Volume 3, Number 2, April, 2015

VOL 3, NO 2 April, 2015 ISSN: 2321-8274
INDINA JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

AND
TRANDSLATION STUDIES
“Heritage Conservation and Preservation: - Connecting cultures in a global

world”
ISSUE EDITOR : Dr. Lopamudra Maitra Bajpai

Editorial
Editorial By Dr. Lopamudra Maitra Bajpai
Articles
1. From Pedagogical to Performatives: Re-postcolonizing Indian Sahitya Akademi

By Saswat.S.Das & Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha………………………………………1-9
2. A case study on Preserving Cultural Identity of Samburu Tribe in Kenya By
Jebamani Anthoney……………………………………………………………………………….10-23
3. As Human As You Are: When Marangdei’s Brothers and Sisters Speak By Oindri
Roy………………………………………………………………………………………………………24-35
4. A ‘Nationful’ of Concerns: An Eco-critical Reading of Kamala Markandaya’s A
Handful of Rice By Saurabh Bhattacharyya……………………………………………..36-56
5. LOST HERITAGE OF FOLKTALES: A GLIMPSE AT MAMANG DAI’S THE SKY
QUEEN AND ONCE UPON A MOONTIME By Sudipta Phukan…………………57-64
Interview
6. of caste-class and dalit writing_Monoranjan Byapari in Conversation By

Sayantan Mondal…………………………………………………………………………………..65-70
Review
7. The Reverse Tree By Soumen Jana…………………………………………………………..71-76
Translations
8. Poems of Surya Kant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ Translated By Dr. Archana Bahadur

Zutshi…………………………………………………………………………………………………..77-83
9. Companions (Translation of Sahacharulu poem of Vimala) By Naresh
Annem...............................................................................................................84-85
Indian Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies ISSN: 2321-8274
“Heritage Conservation and Preservation: - Connecting cultures in a global world”
Editor’s Note
A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the

course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as
paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.- Antoine de
Saint-Exupery
The word ‘heritage’ has been defined in myriad ways down the course of history, quite like
the varied methods of documenting it.Human civilisation has managed to compile
contemporary events and frozen them in time to be referred by future generations as historical
evidences. The earliest examples are preserved in the form of written records, dating to a
little over two thousand years (including especially the Asokan Rock Edicts from the Indian
peninsular). Interestingly enough and dating to no less than 20-30,000 years are the pictorial
representations of human habitation in the form of cave paintings and hand imprints- many of
which are preserved across all the continents of the world till present times. These not only
bear testimony of the earliest representation of interpersonal and intrapersonal
communication, but also help to throw considerable light upon the flora, fauna and
geographical understanding of the contemporary settlements.
Across the course of history, as inter-cultural communications gave rise to new ideas,
thoughts, lifestyles, food habits and daily accessories, man’s nature moulded the heritage
with which he was surrounded all along. Thus monuments, architecture, patterns and designs
got restructured time and again to give rise to new creations- forming an important part of
tangible heritage around the world. On the other hand, oral traditions, including folktales,
songs, rhymes, handicraft and artistic ideas, culinary facts and recipes- which have been
handed down through generations across the globe- also form an important part of heritage
which does not need an exuberant sense of touch for survival, but nevertheless, have been a
part of the emotional repository of communication down the ages. On an international
platform, as the preservation and conservation of tangible heritage has found an echo amidst
various organisations around the world, including UNESCO, the aspect of intangible heritage
too has found a platform of recognition, especially over the last one and a half decades.
UNESCO states about intangible cultural heritage as the one which is traditional,
Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

contemporary and living at the same time, one which is inclusive as they have contributed to
social cohesion, encouraging a sense of identity and responsibility which helps individuals to
feel part of one or different communities and to feel part of society at large, is representative
as it thrives on its basis in communities and depends on those whose knowledge of traditions,
skills and customs are passed on to the rest of the community, from generation to generation,
or to other communities and finally, it is also mentioned as Community-based (UNESCO
Intangible Cultural Heritage)i. Thus forming two significant aspects of heritage, the aspects
of preservation and conservation has taken a significant podium of expression as each
generation borrows, organises and equips the world to be handed down to the next. This issue
of the Indian Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies (IJCLTS)helps to
look into this very aspect of exploring preservation and conservation of heritage structures.
Spanning across myriad social science disciplines of History, Culture Studies,
Heritage Conservation and Management, Tourism and Development, Anthropology,
Archaeology, Literature and Music and Art, the ‘call for papers’ for the issue was
overwhelmed with the diverse contributions from scholars from around the world- covering
issues pertaining to both tangible and intangible heritage and ideas reflecting upon their
preservation and continuity in present times.
With the impressive response, selection of papers was difficult and finally we had to commit
ourselves to the best of the lot which is being presented in the current issue. The present issue
also comprises of preservation attempts through mainstream and popular literature, which
pervades the local geographical boundaries and brings specific cultural ethos and local
heritage onto mainstream platform for a global recognition. A similar example in the present
issue is the insightful study by Sudipta Phukan (Assistant Professor, Dept. of English,
Sonapur College, Shillong)- Lost Heritage of Folktales: A Glimpse at Mamang Dai’s the Sky
Queen and Once Upon a Moontime- based onArunachal Pradesh and Mamang Dai’s
collection of local folktales. Signifying the importance of nature and human beings through
her two children’s books, namely The Sky Queen and Once Upon A Moontime, Mamang
Dai’s unique attempt tries to look into preserving and conserving the identity of the Adis.
This is an important and laudable act considering the fact that many of the languages of
north-east India face the fear of getting obliterated due to an absence of a script and the
collection of Mamang Dai’s folktales acts as an important repository of local knowledge.

An interesting insight is rendered by Saswat S.Das (Associate Professor, Department of

Humanities and Social Sciences IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal) and Anindya Sekhar
Purakayastha (Assistant Professor, Department of English SKB University, West Bengal) in
From Pedagogical to Performatives: Re-postcolonising Indian Sahitya Akademi. The study
attempts to render a post-modern perspective of understanding an important body of letters of
independent India- The Sahitya Akademi. Established in 1954 and in tune with its declared
policies, it is an organization committed for promoting Indian literature throughout the world
and it recognizes Indian languages including English. The paper probes into the very
foundational ethos of such norm-bound institutions in the current backdrop of disseminated
and dispersed nationalities. It also tries to expose the fissures of decolonizationmodes and the
perpetuation of colonial derivative logics in the name of native institutionalization.
In the paper by Jebamani Anthoney (Department of Languages and Literature, University of

Eastern Africa) A case study on Preserving Cultural Identity of Samburu Tribe in Kenya- we
get closer to an understanding of the Samburu tribes- who are Nilotic people of north-central
Kenya. Independent and egalitarian and much more traditional than the Maasai- the study
looks into ways of preserving their cultural identities, and maintenance of their essence of
social relationships that promotes self-esteem and comradeship.
Mainstream literature published by noted authors and philanthropists has always been an
important part of documenting changes and thoughts down the ages. Oindri Roy’s (Ph.D
research scholar, Department of Comparative Literature, The English and Foreign Languages
University, Hyderabad, India)- As Human As You Are: When Marangdei’s Brothers and
Sisters Speak aims to reflect upon a similar idea. It attempts to identify the humane approach
introduced to tribal studies by Padma Shri Mahasweta Devi (noted Indian social activist and
writer and winner of Ramon Magsasay award) in her book Dust on the Roads. The book is a
compilation of Devi’s works, important essays and reports across the decade of 1980s. The
present review attempts to differentiate between Devi’s writings and the works of other
anthropologists, cultural feminists, subaltern scholars etc pertaining to tribal culture.
Saurabh Bhattacharyya’s (Assistant Professor- Chandraketugarh S.S.Mahavidyalaya, under

West Bengal State University, West Bengal) Nationful of Concerns: An Eco-critical Reading
of Kamala Markandaya’s- A Handful of Rice also throws light upon an important aspect of

literature, highlighting significant aspects. Though it is arguably a relatively newly emergent

area of study, ecological criticism dealing with, among other things, environmental heritage
and conservation, can take into focus texts that have been read from the parameters of other
critical modes down the ages. The text by Kamala Markandaya, reveal how the issues of
ecological conservation in the novel have been coupled with the fact of cultural diaspora to
provide an overall attitude of apprehension towards Westernisation leading to the
materialisation of a development/displacement dilemma that has deeper social concerns.
Apart from the research articles, the present issue also includes one interview, one review and
two translation piece along with editorial. The interview- Of Caste-Class and Dalit Writing:
Monoranjan Byapari in Conversation- a pattern is reflected which is a dialogue between-
MB: Monoranjan Byapari, S: Sayantan Mondal- over one of the unfortunate trajectories of
life- about social inclusion, seclusion and stigma and recent expressions through the world of
literature, arts and social activists.
Amongst the translations- Poems of Surya Kant Tripathi’s five poems from Nirala translated
by Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi (Assistant Professor in English, Dr. Shakuntala Misra
National Rehabilitation University, Lucknow) - speaks of nature and the crowds and faces
around us- which are often lost in oblivion- but reminds us nevertheless of the soil and its
bonds... “She breaks stones, I saw her along the road in Allahabad, Engaged in her toil, Not
a shady tree under which she sat with acceptance of her lot...” Naresh Annem’s translation of
Telugu poet- Vimala’s work- Companions (Translation of Sahacharulu) reminds of a similar
bond with the soil through- “Who are you in the many stars, shining in the dark sky? Where
are you those, voluntarily kissed the death for wiping our tears?”
The review- A (Re-) Versed World by Soumen Jana (PhD Researcher on Indian Theatre,
especially on Badal Sircar) speaks of The Reverse Tree by Kiriti Sengupta (Publisher:
Moments Publication (Ahmadabad), ISBN-13: 978-93-84180-77-5 (Hard cover) -
highlighting to a specific extent the spiritual reflections of the author and also underlining
how the work is a translation of thoughts intended to arouse kindred thoughts to effect a true
reversal(s).

Considering the present issue through IJCLTS a small speck of an attempt towards creating a
platform for sharing like-minded thoughts, hoping that the underlined words of tangible and
intangible heritage conservation finds a true meaning the world over- a much-desired podium
to create awareness and educate minds young and old.
Dr. Lopamudra Maitra Bajpai
Assistant Professor and Visual Anthropologist
Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication (UG), Pune, India
i
http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00002

From Pedagogical to Performatives: Re-postcolonizing Indian Sahitya Akademi
Page | 1 Saswat.S.Das
&
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha
Abstract
The Indian Sahitya Akademy is an anachronism in a transnational world and Indian
policy makers have failed to problematize the rationality of postcolonial institutions
like the Sahitya Akademy in the present conjuncture. This paper examines the
temporalities of such institutional visions and functioning ethos and in the process it
seeks to offer new and timely modalities of such institutional roles. Sahitya Academy,
India`s national academy of letters, established in 1954 is committed for promoting
Indian literature throughout the world and is aware of the rich cultural and linguistic
varieties prevalent in India and does not believe in a coercive generalization of
culture through a homogenization of levels and attitudes. The predominant cognitive
imaginary of a unified and univocal discourse of postcolonial nation tends to erase the
suppressed asymmetries and subterranean discordant notes in a bid to reiterate the
official normative taxonomy of nationalism. Sahitya Akademi`s constitutional
legitimization was premised on tropes of national hagiography and unquestioned
national univalence. In this essay, we propose to probe into the very foundational

ethos of such norm-bound institutions in the current backdrop of dissemination and
dispersed nationalities and in that way we seek to expose the fissures of
decolonization modes and the perpetuation of colonial derivative logics in the name
Page | 2
of native institutionalization.
Are institutions like the Indian Sahitya Akademy anachronistic or past their rationale in a world
of blurring boundaries or transnational future? On the policy level, do we encounter templates of
stagnation and non-nomadic play in the sustenance of postcolonial institutions like the Sahitya
Akademy? The present excursus examines the temporalities of such institutional visions and
functioning ethos and in the process it seeks to offer new and timely modalities of such
institutional roles. Sahitya Academy is India`s national academy of letters that was established in
1954 and in tune with its declared policies, it is an organization committed for promoting Indian
literature throughout the world and it recognizes Indian languages including English. Sahitya
Akademi is aware of the rich cultural and linguistic variety prevalent in India and does not
believe in a forced standardization of culture through a bulldozing of levels and attitudes. At the
same time, it is also conscious of the deep inner cultural, spiritual, historical and experiential
links that unify India's diverse manifestations of literature. The predominant cognitive imaginary
of a unified and univocal discourse of postcolonial nation tends to erase the suppressed
asymmetries and subterranean discordant notes in a bid to reiterate the official normative
taxonomy of nationalism 1. The norm-centric ideology of nation is put in practice by hegemonic
narratives of pan-national literature and institutional drives which assumed greater statist support
in postcolonial democracies like India. Sahitya Akademi, India`s National Academy of Letters is
one such institution whose constitutional legitimization was premised on tropes of national
hagiography and unquestioned national univalence 2. In this essay, we propose to probe into the
very foundational ethos of such norm-bound institutions in the current backdrop of dissemination
and dispersed nationalities and in that way we seek to expose the fissures of decolonization
modes and the perpetuation of colonial derivative logics in the name of native
institutionalization3. Such an investigative study of haloed institutional bodies in postcolonial

nations has, we believe, huge futural ramification for potential anti-colonial policy formation and
for the deflation of the official nationalistic a priorie 4.
Postcoloniality may seem to be an abstract externality, indicative of that pure interventionist

