The Many Lives of Bashai Tudu, the Many Acts of (Re)framing Devi

Introduction

In 2012, in response to the brutal murder of the political activist T. P. Chandrasekharan, the Indian-Bengali writer and activist Mahasweta Devi (1926–2016) wrote an open letter to Pinarayi Vijayan, the then CPM State Secretary of Kerala at the time. In her letter, Devi evokes the deathless Bashai Tudu, her fictional protagonist, and compares it with T. P. Chandrasekharan.¹A Malayali politician and the founder of the Revolutionary Marxist Party. Devi writes:

While I was going to meet T. P. Chandrasekharan’s wife Rama, I was telling the young comrades that they should translate my book Bashai Tudu into Malayalam. Bashai Tudu, my hero, was a peasant, a rebel. The then government wanted to kill him. And he was killed. His dead body was identified. But again a rebel, a fighter started his action and declared that he was Bashai Tudu. My Bashai did not die as he was a true people’s leader, and he continued to live in the memory of the people. And T. P. Chandrasekharan is also deathless. He will continue to live in people’s memory and will guide, like my Bashai Tudu. Full reference in Zotero Library

Devi called for her text to speak in Malayalam. She did not live long enough to see her book translated into Malayalam by Sunil Naliynath, who has given the book an ‘afterlife’. In Devi’s account of Bashai Tudu, like in all her works, the mythical always permeates the historical, not only within the literary world but also within the historical contexts. Though she refers to her work as Bashai Tudu, the protagonist is the main character of her novella ‘Operation?—Bashai Tudu’, which, along with its sequel, the short story ‘Draupadi’, forms the book entitled Bashai Tudu, a 1978 English translation from the original Bengali anthology Agnigarbha.²According to Ajay Gupta, Agnigarbha was first published in Bengali as a collection of four stories: ‘Operation? – Bashai Tudu’, ‘Draupadi’, ‘Jal’ and ‘M. W. bonam Lakhind’ by Karuna Prakashani, Calcutta, Jaishtha 1385/1978 CE Full reference in Zotero Library. The book underwent three reprints, Bhadra 1402/ 1995 CE. The English translation of ‘Operation? – Bashai Tudu’ and ‘Draupadi’ by Samik Bandyopadhyay and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak was published by Thema Books, Calcutta in 1990. However, the novella ‘Operation? – Bashai Tudu’ was first published in a Bengali literary magazine Krittibas in Poush/Magh 1348/1977 CE, and ‘Draupadi’ was first published in Parichoy Sharadiya 1977 CE. ‘Draupadi’ was re-printed in a collection of short stories by Mahasweta Devi that was published by National Book Trust in 1993. Along with these two texts, the original Agnigarbha includes two other short stories: ‘Jawl’ and ‘MW banam Lakhind’. This anthology largely deals with the demands of the peasantry, tribals and Adivasis and documents their resistance against systemic oppression perpetuated by the post-colonial state.

In this insight, I offer a close examination of the translated book Bashai Tudu to reflect upon the multiple ways of (re)framing narratives, demonstrating that (re)framing is an activity that operates in and outside the text. First, I show how the text has undergone multiple reframings through re-anthologisation, republication and translation, generating new (literary) contexts and audiences. In this section, I also consider the problem of translation as reframing and bring into conversation different critical studies of translations that take the question of location and relocation of the text as their points of departure. These accounts are both explicitly or implicitly centred on the question of the domestication and foreignisation of the text through translation. Next, I examine the paratexts of the main text, where each paratext directs the reader to read and consider its translation in a certain way, favouring one translation over the other.

In the second section, I demonstrate the dynamics of framing and reframing within the text itself. I show how the fifth death of the character functions as a frame story within which four stories are narrated. I also suggest thinking of intertextuality as a sort of reframing that enables certain kinds of reading; and depending on the frame, one reading could be privileged over the other. Here, I think mythologisation of history functions as a narrative technique not only in the formal but also in the interpretative sense: in that way, myths are used to re-read the cultural repertoires within certain contexts. Finally, given the porous relation between the historical/fictional and oral/textual in the work of Mahasweta Devi, I present a reading of her use of myths and legends as a way to write the history of resistance and critique the injustices of her times.

In the concluding sections, I look at the notion of reframing vis-a-vis reading and conclude that, while framing or reframing could be reductionist, the framed text always resists the reductionism of its frames. Literary texts are always open to new readings, fulfilling the promises of the text, especially when dislocated across time and space; but the frame within which the text is placed is always part of the map of its meaning. There are always already dynamic relations between the text, its contexts, the frame and act of framing that need to be taken into consideration to fulfil the promises of the text. These promises are understood here to indicate the multiple acts of reading that the text itself enables across time, space and language and the ways in which the text becomes something other than itself through translation.³I use the concept of “promise” as a relational act that entails the presence of the text, its readers and translators, and their actions upon/in relation to the text.

