BOOK REVIEW (MOTHER OF 1084)
By
Mahasweta Devi (translated by Samik Bandhopadhay)
This heart-wrenching story is about the heavy uprisings dealt by the Indian Government during the militant communist movement in Bengal, which led to the death of many young rebels in that region, one amongst them was “Brati” who got disenchanted by the bourgeois society and questioned the very ideals he was brought up with. Traumatized by the death of her youngest son, “Sujata” attempts to realize her son’s faithfulness towards the Communist movement, while in turn discovering her own isolation as a woman and as a wife from the two-faced feudal society her son had rebelled against.
The story is a documentation, which is set in the backdrop of the late 60s in Calcutta, when the youth were projected as the “enemy of the state” because of the communist ideologies they propagated in the wake of the Naxalite movement or the “Decade of Liberation”. The state dealt with a heavy hand to suppress these movements by ultimately eliminating everyone who retaliated against the society, one amongst many such revolutionaries was “Brati”. Brutally killed by the state because of his ideology, the story banks upon Brati’s demise and the subsequent trauma suffered by his mother “Sujata” as she tries to come to terms with the situation. Sujata, a middle-aged woman belonging to a bourgeoisie family in Calcutta, is made to pursue a B.A.degree on the pretext of her metamorphosis into an ideal wife in a Bengali household. She is married off to Dibyanath Chatterjee, a prodigious Chartered Accountant and in thirty-four years of their married life she had given birth to four children (Jyoti, Neepa, Tuli and Brati) and three of them except for Brati are leading their p...
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...He is also a philanderer and his mother and children, revere his conquests, further iterating that women have to remain faithful despite their husband’s infidelities. The other characters culminate an image of a traditional bourgeois Bengali family and one can create a mental picture effectively. The novel also condemns the state for being liberal at name but ultimately adopting stringent totalitarian policies and being inefficient as Brati’s killers roamed freely and none could accuse them as they were mercenaries brought off by the state. Using the human tragedy behind the Communist revolution in West Bengal, the misplaced idealism and how death ultimately re-unites a mother and her son, it is obvious that the author Mahasweta Devi’s sole purpose was to paint a wider picture of class differences and enable the readers with a spur of “awakening” within themselves.
In Nehru’s India, women were victims of a “passive revolution” that subtly advanced bourgeoisie men of higher castes under a guise of parliamentary democracy. Though women have presided over the Indian National Congress, served as a prime minister, and represent a large part of India’s la...
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“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance,” transcribed George Bernard Shaw in Immaturity. ‘The Lowlands’ portrays the life of two siblings, born 15 months apart, in the late 1950’s themed land called Calcutta. Jhumpa Lahiri excerpts the book’s title from the section of the city called Tollygunder. During every north-eastern monsoon, the lowland fills with water reaching the height of a bicycle, which remained for the rest of the year. Udayan and Subhash grew up together in this marshland, each bound to be together and often mistaken for the other. This novel shows how two people who are considerably identical can be so much different when faced with distinctive circumstances and life choices. It complicates the age old tale of sibling rivalry and enriches the readers with true love and captivates the way both the brothers swear by each other. Lahiri’s works are usually based on characters who journey to another country and the challenges they come across; deriving from her own personal experience as being born in London to her Bengali parents and the way of life she has overcome. This tale takes us on a high tide while teaching us the bitter reality of the highs and lows of actions which would haunt families for the rest of their lives.
In the novel A Passage to India, written by Forster, he is bias towards the women in the novel. The society when Forster wrote the novel in the 1920’s had different views on women than it has today a...
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy tells the story of the communist state of Kerala and the forbidden love between two castes, which changes the lives of everyone. In the novel an ‘Untouchable’, Velutha is a carpenter and works at Paradise Pickles and Preserves for much less than he deserves because of his status as an Untouchable in the caste system. Velutha falls into a forbidden love with a divorced woman, Ammu who is associated with an upper caste Syrian Christian Ipe family. Marriage was the only way that Ammu could have escaped this life, but she lost the chance when marrying the wrong man, as he was an alcoholic and this resulted in them getting a divorce. Ammu breaks the laws that state ‘who should be loved, and how and how much’, as their affair threatens the ‘caste system’ in India, which is a hierarchal structure and social practice in India in which your position in society is determined and can’t be changed. Arhundati Roy portrays the theme of forbidden love within the caste systems and shows how they are t...
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Lahiri examines her characters’ struggles, anxieties, and biases to explain the details of immigrant psych and behaviour. Jhumpa Lahiri through her work states that the distinction between human cultures is man-made. The characteristic of her writing is “plain” language and her characters. Often Indian immigrants to America must find a way between the cultural values of their homeland and their adopted home. Jhumpa Lahiri has the abilitie to pass on the most seasoned social clashes in the most prompt mold and to accomplish the voices of a wide range of characters are among the one of a kind qualities that have caught the consideration of a wide crowd. She was conceived in London, and after that moved to Rhode Island as a youthful kid with her Bengali guardians. It is especially engaging that Jhumpa Lahiri is the child of Indian immigrants and that she also crosses from England, her birth place, to the U.S.A. and became an American citizen. In The Namesake, Lahiri’s experiences of growing up as a child of immigrants resemble that of her protagonist, Gogol Ganguly. Immigration became blessing in disguise as that makes her a Diaspora writer. In her novel, The Namesake, Lahiri deals with the frightful experience of Ashoke and Ashima, the Indian immigrants and their offsprings, Gogol and Sonia, the second generation, conceived and raised in America. This novel manages space, time, dialect, and societies for drawing out the substance of Indian diaspora. Lahiri has specified three landmasses - Asia, Europe and North America in her novel. She plans to build up the topic of the novel, diasporic dilemma, through the fundamental characters-Ashoke, Ashima, and Gogol. For Ashoke, diasporic strain isn't profound. It is exceptionally obvious in Ashima and Gogol. Sonia is