Page | 3 human agency, performatively inclined towards delivering the restructural act, with hermetic
logo/centers and hostile peripheries, or it may seem to be a plain hubristic stance, directed at
nothingness to those heralding the arrival of those immanent glocal times. These are times
where, according to Antonio Negri, our ontic state stands tantamount to that of the dismembered
capital circulating freely in the open ended market networks—rolling like a dice on a gambling
table, metaphorically speaking—and where agency prefers to stand hermeneutized not as some
sort of Aristotelian subject mediated ‘difference engineering’, but as of a kind spontaneously
erupting out of these networks, the overlapping wires of one’s personal computer, and manifests
through, what these networks put in place to disseminate those motiveless, anti-teleological
impetuses it generates towards its own sustenance, the commodified beings.
What about institutions, if not nations, which stand arrested in a specific time fold, riddled with
impetuses of the decolonizing period that hovers like a disgruntled ghost in the networked lanes
of the immanent glocal world in which we live? Isn’t postcolonization for them tantamount to
that necessary step that they need to take before marking their way into and beyond the
immanent glocal world? Isn’t postcolonization a cornucopia of new sensations, a breeding
ground of new affects, which one must delve into or stand saturated with before moving on to the
era of trans-national politics? Irrespective of what the answer is, a big YES or a disappointing
NO, one must indicate and agree that Institutions like Sahitya Akademi, National Academy of
Letters, in India needs to move on, shake off its fetishized longing for the nationalist past, and
stand refreshed for a while on the postcolonial ground. However, at the same time, one must not
hesitate to confess that while some of us grow restless with an urge to postcolonize the institutes
of the developing nations, in particular, Sahitya Akademi, the fact is that confabulations, if not
well drawn out policies, to restructure the institutes in the lines of those in Euro-American
nations has been integral to our ontic existence since long.
The Hauntological Akademi: Disturbed by the Specter of the Nationalist Past

‘We perhaps need an institution like Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) not Sahitya Akademi’-
indeed, this is what we often get to hear while having one of those coffee house proto-public
sphere dialogical exchanges on the state of Institutes, concerned with literature and culture in
India. However, it is not those funny comparisons we strike during our deliberations on the state
Page | 4
of institutions concerned with literature and culture in India that demands attention or some sort
of sustained engagement to be precise, as much as that which prompts one to make this kind of
comparison at the first place. Indeed, what prompts some of us to preposterously juxtapose
Akademi with ENS, a dynamic Institution, committed to create world class thinkers, with an aim
to restlessly advance the frontiers of cognition? What is it that Sahitya Akademi lacks that makes
it pale into insignificance before Institutes such as Ecole Normale Superieure, regardless that the
prefixed teleological end, if not the sacredness of the hic et nunc, that Akademi serves stands
radically removed from the ‘windowless’ frontiers that the latter pursues5? Indeed, a succinct
summarization of the kind of post-coloniality that Akademi has so far stood for is what one
needs to position in the form of answers to the questions put forward above 6.
Firstly, it is only in the constructivist historical sense that Sahitya Akademi stands as a
postcolonial Institute. Akademi, as everyone knows, was set up in 1954. Nehru was made its first
president immediately after he had officially inaugurated it in the parliament. In this sense,
Akademi’s postcolonial status is more due to its strategical location in space and time—it was
ironically spin doctored into what the Heideggerians may choose to call its ortschaft 7or into
having its settled locational value. Though lately Institutions stand philosophically discoursed as
‘accidental eruptions’, as ‘immanent creations’ of the cosmic order, meant to channelize its
forces, which we often conceptualize as desire or power, Akademi, speaking as per the classical
pragmatist constructivist logic, was one of those few institutes—or one of those timely creations
bearing the traces of that ‘eruptive violence’ of the interventionist human agency it arose from—
that was set up within a decade after independence in order to promote Bhasa writing and Indian
writing in English, relegated to obsolescence during the colonial times. Thus, the goals it went on
to pursue and the ideals upon which it was founded were to a large extent connected with, and
drew its inspiration from, what stood as a ‘solid presence’ in ‘the collective memory bank of the
people’8 of the ‘freshly decolonized’ India at that point of time. Metaphorically speaking, this
solid presence, mocking as it did, what stood as the singular de-differential ontopology of all
beings across caesuric entropic time, was like a thick impenetrable wall guarding what then

stood as that arresting constituent cardinal component of our hetronomous, molecular Indian
ontology. The cardinal constituent was the nostalgic memories that the Indian multitude had
about the quasi-Fanonian resistant nationalist movement against the British rule, and realizing
one’s nation as a homogeneous plurality or a reductive socio-cultural unity. Indeed, Akademi
Page | 5
like all the other Institutes at that point of time believed that by standing as an institute dedicated
to bring about cultural unity of nation, which the nationalist movement against the imperial rule
aiming to realize nation as a single unified whole both hinged upon and demanded, it was paying
respect to—as it had done when it had made Nehru its first president, irrespective of the fact that
the decision to elect Nehru as the president which the founders of Akademi unanimously took
was both an outcome of what they, as every educated Indian then, perhaps stood vulnerable to,
that miasmatic compradorial colonial hangover, which darkened the unfolding postcolonial skies,
prompting everyone under it to over-valorize Nehru’s education in Harrow and Cambridge, and
their unswerving, robust acknowledgement of Nehru’s role in the nationalist movement against
the Colonial British —and standing in conformity with, what prevailed then as a kind of
collective thinking in India. The thinking was that the leaders of nationalist movement against
the British Empire, who also stood interpellated, as they stand even now, as the makers of the
modern Indian episteme and the architects of modern India, had found a unique way to realize its
cultural unity. As a result, it was both essential and inevitable for an Institute like Akademi at
that point of time, within a decade after independence, to reflect its commitment towards, and
rather staunchly align with, what people then thought that the architects of our nation, those
leaders spearheading the nationalist struggle against the colonial rule, had found a novel way to
realize—while positing such realizations in general as instrumental in both gaining independence
and galvanizing the nation building exercise it necessitated—the cultural unity of India. This is
the reason why the founders of the Akademi had to convey that the objective they had gone on to
lay for Akademi partook of that resolve to achieve cultural unity which the nation as a whole
along with those leaders of freedom struggle had displayed
In this sense, Akademi’s job was cut out. It was meant to consolidate the realization of cultural
unity that our leaders achieved rather than problematizing or interrogating it, though—and this
will sound ironical—when it came to consolidating the realization of cultural unity very little
effort was required because almost all activities, both ontic and sublime, were spontaneously

directed towards it. In other words, almost everything we did at that point of time was rather
spontaneously shot through that which stood as some sort of pre-requisite for speaking as an
Indian reconfirmation of our location in ‘historical depths’ or a triumphant acknowledgement of
our decolonized status. This was our realization of cultural unity that the thinking of the
Page | 6
architects of nation yielded. The pictures of the architects of our nation—Gandhi, Nehru,
Vivekananda and Tagore—adorning the walls of our rooms, calendars, and offices—is a case in
point.
To put it differently, it was required that in a freshly decolonized India both opposition to
governmental apparatuses and validation of its ways is done while expressing one’s allegiance to
the architects of our nation. And since, as the saying goes, everything begins at home, the
simplest way one went about expressing this allegiance to those architects—though this may
sound ironical—was to have their picture on the wall. Further, since we at that point were born
into an ambience of buoyant acknowledgement of the contribution of these individuals, the
reference to them while we did everything was immediate or as inevitable as breathing. And
since this postcoloniality of automatic compliance with the thinking of the architects of our
nation was natural, it was nothing but an incisive contextual understanding of postcoloniality that
Institutes such as Akademi expressed in its activities.
Towards a Linguistic Performance: Re-Postcolonizing Sahitya Akademi

However, at present, we stand sixty four years removed from that freedom at midnight speech by
Nehru—not within that mimetic range at all, to be honest. These are times—which the
Heideggerians may call stimmung—where almost everything stands re-invented after being
exposed to head spinning exercises of interrogation and problematization. These are times that
are ambivalent, amorphous, evasive, replete with possibilities and productive ironies, hence
protean and fecund. Here Postcoloniality, unlike the one we experienced during 1950’s, no
longer means adhering to or slavishly resting upon the foundations that the architects of our
nation had laid. Neither does it mean restlessly problematizing those indigenous epistemic
sources—the world view of those we call the leaders of our nation—that the incipient
postcoloniality drew its inspiration from. It does not mean either resisting everything, in a
manner in which the nationalistic struggle did, that stands redolent of Eurocentrism. Rather it
stands reinvented, reflecting a poetic-performative approach towards everything, betraying a

thoughtful dwelling in, and ceaselessly deliberating with, a wide range of ideologies, from what
it had resisted to what it had foregrounded as its epistemic bases. In other words, postcoloniality
is no longer understood only in the historic sense or more in terms of the rupture it achieved with
the colonial times. Rather, it is more of an intellectual concept that thrives by widening its
Page | 7
critical appropriative stance: rubbing shoulders with, sometimes mischievously toying with, and
restlessly burrowing into and borrowing from the varied epistemic sources. The rhizomic
interconnections it forms with varied epistemes in a manner that restless communicative
deliberational logic of Habermas does while problematizing or unsettling their bases is simply
stunning 9. It is a postcoloniality that not only problematizes—speaking within the context of
India—the thinking of the architects of our nation, but also teases out their potentialities:
Tagore’s writings seems even more cosmopolitan than those of today, Gandhi’s more
strategically exploitative than the political speeches of today, Nehru’s skewed, parasitically
inclined towards western models of development, yet keen on opening the futural postcolonial
space, and Vivekananda’s emblematic of an attempt to religionize, if not saffronize, its
inspirational bases—it engages with Kant and Hegel only to consolidate its commitment to
religiosity. In fact, it is this postcoloniality that ensures that epistemes are no longer viewed
according to the requirement of the context. Rather they remain perpetually in a state of de-
territorialization.
Hence, as per the current critico-reflective postcoloniality, which mirrors the irreductive
syncretization of the theory of constant vigilance, the thinking of the architects of our nation did
not merely stand committed to laying down the contours of that evasive cultural unity, as much
as, it sportingly engaged with both, epistemic structures that aided this laying down, the religio-
mythical indigenous texts, and also that which always seemed at odds with such endeavors, the
colonial epistemic constellar units, with equal gusto. It is this postcoloniality that the Akademi
must embrace while stepping into the emergent futural space rather than honing that negatory,
provincial view of the varied epistemes, that the historic postcolonization both equally demanded
and fashioned to meet the requirement of the context it represented, the stroke of midnight hours
in Nehru’s speech, while extending folded hand veneration to those it thought had brought about
this decolonization—given that there was hardly anyone amongst the hoi-polloi who did not
debunk the European import and reify what stood concomitant with the mytho-poeic notion of
indigeneity that our leaders fashioned. The transition to this reflective, deliberative and

performative postcoloniality, keeping the hegemonic configuration in check, while engaging

with a large gamut of epistemic presences wouldn’t be a real problem for Akademi. The clue to
this kind of postcoloniality lies in the performativity of the language of the texts that Akademi
both awards and translates, something that stands both radically and quite ambivalently at
Page | 8
variance with, and indebted to, everything that it is meant to serve or represent, the
transcendental authorial agency and those aporetic lumps and arrivant it floods a particular text
with and stands immanent to.
In fact, it is the performativity of the language of the text that makes it speak for all, the cultural
unity of a nation, demands of those multiple (trans) contexts that a nation ironically shelters and
the (de)historicization process it equally ironically auto-engineers, and of course those
recalcitrant authorial intentions that attempts to strike a mimetic relationship with all these, while
playfully subverting what it speaks for 11. So the clue to postcolonization of Akademi lies within
the texts it awards. In other words, Akademi must speak the language of the texts it awards,
performatively inclined towards everything, a language where representations are as valuable as
the performance it engenders. This is indeed a language that makes and mars what the reader of
it would wish to anchor it to, those innumerable potent hermeutical sites that he might have
gathered through his immersion in the ontical, those mediated ideological commitments of his
and those bio-politicized ontopological urgencies he is ‘unconsciously’ driven by, or to his
incorrigible fetishes, fascinations, desires and obsessions. It is a language that is mobile, dynamic
and self-reflexive, perpetually gravitating towards its renewal.
The beginning towards this postcolonization is what the objective of the Akademi must register
instead of betraying it slavish, almost pedagogic admiration for that cultural unity which the
moments of decolonization demanded from the epistemes, and which it made the thinking of our
architects of nation stand for or permanently festooned to. Thus, it is not exactly ecolization that
we want, but postcolonization of Akademi. We would like Akademi to shift from being a frozen
symbol of what the historical postcoloniality stands tantamount to, a space clearing hyphenation,
to what critical postcoloniality delivers, a pure performance, standing opposed to those bio-
political interpellational performative principles of our times or that of previous eras, if not to the
limited potencies of those monolithical structures that these principles have yielded. The

rhizomic networked march towards this postcolonization of Akademi must begin at the earliest
while aiming to have an institute like ENS.
Page | 9
References
1. Bhabha, Homi. K (2004) The Location of Culture. USA: Routledge.
2. Chakraborty, Dipesh (2008) Provincializing Europe, Postcolonial Thought and

Historical Difference USA: Princeton University Press.
3. Das, Prasanta, What was the Third World?,available at,

http://www.prasantadas.com/?tag=third-world, Posted on September 14, 2012.
4. Nehru, Jawaharlal (1994) The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
5. Habermas, Juergen (1979) translated by McCarthy, Thomas. Communication and

Evolution, Canada: Beacon Press
6. Derrida, Jacques (1998) Of Grammatology. translated from French by Spivak,

Chakravorty, Gayatri. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University.
7. Heidegger, Martin (2008) Being and Time. USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
9. Johnson, Pauline (2006) Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere. NY: Routledge.
10. Mukherjee, Meenakshi (2007) The Perishable Empire, Essays on Indian Writing in
English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
11. Kaviraj, Sudipta (2010) Imaginary Institution of India, New Delhi, Permanent Black.