Reframing through anthologisation and translation: generating contexts and readership

Reframing through anthologising

The texts included in Bashai Tudu have undergone multiple forms of reframing, generating new locations, contexts and readers for the texts, imparting new meanings into them. The original Bengali ‘Operation?—Bashai Tudu’ was first published in the literary periodical Krittibas (December 1977–January 1978). The translated volume Bashai Tudu was first published by Thema in 1990 and 2002. These editions comprise the following: Samik Bandyopadhya’s ‘Introduction’, in which an extract from its translator Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak is inserted, the ‘Author’s Preface’, the novella ‘Operation?—Bashai Tudu’, and the short story ‘Draupadi’. In addition to these texts, the 2016 Thema edition contains two reviews by Ashok Mitra and Malavika Karlekar and readings by Subhendu Sarkar and Shreya Chakraborty. While the reviews explicate the main thrust of the book, which is presented in a positive light, the readings are actually concerned with the politics of translating Mahasweta Devi, which favours Samik Bandyopadhyay’s translation over Spivak’s (more on that below).

While the author’s preface places the texts within the long peasant and tribal insurgency in India, as mentioned above, Samik Bandyopadhyay’s introduction places the texts within the historical conjuncture in which the Naxalite movement is the master reference, thereby linking Devi’s Bashai Tudu to her Mother of 1084, a novel whose backdrop is also the Naxalite movement. In terms of the thematic contours of these narratives, these paratexts could be pitted against Spivak’s reading of ‘Draupadi’ as a revolutionary feminist text.⁴It is interesting to note here that Mahasweta Devi vehemently opposes the label feminist or woman writer Full reference in Zotero Library.

The short story ‘Draupadi’ embarked on a different journey. It was first published in the periodicals Parichay in 1977, and then anthologised in Agnigarbha in 1978.⁵As indicated in Bashai Tudu, the short story was further included in the following collections: Mahasweta Devi-r Chhotogaplo Sanklan introduced by Samik Bandyopadhyay and published by National Book Trust in 1993; and Mahasweta Devi: Shreshtha Galpo by Dey’s Publishing in 2004 Full reference in Zotero Library. Before it was included in Bashai Tudu, the first English translation of ‘Draupadi’ appeared in the Critical Inquiry with a foreword by its translator Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, who, on many occasions, reports that she translated the text at the request of the renowned Indian historian Ranajit Guha.⁶See Full reference in Zotero Library. This contributed to the association of Devi with the subaltern school project and to the reading of her works through the lens of subaltern studies. Note that Spivak’s translation of Mahasweta Devi’s “Standayini” or “Brest-Giver” was published in Full reference in Zotero Library. In her foreword, Spivak tells us that her reading is influenced by a ‘deconstructive practice’, with which she expresses uneasiness in the following statement: ‘I clearly share an unease that would declare avant-garde theories of interpretation too elitist to cope with revolutionary feminist material’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Spivak is sensitive to the dangers of thinking through elitist theories to interpret a subaltern text she considers ‘revolutionary feminist material’. There is also a sensitivity to the location of her enunciation, as she expresses awareness, in her foreword, that she addresses English language “first-world” readers. Elsewhere, Spivak clearly disclaims: ‘I don’t translate for the Indian reader who doesn’t read any Indian languages’ (Full reference in Zotero Library; ‘Telling History’). The foreword and the text were published later in 1987 in Spivak’s In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics Full reference in Zotero Library and then in Breast Stories Full reference in Zotero Library, a collection of short stories by Mahasweta Devi, also translated by Spivak. Here, as well, the story ‘Draupadi’ is framed as a feminist narrative with a host of others by Mahasweta Devi, which focus on female characters.⁷Recently, the Indian writer and translator Arunava Sinha included a new translation of ‘Draupadi’ in his The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories Full reference in Zotero Library.

Reframing through translation

The concept of frame has been recently deployed in translation studies to understand the processes of reframing through translation:

By bringing the frame concept from the context of oral storytelling in which it originated to the literate context of translation, that is, when a text crosses cultural boundaries and travels in/across space and time, it comes to the fore that reframing impacts how texts are read and received—at the very least because no text exists independently of its (re)frames. Reframing in translation is about setting a new frame for a moving text, by acting as a filter that embeds the reframed textual object in a new configuration. As filters, lenses, or, ultimately, borders, frames have the power to enact change and generate processes of signification. If the frame tale affects the intrinsic and the extrinsic dimensions of the framed narrative, then reframing also affects both these dimensions in a translated text. The first dimension relates to content—the text itself—and the latter relates to context, including mediation devices for the reader. Reframing invites questioning what is inside and what (and how or why) is left outside the frame when a text undergoes translation. Full reference in Zotero Library

In other words, translation is an act of reframing. If every translation involves multiple forms of dislocation across language, time and space, then alteration of the text is an inevitable consequence. While the concept of moving and travelling are deployed by Faria et al. to signify the displacement/emplacement of the text across language, time and space, I think it is crucial to think with the concept of dislocation in order to understand more fully the movement of the text.⁸Full reference in Zotero Library provides a rich account of understanding different aspects of reframing.Texts do not travel or move freely by themselves, nor do they travel to all places indiscriminately. Behind a moving text is a set of multiple movers: translators, publishers, literary institutions and markets; and today, travelling texts, like travelling humans, are situated within power relations that shape their routes and destinations. I would like to use the concept of dislocation to signify that the movements and travels of the literary texts are not innocuous.

