Titu Mir

Titu Mir, a peasant leader, led a revolt against the British in Bengal in 1830–31, in the course of which he was killed. He has remained a hero in the popular imagination. This was a period of transition in agricultural Bengal. The evil effects of the Permanent Settlement were beginning to be felt by the rural people. Traditional zamindars were being replaced by absentee landlords. Indigo plantations were eating up fertile agicultural land. Titu, a hotheaded, headstrong young man, a natural leader, found himself defending the rural poor against he exploitation of the landlords and the British, at the cost of his own life. In this warmly told historical adventure tale, Mahasweta Devi brings history alive in the presence of a charismatic hero, all the time, as is typical of her, embedding him in the larger socio-economic situation of the times. We get to know Titu as a young boy, fearless and restless, always standing up for victims of injustice, and then trace his gradual development into a rebel leader after his conversion to the Wahabi sect. Mahasweta Devi is one of India’s foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of the 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 amongst dispossessed tribal communities. Rimi B. Chatterjee is a editor and translator based in Calcutta.