AS I sit down to write about the late Mahasweta Devi, writer, journalist, activist, crusader, who passed away some months ago, my eyes fall on a photograph lying before me. It’s a familiar scene, Mahasweta at the home I have visited often, looking up at the camera, her lips parted as if she is about to speak.

Contemplating that black and white frame, I am suddenly struck by how much the picture says about this remarkable woman. She is seated at her desk, as she invariably was whenever one went to see her, working. I hardly ever saw her at leisure. There was always too much to be done. The clutter of necessary – for her – objects, the pad for her longhand writing, the old-fashioned anglepoise desk lamp, everything simple and functional. Her phone off the hook in order to avoid incessant requests to grace this or that occasion, so that she could focus on the work at hand. She had no time for empty celebrity. The shelf behind her, crammed with books, mostly reference works on a range of esoteric subjects, usually anthropological and scientific, which she researched assiduously for her fiction. Her simple printed cotton sari. And, hanging askew within easy reach, the amusingly and aptly titled Champion Calendar. Perfect. She was a Champion for sure. Champion writer. Champion of deserving causes.

I first got to know Mahasweta di in the mid-eighties. She was already an established name, respected both for her courage and integrity in doing battle for her cause, and for her literary prowess. At the time, her down-to-earth attitude, simple living, disregard for the glamour and glitz of celebrity recognition in favour of dedication to her self-appointed task, be it fiction or reportage or activism, were all admirable qualities, but not highly unusual. In fact, they were a mark of a generation of Indian artists who were at the peak of their form then. Men and women who had been born in colonial India, come of age during the freedom struggle, and were imbued with a strong idealism, belief in an egalitarian social system, and dreams for the nascent nation they were helping create. Simplicity and high ideals, dedication to their vocation, social commitment expressed in their art, were intrinsic to their philosophy. I had already encountered several of this ilk – Habib Tanvir, Badal Sircar, K.G. Subramanyan, Somnath Hore. Mahasweta Devi fitted right in.

It is only now that, one by one, they are gone, that I realize just how very rare a person Mahasweta was. She stood for something larger than her own individual output as a writer, or even her activism. She stood for a way of being an artist in this world, in this country. It is only now that I truly realize the importance of being Mahasweta.

 

Mahasweta di herself assiduously refused to call herself a feminist, but that is palpably false; the word simply loses all meaning if someone like her is not considered one. Her discomfort with the label was partly due to its association, in her mind, with a certain kind of white western elitism she couldn’t identify with, and partly with her own worldview, which saw the dispossessed and the disadvantaged in terms of class rather than gender. In the way she lived her life, and the way she represented women, she was nothing if not feminist.

She grew up, as she has written about often, in a delightfully sprawling, idiosyncratic and vibrant family, surrounded by siblings up to all kinds of mischief and experimentation, with seemingly no patriarchal hierarchy to conform to. In fact her relationship with her eccentric father, whom she called Tutul, which is what he called her, appears to have been one of affectionate indulgence. Hers was a family of writers, thinkers, poets, idealists and strong characters who expressed themselves freely, both men and women. She herself was a tomboy, physically active and mentally restless and rebellious. She later had the courage to walk out of an unsatisfactory marriage in search of self-fulfilment as a writer, although it was at great emotional cost, particularly at having to give up her young son. This was in a period when society did not look kindly upon women who sought independence in this manner, and she paid the price in terms of opprobrium from the literary and social establishment.

 

She remained an outsider, despite the pedigree of belonging to a family of celebrated literati and culturati (to mention just one, the cult filmmaker, Ritwick Ghatak, a close relative). This was also partly due to her own uncompromising nature which refused to countenance any falsity or kowtow to anyone. She lived independently, supporting herself through her own labour, at first a series of jobs from teacher to salesperson, and later her writing. Her considerable talent ensured that she had no trouble getting published and soon she had an enviable reputation both within Bengal and beyond, due to widespread translation into other Indian languages.

In her fiction, her women characters are memorable and nuanced, either sensitively understood and empathized with as in Hazar Churasir Ma (Mother of 1084), or bold, strong, and rebellious (as in Draupadi), or tough and canny survivors (as in Rudali). She never saw herself as a ‘woman writer’ in particular, but her crusade against injustice and exploitation made it inevitable that women, the most downtrodden and abused segment of an already unjust social system, were often her subjects.

She leaves behind an exemplary legacy of a life lived on her own terms as a liberated woman, and a body of fiction that significantly advances the understanding and portrayal of women in India.

 

Literature in Bengali has a rich heritage, brimming with distinctive voices and styles, and in such a scenario it is not easy to find a prominent place. And yet Mahasweta managed to do so. Her first novel, Jhansir Rani, published in 1956, was a pioneering work that broke new ground in several ways. It came out of extensive travels and fieldwork, in the course of which she met and spoke with a spectrum of ordinary people, and it wove a history out of these oral sources. She often asserted her interest in the value of ‘real history made by ordinary people’ and her first book established this.