Moreover, a translated text is always already a dislocated one. Dislocation here can be understood on multiple levels, but I want to focus here on three senses: a) dislocation by changing the readership of the text (to whom is this translated work addressed?), b) by changing the sociopolitical and literary con(text) within which the translated text is placed (the host of paratexts within which the translated text is framed can still belong to the second sense of dislocation), and c) dislocation by changing the literary and ‘lingual memory’ (Alton Becker’s term) of the text. Alongside generating or altering the communities of the text’s readers, all these forms of dislocation through translation entail a reconfiguration of the temporal aspect of the literary text. It is a truism that the time in the text is largely nonlinear and uneven, forming constellations of transtemporal ensembles by evoking diachronically differentiated historical or literary events or characters, myths and legends that enjoy a simultaneity or contemporaneity anchored in the art of narration. The time of the text and its context is not simply the same as the time in the text, nor is it identical to the time of its readers (whether they are the readers of the original text or readers of its translations). Context is not simply the assemblage of the linear historical events within which the text is written. Rather, it can be constructed only after reading the text, and this reconstruction of context could be thought of as “temporal framing” that attempts to shape the “temporal community” of the text. One can understand this insight if one compares and contrasts Samik’s contextualisation of Bashai Tudu within its immediate historical context (the Naxalite Movement) with that of Devi within the long history of peasant insurgency in India (see below).

Changing the literary and ‘lingual memory’ of the text entails an alteration of the temporal dimension of the text because different memories are activated through the translated text. Alton Becker speaks of ‘lingual memory’ or sometimes ‘prior texts’ as the ensembles— oral or textual—alongside ‘words and silences that shape a context, in space, in time, in social relations, in nature, and in emotions and subtle intimations’ Full reference in Zotero Library. While, for Becker, lingual memory signifies that which makes the ‘languaging’ of language and its meanings familiar, one can extend this to the literary, and think of the literary and lingual memory as repertoires of text (oral or textual) that renders the literary text familiar.⁹Becker sometimes uses “lingual memory” and “prior texts” interchangeably. He distinguishes between language and “languaging” as follows: ‘A language, then, is a system of rules or structures, which in the Saussurian view relates meanings and sounds, both of which are outside it. A language is essentially a dictionary and a grammar. Languaging, on the other hand, is context shaping. Languaging both shapes and is shaped by the context. It is a kind of attunement between a person and a context. Languaging can be understood as taking old texts from memory and reshaping them into present contexts. This is the basic way languaging contrasts with language’ Full reference in Zotero Library. With the intimate relation between language, culture, and memory in mind, the act of dislocating and subjugating the lingual and literary memory of a text to that of another language can reproduce inequalities and asymmetrical power relations between languages and literatures. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo convincingly argues, coloniality implants a colonial memory in the colonised, displacing the memory of the text and its reader and thus subjugating their very symbols, cultures, values and mode of being to that of the hegemonic languages and memories signalling the legacy of colonialism Full reference in Zotero Library. Handcuffing a text to the memory of the hegemonic languages and literatures of Europe engenders historical and literary amnesia, which is imposed on these texts and their readers Full reference in Zotero Library. This can also take the form of subjugating the temporality of the text to that of European modernity.¹⁰The time in the text can evoke trans-modern or pre-modern referents activated in the text to reshape the present.This results in the text’s referent being displaced from its immediate literary environment and re-situated in a system of references of the hegemonic European languages and their literature and literary theory. Hence, the language of the text, its memory, structure, audience and reception in its immediate location are either completely neglected or marginalised.

The text and its translation do not necessarily share the same lingual and literary memory. It is often the case that all “prior texts”—oral or textual—that the literary text evokes are not readily accessible to the reader of the translated text. This is a crucial aspect of translation, but it concerns the question of what this text attempts to do with its new readership and to what extent this can be successful. By reading in translation, the reader could place the translated text in a new literary relation with other texts. The translated text itself could activate a literary memory that is not readily accessible to the intended reader of the original. In both cases, the universe of signification of the text is reconfigured. Needless to say, the translated text does certain things in different locations, in different linguistic environments, supplemented by different lingual memories. But what are these certain things? The practice of adding paratexts and interpretation can, to some extent, provide an answer to this question.

