Mahashweta Devi’s Mother of 1084: Disrupting the Normative Hegemonic Institution of the Family (original) (raw)
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MAHASWETA DEVI’S MOTHER OF 1084: AN EXPLORATION
‘Dramatic Realism’ means ‘objective experience’ and ‘social truth’ and in that drama becomes a powerful weapon for exposing and demolishing social evils and injustices. As an anti-establishment artist Mahasweta Devi always committed herself socially and ethically in order to give voice to the marginalized and the downtrodden. Like Shaw she employed drama not merely for faithful documentation of contemporary social evils, but as active medium for revolting against authority and other social constraints. The play Mother of 1084 (1997), actually a translation of her early Bengali novel, titled Hajar Churasir Ma, conscious of the political happenings of Naxalite Bengal, focuses on the exploitation and deprivation of the tribal and the marginalized people, the landless and the curse of landlordism and feudalism, and aboveall the neglected and subjugated fate of women. The plot, a diatribe against decadent social institutions articulates ‘the awakening of an apolitical mother’, which has an urban middle class setting. Through Brati’s (the protagonist) whose commitment to the revolutionary Communist ideology led to his killing in an ‘encounter’, self-sacrifice the dramatist debunked the ‘spent-up intellectuals’, ‘cocktail parties’, the meaningless ‘Godmen’ and the so called radicals. Somehow the play mirrors the whole gamut of a hypocritical culture with its brooding over the Bangladesh war, amorous scandals, a world of ‘affluence’, of ‘pseudo-religion’, selfishness, of drinking, whoring and abnormal relationships. Yet in Sujata, the deprived mother, ‘a new woman is born’. Sujata’s past life, her isolation, her philandering husband, her unwanted motherhood all ultimately ends up in her self-realization which itself becomes a convenient and powerful protest against the rotten societal value system. Key Words Social reality, problem play, anti-establishment, political, subaltern,
GMJHS- JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2016
In Indian English Literature, there are some women writers who have reflected the wounded psyche, suppressed voice and tragic account of the lower or lower middle class people. Mahasweta Devi is one of the most famous writers among them and she has been a champion for the socio- political and economic cause and the advancement of the tribal, down trodden and the underprivileged people. The present paper aims to show an account of a suppressed or neglected mother who has recently lost her son. The trauma of the tragic death of her son always haunts her and it makes her an aggrieved mother. Though Devi employs the Naxalite movement as a background of her drama Mother of 1084, she emphasizes on the tragic plight of a bereaved mother who is mourning for the death of her son. As much as information she gets about her son, she becomes isolated and alienated from the so called bhadralok (gentleman) society. The present paper also explores how she belongs to a male dominated society which considers women as an object of sex, neglected and subjugated being and how she revolts against the traditional established system and trembles the base of that rotten society. KEYWORDS: Naxalite Movement, Suppression, Bereaved Mother.
Motherhood and Mourning in Mahasweta Devi's Kunti and the Nishadin
Mahasweta Devi’s “Kunti and the Nishadin” (2005) announces and documents the vanishing point of the idealist ethico-political (male) history documented by the Bardic tradition. The polyphony and heterogeneity of female voices in Mahasweta’s story displace the omniscient narrative voice of Vyasa while recuperating the ‘woman’ Kunti who was contained in the self-reflecting representations of Kshatriyahood. Mahasweta delegitimises the patrilineality of the male kinship structures in Mahabharata to show how ‘Dharma’ rationalises the Kshatriya state’s prohibitions and regulations upon female sexuality through the polyvalence of power entrenched in structures of fatherhood, family formation and dynastic propagation. As the widowed Kunti reminisces about her sexual encounter with Sun God, Mahasweta’s text retrospectively re-constructs her alternatively conceived female sexuality. Thus, Mahasweta’s story can be read as a profound reorganisation of the Epic tradition as she reinscribes the political Dharma within an ethico-feminist narrative to show it as a phallogocentric circuit enabling the ‘emasculated’ Pandu to perpetuate a male line. Like in Rabindranath Tagore’s Karna-Kunti Dialogue; Mahasweta dissociates Kunti, the stoic ideal of Kshatriya womanhood from Kunti, the erring mother guilty of abandoning her first born. The encounter between the Kshatriya queen and the Untouchable Nishadin constitutes an ethnological encounter, between the historical subject and the gendered subaltern non-subject. The Nishadin calls the entrenched feudal, political and discursive structures of Kshatriyas, Rajavritta. In opposition to it, the Lokavritta, the Law of Nature or Eros does not impose social inscriptions upon the ‘natural/erotic’ body. The Nishads-Kirats-Sabars-Nagavanshis offer a critique of the dominant feudal culture of Hyper-masculinity