Could We Please Read Along the Grain First?
After Kurukshetra is a collection of three new stories by Mahashweta Devi -all have to do with the Kurukshetra battle of Mahabharata and its immediate aftermath. The first story is about five women from the janavritta who are asked to keep company with Uttara, the pregnant young widow of Abhimanyu. It brings out the differences of experiences and views they each present to the other. Devi, much like in her other works, paints a convincingly consistent picture of the ways of the "other" and the marginalized. The aim is to open us up to different feelings, emotions and situations that are also unexpected, and even powerfully shock us out of our own. The women of the janavritta say: "Once we return, all of us together will perform the necessary funerary rituals for our dead. Then the elders will arrange marriages. We need husbands, we need children. The village needs to hear the sound of chatter and laughter. We will...create life. That's what nature teaches us." Indeed what makes Devi readable apart from what the content that could read as political correct or simply correct, depending on how skeptic the reader has gotten, is that she remembers that craft is still an essential part to writing.
The second story, "Kunti and the Nishadin" sounds more like the usual reading-against the grain. The Nishadins, tribals or forest dwellers, here remind Kunti that she forgot to confess that she and her sons killed a tribal mother and her five sons in the lac house, so that Duryodhana could believe that she and her sons were dead. The situation is when Kunti is in the forest tending to Dhritarashtra and Gandhaari. Credit goes to Devi for making the effort to paint the rajvritta imaginatively, since one always encounters a critique of the tradition even before it is adequately represented. The third story "Souvali" is about Yuyutsu, a son born to Dhritarashtra of a maid called Souvali. Yuyustu the only surviving son of Dhritarshtra performs last rites for him although he was never acknowledged as one. Feelings of love, separation, belonging and duty are nicely painted here and critiqued, of course. The three stories sometimes read in a run-on fashion, picking from leftover themes in other stories which adds to the richness of this collection. Although Devi does not exactly say that she finds the janavritta a better way of living, and this is part of her craft, one cannot escape confronting that possibility head-on. Such a possibility evokes some thoughts on Devi's treatment of the subject matter and I would like to share them here.
In all three stories, the reader is presented with a comparison or conversation that ensues in these stories whereby both the janavritta and the rajavritta mourn the loss created by the Mahabharata war, and in each instance the tribal worldview, it seems, offers better alternatives to war or the life dictated as its aftermath. The tribal way of living has to do with being in harmony with nature and a close contact with one's own feelings. Even as Devi's descriptions of the vrittas are fairly consistent and believable, what seems lacking is that the worldview of the rajavritta as painted by Devi is hardly engaged with on its own terms. And it appears increasingly meaningless, nonsensical and esoteric as the comparisons ensue. Actually, the rajavritta that Devi paints is itself most interesting in terms of the life and subjectivities we get to see. I suppose one must first enjoy the legitimacy of this subjectivity that Devi creates, taste its dimensions and then seek other possible alternatives or assess it. It is indeed different from those attempts that anachronize the traditionsin both representation and analysis, and go on to blame the traditions for not being good enough for the current modernity!
Gandhari says: "We must not allow ourselves to be undone by grief", --this does to a great extent reveal how emotions and feelings were viewed by the rajavritta. It is the far end of the tribal worldview of close contact with one's feelings. But what Devi misses is that there is indeed something precious about bringing control over one's emotions, feelings and self. And that it is valuable to view oneself as being an entity apart from one's personality which can then bear some control upon this personality and its selfish interests. This world is however laughed at by Yuyutsu (seen as belonging to janvritta) as an artificial world. If a serious assessment of the two vrittas is intended, Devi must not question the codes of the rajaavritta, but see their logic, coherence and how they must have emerged. This questioning of the codes is indeed very modernist and does not do justice to her own painting of the rajavritta. For example, she does exactly such a thing when she says the following in the voice of Kunti: "The role of daughter-in-law, the role of queen, the role of mother, playing these hundreds of roles where was the space, the time to be her true self?" It is both unconvincing and typical. Would not have Kunti and the subjectivities of her time have learned to live with roles or perhaps more accurately, would not roles themselves have been authentic ways of being the true self? Is it not the uniqueness of the Indian traditions, whether mainstream or otherwise to find the true self in actions and roles, rather than independent substantive dogmas, ideas or quests for 'truth' outside of actions and roles? Unfortunately, these possibilities are awarded to the tribals by Devi and denied to those of the rajavritta.