Therefore, translation-as-dislocation involves certain forms of framing in that it selects the text to be translated, introduces it to the new readership via frames and paratexts, and places it within a lingual and literary memory. In fact, the act of selecting the text to be translated from the overall oeuvre of the writer already frames it in a certain way. This act of framing invites us to question the selection of what is translated and what is left untranslated, for this entails a process of framing and appropriating the writer and her literary texts.¹¹This aspect of framing has been taken up by Anuradha Ghosh, see her unpublished article, ‘The WOR[L]D of Mahasweta Devi: Semiotics of Translational Praxis’. Full reference in Zotero Library

The act of framing, however, involves more than a function of filtering and selecting in the process of presenting a given work. A paradigmatic example of such a problem of translation can be located in the translation of Devi’s texts. For example, in Chotti Munda and His Arrows, Spivak translates Devi’s colloquial Bengali in the text into an African-American dialect, thus rendering visible the diverse registers of the original Bengali text—emplacing the text on the landscape of American English, signalling the different linguistic registers in order to gesture towards that of the original text. While Devi has no American reader in mind, she approved of Spivak’s choice of translation: ‘Gayatri, what I am really enjoying in your translation is how you’ve shown that dialect can be dignified’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Ipshita Chanda, another leading translator of Devi, as well as a literary critic and comparatist, questioned Spivak’s choice of translation precisely because it effaces the plurilinguality of Devi’s text and, thus the plurality of India (see Full reference in Zotero Library). However, if making this plurilinguality of the text visible is what the text meant to do in the Indian context, one may argue that Spivak’s translation carries this activity in a different context to pluralise the American English (literary) scene.

Through a close study of the translation of ‘Draupadi’, moreover, Brinda Bose problematises Spivak’s politics of translation and her attempt of ‘first worlding’ a third-world text Full reference in Zotero Library. If Spivak dislocates Devi’s text by emplacing it in the American context, Chanda and Bose want to relocate it to the Indian context, in which English is a language among so many other languages. Therefore, the contestations over the choice of translation are always at work, whether the reader is bilingual (knowing English and the original) or, at least, an English-speaking reader who has access to the Indian social and cultural imagination. What Chanda and Bose seem to demand from Spivak is to let the translated text generate in its new location effects and meanings as it does in the Indian context or, at least, to avoid the dislocation of the referent of the text from its immediate location to that of the hegemonic centre.

Translational paratexts as frames of reading

In the case of Bashai Tudu, the contestation over translation begins with the original title of the anthology, Agnigarbha. In his review of Bashai Tudu, the leading Indian literary critic and translator, Sujit Mukherjee, prefers the translation of Agnigarbha as ‘Fire in the Womb’, as opposed to Samik Bandyopadhya’s ‘Fire in the Depth’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Asok Mitra, on the other hand, translates the same as ‘The Fiery-wombed’ Full reference in Zotero Library. In his review, in which the question of fidelity of translation is central, Mukherjee favours Samik Bandyopadhyay’s translation over that of Spivak:

Possibly out of the longer personal acquaintance with the author and wider reading of what she has written, he [Samik] has chosen a quieter, more neutral approach, more regardful (if I may use such a term) of the original. Full reference in Zotero Library

These are critical extratextual accounts that impact how translation “ought to be”, by privileging one translation over the other.

Moving to the paratexts that border and filter Devi’s text, Samik Bandyopadhyay, in his introduction, tells the reader that his translation is based on a draft translation by Mahasweta Devi herself Full reference in Zotero Library. Although this earlier draft by Devi is not accessible, it is curious to note that Devi’s name is not listed as a co-translator. Elsewhere, Devi states that she does not translate her works; but nonetheless, she did translate two of her short stories in honour of the Indian literary critic Jaidev (1949–2000).¹²These two stories are ‘Kunti and the Nishadin’ and ‘Mahdu: A Fairy Tale’. See ‘My humble tribute to Jaidev’ in Full reference in Zotero Library .She herself has worked as a translator, translating Jim Corbett: A Complete Omnibus and The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi from English to Bengali.

In line with his politics of framing Devi in the introduction, Bandyopadhyay further inserts a long quotation from Spivak’s foreword that appeared in In Other Worlds, which is a passage that mainly deals with the link between Devi’s fictional character Dopdi [the tribal name for Draupadi], the protagonist of the short story and the mythical character of the Mahabharata (Full reference in Zotero Library). Though both translators worked closely with the author, Bandyopadhyay points out that the translated text of ‘Draupadi’ has undergone some changes:

The text [“Draupadi”] that appears here is somewhat different, after few changes, not quite substantial but significant in some respects, that she made after I had pointed out some omissions and a couple of mistranslations from oversight. (Full reference in Zotero Library, Introduction)

There is an asymmetrical relation at work in this passage, signalling a power relation between the two translators, Bandyopadhyay and Spivak. The latter reports, in the translation’s preface to Imaginary Maps Full reference in Zotero Library, that Mahasweta Devi closely read her translations, made comments and suggestions, and pointed out omissions (Full reference in Zotero Library, ‘Translator’s Preface’).