A case study on Preserving Cultural Identity of Samburu Tribe in Kenya
Jebamani Anthoney
Page | 10
Kenya is a multi-ethnic state in the Great Lakes region of Southeast Africa. There
are about 70 different tribes in Kenya - each of these with its own unique culture.
These tribes are grouped into larger sub-groups - based on their cultural and
linguistic similarities. Nilotes are the second-largest group of peoples. The most
prominent of these groups include the Luo, Maasai, the Samburu, the Turkana, and
the Kalenjin. This paper presents the unique traditions; retain social, cultural,
economic and political characteristics of Samburu tribe that are distinct from those
of the other tribes. The Samburu are a Nilotic people of north-central Kenya. They
are independent and egalitarian people, much more traditional than the Maasai. The
Samburu are a gerontocracy. This study also presents the ways taken to preserve
their cultural identities, and maintenance of their separate identity and backups the
moranism that promotes comradeship, self-esteem and its pride.
Keywords: Tribes, Samburu, Nilotes, Culture, ethnic, gerontocracy, egalitarian, moranism

Kenya is a country of great ethnic diversity. There are about 70 different tribes in Kenya - each
of these with its own unique culture, but majority of them with intertwining cultural practices
brought about by the close resemblance in the languages, the similar environment and physical
Page | 11
proximity of the tribes.
Kenya's ethnic groups can be divided into three broad linguistic groups Bantu, Nilotic and
Cushite. The Bantu speaking people of the Coastal region, the Central Highlands and the
Western Kenya Region, the Nilotes who are mainly found in the Great Rift Valley and the Lake
Victoria Region and the Cushites who are mainly composed of pastoralists and nomads in the
drier North Eastern part of the country. In East Africa, the Nilotes are often subdivided into
three general groups: The Plain Nilotes; River Lake Nilotes and Highland Nilotes. The Plain
Nilotes are people who speak Maa languages and include the Maasai, Samburu and Turkana.
In this paper we study about a peculiar tribe called Samburu, a Nilotic people of north-central
Kenya. They are a dignified, distinct and richly-cultured tribe that primarily inhibit the Rift
Valley. This paper also comments on how this tribe preserve their cultural and maintains their
identity and moranism that promotes comradeship.

KENYA`S TRADITIONALLY FLAMBOYANT "BUTTERFLY DANCING TRIBE"
Ranging across the great Northern plains and ranges south of Lake Turkana, the Samburu are a
Page | 12 people both proud and protective of their culture and the ancestral lands to which it binds them.
Although less well known than their Southerly Maasai relations, with whom they share a
language, the Samburu have an equally intricate and fascinating culture.
Traditional Samburu settlements were positioned in locations of great geographic beauty, often
overlooking spectacular viewpoints. The aesthetic appreciation of beauty is a major part of
Samburu beliefs, and this shows itself in a great attention to physical appearance and adornment.
Indeed, the name Samburu was given to them by other tribes, and directly translates as
Butterflies. Until this time they knew themselves as the Loikop. The name Samburu was most
likely gained in reference to the impression of delicacy created by their personal adornments.
The main thing that differentiates the Plain Nilotes of the Rift Valley from their Luo, Pokot and
Kalenjin cousins is their total reliance on pastoralism, as well as their taboos against agriculture,
hunting and the eating of wildlife or fish. This is indicative of their deeply-ingrained
conservatism, which has helped them survive the sweeping changes of the twentieth almost
intact: as a result, they are now among the most famous tribes in Africa.
The Samburu, who are believed to have split from the Maasai a few centuries ago, occupy the
more central region northwest of Mount Kenya, while their Turkana neighbours live in the more
arid northwest of Kenya, bordering Sudan and Uganda. The Samburu have increasingly been
experimenting with cultivation. The Samburu live just above the equator where the foothills of

Mount Kenya merge into the northern desert and slightly south of Lake Turkana in the Rift
Valley Province of Kenya.
Page | 13
DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE
The district is one of the most marginalized in Kenya. It is currently ranked as the second poorest
in the country with four out of five people living on less than $1 per day. Until recently, Samburu
District habitually fell beyond the reach of government development plans. There are no paved
roads in the district. Less than 5% of the population has access to electricity. Improvement to
livelihoods has been further confounded by frequent cycles of drought and famine.
In comparison to other African tribes, their population is relatively small, estimated around
150,000 people. However, their influence and impact on the country is immeasurable.

Kikuyu
Luhya
Luo
Page | 14 Kalenjin
Kamba
Kisii
Meru
other African
Non-African
samburu
Kikuyu 22%, Luhya 14%, Luo 13%, Kalenjin 12%, Kamba 11%, Kisii 6%, Meru 6%, Samburu
1.9% other African 14%, non-African (Asian, European, and Arab) 1%
SOCIO-CULTURE:
The Samburu are a rugged and pastoral community. They live a nomadic life, one that features a
constant search for fresh pasture for their herds. Their society centers on their cattle because milk
is the main staple of the Samburu diet. Generally, a Samburu village consists of a handful of
families that live together in temporary huts. Gender roles are established and strict. Men are
responsible for the protection of the village and cattle, while women manage the children and
household. The Samburu language is typically referred to as Maa.

The Samburu people are semi-nomadic pastoralists who keep goats, sheep, cattle and camels.
The men move livestock seasonally to fresh pastures while women and children are becoming
more sedentary, living close to the few schools, clinics and development projects that have been
Page | 15
established in the district. The Samburu now tend to remain in one community for five to ten
years.
Generally between five and ten families set up encampments for five weeks and then move on to
new pastures. Adult men care for the grazing cattle which are the major source of livelihood.
Women are in charge of maintaining the portable huts, milking cows, obtaining water and
gathering firewood. Their houses are of plastered mud or hides and grass mats stretched over a
frame of poles. A fence of thorns surrounds each family's cattle yard and huts.
Their society has for long been so organized around cattle and warfare (for defense and for
raiding others) that they find it hard to change to a more limited lifestyle. The purported benefits
of modern life are often undesirable to the Samburu. They remain much more traditional in life
and attitude than their Maasai cousins.
Duties of boys and girls are clearly delineated. Boys herd cattle and goats and learn to hunt,
defending the flocks. Girls fetch water and wood and cook. Both boys and girls go through an
initiation into adulthood, which involves training in adult responsibilities and circumcision for
boys and clitoridectomy for girls.

The Samburu believe that God (Nkai) is the source of all protection from the hazards of their
existence. But God also inflicts punishment if an elder curses a junior for some show of
disrespect. The elder’s anger is seen as an appeal to God, and it is God who decides if the curse
Page | 16
is justified. Faced with misfortune and following some show of disrespect towards an older man,
the victim should approach his senior and offer reparation in return for his blessing. This calms
the elder’s anger and restores God’s protection.
Samburu religion traditionally focuses on their multi-faceted divinity God. It is not uncommon
for children and young people, especially women, to report visions of Nkai. Samburu have ritual
diviners called ‘loibonok’ who divine the causes of individual illnesses and misfortune, and
guide warriors. Although ritual life focuses especially on cattle, other livestock such as goats,
sheep, camels, and even donkeys figure into Samburu ceremonies. In recent decades
missionaries had converted Samburu to predominantly catholic but majority of Samburu
continue to observe most traditional ritual practices.
THE IDENTITY: ENIGMATIC SAMBURU OF KENYA
Like the Masai, the Samburu have held on to their traditions, from their food (maizemeal,
fermented milk, meat and blood), to their homes (mud huts called manyattas) to their
clothing. Men wear a cloth which is often pink or black and is wrapped around their waist in a
manner, they adorn themselves with necklaces, bracelets and anklets, like the Maasai. Women
wear two pieces of blue or purple cloth, one piece wrapped around the waist, the second wrapped
over the chest. Women keep their hair shaved and wear numerous necklaces and bracelets.

As Europeans introduced Western style clothing it was initially shunned by Samburu. As
recently as the 1990s, wearing pants was considered by most to be a rather unmanly
abandonment of cultural traditions, which would be done only when travel outside of home areas
Page | 17
or some official business (e.g. with government offices) made it appropriate. However, as
Western style education has increased, and interaction with non-Samburu has become
increasingly common, it no longer bears the same stigma, although clothing deemed “traditional”
by Samburu is still the norm, and would be expected to be worn in many everyday and
ceremonial contexts.
The Samburu tribe speaks the Maa language, as do the Maasai. However, although they share a
vocabulary, the Samburu speak more rapidly than the Maasai. Together with the Maasai and
Turkana tribes, the Samburu are among the few African tribes who have remained culturally
authentic by clinging to their traditional way of life.
The Samburu dress is so similar to the Maasai that it is hard to distinguish between the two
tribes. Both Samburu men and women dress in brightly colored traditional shukas, which they
wrap loosely around their bodies. Samburu men also dye their hair with red ochre, while the
women adorn themselves in beautiful, multi-beaded necklaces and other traditional jewelry.
Samburu warriors, or morans, keep their long hair in braids and dress in more colorful attire than
other members of the tribe.
Circumcision for both boys and girls is one of the most important rituals among the Samburu.
For boys, circumcision marks the initiation into moran (warrior) life; for girls, it signifies
becoming a woman. Once circumcised, a girl/woman can be given away in an arranged marriage

to start her own family. Sadly, this practice has seen girls as young as 12 years old get married to
men old enough to be their grandfathers.
Page | 18 In recent times, however, concerted efforts by the Kenyan government and non-governmental
organizations have remarkably reduced the number of cases where Samburu and Pokot females
are circumcised and forced into an early marriage. This has enabled many girls to attain an
education.
TRADITIONS
Traditionally, the Samburu believed in one supreme god - Nkai or Ngai - who was thought to
reside in the mountains. Diviners often acted as intermediaries between other mortals and Nkai.
Today, while many Samburu people still adhere to their traditional religion, some have adopted
the Christian or Islamic faith.
MORANISM:
The Samburu are a proud warrior-race of cattle-owning pastoralists. To protect the tradition and
culture every male child is circumcised. As soon as a male of tribe has been circumcised, he
joins an age-set comprised of all the young men so initiated within a period of about fourteen
years and he will maintain a close affinity with these peers until death. Girls do not have any
age-set grouping, passing instead through two stages of life, namely girlhood and womanhood.
The men on the other hand pass through three, boyhood from birth to adolescence before
entering an age-set, moranhood, from circumcision to marriage when they are warriors and
elder-hood, from marriage until death. Samburu society is polygamous.

