Book Review: Imaginary Maps.

Literature has long been used as a tool for resistance and the correct representation of people and societies that do not generally find themselves includedwithin the mainstream society. Such writings aim towards the upliftment of the said minority societies. It is what critics have often referred to as “writing one’s way to power”. Imaginary Maps by Mahashweta Devi is one such work that brings out the oppression of the colonizers and the inherent prejudice and cultural bias of people belonging to the upper class; people much like you and me; who have never really struggled for anything.

For people who don’t know who Mahashweta Devi is, she is considered to beone of the prominent faces of India’s Adivasi movement. She was a Bengali activist and writer who devoted her whole life to the empowerment of the tribal people of West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, and Chattisgarh regions. Her works are primarily in Bengali but they have been widely translated into other Indian languages as well as in English.

Imaginary Maps is a collection of three short stories although the second and third are often considered novelettes. They were translated from individual works written in Bengali by renowned literary critic and translator Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

The book opens with an interview of the author that was conducted by the translator herself. The interview creates a premise for the readers as to what they should be expecting in her works. Mahashweta Devi talks about her journey as an activist and how her travels in the obscure forest and hilly regions of Bengal, MP, and Chattisgarh led her to create characters in her stories. She emphasizes that these characters are not mere fictional descriptions but such characters can actually be found in the tribal villages that she has spent her life in, interacting and working with them. The translator’s note by Spivak helps the reader in situating the stories into a historical context since most Indian and Western readers are expected to be unfamiliar with the tribal experiences. Both the author’s interview and the translator’s note were very insightful for me.

 

Coming to the three stories, the first one is titled ‘The Hunt’. The original Bengali title of the story is ‘Shikar’. The story is about tribal women’s struggle for survival but the story of Mary Oraon could also easily be the story of every woman in our country where her privileges - economic, political, and sexual - are determined by and judged by the dominant cultural perspectives. It discusses in detail the issue of sexual violence and power that upper caste men tend to exert on tribal women. Mary Oraon has been portrayed as a powerful character, hardened by her circumstances as she takes matters of her sexual freedom into her own hands.

‘Douloti, the bountiful’ is probably one of the most heartbreaking stories I have ever read about the subjection of women who are forced into sexual labor as a way of paying back monetary loans given to them and their families by men in power. The second story gives more insight into the bonded labor system that is still prevalent in the tribal villages. The character of Douloti acts as a sharp contrast to Mary Oraon and her story marks the real position of a helpless tribal woman in Indian society.

‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’ is the third story and is a more factual account of the workings of a fictional tribal village. It was surely a compelling narrative but with each page, I started feeling more and more disconnected from the characters because frankly, there are too many of them to keep a track of. Nevertheless, the story presents an appropriate account of the culture and ways of the indegenious people, their beliefs and the realities in which they continue to exist even when their identity is often almost negated by the rest of our country.

You can read the shorter version of this review on my Instagram page. The link is given down below:

Book Review: The Handmaid's Tale.

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays in the maze.”

I am not going to introduce the author or the book in this review. I think everyone has heard of this book because of the Hulu Series that it was adapted into around four years ago. And Margaret Atwood is a household name when it comes to Proto feminist and feminist fiction. I also do not wish to give the plot of the book to people who are looking forward to reading this.

The Handmaid’s Tale, although, is a Dystopian fiction, or rather a Speculative Fiction as the author prefers to call it. For people who don’t know what speculative fiction is, it is a genre that explores elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, nature, or the present universe.

I have been moved by a number of books in this lifetime but very few books have ended up scaring me. The Handmaid’s Tale is one such book that has kept me up at night thinking about it. If I could describe the book using one word, it would be ‘gripping’. From the very first page, you will get sucked into the world of Ofred and the other handmaids like her.

The language is terse and compact and employs brief sentences. There are a lot of full stops which many might find annoying but I didn’t. I think it added that extra element of suspense and fear. The narration is fragmented too. Ms. Atwood’s narrator is what we literature students call ‘an unreliable narrator’. Ofred often skips from one train of thought to another. She gives half descriptions of incidents and although that is a brilliant technique to write a Dystopian novel, it also makes the narrative very hard to follow. I had the most trouble with such a narration because it broke my flow a bit. Nonetheless, the storyline is pretty fast-paced.

A Goodreads review of this book bashes it on the basis of logical realities that it fails to gratify. It said, and I quote, “Societies don’t change overnight.” But I think they do. With the Talibani invasion, we have been proved that things can and do change for the worse and such things do happen quickly. Although the likelihood of such premises to occur in powerful nations like America is pretty low, I must agree. But who knows? The way we have been witnessing drastic changes in the world order over the past few years, one can only wonder. We may not have written rules on the subjugation of women, but every day women of the world (even first world countries) are made to feel the difference of their gender in various sectors of life. We may not have an autocratic government yet that makes women property of the men and the state, only to be used for reproduction purposes, but women all over the world are still denied abortion rights and god knows whatnot. Hence, this book didn’t quite feel like dystopia to me. It just felt like a prophecy of sorts; a dark future that awaits us. 

You can read this review and many other such reviews on my Instagram page. Here's the link:

https://www.instagram.com/the.boi.poka/