Mahashwetadevi- SHYAONTI TALWAR Existential Underpiinings in Mahashweta Devi's Mother of 1084(1) (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,
ILLUMINATING MULTIPLE OPPRESSIONS IN THE PLAY OF MOTHER OF 1084 BY MAHASWETA DEVI
English Studies International Research Journal Volume 7 Issue 2 ISSN 2347 - 3479 , 2019
Mahasweta Devi’s play Mother of 1084 (1973) tried to expose the exploitation of an essentially unorganised people whose lives are deep-rooted in history and to offer a vivid portrayal of the rural underclass along with their suffering. Her work analyses subaltern politics and their unending struggle to bring to light their exploitation. Mahasweta Devi, the champion of the downtrodden, was continuously occupied with the diverse struggles and was a part of several organisations despite the travails of her advancing age. She took up these diversified roles throughout her life and the zeal in her was alive until her last breath. Keywords: Exploitation, Marginalisation, Binary Oppositions, Subjugation, Sublernity Etc
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.
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
Mahashweta Devi’s story is about the reawakening of a mother proselytized by the death of her son against the backdrop of the systematic “annihilation” of the Naxalites in the 1970’s Bengal. The uncanny death forces the apolitical mother to embark on a quest for the discovery of her ‘real’ son which eventually leads to her own self-discovery. The discovery entails the knowledge of certain truths or half truths about the particular socio-political milieu in which the characters are located. Sujata conditioned to play the submissive, unquestioning wife and mother for the major part of her life gains a new consciousness about her own reality (as a woman) and her immediate context (the patriarchal / feudal order). She therefore pledges to refashion herself by assimilating her son’s political beliefs of ushering in a new egalitarian world without centre or margin. In Govind Nihalani’s own words his film is “a tribute to that dream”.
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'.
Mahashweta Devi’s Mother of 1084: Disrupting the Normative Hegemonic Institution of the Family
Research Journey, 2019
This is the idea of the paper. It incorporates a slightly Marxist feminist perspective that basically works on the premise that we are all agents in the production cycle like cogs in a wheel and we have different roles to play to keep the production cycle going and all institutions and arrangements in society that we see are determined by economics. Men and women through their different roles in the cycle of production create a society which in turn shapes them. Marriage is a contract which has economic reasons and the family acquires the status of a hegemonic institution because it is instrumental in facilitating production and in furthering the interest and the material wellbeing of the state. The man works for the state, the woman works for the man and she also reproduces so in other words she brings in more workers or caretakers which will contribute to this cycle of production. I have taken up Mahashweta Devi’s MO1084 and I am looking at how she is trying to disrupt the family as a hegemonic institution and critiquing its functioning just as a mere tool of the state which undermines individual growth and well-being of a person. So we have grieving mother Sujata who has lost her son to the Naxalite movement and she is the only one who is mourning his death. But not publicly. Because they belong to a particular social class, the Bengali bhadralok or the bourgeoisie their actions and reactions and even the dynamics within the family are determined and governed by their class consciousness. So the Brati the dead Naxalite son who has brought bad name to the family is reduced to a number 1084 and disowned in many ways by the family. They don’t discuss him, they obliterate him from their thoughts and they go on as if nothing has happened. Because that’s whats best for the family and the family name and the family business. Except Sujata. She is torn between conforming to middle class standards and mourning over her dead son. And if she is seen to be grieving she allows herself to be labelled as strange, not dutiful enough to her husband and his reputation. So devi gives us a glimpse of this family where no true bonds exist either between the couples, all the married couples share a very perfunctory arbitrary relationship. They are just married to each other because it is socially correct to remain married. There is no bond between the children and the mother because they are in different camps playing the game of capitalist patriarchy. SO through this model of a dysfunctional family devi exposes the decay and the damage which submission to the state machinery can cause to a family and how the family in turn because of its puppetlike existence can be detrimental to the well-being of the individual, how it can lead to estrangement and frigidity and ostracism and marginalisation and finally death. And the paper of course attempts a very close reading of the text to substantiate and consolidate this argument.
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.
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
Rebels and Biopolitics: Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084
Biopolitics—the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed and regulated under regimes of authority—is ordinary currency in society, and ruling political systems exercise surveillance, incarceration and killings to a great extent in this regard. Michel Foucault's work on the regulation of human beings through the production of power serves as an initial medium of investigation into biopolitics. Yet, Giorgio Agamben probes the covert and overt presence of biopolitical violence in society, particularly through his concepts of state of exception and bare life. The Indian playwright Mahasweta Devi's Anglophone play-text Mother of 1084 (1973) enables scholars to participate in a critical forum on biopolitical praxis, because of its pervasive and explicit representation of state violence and rebels. Nonetheless, the play-text is often renowned for its reference to feminist ideology and mother-son relationship. Existing scholarship has overlooked the manifestation of torture and dead bodies on-stage represented in it. The play is also on the periphery of the mainstream literary criticism. By engaging with a textual portrayal of the play through Foucauldian and Agambenian critical lenses, this article interrogates the ways in which biopolitics coerces populations within the contemporary socio-political milieu. The analysis implies a potential to understand the biopolitical logic more meaningfully, and to be resistant to its stratagems of coercion. It adds to the existing body of literature on biopolitics by creating a specific account of life-politics as characterised in postcolonial theatre, provides a supplemental standpoint to debates on biopolitical subjugation and specifically contributes to current discussions of the play.