Later she would go on to write about the forgotten and dispossessed tribals and lower castes, forced into becoming migrant labour, uprooted and exiled in hostile environments. She would document the minutiae of the rural power hierarchy, the upper class landlords and their henchmen, the nexus with the administration and police, all fuelled by hours and weeks of firsthand observation as she tramped the village pathways and lived amongst the people she wrote about.

 

It was in these people, totally marginalized, that she found true nobility, culture, dignity. Her own urban middle class was deeply compromised, largely contemptible, to her mind. Stark, unsentimental, almost brutal at times, interweaving dialects and various registers of spoken and formal Bengali, her sinewy style, dark oblique humour and deep compassion fused to create a unique voice. She succeeded in opening a space in Bengali literary fiction for this otherwise ignored and forgotten world and its people, to which her stories and novels remain an important testimony.

Her trenchant social critique highlighted many social and cultural wrongs, not just the injustice meted out to the tribals and dalits. The hypocrisy and complacency of the educated middle class, for example, or the wrongs perpetrated in the name of religion. This masterly passage from her short story ‘Rudali’ about a poor village woman who has been so battered that she cannot cry, encapsulates a whole corrupt structure of religious exploitation, and the nexus with the feudal landowner:

‘The mela was a grand affair. The Shiva idol was being bathed in pots and pots of milk donated by the rich. This milk had been collecting in large tanks over the past few days. It gave off a sour stink and was thick with buzzing flies. People were paying the pandas money to drink glasses of this milk, then promptly falling sick with cholera. Many died. Including Budhua’s father. It was during British rule. Government officials were dragging the victims off to the hospital tents. There were only five tents. There were sixty to seventy patients. The tents were cordoned off with barbed wire. Sanichari and her son sat and waited beyond the barbed wire. They came to know that Budhua’s father had died. The government officers didn’t give her any time to shed tears. They burned the corpses quickly. They dragged Sanichari and Budhua off for a vaccination against the disease. The pain of the injection made them howl. Still crying, she washed off the sindoor from her head in the shallow Kuruda river, broke her bangles, and returned to the village. New shellac bangles. She had just bought them at the fair. The panda of the Shiva temple at Tohri demanded that she make ritual offerings there before returning to her village, since her husband had died there. On his insistence, she spent a precious rupee and a quarter on a spartan offering of sand and sattu which Budhua offered as pindadaan. But what a to-do there was over this when she got back to her village! Mohanlal, the priest of Ramavatar’s presiding deity, scoffed, What! A mere offering of sand, that too in river water! Is Budhua Lord Ramchandra, repeating His act of offering a pinda of sand for His father, King Dasharath!

But the priest said –

Can a Tohri brahman know how a Tahad villager’s kriya is done? By obeying him, you’ve insulted your local priest!

In order to appease Mohanlal, she was forced into debt to Ramavatar; she received Rs 20 and put her thumb-print on a paper stating that she would repay Rs 50 through bonded labour on his fields over the next five years. And, after paying for Budhua’s father’s shraddha, she was so hard-pressed to feed her little son that she never had time to cry for her husband.’

 

Despite her dry, sardonic and no-nonsense tone, she is also capable of deep tenderness, compassion and poetry, often appearing unexpectedly in an otherwise dark narrative. This lyrical quality is clear when she talks of her belief in everyone’s fundamental right to dream:

‘Nothing happens unless you know how to dream. The Establishment is out to destroy, by remote control, all the brain cells that induce dreams. But some dreams manage to escape. I am after those dreams that have escaped from jail. The right to dream is what allows mankind to survive. If you end the right to dream – which the entire world and everyone is doing – you destroy the world. The right to dream should be the first fundamental right.’

I suppose one cannot talk of her literary merit without mentioning the slew of awards that came her way: from the 1979 Sahitya Akademi Award to the 1996 Jnanpith, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006, to mention just a few. International recognition for literature included the French Officier del’ Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the SAARC Literary Award, and being shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2009.

 

Long after she ceased writing fiction, Mahasweta Devi continued to write as a journalist. These pieces grew from the same source as much of her fiction – her direct observation of rural and tribal conditions on the ground – but were significantly different. In her fiction, the characters, events and atmosphere were transformed, gaining an epic dimension that reflected her fascination with oral myth and lore, and that lifted them from the particular to the universal. Her reportage on the other hand was factual and documentary, and an important way of her continuing to bear witness, to testify, and to build evidence on which to base her activist interventions. In the early eighties she was a roving reporter for the Bengali newspaper Jugantar, during which time she travelled the countryside extensively and produced a weekly column. Similarly, she was a regular contributor to the prestigious Economic and Political Weekly, with her relentless indictment of a system that was failing its most vulnerable people. Her pieces also appeared in publications like Sunday, Frontier, and Business Standard. In the Bengali press she wrote for Dainik Basumati, Bartaman, Aajkal amongst others.