The family lives and shares the same manyatta and it is the women who are entirely responsible
for the home. The most significant event in a boy’s life is his elevation from childhood to
manhood as a result of circumcision. This talks place when he is between the ages of fourteen
Page | 19
and twenty-five. Each generation of age-sets lasts on average fourteen years.
Indeed, the moran ethos is meant to inculcate the values of nkanyit in young men. Myth has it
that the first man Samburi descended from heaven at Malalua, a perennial spring located in the
Leroki plateau in what is now known as Kisima sub-location (Mote 2004). The life of the
Samburu people, like other nomadic pastoralist communities, revolves around cattle keeping.
The society demands that morans not only protect their cattle, but also bring many more from the
neighbouring communities through armed raids. According to the Samburu, other communities
should not own cattle since all cattle were given to them by god. For this and other socio-
economic reasons, raiding other communities is not associated with guilt. Raiding successfully is
an economic activity and an act of heroism for which morans are kept, pampered and decorated.
Although they present a linguistic and cultural unity, there are noticeable dialectic and cultural
differences between the Samburu and Maasai (Kipury 1983).
The Samburu community defines a moran based on age group and rite of passage. The morans
‘are the young unmarried men who would at one time have been the warriors of the tribe’
(Spencer 1965). Young men graduate into morans after being circumcised. The hallmark of
moranism is solidarity. The institution instills in young men a bond of comradeship. They are
supposed to stay together, eat in a group, raid in a group and also suffer together. It ensures
unquestionable loyalty to the group. Newly circumcised Samburu morans, like their

Maasai counterparts must stick together. ‘Through close association with, and imitation of the
elders, the warriors learn and acquire additional skills such as the use of proverbs and the art of
oratory. They also learn the meaning of cooperation, unity and sharing from their peers’ (Kipury
Page | 20
1983). Morans are not allowed to eat food cooked by women for eleven years, they must be good
in humming and dancing and must spend most of their time in the forest together braiding and
painting their hair with red ochre. After serving five years as junior morans, the group goes
through a naming ceremony and graduates into senior morans in which they stay for six years.
After eleven years of seclusion, the senior morans are free to marry and join the class of married
men known as junior elders.
The Samburu morans are often tall, athletic and are flamboyantly dressed. The most captivating
sight in Samburu is the red ochre-plaited hairstyle of the morans, bravado, springysteps
and heroic dance style of jumping high up amid intense heroic humming, known as Ngukori.
Based on their appearance and behaviour, morans are often seen as symbols of valour and
elegance, valued by women, community members and visitors. This is vividly described by
Spencer:
Peter Wasamba says that Moranism still remains the foundation on which the pride of the
Samburu community is grounded. Young boys look forward to the day they will join the
prestigious club of morans. Their dressing, courage and solidarity earn them respect in the eyes
of the society and make them attractive to girls. The new moran is a delicate blend of the
relevant aspects of traditional moranism with the demands of the cosmopolitan
dispensation.(Wasamba, 2009)

The moran are flamboyant in their dress and very vain, frequently applying abstract designs in
Page | 21 orange to their faces and read ochre to their heads, necks, and shoulders and spending hours
braiding each others’ long ochred hair. There is little doubt that moranhood is considered the
best period of man’s life. Fearless and arrogant, he is in his prime during this period, free to do
largely exactly as he likes.
Girls train for motherhood at an early age by heaping with the household chores, and caring for
their siblings. When adolescent girls attend dances organized by the moran of their clan they are
acutely aware of the importance of looking their best at such gatherings.
They paste ochre onto their shaven heads, darken their eyebrows with charcoal, and paint
intricate designs on their faces. She is then likely to earn praise from a moran, probably
becoming mistress to him and enjoying his protection. This relationship is forged by mutual
physical and sexual attraction, although each knows that their relationship has not future. Since
both come from the same clan, marriage is forbidden.
Over the years the moran will heap beads upon his lover or bead girl as a symbol of his love and
whilst the girls may feel passionately about a certain man, they are taught from an early age that
these feelings are irrelevant, for they will never be able to wed someone of their own choosing.
Girls are taught that the marriage bond is not based on physical attraction or emotion, but
instead, that it is a long term sound investment forged by her family.

The Samburu Morani decorate their faces and upper bodies with intricate patterns, emphasize
Page | 22 their eyelines and arrange their hair into elaborate plaits with a distinctive "visor" over their
forehead. They also wear their Shukkas wrapped around their waist with a distinctive white
sash.(Nyambura, et al, 2013)
CONCLUSION:
Despite the powerful forces of modernity, the Samburu take pride in their culture and keeping
their rich tradition alive. The Samburu are a proud warrior-race of cattle-owning pastoralists.
Their dialects is spoken in a more rapid manner than that of the Maasai, but includes many words
that are common to both.
Proud of their culture and tradiation, the Samburu still cherish and retain the customs and
ceremonies of their forbears, unlike most other tribes in Kenya who have been influenced by
Western civilization.
Samburu people are totally committed to their stock, almost to the virtual exclusion of
everything else. Their cattle are their life; their wealth; their livelihood and the symbol of status
and success within the tribe. They believe that all cattle rightfully belong to them; a cattle raiding
of other tribes has always been a major preoccupation of the warriors. This delicacy and beauty
is a deceptive contrast to their fearsome reputation for hunting and fighting prowess.
Warriorhood and initiation is the backbone of the Samburu society. Age-sets of youths initiated
together maintain lifelong bonds. Through a custom known as Olpiroi (firestick) one generation

of morans becomes responsible for the moral and cultural education of the next. Thus a firestick
is literally handed down through the ages, setting up a system of age -hierarchy and respect for
tradition that bolsters the entire society.

Page | 23
REFERENCE
Kipury, Naomi (1983). Oral literature of the Maasai. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books.
Mote, Mugo (2004). Symbolism in Samburu oral narratives. M.A. dissertation. University of
Nairobi.
Nyambura, Ruth; Waweru, Peter; Matheka, Reuben; and Nyamache, Tom (2013). The Economic
Utility Of Beads Culture Of The Samburu Tribe Of Kenya, African Journal Of Social
Sciences, 3 (4) 79-84 ISSN 2045-8452.
Peter Wasamba (2009). The Concept of Heroism in Samburu Moran Ethos, Journal of African
Cultural Studies, 21:2, 145-158.
Shinya Konaka (1997) The Samburu Livestock Market in Northcentral Kenya, African Study
Monographs, 18(3, 4): 137-155.
Spencer, Paul. (1965). The Samburu: A study of gerontocracy in a nomadic tribe. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Reprinted with a new preface. London and New York:
Routledge, 2004.

As Human As You Are: When Marangdei’s Brothers and Sisters Speak
Oindri Roy
Page | 24
The paper aims at identifying a humanistic approach introduced to tribal studies by

Mahasweta Devi in the book Dust on the Roads, edited translated and introduced by
Maitreyi Ghatak. The review, thus specifically focuses on the tone and nature of
articulation rather than the knowledge imparted through the articulation. The
argument is construed through vindicating that there is a distinctive difference in
which her writings articulate the tribal identity and in the works of other
anthropologists, cultural feminists, subaltern scholars etc. Therefore, the review
looks into the means used by the author in depicting the agency of the tribal people,
however subjugated in the act of identity formation.
Keywords: tribal identity, narrative representations, agency and identity formation,

the individual and the universal
The book Dust on the Roads, a non fictional work of the critically acclaimed Bengali
author, Mahasweta Devi. The book is actually a compilation of most of her activist writings in
English published in journals and newspapers including Economic and Political Weekly,
Business Standards, Sunday and Frontier. The editor, Maitrayee Ghatak also includes within this
volume a few of her significant articles from the large body of her Bengali works translated to
English. The content page itself will reveal to those familiar with the activist writings of Devi,
which though bereft of the popularity of her fictional pieces still command the socially sentient
intellectuals respect.The selection meticulously includes all the important essays and reports
which have preoccupied her over the decade of 1980s. What makes the anthology a success is
that the articles cover a huge range of issues relating to the deprivation, degradation of life and
environment, exploitation and struggles of the labouring poor and underprivileged, the landless
and small peasants, sharecroppers, bonded labour and contract labourer and miners in West

Bengal and Bihar. The specific focus, however, is on the tribal life not merely in peripheral
existence but also essential to the equilibrium of the Indian society.
The article does not seek to analyze the literary merits of the book as a whole as
Page | 25
much as to vindicate a specific contribution Mahasweta Devi has made in her act of creating
tribal epistemologies through the ontological considerations of a peripheral existence. There is a
distinctive difference in which her writings articulate the tribal identity and in the works of other
anthropologists, cultural feminists, subaltern scholars etc. This is not to deny credits to all the
valuable documents and discourses available on the tribal issues. But Mahasweta Devi has
dedicated a major part of her life to working with and for the tribals. She not only shuns the very
prevalent empirical, factual approach to tribes that most academicians tend to follow but also
avoids a mere sympathetic attitude appropriate to a victimized entity. What she provides is a
humane treatment where she is a human talking about/with/for another human or other humans
and not merely a researcher on her rather fascinating subject unlike most researchers and
academicians involved in tribal issues.
So that the above mentioned idea does not become a hasty generalization of
facts, it becomes imperative to look into the means of writing about tribal life that Devi chooses
not to employ. Evidently, in present times tribals are a viable academic option and as V.K.
Srivastava (in S.K. Choudhury’s Tribal Identity) says tribals “are at centre of our intellectual
discourse” (vii). However in most books, articles and other documents that have been published
about tribals even in the recent past, the authors have rather empirically and factually examined
the tribes – their population, their habitat, their administrative structure, their customs and habits.
Such an objective even clinical examination of the nature of the things in the tribal life has left us
with a lot of information analyzed and organized for cognitive understanding about the first
inhabitants of the land.
Yet such information has hardly done credit to the tribal identity and alienated
the tribals as entities to be observed from the point of view of those in the mainstream. For
instance, K.S.Singh in his paper Tribal Perspectives states that “most important development in
the field of tribal research over the last 25 years has been the generation of an enormous amount

of data on the tribes which has not only often bewildered but have also provided a deeper insight
into tribal formation”(6), we know that this data will not be used for a greater integrity between
tribal and nontribal humans. And so as K.S. Singh continues “today we are sharply aware of the
complexities, diversities, and variations in the study of the tribal people and are dealing with
Page | 26
tribal matters. We have also been able to locate, identify and study specific tribal groups and
generate probably the first standardized definitive list of tribes. We have today accounted for 426
tribal groups and including 165 sub-tribes. Our studies of tribal movement based on all India
survey have highlighted movements of all types … many tribal economies which are getting
integrated with the national market. There are works dealing with environmental issues and the
tribals unrivalled knowledge of their environment which environmentalists find fascinating”(6).
A certain kind of academic attitude is reflected in both the inanimateness of hard data
and the almost parsimonious acquiring of knowledge evident in the words and phrases like
“bewildered”, ”find fascinating” or “locate, identify, study specific tribal groups” ; even the
sense as reflected in “we” or “us” being the nontribals, the privileged of the binary, and thus,
becoming “aware of the complexities, diversities and variations in the study of the tribal people”
or his declaration that environmentalists are fascinated by the tribal’s knowledge about their
own forests also vindicate the same: the tribal studies that referred to is all about tribal people
being constructed and deconstructed from a nontribal gaze. It will be of as much use to the tribal
people as a study on say, the lions of Gir will be of use to the lions at Gir or anywhere else in the
world, hence attributing to them a kind of exotic-bestial nature. Hence it will merely aid our
nontribal smugness to be augmented after having deciphered some more fascinating tribal
mysteries. It will add to the large number of publications that come out yearly about these
ethnically diverse beings with an appropriately decorated picture of a tribal woman on the cover
page. The breach between the subject position of the tribal people and the knowledge –making
processes enabled by the scholars will thus be attenuated and thus contribute to the other
hegemonic constructions of the society that renders certain sections of itself to the peripheral and
the invisible. In fact, the similar attitude can be traced to the colonial constructions of tribal
identities: In her book State, Society and Tribes: Issues in Postcolonial India, Virginius Xaxa
states:

Colonial administrators used the term tribe to describe people who were heterogeneous in
physical and linguistic traits, demographic size, ecological conditions of living, regions
inhabited, stages of social formation, and levels of acculturation and development. The
need for such a category was necessitated by a concern to subsume the enormous
Page | 27
diversity into neat and meaningful categories for both classificatory purposes and
administrative convenience. (2)
Evidently the process and its purposes though related to human demography bear a great deal of
resemblance to classifications of species of animals or plant life for facilitating the study of the
natural sciences. So this process of dehumanization had apparently been started by the British
Imperialists. However, ironically, even Indian mythology bears evidences of such an attitude
towards the tribals. To quote again from Xaxa’s work:
Sanskrit and Hindu religious texts and traditions describe tribes in a similar fashion. Bara
takes the point even further when he states that the pre-colonial depiction of the tribal
people of India as dasyus, daityas, rakshsasas, and nishadas, when juxtaposed with mid
nineteenth century Western racial concepts, advanced the aspect of bestiality associated
with the tribes.(2)
Unfortunately the attitude, whether a part of colonial legacy or not, continues till the
present date. The reason behind such an attitude is well explained by GN Devy in A Nomad
called Thief. The fact is that the tribal people with their strong sense of self identity never gave in
to their colonial masters: hence as Devy explains “…while the Adivasis kept fighting in the hills
and forests, the rest of India was being educated and ‘civilized’ and its self-cognition was
mesmerized so totally that when independence came, India started thinking of adivasi people as
the primitives who had forever out of step with history.”(Devy, 11) An author who has
published on tribal studies even in this twentieth century can afford to write like this “This state
of India portrays rich tribal heritage and is the homeland of 62 tribes….The major tribal
concentrations is found mainly in western and southern Orissa. Some of the tribes are ….at
different levels of integration or culture contact with the dominant Oriya culture which
constitutes the mainstream of Orissa. Thus with such richness of tribal cultures … much

anthropological research is awaited in Orissa”. The point of view of the author bears extreme
similarity to what has been often termed as the colonial attitude. Acquiring of knowledge and its
consequent articulation may often contribute to the hegemonic act of extraction: and undoubtedly
this mode of knowledge-production is still favoured in studies about marginal existences.
Page | 28
It is in this context, that Mahasweta Devi’s book may be regarded as an alternative mode
of writing, that by default also becomes the critique of the afore-mentioned hegemonic
knowledge producing practice: as Shachi Arya in his book Tribal Activism: Voices of Protest
states “writing is a pious and noble vocation. She lives what she writes and writes what she lives-
a rare synthesis of word and action: documentation of life leading to life and action and vice
versa.” (Arya, 66)The three distinctive qualities as identified by Shachi Arya ‘Partisanship’,
‘frankness and outspokenness’, ‘authenticity of description’ of her writing aid her a lot in her
goal of representing nothing more or less than the truth in her writings about tribal people.
Moreover she also points the reasons behind such outright marginalization of the tribal
people even in the so called academic world. In the chapter (or article) “The Jharkhand
Movement”, she clearly states that:
Behind this …lurks the age old belief that India means India of the caste Hindus. We do
not know the tribals nor do we care to know them. In the past, possibly even today, a
large majority of the educated have a stereotyped image of tribals, promoted largely by
films and plays. Tribals on the screen or on the stage inevitably wear feathered head-
dresses if they are males and flowers if they are women, wear scanty clothing – near
nakedness is compulsory- just to emphasize their innocence. And lastly the typical dance
and music. Not that these are not part of tribal life but certainly not in the way they are
shown. This synthetic image ….exists even in the minds of the educated people. (Devi
105)
In fact the apathy against accepting tribals into the main fold of the society emanates as much
from laymen, as from the “scholars” involved in “tribal studies”. And the intellectuals or the
scholars naturally bear more responsibility in such cases of ignorance and misrepresentation of
facts or they are supposed to be very enlightened individuals with the job of enlightening others.