The contestation over translation is the subject matter of the three paratexts of Bashai Tudu, all of which privilege Bandyopadhyay’s translation over that of others. Subhendu Sarkar offers a critique of Spivak’s and Ipshita Chanda’s translations of Devi’s work. The title of the article is telling: ‘Translating and Mistranslating of Mahasweta’. In it, Sarkar points to the ‘acts of omission’, the acts of ‘miscomprehension’, ‘misreading’, ‘unwarranted additions’ and the absence of method on the part of the translators. He ends his article with a censure, not only criticising the two translators’ works but also the whole Seagull project of translating Mahasweta Devi Full reference in Zotero Library.

In a critical account similar to that of Bose, Shreya Chakraborty in ‘Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as a Translator of Mahasweta Devi’s Works’ questions the politics of dislocating Devi’s texts through translation. She is pained by Spivak’s acts of distracting or appropriating the ‘authorial intentions’, and of colouring Devi’s text to further ‘her agenda’ of ‘postcolonial feminism’, and thus calls into question the ‘America-based metropolitan feminist gaze’ Full reference in Zotero Library. In the other paratext, entitled ‘Samik Bandyopadhyay as a Translator of Mahasweta Devi’s Works’, Shreya Chakraborty starts with a comment by Fredrich Schleiermacher: ‘there are two ways in which to go about translating a text, either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him’ (quoted in Full reference in Zotero Library). This account of Shreya Chakraborty is a comparison between Samik Bandyopadhyay and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as translators of Devi’s works. Like Mukherjee, Shreya Chakraborty favours Bandyopadhyay over Spivak, and here, questions of fidelity, interpretation and location are at work. Referring to the lines she quoted from Schleiermacher, Shreya Chakraborty writes,

Perhaps no other line can so comprehensively summarize the distinction between Samik Bandyopadhyay and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as translators. If Gayatri has sought to mould Mahasweta’s oeuvre according to the palate of her select target audience, Samik has kept the soul and substance of fervent protest intact in his translation to give a regional author like Mahasweta a primarily pan-Indian exposure for what she is […] Samik Bandyopadhyay adopts the tone of a reliable translator who creates the hope of not imposing his own reading on the mother-text. Full reference in Zotero Library

It is rather unusual to have literary texts accompanied by such critical accounts that favour one translator and offer a blistering attack on two other renowned scholars and translators of Mahasweta Devi. All these contestations over translation are contestations over framing Devi, specifically how her text is dislocated from its intended context, India, and then relocated. What Shreya Chakraborty, and to some extent Sarkar, seem to assume is that a translation could be a transparent representation of the original. She seems to be unable to appreciate that a translation cannot perfectly carry across “authorial intentions” or the exact set of meanings of the text in its original context; the text and its translation do not necessarily share the same readership, context and lingual memory.¹³Here, I assume that the context is necessary to elaborate the meaning of the text, but the latter is not completely reducible to the former. This means that these critics are partly right in their reappraisals.Nonetheless, there is still an assumption that, though the text is relocated to different cultural and linguistic landscapes and memories, the discursive presence of the translator could vanish.

From a meta-translational point of view, moreover, the issue that Shreya Chakraborty and others raised is further complicated if we think of Devi as always already a translator of an Adivasi and tribal world that is not readily accessible to the Bengali middle class or upper caste, let alone to all Indian English speakers. While Samik Bandyopadhyay seems to have an Indian English speaker as his first intended reader, Spivak says clearly that this is not her intended reader. But in both cases, of course, we do not encounter Devi’s voice directly but rather through that of Bandyopadhyay. Translators are ventriloquists who are exposed through extratextual and paratextual, or even ‘differential voices’ within the text itself.¹⁴The term ‘differential voice’ is that of Barbara Folkart; it is the translator’s voice in the translation that cannot be encountered in the original. It is the ‘translator’s discursive presence, as a distinct voice and speaking position, hence […] is always there, in the text itself’ Full reference in Zotero Library. It is simply the voice that reminds the reader that one is actually reading a translation.I am problematising these battles over translation simply to suggest that the intended reader, the location (literary or otherwise) in which the translated text is emplaced, and the politics of translational choices impact the translation and our reading and reception of the original text. Thus, in this sense, translation is a site of framing and reframing that is instrumental in shifting the landscape of meaning of the translated works, generating various, sometimes antagonistic readings. The contestations over framing or reframing are always anchored in the question of the language of the text, its location, the question of fidelity to or appropriation of the original, or simply the question of foreignisation and domestication as translational choices. Every act of framing thus tremendously impacts our reading of the text.

Translation is conditioned by its intended readers and its context. This is, again, part of the story; the other part is instigated by a different set of questions: what are the speech acts of the text itself (a question that is open to many answers), what/how does this text speak to its implied readers in their context, and finally as well as crucially, what/how can the translated text speak in other contexts to new readers? Here, the question of framing is almost inescapable, considering the impact on the translational praxis caused by the problem of the intended readership. These are questions worth pursuing, given that translation almost always involves framing, as well as implicating another readership and another context. Devi called for her text, Bashai Tudu, to be translated into Malayalam to speak to a new readership in another context, a context of forming political solidarity against oppression after the murder of T. P. Chandrasekharan. Devi evokes her text and character as an interpretative frame; she forges an affinity between T. P. Chandrasekharan and Bashai Tudu as a deathless rebel, a true leader and will live in the memory of the people who will continue his struggle.

