Lives in a shadow

In these times of market-driven publishing, there are still a few precious books that vex the complacent, cynical reader. To shake up a reader with short fiction is, in my opinion, extremely difficult: even the sharpest of short stories often amount to fleeting pangs of conscience rather than provoking full-tilt soul-searching. The world is not about simple answers or black-and-white escapades, and yet, from time to time, we are reminded that the fictional world also needs its share of justice.

TheAdivasi Will Not Dance , Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s maiden collection of short stories, takes you on a journey where you confront your preconditioned comforts. However, this is an important departure, one that must be made. The history of comfort and progress has been, for the most part, also a history of barbarism. But the grey areas remain mostly untold, thus leaving the popular discourses unblemished. Even as you’re reading this remarkable book, it is pertinent to remember that many adivasis in Jharkhand’s Chota nagpur plateau, where massive mining is slowly eating away the landscape, are probably working 13 hours a day to earn a little more bread.

In ‘November is the Month of Migrations’, Talamai, a 20-year-old Santhali Christian girl, whose family members have had to work as coal-gatherers and farm labourers, finds a way to end her hunger by satisfying the libido of a policeman. She makes a conscious, calculated choice (she knows many who ritually do this for food). This is the shortest story of the collection and it points out (in a brief section) the failure of the missionaries who had a host of economic lures in store for the adivasis, but did not follow up on most of them. Amidst such terrifying realities, Shekhar’s characters thrive; they have no pretentious guilt over the route they choose to survive. There are also riffs on what unemployment does to the red-blooded adivasi male and the patterns of immigration in the state.

In ‘Baso-jhi,’ the eponymous widow is one among many hardworking women who are conveniently labelled witches; “tamasha” begins in the family before becoming village gossip. The hurdles in her way are nothing compared to her indomitable strength and eagerness to move on.

What I enjoyed most about these tales is their ability to agitate without losing the lightness of touch. The brutally honest depiction of the Subarnarekha river (literally, the streak of gold), is testimony to the depravity brought about by “the Copper Town”, and a case in point (remember Dickens’s Coketown?). There’s also a close examination of how rivers have ceased to be the lifelines they used to be. ‘In Eating With the Enemy,’ Sulochona and Subhadra, both good swimmers, speculate if jumping into the river would end the cycle of hunger and exploitation.

In spite of the impending natural doom that urbanisation has created, the fight between Thakurs and Santhals dominates parts of Jharkhand, and is evidenced in the story ‘Getting Even.’ A 10-year-old boy who hasn’t attained puberty is falsely accused of raping a minor; this tale, we are told later, is fabricated, a by-product of land war. “We are like toys — someone presses our ‘ON’ button, or turns a key in our backsides, and we Santhals start beating rhythms on our tamak and tumdak , or start blowing tunes on our tiriyo , while someone snatches away our very dancing grounds. Tell me, Am I wrong?” asks Mangal Murmu in ‘The Adivasi Will Not Dance.’

The “museumisation” of adivasis receives an insider’s sensitivity in this collection. The titular story, a cinematographic protest cry of Mangal Murmu, a performer who is beaten down, is representative of many adivasi protests. Their sweat, desire, displacement and problems matter little to a crowd obsessed by the aesthetics of comfort. It’s interesting to note that this story has been placed immediately after ‘Merely a Whore,’ a story about the dancer-turned-prostitutes of Lakkhipur. Both stories throw light on how a community has been reduced to performance.

The book jacket shows a helicopter hovering above a drum — the promise-makers arriving in choppers, nodding in time to the adivasi’s drumbeats and exiting as soon as the land is theirs. Shekhar’s love for Santhali culture comes across beautifully in The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey , his debut novel that won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. His prose is keenly observed and works well as critiques of existing histories (or her-stories). It’s remarkable how intelligently he has, through judicious use of catchphrases and exclamations, conveyed the sound and feel of Santhali even when he’s writing in English. One of the heroes invoked in the book is Bidu, from the play Bidu-Chandan by the Santhal playwright Raghunath Murmu (who invented Ol-Chiki, the script used for Santhali).

This book deserves praise for reviving these obscure literary artistes. Why should art be the monopoly of the powerful and the famous? The Adivasi Will Not Dance marks a resounding encore for Shekhar.

Rini Barmanis an MPhil student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

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