But their lack of social, moral, and humane responsibility is quite apparent. In the book,
Mahasweta Devi narrates an anecdote in this regard that completely clarifies the attitudinal
defects of the academicians involved in tribal studies and what led to this steady process of
dehumanization of the tribals in the nontribal gaze. She writes:
Page | 29
I remember sometime ago, there was to be a conference of tribals somewhere in

Medinipur district. When a suggestion was made to someone quite learned and otherwise
enthusiastic to attend the conference he replied “I am not interested in meeting synthetic
tribals who wear sophisticated clothes and attend conferences”. Another young person
cultured, very widely read and working in a position of high responsibility, himself a
writer told me about tribals. They are urban and sophisticated to the point of being
unreal”. She further disclaims these fellow authors and scholars in blandly stating that
their concept of “….tribals …wait[ing] for ages forgoing education, wearing loin clothes,
bows and arrows in hand, in their “unadulterated” and “unsophisticated” form,
completely alienated from the mainstream of life, in the hope that someday people like
them would have the time and inclination to go and meet them? (Devi 105)
So in all her articles about tribals Mahasweta Devi attempts to disrupt the process of
dehumanization of the tribals, to make people discard their fascinating and bewildering notion
about them and more importantly to bring together the two objectives of preserving tribal
identity and of normalizing it or humanizing – a task that most scholars and researchers have
avoided for a long time. This does not however, entail that she idealizes the tribal life, presenting
a romanticized naivety and valorized glory to create fictionalized narratives. The aim is to
articulate reality in each of these pieces. Mahasweta Devi is completely realistic in her portrayal
of the tribal people. For her, they are human beings, with various socioeconomic and political
problems, chiefly caused by a globalized urban solipsism, but surviving nonetheless. She defends
them as one among them not as their benevolent protector. In that sense, her vision of tribal life
may be said to be in conformity with the deceased human right activist and writer Dr. Balagopal
whose incessant struggle for preservation of tribals’ right to life, including basic human rights,
have been of remarkable merit, ceasing at his early demise.

So in this book, the foremost concern of Mahasweta Devi is to destroy the

“synthetic image” of the tribals; and she appears to be quite successful in this regard not just for
the tribals in eastern India, at least for time being. As she unearths from the dusts on the roads of
Palamau, Singbhum, and Medinipur tales of human lives, tribes cease to be fascinating specimen
Page | 30
of ethnical diversities. She shows that their epistemic and ontological situation in the scheme of
things is hardly any different from the nontribals. It becomes imperative for her to use her words
to rightfully establish tribal identity as a part of humanity and to wreck the illusion of superiority
among the nontribals of the human race- an illusion that is age old and too deep rooted. So when
Mahasweta Devi begins to deconstruct stringent traditions and constricted ideologies, she begins
when it all began, that is, from the past. Many authors are only interested in the origin of the
tribals and their history only to understand their customs and practices; others do not go beyond
lamenting the fact that how tribals have since the ancient times been portrayed as evil and
frightening or been completely ignored. But Mahasweta Devi takes her own stance, not only
demanding reorganization of tribal history but also suggesting ways of restructuring historical
materials so that adequate justice is done to their past. In her book The Tribal Language and
Literature: The Need For Recognition, she states, “My contention is that history should be re-
written acknowledging the debt of mainstream India to the struggles of the tribals in the British
and even pre-British days. The history of their struggles is not to be found only in written scripts
but in their songs and dances, folktales, passed from generation to another. So much of it has
perished with the people who have died …. But so much still exists.” In fact it should be
mentioned here that she not only advises but also does her own bit. Her novel, Aranyer Adhikar,
recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award provided a moving but factually correct account of the
Munda rebellion against the British in the 19th century along with the life and struggles of the
rebel leader, Birsa Munda. Though some have criticized her work to be fictional it is this novel
that made widely well known the contributions of Birsa Munda as a freedom fighter , hitherto
merely a name in a small paragraph titled the Santhal rebellion in most history books.
Here, too, when she records the contemporary times, she makes sure that the
names of the new tribal heroes and martyrs are recorded for the posterity. She tells us stories of
Chuni Kotal, the first woman graduate among the Lodha Savaras and Kheria Savaras of West
Bengal who unable to bear the pressures of the insensitive civilized world eventually committed

suicide, or Saradaprasad Kiusku, a poet who lived and died without ever being officially honored
either for his literary activities or for his social activism to empower his fellow tribal people.
Equally important in her articles are the stories of Boodhan, a young Sabar with wife and family
who was beaten to death by the police as a part of the political conspiracy but whose death
Page | 31
almost led to a tribal movement for redressal and justice or that of Mangru, who became facially
paralyzed under torture because he dared to protest against hereditary bondage labour but who
still continues his activism undeterred. These names become the metonyms of the actof struggle
in the greater praxis of tribal identity formation. That she is diametrically different in her
approach to tribal studies is very well depicted by this. Researches pertain mostly to objectifying
tribal practices and glorifying their survival techniques. But Mahasweta Devi’s aim is to
demystify tribal life and lay bare their humane credentials. Her goal to bring them at par with
their mainstream counterparts, but not subsume them with more authoritative identities is
evident.
Therefore, Mahasweta Devi is not being merely affective and omitting the factual
portions that are must for anthropological works. Nor can we call her works merely activist
writings because they do replenish our knowledge about tribals. And she does meticulously go
through a lot of research work like her academically qualified counterparts. The thing is she
presents them in a very different manner- so that it seems that she is talking about her fellow
creatures, as human as her and not some fascinating specimens of biodiversity. She enumerates
the variegated amount of problems the tribals face- financial strains, political disruptions, socio-
cultural marginalization and even ecological exploitation but not in a cold objective manner
required in a scientific analysis of say, the reasons for extinction of a certain rare species of
birds. So an academically sound anthropologist with highly informative publications would
merely identify the problems, its causes and consequences. Mahasweta Devi would do the same,
but only humanize the issue further so that we can appreciate the problem as of our own concern
and not something the remote. For example, an article on tribal rights to land and forest and their
encroachment by various illegal but powerful elements will only identify the technical
drawbacks: the restrictions on selling tribal land that cause hindrances for the tribal in entering
the free land market , the poor agricultural development and poor economic status of the majority
of tribals leading to the demand for land amongst tribals, and the subsequent causes
undervaluation of tribal land. It may also identify the ill effects of all-consuming urbanization:

due to ever increasing industrial, mining and development activities, the tribal lands are in great
demand among the non – tribals. This makes them easy victims of corruption by government
officials, police personnel etc. who frequently engage in a conspiratorial nexus to isolate tribal
lands by manipulating the law and their custodians. However, such words hardly depict the cruel
Page | 32
reality in tribal life or the insensitiveness of the administration who are simply not interested in
resolving such issues. For Mahasweta Devi, it is more than merely a subject for a paper. She
decides to bring in a human face to make the situation more fathomable for those unaware of
such kind of lives. In her article Land Alienation among Tribals the rampant social evil of
breaching tribal rights is very well portrayed in the story of Angu and his family who for two
generations have trying their utmost to get back 32.99 acres of their ancestral land that had been
tricked out of their possession by forged papers. Even the High Court ruling in their favour
which was declared after a long delay during which Angu’s family ran pillar to post (Angu even
lost his BSF job in the process) did not help. Forcibly evicted from the land, even after numerous
police complaints and applications of redressal to seats of authority, they stare at nothingness. So
again Mahasweta Devi manages to get across to us the blatant violations of law faced by the
tribals without delving into statistics and surveys unlike other researchers.
Another such example can be from the subject of ecological interdependence of the
tribals on the forest. The problem of deforestation especially in tribal areas is identified by most
ecologists and environmentalists and more or less all of them have the same take: they identify
ecological problems, suggest conservation techniques to preserve forests and protect tribals in
the most scientific, rational manner possible that hardly sensitizes the non sufferers of the
problem to this issue. But Mahasweta Devi sees the depletion of natural resources as the cause of
trauma for men and women who are forced to leave their loved ones and their homes to look for
livelihood in the hostile urban forest of concrete. In her article, Contract Labour and Bonded
Labour, the seriousness of the situation comes out in an authentic manner in the folk song that of
a distressed mother forced to part with her teenage daughter:
My Bali could live on forest fruits
My Bali could live on jungle roots ;
But trees, alas, do not saris grow
So to the Bhatta* my Bali had to go
My Bali had to go (Devi 34)

*(A bhatta is a brick kiln where young girls are made to work in terrible conditions under
ruthless employers who go to the extent of exploiting them sexually.)
Evidently, the urban-scientific nature of understanding global-warming vis-à-vis
capitalism is simplified into the quotidian and the more understandable by tribal knowledge.
Page | 33
Devi does not report it as fascinating but as knowledge gained through day-to-day living.In the
article, “Back to Bondage”, the forest and its resources being of tremendous interest as sources
of sustenance to the tribals which becomes completely evident in the line : “One old man quietly
said “Jab jangal giya, hum log bhi mara” (which means – when the jungle goes, it’s the end of
us.”(Devi 9)
Besides through these articles, it becomes evident that Mahasweta Devi does not make
the tribal identity symptomatic of victimization, unable to take assert self-protection. Most
authors have a vaguely sympathetic turn of mind and is apparently desirous of helping them.
Take for instance her expounding on the tribal economy: while several governmental documents
and empirical sources claim that the traditional system of tribals is now a thing of the past and
one has to find out alternative models of tribal development that would help them to strengthen
their socioeconomic, cultural and political base and also protect their right of self
determination” in research papers appear reflecting a hegemonic attitude. Hardly a few people
can bother about speaking of tribal self sufficiency; many cannot even acknowledge the idea that
tribal people themselves have the potential to empower themselves if not deliberately harmed by
the mainstream elements. But Mahasweta Devi trusts that“…..development can only be ensured
if people are involved at every stage, from planning to implementation.” And as Shachi Arya
states
Mahasweta is associated with about two dozens voluntary tribal welfare organizations.
She is convinced that it is through these and such other organizations that the tribal can
be really awakened into standing up on their own seeing things with their eyes and taking
charge of measures that can provide redressal to their grievances. She laments the
lopsidedness, unimaginativeness and also insensitivity of governmental policies and
priorities, and feels that much could have been achieved within the limited available
resources, only if the central government was a .little less interested in squandering
money on seminars and workshops that signified nothing, and a little more interested in
easing that money out to the needy who could work wonders with that since locally and

sporadically they have been able to achieve that with meagre aid coming from the
voluntary organizations. (71)
The paper does not argue that the work is of highest academic competence but chooses to
Page | 34
identify and validate an approach taken by the author. Compared to the works of academically
qualified anthropologists and scholars of social sciences, Mahasweta Devi’s take on tribal studies
has its own faults. For some, her reach may seem limited concentrating only on the tribal people
of Eastern India i.e. West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa. Her work may be criticized on
the grounds of lacking formal terminology required in the field of anthropology and branches of
social sciences dealing with tribal studies. In fact her fictional works have been criticized the
other way round- for being merely chroniclers of social reality. Yet she has been involved with
tribal life in a way very few mainstream people had the sense to. All her writings reflect her
determined support for the marginalized sections of the society like the tribal people, as
Maitreyee Ghatak the editor of the book writes, “especially the little known, little lauded
struggles which are part of everyday life and don’t necessarily find a place in history books or
the mainstream media.” And in a society that only pretends to be liberal and democratic, that is a
tough if not a brave act, having introduced along with a few others a new more humanistic way
of looking at the tribal life. A few more contemporary authors are following her school of
thought. GN Devy is one of them, so inspired by Mahasweta Devi’s way of thinking, in fact
dedicates her acclaimed work A Nomad Called Thief (2006) to the older author as the one who
brought her to the tribes. As for the tribal people, to whom she is Marang dei or elder sister, her
works are a mode of tribal identity formation which respects their human agency.