The mythical framing the historical

So far, I have examined the act of reframing by closely attending to acts of translation as rereading and to the paratexts and extra-texts that inform and shape the act of reading the book under discussion. Here, I pay attention to the concept of framing narrative in its intra-textual formations, as well as to the notion of intertextuality as an act of reframing and dislocation. A contextualisation of the text is in order here.

Bashai Tudu, along with a host of Mahasweta Devi’s writings, can be considered as an aesthetic articulation of the consequential disillusionment that accompanied India’s independence in 1947. Dissent against the newly-formed Indian state on the food crisis, the question of unemployment, the rising price index of essential commodities, land distribution, labour (both agrarian and industrial) rights, rights to land, shelter, health and education. This became the rallying point of political movements focusing on the question of democratic rights during the turbulent decades of the ’50s to the ’70s. Political movements like the Dalit Panthers movement in Maharashtra in 1972, spearheaded by Namdev Dhasal, found a natural ally in the Naxalite movement, as both were militant movements against the Indian state. Tebhaga Movement (1946–1947) and Telangana Uprising (1947), Bihar movement, Chipko movement (1970s), along with several allied feminist and democratic movements on the question of tribal rights, ecological issues and environmental ethics, as well as minority rights and women’s rights, culminated in the declaration of the twenty-one-month-long Emergency owing to “internal disturbances” from 25 June 1975 to its withdrawal on 21 March 1977. It effectively curbed such movements and forced organisations to go underground, and despite large-scale arrests and detentions, anti-emergency protests surfaced to restore democracy—all of which found a place in the writings of Mahasweta Devi.

Bashai Tudu was written in the 1970s, probably the most productive years of Mahasweta Devi’s literary career. This historical conjuncture was marked by its turbulences and upheavals in India. The Naxalite Movement, which forms part of the historical background to the anthology, is a peasant movement that started in 1967 in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal and spread to several states in India. The movement adopted guerrilla warfare to defend the cause of the poor and the landless labourers. By 1973, the movement was suppressed by the Indian government when most of the cadres of the movement were either killed or imprisoned. The novella covers the period of Emergency (25 June 1975–21 March 1977) that suspended democratic and civil rights, and all oppositional voices were targeted. The causes and the demands for which this movement erupted remained intact— though unaddressed —after it was ruthlessly crushed by state violence.

These causes, demands and struggles, though violently suppressed, made indelible marks that could not be erased from the history and the political map of India. Devi sets herself to document them and transcribe the life and struggles of the oppressed and their resistance across the cultural landscape of India. Though she was not involved in this movement or any other organised political party, the pressing problems within her historical circumstances make their way into the frames of her fiction. However, the Naxalite movement, for Devi, is only one event in a long history of Adivasi and peasant rebellions. Devi thus begins her preface to the English edition of Bashai Tudu as follows:

The long history of peasant insurgency in India (where the landless peasantry number nearly fifty million and constitute 26.33 per cent of the country’s total labour force) has shown up, time and again, the nature of exploitation that has been the fate of the peasant. The uprisings, from the Sannyasi revolt, the Wahabi movement and the Indigo revolt, to the Naxalbari rebellion, have voiced the same fundamental demands. (Full reference in Zotero Library, ‘Author’s Preface’)

Though the preface to the English translation seemed to be written for the Thema edition, it is actually a translation of the original Bengali preface to Agnigarbha. Through this preface, Devi places the thrust of her narratives within a long historical context of resistance movements waged by the Adivasis, as well as the peasantry. In his book, In the Wake of Naxalbari Full reference in Zotero Library, Sumanta Banerjee posits that:

Obituarists of the Naxalite movement have always been proved premature in their pronouncements. If the movement was contained in one part of India, and declared “crushed”, it soon erupted in another, sometimes a very unexpected corner of the country. Naxalbari was followed by Srikakulam; Srikakulam by Debar-Gopiballavpur; Debar-Gopiballavpur by Birbhum—and so it went on’. (Full reference in Zotero Library; Introduction, emphasis added)

Locating Devi’s fictional narratives within the historical conjunctures in which they were written enables us to understand an important aspect of turbulent times when the Naxalite movement was in action. This also explicates the construction of a deathless character like Bashai Tudu, who outstrips the Naxalite movement, and delineates how Devi frames history into myth.

