi wrote a scathing indictment of Bengal’s ruling communist government in the Economic and Political Weekly, calling out the systemic injustices that had proliferated under its regime.

A little over a decade later, she joined the agitation against land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, led by Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress party, which led to the eventual demise of Left rule in Bengal.

Be it in her life or work, Mahasweta Devi left a unique imprint of integrity, putting humanity before politics. Her courage of conviction rings loud and clear through her writings, even in translation. But it is in Bengali that the true measure of her empathy shines through. I had this epiphany as I reread Aranyer Adhikar over the last few days in the original, halting at the unfamiliar cadences of the Mundari language that she tries to convey.

Her ear for dialogue, especially for the nuances of tone, is finely tuned. You hear roars of joy, fiery battle cries, or the keening of women in her sentences. The throbbing life of her prose is matched by the poetic bursts she allows herself while describing the jungle—anthropomorphised in Birsa’s eye as a Mundari woman, who is being looted by avaricious zamindars and colonial sahibs.

Alongside this polyphony of human and natural voices, Mahasweta Devi brings into her narrative the region’s incredible biodiversity, which yielded nourishment to the starving as well as potions that can heal or kill. It is impossible to capture the rustic earthiness of her diction in English.

Despite its anti-colonial and anti-missionary concerns, Aranyer Adhikar unfolds, structurally and affectively, like a biblical narrative. It is reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), where the Nigerian writer tells the story of another Birsa-like hero, Okonkwo.

Birsa is a Jesus-like figure. His mother, Karmi, claims that three shining stars had heralded his birth. Although he is born into poverty, Birsa is told, from a tender age, that he stands out in his community. He is destined for greater glory. And, indeed, for a while, he pursues this foretold destiny by joining a missionary school, getting an education, and hoping to become a preacher.

Eventually, as Birsa realises that the priests are mere stooges of the colonial government, he seeks out a Brahmin to learn the path of Hinduism, which opens his eye to other forms of religious red-tape. In the end, hailed as their god and saviour by some of the village elders, Birsa embraces his divine identity and decides to launch his own religion. His followers call themselves Birsaits and mobilise under his direction to wage guerrilla war on the police and landholders. In the end, hundreds of them are arrested, imprisoned, denied justice, and dozens killed.

The events of the rebellion waged by the Mundas is recorded in the history books, but Aranyer Adhikar zooms into the human faces that lived and died through it, the brave men and women who led it, and their enemies, who derailed it. As the novel opens, Birsa, who is all of 25 years old, is allegedly dying of cholera in jail, though, in all likelihood, he had been poisoned by the prison superintendent. His story begins with his violent death—yet no ordinary death can erase him.

A godlike figure, Birsa Munda remains alive in Mahasweta Devi’s words and in the hearts of millions of his admirers. Yet 125 years after his death, the status quo hasn’t changed. The rights to the forest continue to be stolen by those drunk on power and money, while a handful of activists continue to fight for an equitable world.