References:
BOOKS:
Page | 35 Arya, Shachi. Tribal Activism: Voices of Protest. New Delhi. Rawat Publications.1999.
Choudhury, S.K. Tribal Identity. New Delhi. Rawat Publications.1999.
Devi, Mahasweta. Dust on the Roads. Calcutta. Seagull Books.2000.
Devy, G.N. A Nomad Called Thief. Hyderabad. Orient Longman. 2007.
Gupta, Ramanika. Tribal Contemporary Issues : Appraisal and Intervention. New Delhi.
Concept Publishing Company.2008.
Miri Mrinal. Continuity and Change in Tribal Society. New Delhi. Indian Institute of
Advanced Studies.1999.
Xaxa, Virginius State, Society, Tribes: Issues in Post Colonial India: New Delhi, India
Binding House. 2008.
JOURNALS:
Combat Law( Bimonthly) Volume 1 Issue 1 January-February2010

A ‘Nationful’ of Concerns: An Eco-critical Reading of Kamala Markandaya’s A Handful of
Page | 36 Rice
Saurabh Bhattacharyya
In his well known work, Ecocriticism (2004) Greg Garrard posits the general parameters
that define and guide ecocritical studies by making a collection, as it were, of the different
definitions of ecological criticism in the first chapter of his work. For instance, he cites
Glotfelty’s definition from The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) of it as being “the relationship
between literature and the physical environment” (qtd. in Garrard 3). This is followed by Richard
Kerrigde’s definition in Writing the Environment (1998) which boils the meaning of
ecocriticism, as it were, down to the environmental issues of the day:
The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they
appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often part concealed,
in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas
in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis (qtd. in
Garrard 4).
If one keeps these two definitions in the mind, Kamala Markandaya’s A Handful of Rice (1966)
does not appear to be a text that overtly lends itself to ecocritical analysis on the first reading. In
fact the novel it is most often coupled with as a sequel, though written more than a decade
earlier, Nectar in a Sieve (1955), with its plot dealing with the displacement of a peasant family
through industrialization in the form of establishment of a tannery in their village is more an

ecological text in the accepted sense of the term. If Nectar in a Sieve is largely set in a village,
amidst what can be called a rural way of life, such a life exists in A Handful of Rice in the
memory of its protagonist, rather problematically, being intertwined with the memory of
Page | 37
suffering, and is carried by him in his urban existence, more as a deep psychological wound than
anything else. A Handful of Rice is the story of Ravi, a peasant by birth who has to leave his
ancestral village in search for work in the city of Madras. Under the influence of a man called
Damodar, he resorts to lead a life of petty crimes in the city until he chances upon a family of
tailors and enters the family in the pretext of being an apprentice of the head of the family, Apu,
in tailoring. As time goes by he grows deeply attracted towards Nalini, the unmarried daughter of
the family and, managing to marry her, he eventually takes over the tailoring business after
Apu’s death in a stroke. With the ruthlessness of his business life increasing, Ravi becomes more
and more hardened as a business man, causing the increase of emotional distance between him
and his wife. In fact, it was in his fight with the ruthless business world, dictated by western
standards of professionalism, that he loses his son and his family, something which he had
valued over everything in his life. Still, at the end of the novel, when under deep duress of
poverty the local people decide to loot the granaries, Ravi accompanies them all the way but is
unable to resort to violence as the ecological values of his actual home and his now lost family
have infused something in him that stand in the way of his destructive instinct. Ravi may have
been a victim of pollution from the ecological point of view, but he shies away from being an
instrument of that.

The criminality with which Ravi is introduced at the outset is something that hardly
makes it credible for this deterrence on his part. It is true that he visits Apu and his wife
Jayamma’s household a number of times towards the beginning of the novel to infiltrate it and it
Page | 38
is also true that it was primarily Nalini, and the necessity of a family belonging which was in his
mind, still, at the outset, Ravi is introduced as a petty criminal, with hardly any sense of dignity
in him. More a hardened criminal than him is his friend Damodar. Our first impression of
Damodar is presented from the point of view of Ravi himself. Damodar is more a pollutant than
a humanised victim of the murky world as Ravi is. He is an organism fully adapted to the
polluted world he inhabits and, as a necessity, proliferates. He is the representative of the agents
that contribute to the ecological imbalance of the world that they inhabit. It is also due to this that
Damodar remains the same throughout the novel. He is instinctively drawn to pollution and dirt.
“He stayed where he had made his money, among the corn and grain merchants, the distillers and
importers, preferring the pungent air of these turbid streets to what he might have breathed in the
rarefied casuarina and hibiscus areas” (Markandaya 212). In the polluted world, only the
pollutant and those adapted to the pollution can keep on.
However, despite the pollution of the urban atmosphere, it would be wrong to assume
that the novel presents the rural and the urban as bipolar correspondents to the unpolluted and the
polluted. In fact, neither of the two worlds is pure in its essential characteristic. One effective
way of reading the novel along these lines is by keeping in mind the Pastoral Tradition that has
been there in the West as a very distinct trend of environment conscious literature. Quoting Terry
Gifford, Garrard provides three ways of defining the Pastoral. The first is characterised by the
retreat from the city to the countryside. Secondly, it could be a literature that places the country
in a relationship of explicit or implicit contrast to the urban; and thirdly a work can be called a

pastoral in the negative sense that involves the idealization of the country and rural life with
total disregard for the qualities of life actually led there (Garrard 33). When the relationship
between the rural and the urban in the novel are judged keeping in mind these three definitions,
Page | 39
the treatment reveals a curious blend of affiliation and departure. While a Pastoral involves a
movement from the city to the countryside for a better and fuller life, as in As You Like It or
Scholar Gypsy, for instance, A Handful of Rice tells a story of migration from the countryside to
the city in search of sustenance. It is a movement from one site of environmental disaster to
another, the former instinctively congenial but not physically sustaining, the later, only allowing
one to lead the life of a beast of burden revealing its true self only after one has reached there.
Consequently people like Ravi find themselves caught between two different sorts of sordid life,
one relatively closer to the heart in being a kind of repository of childhood feelings and
associations, the archetypes with which the individual has associated his being through
generations, the other carrying with it a sense of allure, calling one with a prospect of starting
everything afresh, but cannot be reached at without undergoing a total displacement, and
choosing to undergo the general exodus to reach a diaspora state. Ravi has moved out of his city
following tradition because “their village has nothing to offer them. The cities had nothing either,
although they did not discover this until they arrived; but it held out before them like an
incandescent carrot the hope that one day, some day, there would be something” (25-26). There
is a distinct contrast presented between the city and the countryside, but the essential point of
similarity lies in the fact that both offer no natural physical sustenance to people like Ravi. This
fact also renders the third definition inapplicable to the attitude of either the novelist or her
central character towards the rural and the urban.

In fact the use of the word diaspora in the present context is more appropriate when taken
in its vegetative etymological sense drawing from its original Greek meaning ‘a scattering of
seeds’, rather than its commonly used implication, largely in the area of postcolonial literature.
Page | 40
What the etymological root does not suggest is, however, the fact that most often the
displacement and the subsequent diaspora experience is more voluntary, than undesired. In
Ravi’s case it is partly so, though the cultural displacement works inside him to disorient him.
John A. Armstrong in ‘Mobilised and Proletarian Diasporas’ (1976) distinguishes between two
kinds of Diaspora. The first is what he calls the “mobilised Diaspora”, and the second is the
“proletarian Diaspora”. Both depend on the motivations of the character in the choice of the
Diaspora condition. If the former deals with a kind of diaspora that depends much of its
existence on the choice of a better life in the West, the latter forms a kind of compulsion to move
to the adopted ‘home’, not so much for the betterment of life as for the compulsion of living.
Ravi’s case is dominantly the latter one. However, in the allure he felt in the village for a new
life in the town provides some traces of an exodus of choice. In fact his diaspora predicament is a
curious mixture of both the types and is much more fundamental than Armstrong’s presentation
of diaspora as “ethnic collectivity which lacks a territorial base within a given polity”
(Armstrong 393).
In A Handful of Rice there is an indirect representation of Environmental disaster, or at
least a movement towards ecocide occurring at two sites within the world of the novel. The first
being in the way Ravi has to be displaced from his native village on account of inadequacy of
food and resources to sustain himself. This mainly is informed by his internal monologues
recalling a remembrance which is polluted in such a way that any reminder of the moments of
environmental bliss in the village is impeded by the memory of the suffering and the

displacement associated with it. It is only once in the novel that he wistfully remembers his
earlier state without being reminded of his compulsion to flee from that state. During the tensed
moments of his wait for his first child’s birth, he misses the emotional space that he found in the
Page | 41
natural surroundings of his home in the village:
Here there were no fields to lose oneself in, as the men of his village had done: and as he
waited he could not help remembering – stress having eaten away his defences – that here
was something about the land, mortgaged though it was to the last inch, that gave one
peace, a kind of inner calm, that he was acutely conscious of lacking as he gazed at the
narrow, hard, bustling and indifferent street (Markandaya 123-124).
What is remarkable here is the fact that Markandaya takes care to mention that his ‘defences’
have been deactivated by the stress before he makes this acknowledgement. The defences that
Markandaya talks about are the defences working in and through memory.
The second site of disaster is the city, going through the process of being more and more
westernised, in which he eventually has to lose his family and reenter the world of criminality,
accepting the predicament of being a pollutant himself. The world is repeatedly called a jungle
in the novel and recurrently contrasted with the images of the village in which he lived and
which lives only in his memory, though in a complicated way because of its association with the
sense of dislodgment and loss of home described above. According to Dr. Nagendra Kumar
Singh, “The author uses the symbol of jungle several times in the novel to indicate the kind and
quality of life the urban Indian offers us” (Singh 69). Singh in fact, goes on to provide the
instances from as many as five places in the novel where the urban life has been compared to that
of the jungle and the rules of survival over there are equated to the ruthless laws of the jungle.

One of the essential aspects of the novel is its placing of these two worlds alongside. One
is the world of the past which is most often described in terms of its association with
reminiscences associated with it. The other is the present which is compared, very significantly,
Page | 42
to a jungle on multiple occasions. The following extract from the text will demonstrate how the
past is celebrated in terms of scenic beauty, but when it comes to the question of natural
sustenance, it is discarded for the present jungle. Brooding on the Bougainvillaea flowers
scattered on the surface of the road, he suddenly becomes aware of the beauty of the sight and is
taken back to the world of his early days which he had to leave despite its occasional beauty:
It was a pretty creeper, the bougainvillaea, he thought, lovely bright
colours although the flowers had no smell. He had not realised how pretty it was until he
saw the way they used it in the big houses, slap against white-washed walls where their
brilliance could show, and the flowers hung down in great heavy trusses of crimson and
purple. But you had to have that wide expanse of wall first. If one planted the creeper
here—not that you could, there was no earth to set a root in—it would hardly show
against the drab brick and tiles, except perhaps to bring out the drabness more. That was
the one thing about his village life, though he had not dwelt on it much before: there had
been a small plot of ground beside their hut, which his mother had planted with chillis
and brinjal and pumpkins—and how pretty that had been in season, golden swelling
gourds among the vivid green vines! Ravi shook himself angrily. What was the matter
with him, harking back to that putrid existence? Of course it was all right in the one good
season that came their way out of five— but what about the others when the paddy fields
turned brown and the pumpkins looked like wrinkled old hags? He felt his mouth
working in the old way, as if to be rid of the bitter remembered flavour, and he spat into

the gutter that ran along the street in front of the houses, narrowly missing the man
perched on a flagstone that spanned it to form a footbridge (Markandaya 107).
Page | 43 The contrast that we find in these lines are reminiscent of the two oft-quoted contrasting
paragraphs from what has become a cult book in ecological studies, - Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring (1962). Markandaya does not go into the evocation that Carson’s prose ventures into, but
the contrast between the moments of ecological balance and those of pollution, for Carson
informs later that it is DDT and other pesticides that had led to this environmental disaster, are
similar in both the texts:
Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the
traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of
beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the
dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the
abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring
through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others
came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady
pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers
raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell
had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the
cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers
spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and
more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been

several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children,
who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours (Carson 1-2).
Page | 44 Markandaya’s contrast between the “golden swelling gourds among the vivid green vines” and
the “paddy fields turned brown and the pumpkins looked like wrinkled old hags” is more
complex in the fact that in Carson’s description one follows the other, in Markandaya it appears
to be similarly progressive in its sequence in memory, but are actually repeating in a cyclical
sequence. This has been going on for generations for people like Ravi and no human pollutant is
located there except the poverty that is engrained and is a product of the system of being “rack-
rent farmers” as Ravi and the other members of his family are. Despite the unusual spelling of
the bougainvillaea which is most often spelled as bougainvillea, and the inaccuracy in the fact
that it is not a creeper, the movement of thought, as one may easily trace, is from the urbane to
the rural. First, beauty is discovered here and now in the city in the way the bougainvillaea looks
against the white washed walls. What follows is the contrast between the flowers when they are
placed in the rich urban context and them being imagined in the context of the dingy locale to
which he had migrated to at the beginning of his life in the city. However, what follows is a
wistful reminiscence of his mother’s kitchen garden with, importantly, fruits and not flowers as
the edibles are more important for them, perhaps the colour of the bougainvillaea leading the
memory to the colours of the red chilli. Ravi’s anger does not come from a sense of escape, as
that would have also given him a sense of relief. The anger, the source of which lie even beyond
his own understanding, is caused by a sense of pain at his having left everything, at the
displacement from the village and finally taking refuge to the jungle over here. This anger
becomes more and more until finally it comes out that the displacement is not complete at the
climactic final scene.

