Bashai Tudu – Mahasweta Devi

Description

Language: English
Pages: 226

Back of the Book

Operation? Bashai Tudu’, a Novelette, and ‘Draupadi’. a short story, translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak respectively, evoke a modern myth of a tribal peasant revolutionary who turns up whenever the landless farm labourers are driven to a crisis, leads them to a revolt, gets killed, and appears again at the next point, and a dedicated Communist journalist who has to identify Bashai Tudu’s dead body every time—an original mix of documentary realism and revolutionary fantasy, history and fiction, so characteristic of Mahasweta Devi, the outstanding contemporary Bengali novelist and social activist who writes about women, tribals, revolutionaries, in their confrontations with an elaborate exploitative system and writes with both passion and a profound sense of history, and from her direct involvement with the lives of these people.

Preface

The long history of peasant insurgency in India (where the landless peasantry number nearly fifty million and constitute 26.33 per cent of the country’s total labour force) has shown up, time and again, the nature of the exploitation that has been the fate of the peasants. The uprisings, from the Sannyasi revolt, the Wahabi movement and the Indigo revolt to the Naxalbari rebellion, have voiced almost the same fundamental demands.

The peasant movement in the Naxalbari region in north Bengal in May-June 1967 and its background would explain something of the spirit that has gone into the making of these stories. Most of the inhabitants of Naxalbari, Khadibadi and Phansidewa in the Darjeeling district are adivasis, landless peasants. The different ethnic communities represented here include the Medis, Lepchas, Bhu