staged in the Kurukshetra war. The Nishadin re-defines Kurukshetra battle as a reified cultural instrument for reproduction and reassertion of Masculine excesses. As the title of the collection, After Kurukshetra (2005) alerts us; the story serves as a post-textual or extra-textual investigation of new areas of social life such as the lives of women and aboriginals. Mahasweta contests the Male Bardic history by using tales of domestic dispute, marital disharmony, and tribal labour. According to Judith Butler in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence when we grieve; we are experiencing a state of unknowingness since we are undergoing something outside our control. Kunti experiences this same heuristic ambivalence, but the loss of her sons fails to jolt her into a critical re-evaluation and condemnation of Kurukshetra war and to apprehend the fallibility and vulnerability of those exposed to violence. Keywords: Mourning, feminist, subaltern, sexuality, Aboriginal, Adivasi, Tribal, Mahabharata, Motherhood, violence
Psychological Crisis of Mother in Mahesweta Devi's Mother of 1084
Mahasweta Devi is one of the leading writers of our times. Translated into many languages, her works have won her international acclaim and prestige. Her voluminous writings, cemented by her activism, has made her the celebrated writer of social commitment. Committed to the cause of tribals, peasants, landless labourers, bonded slaves and oppressed women, Mahasweta Devi has wielded her pen to raise the voice of these downtrodden people. The mother of 1084 is one of the most read novels of Mahasweta Devi. Set in the background of the Naxalite Movement of Bengal in the seventies, this novel focuses on the emotional and psychological crisis of a mother whose son is killed in this movement. Sujata, the mother of Brati, becomes the voice of all women who have to bear the emotional setback due to this and other such movements. Sujata becomes a living dead body after her son's death. Analysing the cause of this movement and the death of her son, she comes face to face with her own real self which hitherto has been suppressed by her callous husband. In this paper my endeavour will be to trace Sujata's journey through the emotional vacuum created Brati's death. Mahasweta Devi is one of the foremost literary personalities, a prolific and best-selling author of Bengali fiction. She is basically a social activist, who further has added another feather to her field through her writing. She has been working with the tribals and the marginalized communities so that their real stories could reach the authorities at the helm of affairs. Devi started her career as a socio-political journalist whose articles have appeared regularly in the Economic and Political Weekly, Frontier and other journals. Mahasweta Devi has made a significant contribution in the field of literary and cultural studies in our country. Her research into oral history of the cultures and memories of tribal communities is a first of its kind. Her powerful and horrifying tales of exploitation and struggle
Description of The Marginalized Status of Women by Mahaasweta Devi
The post-colonial era was of gender issues. Women has been much debated and discussed. Many seminal works have been based upon women. Mahashweta Devi a writer and an activist focuses on different phases of suffering, the women undergo in society. In this research paper some of her works such as Draupadi,DhouliShanichari, Ma and sindhubalaare taken into insight In order to show the paradoxical position of women In society as well as their fragmented voices. This paper is an attempt to explore and throw light on Mahashwata's vision. In this paper focus will be on the marginalized female characters who would have been marginalized in the real life, but in Indian fiction find the center stage. Over the years there has been a paradigm shift in literature and also on critical approaches to literature .Literature was used to be about Gods, divine fights and supernatural sages. Later, literature came to be focused on kings,queens, princes and princesses. Today, literature is about everyone. With the spread of ideas of democracy, liberty, freedom, equality and social justice, the limelight has completely shifted to the weak and the marginalized. In the times of Browningand Shakespeare, no one would have imagined that literature would be written on domestic servants exploited women " s and laborers. This is shape for better. The compass of literature has widened. Literature has come out of ambit. The scope of literature has become inclusive and assimilate. The theme of literature have been universalized. This is a very welcome shift. Indian writers have been adapted themselves very well to this changed scenario. They have caught the pulse of the masses. Literature is not about the elite only. These days it is about everyone. Indian women writers have been particularly sensitive to marginalize women and marginalized girls. When we think of depiction of marginalized women in India, one name cannot escape of our attention and that is the name of Mahashweta Devi. Not only women, Mahashweta has portrayed the whole marginalized section of Indian society very effectively. She has not only painted this much ignored section but also spent her entire life living among them and fighting for their guanine cause. In our developmental model a very large section of society has been left out. Avery large number of people who wereinherently poor and undeveloped have not received the benefits of India " s progress story.it is not only that they have been left out but their land, theirsoil, their minerals and their body are being exploited by the market cunning capitalists of developing India. India " s growth story has been completely truncated. Mahashweta has been
