Maps: Three Stories. - book reviews

MAPS: THREE STORIES by Mahasweta Devi. Translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. xxxi + 213 pages. $17.95.

Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps portrays the pains of decolonization from the perspective of the indigenous tribes who inhabit the lowest level of India's strictly demarcated caste society. For Devi, a well-known writer and political activist who writes in Bengali, the struggles of decolonization are fundamentally cultural: central to each of these stories is a tension between the myths and rituals of the indigenous tribes and the pervasive modernity of national bureaucracy and multinational capitalism that penetrates even the most remote regions of the Indian subcontinent. By looking from the, bottom up, as it were, Devi's stories make it impossible for the Western reader to conceive of India without acknowledging the fierce regional, religious, class, and gender struggles that have accompanied decolonization and nascent nationhood. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out in her introduction, these stories continually remind the Western reader that "`India' is not an undivided perspective."

The first two stories, "The Hunt" and "Douloti the Bountiful," relate the disempowerment of the tribals through the particular struggles of tribal women. In "The Hunt," the central character, Mary Oraon, a half-Anglo, half-tribal woman who finds some measure of independence in her outcast status, resorts to violence to rebuff the sexual advances of a wealthy developer from the city. Devi merges the ritual of the tribal women's hunt with Mary's murder of her suitor, suggesting that indigenous practices still provide a fertile ground for myths that can be deployed to combat contemporary oppressions. "Douloti," the story of a tribal woman sold into bonded labor as a prostitute to a wealthy landowner, also relies on a central metaphor: as the tubercular Douloti collapses dead on the way to a hospital, she happens to fall on a concrete map of India, into which the Indian flag will be planted in celebration of Independence Day. Devi leaves no room for doubt about the governing metaphor here; the last line of the story,--"Douloti is all over India"--makes it abundantly clear that Douloti's narrative speaks both to the specific oppression of women in the bonded labor system and the general disenfranchisement of the various tribes throughout "unified" India.

Devi explores the tension between myth and modernity most fully in the final story (really a novella, at 100-plus pages), "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." Told through the eyes of an urban journalist, Puran Sahay, who travels to a remote, famine-stricken tribal village to report on the supposed sighting of a pterodactyl, the story dramatizes the position of the Third World intellectual in representing the plight of indigenous cultures to a wider public. The plot turns on Puran's struggle to decide how to represent the prehistoric creature in his report. The pterodactyl represents a scientific anomaly--a freak of nature--according to Western eyes, yet the natives of Pirtha believe it to be an ominous message of impending famine and extinction. Through the course of the story, strange events draw Puran away from his reporter's objectivity and into the community's quest to understand the strange omen of the pterodactyl. In the end, Puran finds no rational explanation for the appearance of the pterodactyl, but is nonetheless convinced of its import as a mythical message that his Westernized intellect cannot grasp. Puran abandons reason but not commitment; as he tells a local government official, to rebuild the tribal community, one "must love beyond reason for a long time."

These stories wear their messages outwardly in a way that might be disconcerting to readers used to reticence and ambiguity in literary texts. But this is partly the point. Devi's work as a writer is but one element of her life's project of political activism, and her fiction declaims injustices loudly and without reservation. Moreover, as Spivak's preface and afterword point out, these stories are not to be read in an idealized sphere in which author and reader meet each other without cultural and political affiliations. Devi accomplishes in fiction what theorists of postcolonial cultural contact often miss: an articulate account of the struggles of decolonization from a specific cultural context. As she insists in her introductory interview with Spivak, this need for local knowledge is a responsibility of intellectuals everywhere: "Why should American readers want to know from me about Indian tribals," she asks, "when they have present-day America?" While Devi's writing speaks about specific struggles, the kind of inequalities that she writes about are not exclusive to India. Here, as in her stories, Mahasweta Devi refuses to allow the First World reader to understand her work as an exotic artifact of the Third.

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