In the aftermath of the Naxalbari uprising, the young female protagonist in the epical ‘Hajaar Chaurishir Ma’ comes out of prison, tortured, brutalised and marginalised, her lover killed by the police, many of her comrades murdered in cold blood, others dead, imprisoned, disappeared, scattered, fragmented and underground. Defeated, undefeated, as yet, she looks at Calcutta and wonders if this Mahanagar, which seemed on the verge of a spontaneous, volcanic, luminescent revolution, has already condemned and exiled her. She had thought, with despair, after all the sacrifices, the dreams, the visions, the tragedies, the great struggles, the world would have changed. But nothing happened. Calcutta moved on like a gigantic animal in pain, its pain hidden but alive for the years to come by, everyday turning its fated, addictive metamorphosis from one ritual to another. The dream is dead. Nothing has changed. Why?
“It’s just that time, age, wrinkles, fragility, an old body, just do not matter. Her mind is as young and alive and formidable as an eclectic first timer slowly whistling in the forests of tribal uprisings, the fires of rebellion still simmering and alive, carving words and nuances with the fluency of a beautiful, anti-iconic, irreverent woman in love with her own shadow images of revolution, relentless in her quest for justice, and, always, always, her instinct on the threshold against the injustices of power.”
She could have asked this question to Mahashweta Devi. She could have asked the author, why is the book ending like this? Why did the revolution die? And what would the writer have answered? In which language of rebellion, despair and hope? She would have, perhaps, said, cryptically, “No, the revolution is not dead. It will come back. In many new forms and shapes.”
Many years ago, in the early 1990s, after a lecture at the Sahitya Akademi in Delhi, a man went to the podium to touch Mahashweta Devi’s feet. She said, almost half-hysterically, moving away hurriedly, “Don’t touch them. They are dirty.”
Soon after, in an interview with this reporter, she redefined yet again the meaning of the organic intellectual. She was adamant that she is not an intellectual. Those days she was literally living with tribals in their primordial habitat, they being integral to her consciousness. She said, “I am not an intellectual. Sagar Sabar is an intellectual. Sagar Sabar has built a house on the trees. He can understand the language of the leaves, the wind, the seasons, the birds, the trees, the rivers and forests. He is an intellectual. I am not an intellectual.”
It’s just that time, age, wrinkles, fragility, an old body, just do not matter. Her mind is as young and alive and formidable as an eclectic first timer slowly whistling in the forests of tribal uprisings, the fires of rebellion still simmering and alive, carving words and nuances with the fluency of a beautiful, anti-iconic, irreverent woman in love with her own shadow images of revolution, relentless in her quest for justice, and, always, always, her instinct on the threshold against the injustices of power. No wonder, she was the first to come out and say that Mamata Banerjee is fast turning into a fascist, even while a public protest in Kolkata was denied by her new, eccentric and arrogant regime – already losing its lustre and dream sequence, and so soon. Coming from Mahashweta Devi, great writer and rebel, perhaps one of the greatest in world literature for all times to come, the term ‘fascist’ rang an uncanny melodious note. It rankled Mamata, as it should, because, in her maverick individualistic authoritarianism, she too can outsmart and out-manoeuvre the organised extra-constitutional muscle power which the CPM displayed on the ground, for three decades plus.
More than that, the term ‘fascist’ turned the dialectic upside down. Because it was Mahashweta Devi, a key catalyst, who led the anti-CPM outrage and epistemological rupture, broke the three decade old stagnation and suffocation and stasis of ‘revolutionary’ Bengal, and resurrected an intellectual political current which had become part of an angst-ridden Bengali political unconscious. Indeed, like Mamata now, the mandarins at Kolkata’s Alimuddin Street, were equally wary of her stature, irreverence and political stance. This was a woman you could not push outside the barricade because the barricades were already broken in the mind, in public consciousness, in the great legacy of this gutsy writer, in whose heart and written and unwritten pages, many forests of rebellion grow, like the story of Birsa Munda, and many rivers of compassion and pain flow, like the story of Corpse Number 1084.
If you have visited the beautiful geographical expanse of Kalinganagar or Kashipur in Orissa, or the precious eco-heritage of Niyamgiri, you would be surprised to know that many of the ordinary people from these protracted resistance and conflict zones actually made a long trek to Nandigram – in solidarity with the struggle of the people of Nandigram against notorious Indonesian MNC Salem’s SEZ. Many of them had never heard of Mamata Banerjee. But they all knew about Mahashweta Devi, though most of them have not read any of her books.
It’s these little revelations which makes her image luminescent. During the Nandigram struggle, and after the mass atrocities, murders and rapes, a group of students of Development Communication at MCRC in Jamia Millia Islamia, made a street play. They performed all over Delhi, despite the cops opposing it. They collected a heavenly sum of Rs 5,000 from the streets and you know what they did with it? One of them went to Kolkata and donated it to Mahashweta Devi for the struggle and rehabilitation in Nandigram. She was already in the midst of collecting all kinds of help for the displaced and hounded people. Hence, this little gesture from Jamia students, arrived as yet another unwritten short story of hope.
Her acidic, non-conformist humour, her no-nonsense repartee, her abject distaste for 15-minutes of fame, her vehement dislike for all that is artificial, pseudo, hollow and bloated, her angst and anger at the world and world-view of this world, her disciplined, epical writing, her public stances in solidarity with justice, protracted struggles and people’s movements, her frail resilience and hatred for totalitarian power structures – all that makes Mahashweta Devi a magical revelation, yet unfolding. For women like her, and great writers and rebels like her, there is no end or beginning. It’s always a new landmark of hope. A new rainbow coalition.
