Chapter 4 - Black Blood: Fictions of the Tribal in Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy

Summary

Chapter 4 examines representations of tribal or adivasi movements by two of India’s best-known writers, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Roy’s creative non-fiction essay “Walking with the Comrades” ‘2011’ created a stir in India for its sympathetic portrayal of rebellious tribal activists. I maintain that Roy’s key inspiration is the earlier short story by Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi” ‘1978’. Describing a tribal woman leader Dopdi Mejhen, Devi’s story, translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is a widely anthologized text in postcolonial literature. However, the text’s global career fails to capture its complex history: this includes the Cold War and the contest between the Soviet and American-led blocs for regional hegemony in South Asia; the impact of antiwar peoples’ theater of the 1960s, including plays on Vietnam and the Black Panthers; and the tradition of progressive Bengali women’s fiction within which Devi is properly located. The chapter surveys the relationship between Devi’s Bengali-language story and Roy’s English-language essay through a host of little-known ‘to the Anglophone world’ intermediaries. In doing so, it demonstrates how various grassroots movements for the rights of adivasi and ethnic minorities continue to inflect creative non-fiction in the contemporary era.