Short Fiction
The other great war
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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In After Kurukshetra, Mahasweta Devi speaks once again of women from a woman's point of view.
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After Kurukshetra, Mahasweta Devi, translated by Anjum Katyal, Seagull Books, Rs.120.
IN the compellingly powerful stories in After Kurukshetra, Mahasweta Devi speaks once again of women from a woman's point of view, in a woman's language, marked by thoughts and feelings that mainstream literature still seems to want to assign to the sidelines.
Mahasweta Devi does not just move aside the curtains of mainstream perspectives to show readers the "other" side of the Kurukshetra war — the women's side — but goes further into this shadow realm to show us the "other" women hidden away there — vibrant, strong-willed, strong-charactered, "common" women, alive with purpose and capable of doing, as the royal women are not.
Then, though the different women who appear to have their stories told — Uttara and Subhadra in the first tale, which is more abstract than the others, and also perhaps more haunting; the Pandavas' mother, Kunti and the nishadin, in the second story and Souvali, the dasi-wife of Dritarashtra — are all victims of patriarchy, they are not subsumed into a single master identity but remain very individual, very different women, whose reactions to their own victimhood is likewise very different.
While the royal women's victimisation comes about by their own compliance, their wilful desire to conform to the womanly ideal, the dasis are victims through force — whether because their husbands have to drop their lives and run every time the king cried "war" or whether in having to "serve" these very kings themselves. In both the cases, however, the recognition of the wrongs done them is both self-knowledge and self-assertion.
Stark contrast
It is this that gives the stories their punch. The readers are first startled by what the queens and princesses that the Great Epic always depicts as extolling the virtues of the royal way of life, actually feel, and then completely shaken by the contrast with the lives of the dasis, who are conscious all the time of the crushing grip of royal intentions and the royal interpretation of "dharma". And manage still to live lives that are joyous and meaningful.
The contrast between the royal women and the dasis is drawn out clearly in these stories: while the pregnant Uttara is crushed by the weight of her losses and the widowed queens of two generations yoked by decorum, the five dasis, the women from Kurujangal, actively grieve for their dead husbands but are just as active in wanting to mark an end to one phase and go on to the next. They come to ensure that their husbands have been cremated but now that the rains have come, they will return to their village to marry other men, because, like the earth on which the rains have finally fallen and must be ploughed, life must also be ploughed and tended so that it will go on. As it must.
Shifting perspectives
In the Kunti story, the nishadin, daughter-in-law of the old nishadin and her five sons, who Kunti had ordered to be trapped and burnt (in the trap intended by the Kauravas for Kunti and her five sons) is witness to Kunti's final moments in which she is forced to speak, to give voice to all the doubts, the guilt, the shame and the desire for punishment that she has harboured all her life.
The last story, which tells of the dasi woman and her son fathered by Dritarashtra, the blind king, seems a little heavy-handed in comparison. Perhaps because a slight activist note of stress on the rights angle creeps in, unsettling the story.
Not many can write like Mahasweta Devi about the many supposed sidelines in literature and the lives in literature, with such intricate, un-self-conscious detail, evoking their rooted, earthy realness: when she tells of it, there is a subtle shifting of the lines.
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