Mahasweta Devi
had people in tears at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. Delivered
with passionate heart, her inaugural speech about our freedoms still
on hold stirs a kind of moral transformation. Excerpts
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Indian culture is a
tapestry of many weaves, many threads. The weaving is endless
as are the shades of the pattern. The pattern shifts, flows, stutters,
forms again and changes shape from one season to the other. I
see one India in the pattern. You see another |
Repetition and
recollection are the
same movement, only in opposite
directions; for what is recollected
has been, it is repeated backwards,
whereas repetition properly so-called
is recollected forward.
Søren
Kierkegaard, Repetition
At 80-plus I move forward often stepping back into the
shadows. Sometimes I am bold enough to step back into the sunlight.
As a young person, as a mother, I would often move forward to when I
was old. Amuse my son. Pretend I couldn’t hear or see. Make mockery
of memory, forget things that had happened a moment ago. These games
were for fun. Now they are no longer funny. My life has moved forward
and is repeating itself. I am repeating myself. Recollecting for you
what has been. What is. What could have been. May have been.
See the tree, the forest, the field lush with crops,
a stream dazzling in sunlight. And see, the spotted deer are jumping
and fleeing to the forest, the mothers are filling the pitchers from
the stream, clutching their children. And the houses are the ones they
left behind at Badihatta. The sun is leaning to see the earth. The peasants
are irrigating their fields. What an expanse of forest. How green the
hills are.
Nothing happens
unless you know how to dream. The Establishment is out to destroy, by
remote control, all the brain cells that induce dreams. But some dreams
manage to escape. I am after the dreams that have escaped from jail.
The right to dream is what allows mankind to survive. If you end the
right to dream — which the entire world and everyone is doing
— you destroy the world. The right to dream should be the first
fundamental right. The right to dream. [...]
There’s a
story about Nanak — his father made him sit in a shop, told him
to sell goods… dus, gyarah, barah, tera… tera, tera, tera...
and he gave everything away. Everything is yours. With me, everything
became tera… nothing touches the inside. Material things don’t
touch me, I remain an outsider, I can’t always be an insider.
Genuine warmth, real understanding, some friendship, a few strange things
touch me, but I’m an outsider and an insider at the same time.
[...]
Since the 1980s,
I have been vocal about the daily injustice and exploitation faced by
the most marginalised and dispossessed of our people: tribals, the landless
rural poor who then turn into itinerant labour or pavement dwellers
in cities. Through reports in newspapers, through petitions, court cases,
letters to the authorities, participation in activist organisations
and advocacy, through the grassroots journal I edit, Bortika, in which
the dispossessed tell their own truths, and finally through my fiction,
I have sought to bring the harsh reality of this ignored segment of
India’s population to the notice of the nation, I have sought
to include their forgotten and invisible history in the official history
of the nation. I have said over and over, our Independence was false;
there has been no Independence for these dispossessed peoples, still
deprived of their most basic rights.
Let
the people trace their hands over every alphabet until they can
write for themselves:
I know, I can, I will |
How to save and
protect one’s culture in these circumstances? Which culture do
we protect? And what do we mean when we speak of Indian culture in the
21st century? What culture? Which India? Sixty years after our hard-won
Independence, the khadi sari is India just as the mini skirt and the
backless choli is. A bullock cart is India just as much as is the latest
Toyota or Mercedes car. Illiteracy haunts us, yet the same India produces
men and women at the forefront of medicine, science and technology.
Eight-year-old children toil mercilessly, facing unimaginable working
conditions and abuse as child labourers. That is India. On the other
hand, there is another lot of eight-year-olds who spend their time in
air-conditioned classrooms and call their mothers at lunch break using
their personal mobile phones. That too is India. Satyam Shivam Sundaram
is India. Choli ke peechchey kya hai is also India. The multiplex and
the mega mall are India. The snake charmer and the maharishi —
they too are India.
Indian culture
is a tapestry of many weaves, many threads. The weaving is endless as
are the shades of the pattern. Somewhere dark, somewhere light, somewhere
saffron, somewhere as green as the fields of new paddy, somewhere flecked
with blood, somewhere washed cool by the waters of a Himalayan spring.
Somewhere the red of a watermelon slice. Somewhere the blue of an autumn
sky in Bengal. Somewhere the purple of a musk deer’s eye. Somewhere
the red of a new bride’s sindoor. Somewhere the threads form words
in Urdu, somewhere in Bengali, somewhere in Kannada, somewhere in Assamese,
yet elsewhere in Marathi. Somewhere the cloth frays. Somewhere the threads
tear. But still it holds. Still. It holds.
