Opinion Mahasweta Devi would be angry with today’s India
Had she been alive today, she very likely would have been branded an ‘anti-national’. An impediment to the GDP growth rate-induced development riding on bulldozers, while around 55 per cent of the country’s people rely on free rations.
Mahasweta Devi As those who still appreciate quality literature and value literary activism remember Mahasweta Devi on her birth centenary, it will be impossible to avoid what she stood for, what she wanted India to become, and what she would have thought of it today.
Born in Dhaka in 1926, she had her schooling at Shantiniketan while Rabindranath Tagore was at the institution. That formative phase created the iron woman she became later. She told me, “In Shantiniketan, girls were never asked to be different from boys. We learnt lathi khela and chora khela (art of fighting with bamboo sticks and knives), we had to cut the branches of guava trees and make hockey sticks out of them and then play. That made us tough.” Thereafter, till her death in 2016, she was in Kolkata.
Devi’s enormous body of work, ranging from meticulously researched historical fiction to political narratives, was never just a means of leisure for docile urban elites . She gave voice to the voiceless, to the crying women for hire at rich people’s funerals, to the “mothers of 1084”, to tribals whose lands have been usurped by repressive governments and turned over to businessmen.
However, over the past decade, instances like a play based on her short story, ‘Draupadi’, being disrupted in a Haryana university, and Delhi University dropping it from the English (Hons) syllabus, show that today’s ruling class doesn’t value creative people holding up a mirror to society. They are instead viewed as insidious. The issues she wrote about — caste discrimination, untouchability, exploitation and marginalisation of tribals, the condition of women, the inequality of wealth — are all considered, when voiced, as part of a design to malign the glory of the country.
Had she been alive today, she very likely would have been branded an “anti-national”. An impediment to the GDP growth rate-induced development riding on bulldozers, while around 55 per cent of the country’s people rely on free rations. Thousands of hectares of forest land have been cleared for mining corporations, depriving millions of tribals of their right to live off the forests. As someone who brought real change to 20,000 Kheria Sabar tribals in Purulia, West Bengal, by setting up residential schools, vocational centres, pisciculture and sericulture projects, handicrafts centres, etc., she would have been aghast at the government’s apathy towards the marginalised. As the founder of the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group, she would have been appalled by the government marking anyone standing up for their rights as an enemy of the state.
Her works, written in Bengali, were translated into almost all Indian official languages and many foreign languages. As a global brand ambassador of India’s rich culture, she would have been angry to see how people speaking her mother tongue are hounded in different parts of the country, branded as foreigners, and herded into detention camps. Thankfully, she is not around. The pain of what India has become today would have been overwhelming even for a woman as strong as her on her 100th birthday.
Bhattacharya is Mahasweta Devi’s grandson and author of General Firebrand and His Red Atlas
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