 

Apart from writing for newspapers and magazines, she also published a journal, Bortika, which she inherited from her father, who founded it as a literary journal. She transformed it into a forum that featured the voices and stories of the people she dealt with daily, the wage labourer, rickshaw puller, migrant worker, landless peasant, tribal and dalit men and women. She continued to edit Bortika for decades.

She was awarded the Padma Shri in 1986 and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1997 in recognition of her work in journalism, literature and the ‘creative communication arts’.

Not content with writing against the evils she witnessed, Mahasweta Devi also plunged into direct activism, which for her began at home. She personally offered refuge and help to distressed individuals and families who showed up at her doorstep on a daily basis. Apart from this she helped organize the affected by setting up several small groups and societies of and by the people. In 1981 she was involved in founding an organization of bonded labourers, Semra Bandhua Mukti Morcha, or Semra Bonded Labour Liberation Front, which later became the Palamau District Bonded Labourer Liberation Front or Mukti Morcha. She was actively associated with about fourteen local organizations of tribals and dalits in the rural areas of Bengal and Bihar, but the one she was most deeply involved with was Paschim Banga Kheria Sabar Kalyan Samiti based in Purulia, a tribal organization of the Kheria Sabars, a tribe of Purulia.

 

Mahasweta tirelessly wrote letters of advocacy and support, intervened with the police, helped supply legal aid, raised funds, and developed income generation avenues such as handicrafts which she helped sell through participation in melas.

Two particular cases illustrate the degree of her personal involvement in the crusade for justice for the tribals. The tragedy of Chuni Kotal may be remembered by some as a bitter precursor to the more recent Rohit Vemula suicide. Chuni was the first woman graduate among the Lodha Sabar tribals. She graduated in 1985, but finding the harassment at the workplace unbearable, she killed herself in 1992. Mahasweta informed the police, and began a movement in support of the targeted tribals.

 

The 1998 custodial death of Budhan Soren was another major incident where she intervened to prevent gross injustice. Picked up by the police, this young tribal man was locked up and then abruptly declared dead by suicide. It seemed clear that he had been beaten to death in police custody. Mahasweta helped the distraught Sabars hide his body at home after the post-mortem, preserving it for a further autopsy, meanwhile fooling the police into believing that they had burnt his corpse in a false pyre. She filed a writ petition in Calcutta High Court. A CBI probe was ordered, and the case was heard. This particular story bears the hallmark of her best fiction, and I still remember her recounting in vivid detail the blow by blow unfolding of the dramatic events as they had occurred.

Another crusade dear to her heart was the fight to de-criminalize the so-called ‘criminal tribes’ of India. She co-founded the national level organization, De-Notified Tribals Right Action Group, DNT-RAG for short.

In her own mind, Mahasweta di did not seem to recognize any divisions between these different aspects of her work. To her they were interlinked by a common concern. She says:

‘Since the 1980s, I have been vocal about the daily injustice and exploitation faced by the most marginalized and dispossessed of our population, the indigenous peoples or tribals, the landless rural poor who then turn into itinerant labour or pavement dwellers in cities. Through reports in newspapers, through petitions, court cases, letters to the authorities, participation in activist organizations and advocacy, through the grassroots journal I edit, Bortika, in which the dispossessed tell their own truths, and finally through my fiction, I have sought to bring the harsh reality of this ignored segment of India’s population to the notice of the nation, I have sought to include their forgotten and invisible history in the official history of the nation. I have said over and over, our independence was false; there has been no independence for these dispossessed peoples, still deprived of their most basic rights.’

 

It was this interwoven nature of the multifaceted Mahasweta Devi that led us, at Seagull Books, to conceive of The Selected Works of Mahasweta Devi, a far ranging series of Mahasweta translations into English. The publisher’s note describes it as ‘a publishing programme which encompasses a representational look at the complete Mahasweta: her novels, her short fiction, her children’s stories, her plays, her activist prose writings.’ When the series began, Mahasweta’s work was available in Hindi and other regional languages, but very little of it had appeared in English. Not only is English accessible to readers across the country, it also brings her work to an international audience. Realizing that hers was a voice that deserved to be heard as widely as possible, we began the task of making her oeuvre available to as broad a readership as possible in responsible translations that strove to do justice to a style as complex and nuanced as hers can be. The series continues to grow. Even then we had begun to realize the importance of being Mahasweta.