Portrayal of Motherhood in Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084
THE CREATIVE LAUNCHER: An International, Open Access, Peer Reviewed, Refereed, E-Journal in English, 2017
Mahasweta Devi is a prolific writer who has used her pen for the causes of the most deprived sections of the society. She has written about the pangs and plights of tribals, women, dalits and other marginalized sections of society. Her novel, Mother of 1084, is the depiction of the miserable condition of a mother who tries to search for the causes of her son's commitment towards Naxalite movement during 1970s after his brutal killing. She comes across many layers of hidden things which a mother from upper class may not bother to know in normal situations. She explores that her son was like her who cared for others, wanted equality in the society and therefore he had sacrificed his life. She finds her life akin to the thoughts of her son as she herself is excluded in her own family. She has to bear the oppression of exclusion in her own house. These things have made her stronger and able to understand those causes for which her son has sacrificed his life. Unsympathetic behavior of the husband and some of the children, double standard of morality and civil laws, the gap between the proletariats and the bourgeois, Naxalite movement and its aftermath, indiscriminate brutal killings of Naxalites, lust for materialistic life and hollow prestige among the upper class society are well documented by Mahasweta Devi in her most popular work, Mother of 1084.
2013
Freedom and family hardly go together. There is no niche for freedom in Indian families where the male dominated society hold the reins taut, and generally the women readily submit themselves to be ruled over mentally, physically, psychologically, economically and socially merely to 'keep it going'. As a bi-product of the class society, family does exhibit such domination of one individual over the other. This hidden truth hardly surfaces, and families maintain within its core the stinking and manipulative mechanism, well-hidden by the so-called bourgeoisie values and family pride in Indian societies. Adjustment usually by the womenfolk, become the only mantra for the bare survival of the Indian families. This is well depicted in the plays of Mahesh Dattani, a great playwright who has brought out the crux of gender crisis which Indian families face. This paper explains the birth of family, its inner ugliness, and how it barely manages to survive in Indian scenario, and its n...
The Criterion, 2017
The concept of ‘Other’ is an essential part of Postcolonial theory and literature. In Postcolonial studies, ‘Other’ always comes in contradiction with ‘Self’. The struggle between the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self’ is an ongoing process between the influential and the influenced and it hardly seems to be off and out of existence from our society. This continual and endless process of struggle has been going on since the very origin of our civilization. Lack and deprivation, subjugation and subordination, loneliness and alienation, resilience and neglect, resignation and silence are the very signs of the ‘Otherness’ against which many sensible writers and theorists have come to challenge with a voice of protest. However the way the concept ‘Other’ has been treated by Mahasweta Devi in “Mother of 1084” is an achievement in itself. Based on the Translated version of Samik Bandyopadhyay “Mother of 1084” from its original Bengali version entitled as “Hajar Chaurasir Ma”, this present paper tries to present the struggle between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ on the dramatic surface against the backdrop of Naxalite Movement of 1970s.
NATURE OF 'POLITICAL': MAHASWETA DEVI'S MOTHER OF 1084
This paper discusses different definitions of political theatre and it evaluates as well as re-defines the nature of 'Political' that is used in Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084. Basically, the play deals with Naxalite movement that began in a small village of West Bengal during 1970s and the effects of the movement influence socio-economic and political conditions of middle class as well as capitalist society. Basically the Naxalites look after middle class society as government authorities unable to bring transformation in their conditions. So there are conflicts between Naxalite movement that wants to bring transformation and Power structure-Institutions of the nation that wants to suppress the voice of the Naxalites at various levels. Therefore, operation of working larger power structure of institutions towards middle class society becomes pivotal issue that leads to label Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084 'Political'.