There is hardly a single occasion in the story where the bliss of the village life comes to his mind
without being accompanied by the bitter memory of why Ravi had to leave his home. When his
father blames the temptation in the villagers towards urban life for the plight they face after
Page | 45
migrating to the town or city, Ravi seethes deep inside:
Town, town, town, thought Ravi, chafing in silence. They gathered every evil they could
think of and laid it at the feet of a town, as if they were making an offering to some black
god. He felt he knew "why: because they had nowhere else to spill the blame. But his
father? Who knew the evils of another kind which their village? What right had he to
slander any town? It was hopeless, he decided: a hopeless case; and the gulf widened
between parent and son (Markandaya 51).
The entire urban life, in which he lives from the beginning to the end of the novel, adapting with
it as necessity comes, seems to be polluted to the extreme. It is a pollution that would lead one
toward a kind of ecological disaster, as is evident in the later parts of the novel when Ravi
becomes the victim of it, living through poverty once again and losing his family in the way.
In this context, His attraction towards Nalini is a kind of going back to the other world,
the world from which he has been displaced and where he needs to return to. Just after his first
encounter with her in Apu’s family, he realises that he needed:
this girl with the bright eyes and the thick, glossy hair, who could transform a man's life.
He would have liked to meet her—properly, not as a labouring coolie in her father's
house; to talk to her as an equal, to get to know her, as other young men came to know
young girls, within the approving, carefully conducted circle of mutual friends and family
relationships (Markandaya 25).

Getting the girl also involved adapting to a better living standard, morally, as well as from the
societal point of view. It is this that comes out very directly in the description of Nalini as
antithetical to that of the jungle he inhabits and hates. While his remembrance of an emotionally
Page | 46
congenial village life is impeded by the memory of suffering instinctively associated with it, it is
only in Nalini’s thought that he finds perfect compatibility with his environment which is not
impeded by memory or suffering:
Ah, Nalini, he thought, Nalini. She was worth it, worth anything, even worth giving up
the sweet life for. He put it all on her, forgetting the trinity of hunger, drink and misery
that had been intermittent companion to his sweet life, and which had forced his entry
into Apu's menage in the first place (Markandaya 40).
Thus, even in this jungle there is an environment, closed in itself, that promises a kind of
emotional sustenance that is rarely there in the life he has left in the village and utterly absent in
his life in Madras. It is the world surrounding Nalini. Apu and Jayamma’s family becomes a kind
of emotional abode to him only because of the fact that it houses Nalini. It corresponds to a more
environmentally attuned way of life:
Nalini, his girl. He said it to himself sweetly, roundly, secretly, and it filled him with a
delicious sense of pleasure. Nalini, the girl who could make a man feel like a man even
outside the jungle of his choosing, the girl for whom he was ready to repudiate all in his
life that was unworthy. And what this was, he realised clearly, was precisely what would
have alienated his own respectable family: his dubious activities on the fringes of the law
in the dubious company of Damodar. But whereas the standards of his family filled him
with contempt—for what had it taught them except an excessive endurance, and what had

it brought them except perpetual poverty!—he accepted them as entirely necessary for
this girl. Nor did the split in his thinking trouble him. One varied one's criteria to
circumstance, as any fool knew: and how a man reacted to the strictures of his father was
Page | 47
entirely different from the returns he willingly made to his girl (Markandaya 33).
The ‘varying of one’s criteria to circumstance’ is in fact adaptation, and this he will perform
fairly well given the fact how he enters the family of Apu and ultimately becomes a compliant
member of the family. Later when he encounters a moment of unadulterated bliss in his life in
which he sees Nalini bathing, the reference to the hair acting as curtain and the uncovered breasts
reflect a sylvan situation, so to say, which hardly goes with the jungle of his life and, unawares,
brings him to the earlier existence from which he has had to escape. Needless to say, the
language used to evoke the sense of bliss over here, the bliss of his seeing the semi nude Nalini
and her uncovered breasts is more spiritual than erotic. It in fact links him to his earlier life, the
life of ecological balance which is interrupted by the law of the jungle:
Sometimes there was not even this: sometimes after a whole day's endurance all he had
for his comfort was the sound of her, the swish of her sari as she whisked about the place
at her mother's bidding, or a glimpse of her sitting cross-legged like an inaccessible
goddess in one of the inner rooms. Except once, when someone had forgotten to close the
door that led to the tiny open courtyard beyond, and he had seen her sitting on a small
wooden plank near the tap in the centre, soft and flushed from her bath, dressed in a pink
mull sari with her hair loose about her shoulders. It was like a curtain, her hair: a shining
silk curtain that rippled and shimmered as the ivory comb worked down from root to tip.

He hardly dared to breathe, he was so taken by the beauty of it, her grace, the lovely
movement of bead and rounded arm that curved and lifted her uncovered breast.
Page | 48 But this was only once, a single isolated moment of distilled pleasure (Markandaya 34).
While the rarity of such moments of bliss is described, there is an implicit superimposition of a
feeling of natural opulence working through the fullness of the hand and the uncovered breasts.
The world to which Ravi is transported goes back to prelapsarian world, as it were, to which he
belonged. This is an enclosed space of environmental balance, “a single isolated moment of
distilled pleasure” (Markandaya 34) in the urban jungle. Nalini contains in herself that enclosed
space and thus symbolises a kind of ecological balance that he seeks through his life. When Apu
and Ravi walk their way to Nungambukkam, the description of the locale becomes extremely
symbolic, pointing out, as it were, a mixture of the urban and the village from which he has
come. Just as Apu’s family is like an oasis in the otherwise harsh society that is polluted by
people like Damodar, there is also a different world in the urban jungle itself, described in the
imagery of trees and flowers, in which he may be able to find some rest. “it was quiet here, with
large cool detached houses, and dancing patches of shade from spreading tamarind trees and
gulmohar such as never lines the streets where they lived, and in the shade an occasional slab of
stone or a concrete bench where people could sit” (Markandaya 37).
When marriage is fixed in between Ravi and Nalini, the list of articles necessary for
marriage given by Jayamma reconstitutes a world of its own much different from the drab
surroundings of the city “‘Jaggery, gingelly oil, jeeragam, lavangam, turmeric, venthiam,’ he
heard her intoning. ‘Cardamom, coriander, cummin seed, tamarind, chillies, two bundles plantain
leaves, twenty limes, coco-nuts another twenty, flower garlands …’” (Markandaya 58). It is a

subconscious effort in Ravi’s mind that makes him set up an adaptive ecologically balanced site
of peace in a general environment of imbalance and struggle. In fact, at multiple occasions in the
novel, Nalini and the household are described with profuse imagery of flowers, the flowers that
Page | 49
Ravi misses in his life in the city, which recall his childhood in the village, the life he left back:
She sat upright, dressed in her best shot-silk sari, orange and green with a narrow mango
border and an orange blouse to match. Her hair was braided and coiled, and circled with
jasmine flowers and rosemary—he had seen her that afternoon, twining the florets
together. When she moved he could smell their fragrance, wafted up strongly on the
slight current of air; and if he moved he could touch her, their seats were so jammed
together (Markandaya 44).
Falling flowers from the mango tree interlace their moments of romance. In one of the rare
places in the novel celebrating beauty in nature, Markandaya writes:
The light was going, grey edged the extravagant swathes of colour in the sky. Punctually,
as if set in motion by a clock, a light breeze wafted up, fanning out over the blistered city,
bringing a hint of cool showers and the sharp scent of mango. Pale gold bruised flowers
fell, swirled round in a last eddy and were still. Ravi scooped up a handful of the tiny
stars and crushed them for the smell. There must be a mango-tree near by, though he
could not think where. In this quarter so far as he knew no trees grew (Markandaya 98).
The flowers could be bruised, yet they are flowers. Ravi knew that trees do not grow in these
places; there is a presence of a tree, more significantly, a mango tree that must have carried for
him associations from his childhood, things about which he does not love to think for their
association in his memory with suffering and the subsequent the loss of the home. Even on the

marriage day, Ravi finds “flowers, flowers everywhere” (Markandaya 59). Subsequent to the
marriage, His proximity with Nalini made him dream of a home, an enclosed space that he can
call his own, free from the pollution of the outside world. “If only, Ravi thought irritably, with
Page | 50
longing, then savagely, if only they had their own small house—however small, a doll's house—
just somewhere to call their own!” (Markandaya 77).
Eventually, as time passes, Damodar and Nalini become two aspects of his world.
Damodar is the pollutant in the urban jungle, while Nalini is the essence of life itself, the
ecological opposite of pollution that Damodar or the memory of the “trinity of hunger, drink and
misery” (Markandaya 40) can not pollute. Even at a stage very early in the novel, Ravi is
apprehensive if the fact that Damodar might prove injurious to his newly found family:
Damodar who knew the brewery, who knew all the bootleggers in town, who knew the
town like the back of his hand—it would not take him long to pinpoint the house with the
broken grating. And his friend wasn't like him, a country youth newly up from a village.
Damodar was a city slicker, born and bred in the streets of the city, with city standards
that were not exactly different from his own but tougher, more elastic, so that Ravi was
never sure exactly how far they would stretch. Usually it did not concern him. He knew
that life was a battle in which the weak always went under; he accepted the fact that the
man who did not do all he could to keep on top was a fool. He would never fault
Damodar on that score. It was simply that he had some way to go yet in toughening his
own fibre, flabby from all those homilies on decency (Markandaya 15).
There is a distinct implication of pollution in the introduction of Damodar. The use of the word
‘slicker’, meaning a deceiver, etymologically closer to the word ‘slick’, has a particular

association with pollution. Here Markandaya is perhaps stressing on the fact that Damodar is
more adapted to the ways of the jungle than Ravi. In fact he proves to be that throughout the
novel but if the location of a pollutant and the source of pollution that threatens the well being of
Page | 51
the physical environment become crucial in ecological criticism, there is a distinct presence of
that in the character of Damodar and the world he inhabits. In the paragraphs that compare
between how Ravi and Damodar drink, drinking implicitly becoming a rite of ritual initiation to
the world of pollution, the difference is clearly representative to their respective adaptability to
pollution:
Ravi was not much of a drinker, he got drunk too easily, but the interregnum of
companionable tippling before he arrived at this blind state was agreeable, and blunted
the thoughts that had griped him all day. Relaxed and mellow, he gazed at Damodar with
a distant affection, and wondered why he had ever considered him sub-standard, unfit for
the strait-laced, dull, foolish, craven and killjoy company in which he had landed himself.
Damodar's drinking was of a different order. He drank with a kind of dedication, in a
cold, systematic rebuttal of the tenets of a religion which had been thrust upon him with
relentless fervour, his grey eyes grown harder in his pale face as he watched his weaker
companions reel from a consumption that left his own faculties as sharp and chiselled as
ever. Sometimes—now—Ravi speculated whether Damodar could possibly enjoy this
kind of drinking, only to have his doubts dispelled by sudden outrageous clowning, or a
general hilarious bonhomie that only in his more sober moments did he question whether
put on (Markandaya 72).

The way Damodar drinks bears testimony to the way he has adapted himself to the pollution of
the world around. He is a person used to the world of drinking.
Page | 52 Displacement is one of the key motifs in the text and is in some way linked to the concept
of westernistion. It is clearly described how the memsahibs, the remnants of the British raj,
would cancel total lots of orders on the instance of a single failure of reaching deadline. It is an
exacting world with no place for sentiments. It is entirely an anthropogenic world, so to say, but
human values do not matter. Ravi is expected to carry on with his duties unaltered by the client
memsahib, even when his father in law, Apu, dies (Markandaya 184). Actually, what is hinted at
is the role that the large or medium scale industry is playing in displacing first the agrarian
community, and then the petty bourgeois. While in Nectar in a Sieve, the cause of the
displacement from the village is particularly specified to be the establishment of a tannery, in this
case, no particular cause is stated for the famine that displaces them. The second level of
displacement occurs in the city itself, in the poverty there, in Ravi’s loss in the battle of survival
in his increased separation from his wife and in the death of his son. The way in which the death
of the son is described is itself a kind of statement of the ecologically symbolic expansion of one
life form into the other and the disorientation of the both that happens through death:
Raju lay quietly in between spasms; but as darkness gathered in the room he began to
scream, short sharp cries, and a quivering wait for the membrane of silence to rupture
again. Then at last Ravi prayed, not for himself but for his child to die; and towards dawn
there was a last convulsion. Ravi held his son in his arms, tightly, crooning to him to take
the terror away, until it was over. He would have gone on holding him but Nalini touched

