Mahasweta Devi at 100: Naveen Kishore remembers a life of writing as activism
Writing as intimacy. As ‘surrender’, as in totally drowning in the act of writing. ‘Loving’ the language enough to completely immerse yourself in it. No
Writing as intimacy. As ‘surrender’, as in totally drowning in the act of writing. ‘Loving’ the language enough to completely immerse yourself in it. No place for the self as ‘ego’ or ‘personality’ with its own views. To be ‘possessed’ by the spirt of the language of literature. Writing, therefore, as ‘activism’. Writing also as relationship. Not just between two people. But with the freedom she allowed her characters. Or mukti as she called it. Often in the context of the belief that her characters had the right to dream their own paths. Choose their own fates. Regardless of the consequences, which would lead to some amazing stories where the reader often forgot the writer. The writer as a clandestine presence? Maybe. Mahasweta Devi’s ability to combine the fact of her daily life with her fiction. And her activism that instinctively made her decipher realities and then translate them into a literature of resistance. Not just as an extension of her own ‘fighter’ self but also as a human being with an evolving concerned vision. Writing as an act of intuition. A desperate storytelling that does not always position itself in the objective. It is personal. And political. It is left to the reader to find motivation or strategy or allusion or method in her texts. “Writing became my real world for me, in which I lived and survived,” she said. We read to each other. Poems, texts that qualified as jottings. She insisted I write. Every single day. And made me send her texts — long, short, anything I did that day — for 30 days to start me off.
Our conversations were meanderings in an otherwise vast and unfolding ‘interruptus’. Life. And in her case, all the ‘throwing herself into the fray’ on behalf of the tribal community, for instance. Fighting battles with the police on their behalf. And yet we talked. We joked about death in the same breath as we joked about wanting to hover over our own wake. She hated ‘good people’. Had no time for them. Often said to me: “You must promise me that you will not change into a good person.” “What happens to belief when it is betrayed?” I suddenly said aloud to her. “About belief — I have never found any reason to feel negative or pessimistic. The old values are alright for me and I see no reason to depart from them. You see the way I stay. You’ve seen me before too, you see it now. And I’m not doing a lot, I’m not doing anything great. This is the least I can do. I don’t even feel the urge to be otherwise. People talk about my being a Naxalite sympathiser. Yes, I sympathise with them for sacrificing their lives. For a belief. Even when they knew that writing a slogan on the wall would court a bullet from the police, they did it. They were young jewels. The Party just used these people and threw them away. And forgot all about them. They are looking forward to my death so that they can slip in and give me a State funeral.
The BriefWire