The pattern shifts,
flows, stutters, forms again and changes shape from one season to the
other. I see one India in the pattern. You see another. Light and shadow
play. History and modernity collide. Superstition and myth, Rabindrasangeet
and rap, Sufi and Shia and Sunni, caste and computers, text and sub-plot,
laughter and tears, governments and oppositions, reservations and quotas,
struggles and captivity, success and achievement, hamburgers and Hari
Om Hari, Sanskrit and sms, the smell of rain and the sound of the sea.
A seamless stitching. Many, many hands have stitched, are stitching
and will continue to stitch India. My country. Torn, tattered, proud,
beautiful, hot, humid, cold, sandy, bright, dull, educated, barbaric,
savage, shining India. My country. And its myriad cultures. From time
immemorial to now, the 21st country. From the Indus Valley to the bluetooth
handset, India has seen it all, contains it all within itself and its
cultures. There is room in India for all faiths, all languages, all
people. Despite the communal crises, despite the fundamentalism, the
backwardness of rural life, the memories of underdevelopment which are
no memory but reality for us, the threat of aids, tsunamis, earthquakes,
floods and droughts, farmer suicides, police violence, environmental
disasters wreaked by industries and farmland being bought over by multinational
companies, despite the battering by history and circumstance, India
still is. Its culture still is. Hence we all still are. India has learnt
to survive, to adapt, to keep the old with the modern, to walk hand
in hand with the new millennium whistling a tune from the dawn of time.
This is truly the age when the joota is Japani, the patloon Englistani,
the topi Roosi. But the dil — the dil is and always will remain
Hindustani.
As we face the
future, and as I stand here, invited to speak of my country’s
culture before such an eminent gathering and at such an honourable occasion,
I wish to share my dream of where I would like to see my India go. I
have spoken of the fundamental right to dream. I would now like to exercise
that right.
I dream of an India
where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. Where knowledge
is free. Where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow
domestic walls. Where words come out of the depth of truth. Where tireless
striving stretches its arms towards perfection. Where the clear stream
of reason has not lost its way in the dreary sand of dead habit.
I dream of an India
to which the world ‘backward’ does not and cannot ever apply.
I wish to be Third World no more but First, the only world. I wish for
children to be educated. I wish for women to step into the light. I
wish for justice for the common man. Survival for the farmer. Homes
for the poor. And hope for all. I wish for debts to cease. For poverty
to vanish. For hunger to become a bad word that no one utters. I wish
for the environment to be protected, to be loved and restored. I wish
the land to be healed, the waters to be pure again. For the tiger to
survive. I wish for self reliance, for self respect, for independence
from the shackles of superstition. I wish for equal medical aid for
all.
For light and water
and a roof above every head. I wish for more and more books to be written,
to be published, in every language there is in the country. Let the
words pour out. Let the stories be told. Let the people read. Let them
learn to read. To trace their fingers over every alphabet until they
can spell their names. Their addresses. Until they can write for themselves:
I know. I can. I will. Let us fight ignorance with knowledge. Let us
battle hatred with logic. Let us slay evil with the sword of the pen.
I wish for no more
satis, no more dowry deaths, no more honour killings, no more flesh
being bought and sold. Let no more parents sell their children to survive.
Let no more mothers drown their daughters in the dead of night. Let
the downtrodden awake, let the forgotten faces and the muffled voices
arise to claim their own. Let the pattern make room, let these new threads
find place, let new colours set afire the tapestry. Set ablaze the future.
Into that heaven of freedom, let my India awaken again and again. It
is a big dream, I know. But not an impossible one.
When I speak of
Indian culture, then, I speak of all this. Culture is what will take
us into the future yet keep us in close contact with our roots, our
history, our tradition, our heritage. Culture will let us take a quantum
leap and land on the moon bur first, before all that, it must help us
take a few small steps towards understanding ourselves better, towards
knowing each other better. Culture must once again remind us to be a
tolerant and truly secular people.
I have tried in
my own way to give you a picture of this culture. But how am I to even
to begin arriving at a definition that will be acceptable to all across
an India that is so chaotic. So calm. So flexible. So rigid. So rich.
So poor. So understanding. So easy to be misunderstood. After all, there
are many Indias, as I say over and over again. Simultaneous. Even parallel.
And whose culture
is it anyway? Yours? Mine? Theirs? There are so many ‘theirs’
in the land of my birth who have nothing but the harsh landscape of
surviving from day to day. The dispossessed remain with us after six
decades of becoming possessed of a freedom we all fought for. They all
fought for.
I claim elsewhere
to have always written about the ‘culture of the downtrodden’.
How tall or short or true or false is this claim? The more I think and
write and think some more, the harder it gets to arrive at a definition.
I hesitate. I falter. I cling to the belief that for any culture as
old and ancient as ours to have survived over time and in time, there
could only be one basic common and acceptable core thought: humaneness.
To accept each other’s right to be human with dignity.
This then is my
fight. My dream. In my life and in my literature.