In order to capture this aspect of the times she covers in her narrative, Devi mythologises history by framing the historical through the mythical, offering a rewriting of the dominant myths and their interpretations in the Indian social imaginary. In ‘Operation?—Bashai Tudu’, Banerjee’s historical recount parallels the high points of the narrative. The news of the death of Bashai Tudu meant that he was in action somewhere else. Bashai Tudu is a rebel who is disillusioned with the politics of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-CPIM within the Indian post-colonial state because, like the state, the party not only failed to realise its ideals and the promises given to people but also, and especially in the case of Dalits and the Adivasis, continued to perpetuate different forms of oppression and casteism. As a story of resistance and survival, Bashai Tudu fights for central issues such as the implementation of the Minimum Wages Act (1948) and access to water. The story starts with news about the fifth death of Bashai Tudu and Kali Santra embarking on a journey to identify him. Kali Santra, once a colleague of Bashai in the Party, is presented as an honest party worker within a corrupt milieu, a man who still believes in the ideals of the revolution. The government insists on framing and labelling Bashai as Naxalite, though he is not, and wants him dead or alive. Every time Bashai is identified as dead, he comes back into action again as someone steps into his role and claims to be Bashai Tudu. Kali is presented as the only one who knows Bashai personally and, thus, can identify him; he recounts the four stories of Bashai’s deaths, identifications and resurrections before the narrative intersects with the frame story of the fifth death. Meanwhile, Kali Santra, through his activism and interactions with Bashai, is transformed from a mere idealist activist and party worker to an advocate of the cause of the subaltern, the landless labourers.

The sequel short narrative ‘Draupadi’ tells the story of another Adivasi fighter, Dopdi Mejhen. Like Bashai Tudu, Dopdi is a Santhal rebel and activist who fights for the rights of landless labourers. With her husband Dulna Majhi, she murdered landlords who denied the Adivasis access to water. The government wants her dead or alive. After failed attempts to capture her, it was only the commander Senanayak, ‘the elderly Bengali specialist in combat and extreme-left politics’ Full reference in Zotero Library, who was able to capture Dopdi using his expertise and tactics. Senanayak ordered his men to ‘Make her. Do the needful’ Full reference in Zotero Library. After she was tortured and gang raped, Dopdi was given water and clothes to wear, but she refused to cover herself and faced Senanayak with her naked body.

To mythologise history, Devi uses frames of folklore, re-works mythical stories in the Indian cultural context, and deploys them to tell her stories about times past and present in order to subvert the dominant readings of such myths in line with her politics and poetics of liberation. Bashai Tudu is a myth created out of several historical rebels reflecting upon the history of Adivasi and peasant resistance movements, and their metamorphosis during the early seventies. Through her narrative, she makes visible these resistance movements and peasant rebellions, which are often absent from the Indian historical and national narrations.

The story of ‘Operation?—Bashai Tudu’ begins with the news about the fifth death of Bashai Tudu and Kali Santra going to identify him. Meanwhile, Kali Santra retells from memory the four deaths of Bashai Tudu in four different operations conducted by the administration (Operation Banari, May 1970, Operation Jagula, 1972, Army Operation or Bakuli Operation, Operation Kadamkhuiṅya). This corresponds to five narrative movements, where the fifth story of Bashai’s death functions as the frame story in which four stories, almost identical in terms of structure, are narrated (see the diagram below). Each encounter or story begins by hearing news about the death of Bashai Tudu or of him being in action, followed by the identification by Kali Santra, and, again, the rebirth of Bashai. The narrative starts with and comes back to the fifth identification. Taking the act of framing as a deliberate act of Devi herself and reading it alongside her preface, one cannot ignore the movement from the historical to the mythical. By embedding the historical into the mythical, she insists on the long history of the Adivasi movements of liberations and notions of heroism, signalling the endurability of their resistance in the face of oppression throughout history.

The story of the fifth encounter fittingly culminates in the sequel ‘Draupadi’, which I read as the sixth Bashai Tudu, marking the transition towards feminising the narrative act. This reading is enabled by the text on different levels: first, within the main narrative of ‘Operation?—Bashai Tudu’, Bashai’s body is often ridden with bullets and deformed, ‘distorted’ or ‘mutilated’, so much so that it is difficult to identify him or his gender. The only clear indicator of Bashai’s identity is a frenzied gesture: wringing the neck of the air with his two hands. Second, throughout the four stories of death and reappearance, there is someone who steps into the role and claims that he is Bashai Tudu.

Dopdi, on the other hand, does not claim to be a Bashai Tudu, but it is remarkable how she fits into the larger frame of Bashai Tudu’s narrative. Despite her arrest, followed by gang rape in the barrack, and with her indomitable courage, she challenges the establishment through her bruised and mangled body. As I suggest elsewhere, in ‘Draupadi’, Devi turns the formal elements of the epic Mahabharata upside down. The five Bashais who are encountered in the novel remind us of the five husbands of the mythical Draupadi. The Draupadi of Devi’s novella and short story has one husband, but the play on the number five is an interesting one; conceptually, it helps to subvert the story of the mythical Draupadi, who invokes Krishna, taking recourse to prayer to save her honour Full reference in Zotero Library. Devi’s Draupadi has no mythical Krishna in mind, and neither does she relate to the pre-codes of the notions of honour and shame as accepted by the Indian social imaginary Full reference in Zotero Library.

