Communication

THE issue of Seminar (608) titled ‘The Enduring Epic’ makes fascinating reading – from Romila Thapar’s ‘The Epic of the Bharatas’ to Badrinath’s ‘Living with the Mahabharata’. I have been greatly informed and much inspired. It is an issue that needs to be circulated to all the major universities in India.

Reading the current issue of Seminar makes me recall a story about the Mahabharata – not a story of old, but a story of modern times, a true story.

A few years ago my friend Kartikeya Sarabhai, son of the great scientist, Vikram Sarabhai, witnessed Peter Brook’s production of the great Indian epic in Avignon (in France). In it was depicted the entire tale of how Yudhishtra lost all his wealth in playing dice with Duryodhana and continued with the game even whilst continuously losing, ultimately offering his wife Draupadi as a wager. The tale is familiar – after he loses, Draupadi is fetched by force to the victor who starts removing her garments. And then a miracle occurs, fresh garments are seen to close her body, and good men praise God, and weep.

After seeing the performance in Avignon, Kartikeya came back the same evening and wrote a poem representing the thoughts of Draupadi and offered it to his sister. The poem ‘I Draupadi’ is poignant and so expressive of the reality of conditions of women in modern India. In the poem Draupadi says:

‘All rights belong to husbands so says society,

But to be shared by five, a commodity in the market place?

All this I accepted, became the wife of five

– to each gave a son

I was the only wife of none.’

And then it goes on:

‘Gambling they went, invited by Duryodhana

Lost all they had, losing even themselves

I, unspared, was dragged into the court of men-

Which were these bonds of Dharma

that tied my husbands?

What kind of husbands these,

that are tied by the Dharma of lies?’

And the poem ends with a condemnation of the male gender for forsaking equality in practice:

‘Years went by, our lives we lived together

Started on our journey’s end towards the snow-clad Himalayas

I fell first, no Pandava stretched a hand

Towards paradise they walked, no one stayed by my side.

Then, I realised heaven too must be only for men

Better then to rest in the warm embrace of this snow.’

The significance of the poem written with such spontaneity by a 20th century Indian male about Indian women highlights the difference between formal equality, hypocritically mouthed by us all and, the actual inequality which the fate of Draupadi has eternally symbolised: the inequality that women have had to bear, and continue to suffer, even in 21st century India.

Fali S. Nariman

New Delhi

 

Aditya Nigam’s ‘Rumours of Maoism’ (Seminar 607, March 2010) raises more questions than it answers. Considering the conflicting reports in the media, many of them heavily biased, the doubts expressed are natural, but they run up against certain problems of interpretation. Nigam takes pains to challenge the hegemonic claims of the Maoist discourse and distinguish it from the ‘ordinary’ discourse of the Adivasis in a rather purist and a-historical sense. But enmeshed as they are today in a market-driven economy (as in collection and sale of tendu leaves) and land laws that take no cognizance of their traditional rights to land and forest resources, eking out a precarious livelihood, their discourse is bound to differ from that of early colonial times, when their traditional way of life, though under a serious threat, had not yet collapsed. Today, they are bound to come under the influence of ideologies that make better sense of their plight than their ‘native’ ideas.

It is doubtful, even for colonial times, if Ranajit Guha’s method of deciphering the Adivasi rebels’ discourse by turning upside down the values of terms (for example badmashes become ‘peasant rebels’) used in the colonial discourse of counterinsurgency will be adequate to the situation. The rebellions had been inspired and underpinned by the tribals’ deep sense of outrage and indignation at the loss of their heritage and their ‘natural’ rights to land and forest that had been their habitat. In colonial discourse, the forests became state property which cancelled immemorial rights. To recover that aspect of their discourse it is not enough to reverse the pseudo-legal terms; it must be seen as an outright rejection of usurpation by aliens. Colonial law just ruled their rights out of court. Something of that outrage persists even today, perhaps because the modern Indian state has turned those tribal territories into internal colonies, as suggested by observers like Gautam Navlakha. That suppressed part of their discourse must be recovered if we want to understand the burning rage behind the present turmoil.

Second, Nigam is troubled by the ‘organicity’ or composition of the Maoist leadership. He tends to see the Adivasi rebels as tools in the hands of caste-Hindu ideologues rather than as agents in their own right, and harks back to a past when the Adivasis had their own pristine moral and intellectual leadership. This appears to be a utopian notion. Among the early anti-colonial peasant rebels he mentions Titu Meer, whose debt to the Wahhabi jihad against western powers has been documented. There was perhaps no ideal peasant uprising insulated from outside influence, and anything that helped the rebels’ cause was welcome.

Gramsci’s notion of organic leadership was intimately linked to class struggle and social change, where a struggling subaltern group seeks to unite all oppressed groups against the ruling class/es into a class-bloc through intellectual and moral leadership and form ideological hegemony with a view to effecting social and political change. Organicity is not merely a matter of social composition, but of orientation towards class struggle. For Nigam the idea of such an orientation seems irrelevant, and in this he is at one with current subaltern theories which accept the splintering of discourse among different communities according to their circumstances and culture. But without an idea of class struggle, the leadership of resistance movements seem to fall into the hands of proto-bourgeois elements that are content to form alliances with ruling bourgeois forces without much concern for liberation of the masses. The poor Adivasis can expect little from such leadership. Hence it is necessary to have recourse to an ideology and an organization that ensures liberation of the masses. Hence, the Maoists do seem to ‘represent’ historically the aspirations of the tribal masses, whatever their caste composition, though there may well be debate about their tactics. Without such a perspective, the Adivasi voice will remain one of agonized protest and desolation.

It may be added that Salwa Judum was just such a monstrous attempt by the ruling classes to rig up a fraudulent ‘organic leadership’ of tribal composition dedicated to defeating the struggle for social change, which naturally led to fascist-type atrocities against the masses themselves. For a way out of confusion, tribal masses must be freed from unavailing nostalgia and isolationism.

Arundhati Roy’s graphic first-hand account in Outlook and Gautam Navlakha’s searching report in Sanhati.com make it clear that whatever their limitations the Adivasi cadre are not passive tools but highly motivated creative agents capable of moulding circumstances to their collective revolutionary will in a disciplined manner. The Maoist leadership apparently takes pains to explain every move, offer timely apology for every mistake, and get due feedback from the cadre and the grassroots. The cadre study diligently to understand current events and relate them to their struggle. Only certain things arouses unease – their admitted ignorance of events outside their particular ‘area’. Nor is it clear how the Maoist leadership is seeking to broaden its support across other sections of the suppressed masses and on the basis of what kind of strategy. The awesome diversity of conditions among different oppressed groups with different positions in the socioeconomic formation demands an alliance among classes and groups, a task that should be made easier by the ravages of globalization.

With globalized capital running rampant, and a state subservient to corporate interest and outlook clearing the way for it, the plight of marginalized communities is bound to become more and more desperate. Under such circumstances, and with the interpretation of law becoming increasingly overshadowed by the unhindered march of a capitalist ethos, the Maoist-led upsurge does not appear as authoritarian and arbitrary as Aditya Nigam would lead us to believe. But all criticism is welcome, except calumny and slander and one hopes the Maoists will learn from it.

Hiren Gohain

Guwahati