Old Women

The two stories in this collection, ‘Statue’ (Murti) and The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur’ (Mohanpurer Rupkatha) are touching, poignant tales, in both of which the protagonists are old women. In the first, a tragic, for bidden love returns to haunt Dulah, now an old woman pre-occupied only wih filling her stomach and surviving from day to day. In the second, Andi loses her eyes through a combination of poverty, societal indifference and governmental apathy, even as she persists in her belief in fairy tale solutions. Mahasweta Devi is at her most tender in her sensitive, delicately-drawn portraits of these two old women, although her trenchant pen is as ruthless as ever in delineating the socio-economic oppression within which they are forced to survive. Though extremely readable as moving stories for the fiction lover, they also yield layers of deeper significance upon closer reading. As translator Gayatri ChakravortySpivak says: ‘Here in this text, you’ll find what Kamala Visweswaran has called ‘women as subaltern’—the first story—and ‘subaltern women’—the second. In my way of reading there is here a solid critique of nationlism as an end in itself—and a loving critique of how male-gendered nationalism can solve a young man’s crisis; and of course, a very strong critique of the failure of decolonization in the second story. ‘The realization that as time passes, for a woman, the ideology of “love” remains a memory but acknowledges defeat in the hands of hunger is an exquisite aporia in the first story; almost between species-life and species-being. And in the second, the extraordinary resourcefulness of this village community of women and the guileless courage and simplicity of Andi, her relationship with her eldest daughter-in-law and so on, are again a responsible narrative that offers a critique no less powerful than a merely reasonable one. How tellingly Devi outlines the limits of mere goodwill! Indeed, I’m always amazed by the theoretical delicacy of Mahasweta’s stories. The aporias between gendering on the one hand (‘feudal’-transitional, and subaltern), and the ideology of national liberation (as tragedy and as face) are also worth contemplating. Mahasweta Devi is one of India’s foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del’Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, translator, critic and scholar, is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities Department, Columbia University. She is well known for her translations from French and Bengali into English.