Getting society's undercurrents right was her forte, says Civic Chandran
KOCHI: Mahasweta Devi, 90, the Bengali writer who breathed her last on Thursday, made her foray into Kerala in the early 1980s. The occasion was to inaugurate a cultural meet organized by Janakeeya Samskarika Vedi, a politico-cultural outfit floated by Naxalites after the Emergency. She made more visits, including to Moolampilly in Kochi to interact with the evictees of Vallarpadam project, and to the residence of the late T.P. Chandrasekharan.
Civic Chandran, then one of the leaders of Samskarika Vedi, said “she had the magic to assess the emotions and undercurrents of society.” The innate commitment to the cause of the downtrodden enabled her to raise radical questions to the government at the height of the Naxalite uprising when many famous writers chose to remain silent.
“Why did we fail to understand our children? Why did we fail to understand their dreams? Why did we fail to evaluate the value of their sacrifice? Her words were historic and had their resonance across the country,” said Civic. C.R. Neelakanthan, who established a close affinity with the Bengali writer in 2008 following the eviction of people from Moolampilly village in Kochi, remembers the passionate way in which she addressed the issue.
“She wrote a strong letter to the then Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan stating that she never expected such an atrocity during his regime.” The reply received by her from Mr. Achuthanandan only helped to infuriate her further as she wrote back stating that a person like VS should not send a letter drafted by the officialdom. “She was definitely different from the writers we know in Kerala who prefer to take a position after carefully weighing the political risks,” Neelakanthan said.
The contempt and irreverence shown by Mahasweta Devi towards politics as practised by the mainstream parties is borne out by her experience in working amongst tribal people in Bengal and Bihar for decades. In the introduction to Agnigarbha (Womb of Fire), a collection of stories, the author has written, “Life is not mathematics and the human being is not made for the sake of politics. I want a change in the present social system and do not believe in mere party politics.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose famous essay ‘Can Subaltern Speak,’ inspired by her experience of translating a few works of Mahasweta Devi, quotes this observation in her foreword to the translation of Draupadi.
