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Journalism of Courage
One of the most haunting 8220;pictures8221; that made its way to mainstream media in New Delhi in recent times is, perhaps, that of a group of middle-aged Manipuri women standing stark naked in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters in Imphal, in protest. Strangely enough, the women in the picture stand with their backs to the hugely ornate gates of the army installation, facing the camera instead 8212; in times awash with tabloidish intimations of nudity, this was nakedness being waved like a gun, right in the face of New Delhi.
Ever since that episode, by which Manipur forced itself on our front-pages one fine morning, an insider8217;s story is circulating in literate circles in Imphal, Kolkata and later Delhi. On who or what could have inspired those women to take to stripping as a form of public protest. The political provocation, of course, is well known. What is not is the 8220;source8221; of the idea, the very violence of the collective gesture.
The central character in the story is Dopdi Mejhan, a tribal woman who cannot pronounce her own Sanskrit name Draupadi. Of course, it could also be read as the real name of the ancient epic heroine Draupadi, the dark princess of the Mahabharata who had to take five Pandava princes as husbands.
Mahasweta8217;s Dopdi does what Mahabharata8217;s Draupadi could not. She cannot save her modesty with yards of miraculous sari supplied by Krishna incarnate, so she dis-robes herself. The victim of multiple rape, at the end she accosts her apprehender and instigator of her torment, Senanayak, with a naked body. 8220;Senanayak walks out surprised and sees Drapaudi, naked, walking towards him in bright sunlight with her head held high. The nervous guards trail behind8230; Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds8230; Draupadi8217;s black body comes even closer, Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand8230; What8217;s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man? What more can you do? Come on, kounter me 8212; come on, kounter me?8221;
Spare a minute for a footnote: does kounter in the tribal Dopdi8217;s mouth mean encounter, or just the abject lack of a counter on the part of Senanayak, his defencelessness?
Mahasweta ends her story on this note: 8220;For the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid.8221; Breast Stories, Mahasweta Devi, tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Seagull 1998.
Night after night, this scene was enacted on stage in Kanhai8217;s play. Then came the Manipur news photograph we all saw. It was like an ultimate tribute to Mahasweta, fiction mingled with the fire of activism 8212; 8220;getting completely enmeshed in each other, where lines begin to blur8230; from fictional story to enactment and enactment to real-life event and news story8221;, as her close friend and translator Samik Bandyopadhyay put it.
Mahasweta has just turned 80, self-administered insulin injections and all. Under her belt are close to 100 novels and over 20 collections of short stories which more or less sustain the Bengali-students-run mini-translation industry in American universities. Still, she is fighting fit 8212; as prolific with her pen and her two-decade-old tribal rights journal Bortika as she is when she passionately argues with budding crime reporters on how identifying certain tribes as 8220;criminal8221; is itself an act of crime.
If activism is what gives form to her fiction 8212; Hazar Churasirir Ma; Birsa Munda; Nairhite Megh; Aranyer Adhikar; Rudali; Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha 8212; it is the unromantic portrayal of the marginalised, the tribal and the woman that provides the content and language to her oeuvre. At a time when the whole globalised world is eager to speak one speech and regain Babel, the multiple layers of dialects and dense word-punning in Mahasweta8217;s texts may almost seem an annoyingly tiresome tool fit for intellectual discourse and obtuse literary studies.
Till one sunny morning, we wake to a group of real-life Dopdis challenging the Senanayaks of the day in full media glare, creating a whole new myth of its own. Restoring to us the power of the idea, renewing for us the possibility that the most disturbing visual of our times 8212; times saturated with electronic images 8212; can still come from the written word.
It is then that one wonders what makes an Indian writer 8212; the women writer especially 8212; flaunt her activism and her apostasy, finding purpose in meticulous mining of oral histories for her stories for urbane homes. Whether it is the aging Mahasweta or young Arundhati Roy or, indeed, the timeless Kamala Das on her conversion spree!, they search out silent people8217;s movements just as the movements seek them out. Reminding us of lost heroes like Birsa Munda by now subsumed by the Shibu Sorens or villages washed away in the battle for a dam.
