Mahasweta Devi, a rebel’s recollection in tranquility

The litterateur from West Bengal, calling herself a “recruit” of Govind Nihalani – the director of her film – for being in the city for the film festival, was speaking to Express Newsline in an interview on Monday. The book, made into a two-and-a-half-hour-long film, is a journey of an apolitical mother to an understanding of her dead Naxalite son (Brati, no 1084 in the police files) and into subsequent politicisation. While in the novel, Sujata, the protagonist dies, in the film, she goes on to become a human rights activist.

For a self-confessed student of history, “be it the 7th century, the 11th century, or the 18th or 19th century,” the book written in Bengali, Hazar Churasir Ma, is a “documentation” of the turbulent times in West Bengal when the cream of the Bengali intelligentsia abandoned pens and books to bring about an immediate change in the young independent nation.

“It happened one evening,” narrates the writer revealing her flair for details, “by then I had already written a few stories against the rural background of the Naxalite movement. Anyway this was late one evening and the streets were dark. It was during the Bangladesh war. Two young boys approached me and said, who will write about us… when we were dying in the streets of Calcutta. That was how the story was written and published in a (Durga) Puja magazine.”

Then, of course, the magazine was smuggled into the Naxalite quarters in West Bengal prisons and took the Bengali community by storm. “That was how I became a friend of many of them,” says Devi and the book, a much-loved motif for the Bengali. Which is why the fear that Govind Nihalani, the director of the film, could be criticised for changing the ending and bringing it to the present times, though the changes were done with her permission. But then, isn’t the Naxalbari movement still on? “Forget Calcutta, look at the entire country. Why are there so many protests everywhere? … Because there is cause to protest,” she feels. At the root of which, according to her, is an “independence that failed”.

Land reforms which were given a blind eye and a feudal land system allowed to continue which created a feudal value system; anti-women, anti-the subjugated, and anti-workers/peasants. “Five generations have grown up inheriting this in their blood. So there is no shock at ministers making crores, at corruption. What happened in the 1970s of course cannot be repeated. Such movements change course like a river. They get much more widespread. Which is why I feel Nihalani has taken the film further,” she says.

In her own world, Devi believes more in work than words. Dedicated to the cause of the Sabar tribes in the Purulia district where she has been working for the past 15 years trying to raise it from abject poverty (20 villages found it difficult to raise Rs 20 to buy a `gamchcha’ (cloth towel) to honour her for winning the Jnanpith award), she retains her activist persona when she uses this interview to ask for funds.

Cheques can be sent marked to her, addressed 18A, Ballygunge Station Road, Calcutta 700 019. “Of course, I will not be using the money for myself,” she assures against scepticism. As a woman who has donated all her money from the Magsaysay award and the Jnanpith award to her Paschim Banga Kheria Sabar Kalyan Samiti, one does not think we need that assurance.