Underlining A Tribal Revolt

Mahasweta Devi’s writing has always been an impassioned tapestry of art and activism. Her stories, fired by anger at the injustice she ...

Mahasweta Devi’s writing has always been an impassioned tapestry of art and activism. Her stories, fired by anger at the injustice she sees around her, are trenchantly political and vividly creative. Rather than being simply didactic or academic, they take us into the hearts and souls of the men and women that she writes about — and deep into their struggle.

Chotti Munda and His Arrow (Chotti Munda Ebang Tar Tir), written in 1980 and now brought to us in Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s articulate translation, is an epic novel. It tells the story of the Munda tribals, tracing back from the days of the Ulgulan, young Birsa’s legendary uprising, through the Indian struggle for independence, to the post-Emergency period.

The more things change, the more they remain the same for this marginalised community. While at one level the novel tells of the adventures of Chotti Munda and his magic arrow, it is also the story of a forest, a people, and a whole world that is being inevitably destroyed. While the novel asks urgent questions about the right of the tribal to live with dignity in modern India, it is also the tale of all dispossessed people, everywhere. This becomes poignantly clear especially in Chotti’s final, emblematic desperation: “Then he waits, unarmed. As he waits, he mingles with all time and becomes river, folklore, eternal. What only the human can be.”

Chotti Munda and his Arrow
by Mahasweta Devi
Translated by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak
Seagull
Price: Rs 550

For activist-writer Mahasweta Devi, documenting the aspirations and myths of the tribals has been a life’s mission. “It struck me (that) I have to document it, these things will vanish,” she says in a moving interview, “Telling History”, included in this volume. She talks of feeling a sense of urgency about this task, “a great asthirata, such a restlessness; an udbeg, this anxiety.”

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In the vast epical sweep of Chotti Munda, she has recorded the tribal experience in a clear and unafraid voice. The heart of the venture remains creative: “Everything is for storytelling in Chotti Munda’s life for many reasons.” The novel is dense with detail and grandeur, natural and human — from the little river Chotti that is the beginning of the great Damodar, to the unforgettable sight of the aged Pahan walking off into the forest leading the few dogs that were left in the village.

In Spivak’s translation, the prose retains its vivid musicality and sense of flow. The narration is spirited and imaginative as it moves from story to story in Chotti’s life, ebbing and flowing with a rhythm of its own, like a great musical composition. In its humanism and its music, it brings to mind several great novels of struggle, but especially Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

There are passages of vivid dialogue, and Spivak’s unique contribution has been in retaining the dignity of the subaltern dialect, and its poetry. Listen to Chotti’s proud reply to the Daroga: “A man-man shoots an arrer — a man-zero shoots a bullet.” And listen to Dhani Munda’s proud grief as he tells young Chotti why he isn’t allowed to shoot: “They know I’m t’ Haramgod of archery. They think if I lift an arrer I’ll call t’ great revolt — Ulgulan — again.”

Spivak’s practice of underlining the words in English in the original gives us a feel of what she calls “the very history that is one of the animators of the text”. At first, it is mainly “station”, “railway” and “police”; with time, words like “black-market”, “vote meeting”, “brickfield” and “cement factory” appear in the tribal world. Suddenly the pages are thick with underlined words. We are in post-Emergency India.

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“Chotti is my best beloved book,” says Mahasweta in the interview, and her love shines through in the novel.