This type of intertextuality is at once an inter-orality, meaning that the text weaves the oral and the textual within the narrative. I call this an “internal act of framing”, for it gestures towards other texts (oral or textual), and this invites various kinds of literary relations, which generate certain methods of reading and interpretation. For instance, there are at least two intertextual gestures that direct the reader to draw parallels between Bashai Tudu, Raktabeeja and the monster/creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though this may appear farfetched, if one employs Frankenstein as a frame for reading the narrative—or, at least, the construction of the character of Bashai Tudu—then certain similarities can be identified in terms of structure. Bashai Tudu, the protagonist, can be read as a product of the oppressive system, a protagonist who grows larger than the circumstances that produced him, and who becomes uncontrollable; hence, he is portrayed as a demon that needs to be contained, dead or alive. Like in Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is a sort of ambivalence as the borders between the identity of the creator and the created are blurred. It is also interesting to know how Tudu is given space to spell out his perspectives to Kali Santra, the only character who knows him well and is able to identify him.

However, if we compare this gesture with that of Raktabeeja, the reference to Frankenstein seems to be a minor one. Although Devi’s text opens the possibility of reading Bashai Tudu alongside Frankenstein, Devi’s character is strongly reminiscent of the story of the demon, Raktabeeja. As the myth has it, this demon had the capacity to reproduce himself from every drop of blood that fell to the ground. The gods soon realised that killing him was an impossible feat; every time they tried eliminating him, hundreds of Raktabeejas arose from the drops of his blood as his exact replicas. Finally, Goddess Kali, who set out to destroy him, covered the entire battlefield with her tongue in order to drink all the blood that would be spilt in the ensuing battle, thereby not letting even a drop fall and touch the ground. In the battle that followed, the invincible Raktabeeja was killed. This notion of invincibility is used in the characterisation of Bashai Tudu, a figure of resistance that wages war against injustice and is therefore considered a “demon” by the state. The demonic character consists in its many lives and its resistance to death as a continuous act of reframing stories of resistance. Devi, again and again, reframes Bashai Tudu and therewith both Indian political history and the mythological landscapes, offering space for engaging the textual with the non-textual, the fictional with the real, and the history of struggles with the struggles to come.

Conclusion

In this paper, I sought to demonstrate multiple forms of framing that are not limited to the textual materiality of the book Bashai Tudu. The book is framed and reframed through anthologising, republishing and translating, generating new readership and literary contexts. Thus, I attempted to think with the concept of (re)framing on two levels. First, through considering the material journey of the text through (re)publication and translation that generate new readings and audiences of the text. On this level, attention to extra-textual and paratextual elements shows how each “supplement” opens a reading and may foreclose others. I have also shown that the contestation over translation and meaning is a contestation over the dislocation from and relocation to its intended contexts and readership. Instead of privileging one over the other, I suggest thinking about the relationship between the text, its contexts (in both the original and its translation) as well as the frame and act of framing in dynamic terms, which need to be taken into consideration to fulfil the promises of the texts across language, time and space.

On the second level, the concept of framing is examined in its intra-textual formations, where the text always gestures towards a frame outside the text itself. The intra-textual frame hints at the work’s intertextuality. Intertextuality here is also examined as an act of reframing, anchored in the act of dislocating and relocating the text in different contexts. I have explained how, within the texture of the narrative, history itself is framed into myth—mythologised, as it were—and how the act of framing implicates what is outside the text. This is done through the frame story, the fifth story of Bashi Tudu’s death, within which four stories are narrated. The cyclical-linear narrative with an open ending suggests the continuity of the struggle against oppression.

Bashai Tudu also hints at a general function of literature, as every text generates multiple promises of reading. While framing or reframing through paratexts, translation and republication may seem to reduce the semantic scope of the work (that is, as an outcome of a selection process), the framed literary text possesses the means to resist its frames. The continuous attempts to interpret, translate and frame a text—to make it accessible to various readerships at different times—signals the enframed text’s ability to remain stable on the level of its materiality, whilst it allows different afterlives on the level of interpretation and translation—in how it generates transtemporal, trans-local communities of readers of the same text. To understand the dynamic of these transtemporal, trans-local communities of readers, and of interpretations and translations, one still needs to attend to the context of the text, a context that clarifies the unnamed history, location, structure, language and readers of the text. This enriches one’s understanding of the text’s literary and theoretical interventions. While Bashai Tudu seems to make sense when appropriately presented—through paratexts—to different readerships across time, space and language at different stages of its republication and re-anthologisation, on the intra-textual level, what Bashai Tudu was/is can only be reconstructed in the plural. Thus, the many lives of Bashai Tudu coincide with the many acts of (re)framing, and this consequently necessitates many different readings.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Johannes Stephan, Beatrice Gründler, and Simon Godart for their valuable insights and many discussions throughout the process of writing this paper. I am grateful to Anuradha Ghosh and Devika Mehra, Rebecca Hardie and the two reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.