One hopes that Devi's concern is not about rewriting history or epic for the real contemporary peasant or tribal community today. What does nishadins in the Mahabharata have to do with the real empirically available group of people in contemporary times? The traditional way of addressing the real group of people, if a discomfort arose, has been to create an alternate story that finds heroes amongst the nishadins who were praised as much by the rajavritta in another instance. Or another story that would trace the karma of the nishadins would be created. These are often voluntarily created by groups of people, but one also sees a strong tradition of writing in the case of both our epics. One could have said that Devi's attempt is akin to this process, but that is not the case. This is because; the tradition of creating alternate stories does not violate the prevalent canonized version. It allows for its celebration as much as it celebrates its own. It does not lead to the displacement of one story by another in a normative fashion. In fact, the traditional way of creating alternate stories, although acts on a deconstructive impulse much like Devi's, it is free from the insecurity and urgency that her stories bring. The traditional way of creating alternate stories seemed to add endlessly, in order to record and cherish a variety of cognitive possibilities, differences, imaginations and twists. In fact most retellings start from the point where the event and its consequences were known prior to its occurrence and the occurrence only confirmed what was bound to happen, because of another set of events that we are now told about in the form of a new story. This was perhaps a way of grasping the causal issues at hand. Or simply a wondering as to what causal issues could be at hand in the creation of an epic. Or perhaps they intended showing that causal issues are ungraspable, and are not what they appear to be. Is it not true in India, after all that every community has stories of its heroes, its divine origins, its purpose on earth and its accomplishments? If yes, then Devi's reasoning seems somewhat alien and probably brings a western deconstructive impulse that necessitates a break with one tradition in order to make another. And would not such breaks defeat Devi's own purpose of restoring respect to the others' way of life and being?
(Earlier versions of this review were published on this blog. This reworked version has been published by Muse India: India's Literary E-Journal. Issue 23, Jan-Feb 2009)
The second story, "Kunti and the Nishadin" sounds more like the usual reading-against the grain. The Nishadins, tribals or forest dwellers, here remind Kunti that she forgot to confess that she and her sons killed a tribal mother and her five sons in the lac house, so that Duryodhana could believe that she and her sons were dead. The situation is when Kunti is in the forest tending to Dhritarashtra and Gandhaari. Credit goes to Devi for making the effort to paint the rajvritta imaginatively, since one always encounters a critique of the tradition even before it is adequately represented. The third story "Souvali" is about Yuyutsu, a son born to Dhritarashtra of a maid called Souvali. Yuyustu the only surviving son of Dhritarshtra performs last rites for him although he was never acknowledged as one. Feelings of love, separation, belonging and duty are nicely painted here and critiqued, of course. The three stories sometimes read in a run-on fashion, picking from leftover themes in other stories which adds to the richness of this collection. Although Devi does not exactly say that she finds the janavritta a better way of living, and this is part of her craft, one cannot escape confronting that possibility head-on. Such a possibility evokes some thoughts on Devi's treatment of the subject matter and I would like to share them here.
