G. N. Devy - Mahasweta Devi drew imaginary landscapes to narrate stories of the oppressed and the marginalised
Great fiction, once
come in your ken never leaves you. If I were asked to pack up and carry only
one story with me to an imaginary world, I would cling to Pterodactyl of
Mahasweta Devi. It transformed my dreams. Pterodactyl is a
mythical bird, ominous to the sceptic and epiphenic to the believer. Mahasweta
brought it in to depict the truth about adivasis, to lash out at our failure to
understand them. Gayatri Spivak translated it from Bangla and, together with
Draupadi put it in a collection called Imaginary Maps.
When I first met
Mahasweta, she was 72 and already a living legend. A Jnanpith, a Magsaysay and
a formidable global fame as writer to her credit, she was already more of an
idea than a person. Every feminist, political activist, aspiring writer swore
by her. Therefore, when she agreed to visit Baroda, I had expected to meet with
a difficult person, a female Che or a contemporary Laxmibai.
She was to come for
the Verrier Elwin lecture of Bhasha Centre. When I asked where she would like
to be put up, she replied with a single word, “home”. Her flight was to arrive
at Ahmedabad. I requested Tridip Suhrud to receive her, feed her and bring her
to Baroda. The flight was delayed. Tridip called me from Ahmedabad to say that
she refused to eat. I knew that by the time they get to Baroda all restaurants
will be closed. My wife Surekha was away in the US on a research assignment. I
was not enough of a cook to feed a legend.
I kept calling friends
who had already arrived in Baroda to listen to Mahasweta the next day. There
was the folklorist Bhagwandas Patel, the rebel writer Laxman Gaikwad, historian
Ajay Dandekar and poet Kanji Patel. Out of our collective courage, we put
together some oranges, boiled eggs and peanuts as a possible meal. I knew how
disastrous the results would be.
Close to midnight, the
guest arrived. Mahasweta stood at the entrance tentatively. Neighbours had
gathered to have a glimpse of her. After an uncertain moment, she held my hands
and said nothing. I was thinking of the meal that we had concocted for her. Not
knowing how to put across the difficulty, I asked, “Do you have teeth?” She
laughed. That was a sterling laugh. She replied, quite unexpectedly in Hindi,
“kuchh bhi de do, I don’t care.” She stepped inside and sat with all of us. The
neighbours brought some daal and rice. I made tea. She asked for more. We
talked of adivasis, struggles and her stories. By the time, the dawn broke out,
we had become friends for life. What energy she exuded!
That was in March
1998. Over the next 15 years, she made Baroda her second home. Her visits
stopped when, beyond 85, her body rejected the idea of long journeys. During
those years, we travelled together to villages, towns and cities, meeting
nomadic communities and listening to them. We travelled to all parts of India,
in trains, cars, buses and planes. As part of our campaign for the rights of
the de-notified tribes, we met prime ministers, home ministers, judges, police
officers.
This was when I was
trying to create the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh. Mahasweta developed a great
affection for the campus. There, in the old caves, she saw the pre-historic
rock paintings for the first time and was surprised to see how the images
resembled her depiction of the pterodactyl. We went to rivers, where she swam.
We went to relief camps after the earthquake, after the riots. We shared
people’s grief, agony and anger.
She spent long spells
in Baroda talking to Surekha and Bhupen Khakhar, the painter, for who she had
developed a keen admiration. She sang old Hindi songs and in return Bhupen sang
Gujarati bhajans. She talked to him about her stories. In response, he painted
epiphenic elephants. She would talk to us about her mother, her time in
Shantiniketan, her uneasy marriage and son Nabarun Bhattacharya, a poet, of
whom she was mightily proud. When she was not in Baroda, she sent hand-written
letters to me, copies of various petitions she had filed, copies of Bortika,
the journal she used to edit, lists of things that she wanted Surekha to get
for her. She became a mother, a sister and a daughter to us, found her home in
our home.
The Adivasi Academy
became for her the Shantiniketan of her childhood; my colleagues became her
adopted children. She repeatedly said she wanted to live on as a tree there. We
cried thinking of her affection for us. At the Jaipur Festival, she said that
sleep under the majestic tree at Tejgadh would bring her eternal peace. Her
pterodactyl! This is the most extraordinary of endings she created in her
fiction!
The author, a cultural
activist and literary critic, founded with Mahasweta Devi the Denotified &
Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group, DNT-RAG
