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Mahasweta became well known for her sharp satires of gender inequality in India.
At the start of “Breast-Giver,” one of her most acclaimed short stories, Yashoda,
a Brahmin wet nurse for the family of a patriarch, worries that she exists only in
relation to the men in her life. “It’s as if she were Kangalicharan’s wife from birth,
the mother of twenty children, living or dead, counted on her fingers,” Mahasweta
writes. “Yashoda was a mother by profession, professional mother.” Mahasweta
herself was the daughter of a modernist poet, the wife of a street-theater director,
and the niece of an arthouse filmmaker, and she tended to speak about about the
men in her own life in more ambiguous terms. When asked whether she worried
about consequences of her activism, she answered, “I am Ritwik Ghatak’s niece, I
am the wife of Bhattacharya. What should I be scared of? We don’t know what fear
is.”
Mother of 1084 (Hajar Churashir Ma), which Mahasweta wrote in the seventies—
just after the most visible phase of Maoist insurgencies in West Bengal—is perhaps
her most widely read work. The novel centers on Sujata, a mother who wakes up one
morning to learn that her son Brati is lying dead in a morgue; he is corpse number
1084. Brati was a Maoist, and he owed his death to his often violent revolutionary
commitments. Sujata spends most of the novel trying to work out why Brati believed
what he did, and why he died as he had.
Mahasweta wrote often about the injustices faced by India’s poor and
marginalized, but she was also a more committed psychological writer than her
reputation suggests. Though the omniscient narrator of Mother of 1084 can feel
at times like a self-righteous friend lecturing about the right political line, the
book is less a political treatise than a psychological novel about a mother hoping
to understand herself and her son. In fact, the real drama of the book is personal:
Sujata begins looking for answers in a place that is both geographically and
socially distant, a “ramshackle house” where cracking walls are “patched up with
cardboard,” and ends up at an old-fashioned two-story building with a porch, a
place that is “quite close to her own.” The book ends with Sujata letting out a long cry
that “exploded like a massive question.”
During her keynote speech at the 2013 Jaipur Literature Festival, Mahasweta
said, “The more I think and write and think some more, the harder it gets to arrive
at a definition. I hesitate. I falter.” In her best writing, she captured not only our
usual indifference in the face of injustice but the difficulty of precisely articulating
what oppression is. That we might not have the right words is the very reason that
Mahasweta Devi is still worth reading.
1926–2016
By: Shivani Radhakrishnan
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