In all three stories, the reader is presented with a comparison or conversation that ensues in these stories whereby both the janavritta and the rajavritta mourn the loss created by the Mahabharata war, and in each instance the tribal worldview, it seems, offers better alternatives to war or the life dictated as its aftermath. The tribal way of living has to do with being in harmony with nature and a close contact with one's own feelings. Even as Devi's descriptions of the vrittas are fairly consistent and believable, what seems lacking is that the worldview of the rajavritta as painted by Devi is hardly engaged with on its own terms. And it appears increasingly meaningless, nonsensical and esoteric as the comparisons ensue. Actually, the rajavritta that Devi paints is itself most interesting in terms of the life and subjectivities we get to see. I suppose one must first enjoy the legitimacy of this subjectivity that Devi creates, taste its dimensions and then seek other possible alternatives or assess it. It is indeed different from those attempts that anachronize the traditionsin both representation and analysis, and go on to blame the traditions for not being good enough for the current modernity!
Gandhari says: "We must not allow ourselves to be undone by grief", --this does to a great extent reveal how emotions and feelings were viewed by the rajavritta. It is the far end of the tribal worldview of close contact with one's feelings. But what Devi misses is that there is indeed something precious about bringing control over one's emotions, feelings and self. And that it is valuable to view oneself as being an entity apart from one's personality which can then bear some control upon this personality and its selfish interests. This world is however laughed at by Yuyutsu (seen as belonging to janvritta) as an artificial world. If a serious assessment of the two vrittas is intended, Devi must not question the codes of the rajaavritta, but see their logic, coherence and how they must have emerged. This questioning of the codes is indeed very modernist and does not do justice to her own painting of the rajavritta. For example, she does exactly such a thing when she says the following in the voice of Kunti: "The role of daughter-in-law, the role of queen, the role of mother, playing these hundreds of roles where was the space, the time to be her true self?" It is both unconvincing and typical. Would not have Kunti and the subjectivities of her time have learned to live with roles or perhaps more accurately, would not roles themselves have been authentic ways of being the true self? Is it not the uniqueness of the Indian traditions, whether mainstream or otherwise to find the true self in actions and roles, rather than independent substantive dogmas, ideas or quests for 'truth' outside of actions and roles? Unfortunately, these possibilities are awarded to the tribals by Devi and denied to those of the rajavritta.
One hopes that Devi's concern is not about rewriting history or epic for the real contemporary peasant or tribal community today. What does nishadins in the Mahabharata have to do with the real empirically available group of people in contemporary times? The traditional way of addressing the real group of people, if a discomfort arose, has been to create an alternate story that finds heroes amongst the nishadins who were praised as much by the rajavritta in another instance. Or another story that would trace the karma of the nishadins would be created. These are often voluntarily created by groups of people, but one also sees a strong tradition of writing in the case of both our epics. One could have said that Devi's attempt is akin to this process, but that is not the case. This is because; the tradition of creating alternate stories does not violate the prevalent canonized version. It allows for its celebration as much as it celebrates its own. It does not lead to the displacement of one story by another in a normative fashion. In fact, the traditional way of creating alternate stories, although acts on a deconstructive impulse much like Devi's, it is free from the insecurity and urgency that her stories bring. The traditional way of creating alternate stories seemed to add endlessly, in order to record and cherish a variety of cognitive possibilities, differences, imaginations and twists. In fact most retellings start from the point where the event and its consequences were known prior to its occurrence and the occurrence only confirmed what was bound to happen, because of another set of events that we are now told about in the form of a new story. This was perhaps a way of grasping the causal issues at hand. Or simply a wondering as to what causal issues could be at hand in the creation of an epic. Or perhaps they intended showing that causal issues are ungraspable, and are not what they appear to be. Is it not true in India, after all that every community has stories of its heroes, its divine origins, its purpose on earth and its accomplishments? If yes, then Devi's reasoning seems somewhat alien and probably brings a western deconstructive impulse that necessitates a break with one tradition in order to make another. And would not such breaks defeat Devi's own purpose of restoring respect to the others' way of life and being?
(Earlier versions of this review were published on this blog. This reworked version has been published by Muse India: India's Literary E-Journal. Issue 23, Jan-Feb 2009)
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