him, and turning saw the tears rolling down her face and then he knew, and laid his child
down.
Page | 53 'My son,' he said gently, 'my son.' His face was wet. He wiped it with his hands so that
Raju should not see before he bent and drew up the covers. He hoped Raju could not hear
him cry: it was unfitting for a man, which was what he had wanted his son to be; but
whatever he did he could not check the-hoarse sobs that rose in his throat (Markandaya
230).
Ravi has not lost the village in him, despite the fact that he partly justifies his exodus
from it. In fact Markandaya used images that subconsciously recall his earlier life in the village
when narrating from Ravi’s point of view. He calls the warehouse they plan to rob “more than a
plum, it was a real orchard” (Markandaya 29); he calls a heated conversation “prickley
exchange” (Markandaya 35). Importantly, the picture that he proposes to go and see with Nalini
is Shakuntala, though the ostensible reason is that it is “a nice classic picture without any modern
forward nonsense to which the parents might object” (Markandaya 43) In all these, there is a
very undercurrent of a subconscious presence of Ravi’s earlier more emotionally balanced
existence in the village. His memory and perceptions are literally strewn with flowers and fruits
all belonging to his life in the village. However it is purely subconscious for Ravi who, when
reminded of the squalor of the city cannot but remind himself of the sufferings in the village that
caused him to move into the city.
While talking on the relevance of diaspora theorizing in contemporary literature studies,
Jana Evans Braziel, Anita Mannur writes, “First, diaspora forces us to rethink the rubrics of
nation and nationalism, while refiguring the relations of citizens and nation states. Second,

diaspora offers myriad, dislocated sites of contestation to the hegemonic, homogenizing forces of
globalization” (Braziel, Mannur 7). And it is in this that Markandaya’s concern rests, in the fact
that Markandaya is here speaking for the opposition to westernised city centred culture which is
Page | 54
a germinal entity of globalisation. If nationalism is a construct, as Partha Chatterjee writes in
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1986) of a larger industrial
culture that replaces a smaller fragmented culture in terms of groups and communities, Ravi gets
no scope of involving himself as an individual in the larger industrial culture, represented by the
granary in the city, to seek a nation of his own. He remains a nation-less individual seeking
desperatiely a nationality that gives him a right to live peacefully; “the myriad dislocated sites of
contestation” that Braziel and Mannur write about are those of the idyllic childhood, contested
by Ravi’s memory of suffering and loss, and the “single isolated moment of distilled pleasure”
(Markandaya 34) that Ravi experiences in his union with Nalini, which is only a fleeting moment
of life. Markandaya does not put the city and the village as bipolar entities, symbolizing the two
states of Carson’s world before and after the act of environmental disaster. In fact her concern is
with the survival of man. It goes beyond doubt that Ravi carries within him the subconscious
memory of a fuller life amidst the physical environment in his village. But the village does not
allow the lives of its inhabitants to prosper any more. It is true that his relationship with the
village is love-hate while that with the city is only of hate. It is also true that his final act of
desisting himself from violence is also a kind of materialization of the seed of a culture of
benevolence drawn from the village which he has carried within him and which has been
sustained by the family which he has lost, corresponding to the balance of his earlier life.
However, the concluding part also becomes a kind of a prolepsis, a jeremiad for an all engulfing
ecocide:

'We'll get them yet,' a hoarse voice beside him exulted. 'Your turn, brother!'
Ravi took aim, poising the jagged brick level at his shoulder. But suddenly he could not.
Page | 55 The strength that had inflamed him, the strength of a suppressed, laminated anger, ebbed
as quickly as it had risen. His hand dropped.
'Go on, brother, go on! What is the matter with you?'
'I don't feel in the mood today,' he answered, a great weariness settling upon him. 'But
tomorrow, yes, tomorrow....' (237)
The last lines are ambiguous and full of concern. While one well known critic1 has pointed out
that this tomorrow will never come, and despite its very telling recall of Macbeth, there is a kind
of open endedness that brings out a concern of the writer, this concern is purely an ecological
one. How long is the tradition of non violent tolerance going to sustain? Ravi has already joined
the gang, he, evidently, has not been sufficiently dehumanised despite living through the novel in
the city, but is there any assurance that the subconscious values of ecological peace, that he
retains till now, will accompany him perpetually? The clock for the ecological apocalypse has
started ticking and perhaps not a very long night is left now for Ravi to reach that tomorrow.
Notes
1
Fawzia Afzal-Khan 112. (See Works Cited)

Works Cited
Page | 56
Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. Cultural imperialism and the Indo-English novel. University Park, PA:
Penn State Press, 1993. Print.
Armstrong, John A. “ Mobilised and Proletarian Diasporas.” American Political Science Review
70.2 (1976): 393-408. Print.
Braziel, Jana Evans, Anita Mannur. "Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in
Diaspora Studies". Theorizing diaspora: a reader. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel, Anita Mannur.
Malden, Massachussets: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. Print.
Carson, Rachel. Silent spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. Print.
Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A Derivative Discourse. Tokyo
and London: Zed Books for United Nations Library, 1986.Print.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Markandaya, Kamala. A Handful of Rice. Delhi: Hind Pocket Books , 1966. Print.
Singh, Dr. Nagendra Kumar. "Dialectics of society and Self in Kamala Markandaya's A Handful
of Rice". New lights on Indian women novelists in English. Ed. Dr. Amar Nath Prasad. New
Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2003. Print.

LOST HERITAGE OF FOLKTALES: A GLIMPSE AT MAMANG DAI’S THE SKY QUEEN

AND ONCE UPON A MOONTIME
Page | 57 Sudipta Phukan
Mamang Dai hails from the eastern most part of India, Arunachal Pradesh.
It is famous for its serenity, traditions, ethnicity, greenery, beautiful flora and
fauna. Mamang Dai responsibly collects the folktales which particularly reflect the
spirit of the place. Story-telling has always been associated with the origin of
human creation along with the universe. Every ethnic race and community has its
own set of folktales and stories regarding the origin of the world. Sometimes these
stories or folktales dignify the status of the tribe in an unbelievable way.
Mamang Dai collects the local folktales to give them a material
presentation in her two children’s’ books, namely The Sky Queen and Once Upon
A Moontime, from the ‘magical story world of Arunachal Pradesh’. Folktales
reflect, in the words of Josepha Sherman, “many traditions and helps to familiarize
people with world cultures” (2011: xix). Mythical and legendary folktales are
representatives of culture and heritage that are to be preserved ad protected. These
folktales carry close association of Nature and human beings, which is rare in
present era. Nature as living soul is the prime focus in the folktales of Arunachal
Pradesh. Mamang Dai thus tries to re-create and re-invent a world of folktales,
which carry the lost glory of her place and people.
Key words: Heritage, folktales, identity

The concept of heritage is very broad and multifarious. It has no fixed boundary and can
be extensive to anything and everything. There is no fixity of structure in which the idea of
heritage can be properly shaped. Everything becomes heritage which people are willing to save
and protect for future. Be it culture, nature, tradition, material wealth, sculpture, monuments and
Page | 58
so in, all become heritage when they contain and carry significance, values and identities. Some
of them are tangible and some are intangible in nature. Heritage, in brief, is the preservation of
the past. In the words of Laurajane Smith,
Heritage is a multilayered performance- be this a performance of visiting,
managing, interpretation or conservation- that embodies acts of remembrance and
commemoration while negotiating and constructing a sense of place, belonging
and understanding in the present… Heritage is about negotiation- about using the
past, and collective or individual memories, to negotiate new ways of being and
expressing identity. (2006: 3-4)
A whole set of cultural and traditional practices collectively contribute to the preservation of
heritage. Human interests and love for their identity offer a great help in heritage preservation.
But unfortunately there are many instances where past monuments did not get human attention
and thus found to decay. At the present scenario there is urgent need to preserve lost heritage
with proper planning and maintenance.
The heritage of folktales reflects a hidden glory of the lost past. Folktales are themselves
a true representative of a golden past which is no more to be found or experienced. In a society
which is rich in oral tradition is also rich in cultural and traditional heritage. The folktales carry
the spirit of the place in such a manner that they become intangible property for the whole race.
Each and every tribe or community of the world is more or less surrounded by folktales,
regarding the origin of the world, human existence, the creation of Nature and so on. There
works a certain inbuilt faith and ideology from which one cannot easily escape. The beliefs
regarding creation of the world and Nature continues to exist in a society throughout the ages,
mostly in oral versions, in the form of folktales and folk songs. The whole society gets structured
and shaped with an ideology based on traditional folktales and beliefs. Stith Thompson says,
Although the term “folktale” is often used in English to refer to the “household tale” or
“fairy tale” (the German Marchen), such as “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” it is also
legitimately employed in a much broader sense to include all forms of prose narrative,

written or oral, which have come to be handed down through the years (Thompson, 1977:
4)
Folktales are thus regarded as intangible properties of a race or nation, which contribute
to the rich literary heritage. Mamang Dai recollects the oral tales present in the Adi society to
Page | 59
give them a shape in her two children’s’ books namely, The Sky Queen and Once Upon A
Moontime, from the ‘magical story world of Arunachal Pradesh’. Arunachal Pradesh literally
means “the land of the dawn-lit mountains”. It is also popularly known as “land of the rising
sun”. It is the land of numerous hill tribes and sub-tribes. Arunachal is one of the linguistically
richest and diverse regions in Asia, with more than thirty languages, dialects and sub-dialects.
Till date, the origin of the land and its people remains in mystery, due to the lack of a written
history. Among the three cultural groups, the Adis are the major group of tribes inhabiting in
West Kiang District of the Province. It has got different sub-tribe groups like Gallong, Janbe,
Karka, Memba, Ashing, Bori, Bogum, Bagi, Pailibo, Minyong etc. Myths and stories largely
dominate the lives of people there. Social beliefs and cultural practices are mostly based on
stories from the hidden past, where the level of reliability is totally uncertain. The plethora of
literary products of the entire north-east lingers upon its mysticism, ethnicity, cultural identity,
heathenism and primitivism. Mamang Dai focus mostly upon what we can refer to as mythical
and legendary, reflecting back to the origin of ‘creation’. She tries to discover hidden, untouched
facts of her land, giving a special perfectibility to what is mythical, traditional and legendary.
She talks about intricacies, labyrinthine presence, enlivening Nature and building a strong
bondage between human and Nature. Re-living and re-visiting her past with an amalgamation of
the new carry readers with amusement and awe.
The Sky Queen is the story about Nyanyi Myete, “the beautiful lady who floated in one
day from the deep endless skies” (2005: 30). She was the celestial aunt of the Kojum-Koja,
whose kingdom was destroyed in the great flood. Kojum-Koja, a civilization was happily living
and celebrated many festivals. Before each festival, they went for hunting and fishing. ‘Pi-me’
was one such festival when all went for fishing and caught a huge fish-like creature. The elders
recognized it as Biri Angur Potung, the son of Biri Bote, the strong and mighty monarch of Sili-
Sidong, the Water Kingdom. But the young Kojum-Koja ignored the restriction of elders and ate
it up and all fell sick. Koru Ponsung, the Bat witnessed everything that happened in the festival
and reported it to the Queen of Biri Bote and miserable death of their son. Biri Bote became

angry and declared war against Kojum-Koja. The war continued for many days where the
Kingdom of Water defeated Kojum-Koja with storm, rain, water and flood. Thus the whole
civilization of Kojum-Koja disappeared under water. After the destruction, only Nyanyi Myete
remained alive to spread the lost glory of Kojum-Koja, their songs and dances. She was very
Page | 60
kind hearted to everyone starting from birds, animals, insects to human beings. She made people
“sing and dance and have a good time”. The Adis therefore remember her as a beautiful lady
who floated from the sky and celebrate Nyanyi Myete every year.
On the other hand, Once Upon A Moontime contains four beautiful stories which are
“How the World was Made”, “The Story of the River”, “Why the Dove Weeps” and “The Sun
and the Moon” respectively. “How the World was Made” is the story of the creation of the earth.
Lopong Rimbuche and Chom Dande were two brothers who lived in the sky and there was water
everywhere. They created human beings on earth and threw a lotus flower to cover the water.
They called winds from four directions; the east wind blew yellow dust, the south wind red dust,
the north wind black dust and the west wind mixed all the dusts to form the earth. Then the two
brothers shaped the earth into hills and valleys giving different colours to them. “The Story of
the River” is a wonderful story of the creation of the river Lohit (in Arunachal) or the
Brahmaputra (in Assam). Techimdum, the god who lived below the “bluest of blue waters”
thought of creating earth as there was only water everywhere. Each and everyone starting from
ants, Sun, wind, to Drakob and Daiyunga offered help in this work. The ants carried mouthful of
earth from under the water to the surface. The sun helped in drying them and the wind blew the
earth all over the surface. The ants also helped in putting four pillars in each corner of the earth
for support. They carried seeds of flowers and trees. Drakob and Daiyunga also made a high
mountain named the Land of the Sun or Ring Lembun. The Lohit River flowed down this
mountain happily but stopped by many little hills. So Crab helped by cutting a channel through
the hills. In another part, Lohit became a great lake where a worm helped to dig a little channel
to flow the water. A Wild Cat made the channel a bigger one after drinking its water. The River
followed wherever Wild Cat went wandering everywhere till it reached the plains of Assam. It is
believed till date that Lohit carries peace and plenty to human beings, animals, birds, insects,
trees, flowers and seeds. In “Why the Dove Weeps”, Dove was the caretaker of the son of Donyi
the Sun. One day Dove strapped the baby with an eppon when Sun set out to work. When the
baby started crying, Dove sang lullaby to make him happy but in vain. So she carried him to his

mother and handed him. But unfortunately the eppon fell down and Dove flew to bring it back.
When she tried to carry the strap her wings became heavy and thus could not fly back to Donyi’s
abode. So she remained on earth forever and starts crying everyday when the sun rises in the
east, sets in the west and during midday, remembering her past life. The eppon became a creeper
Page | 61
called ‘rippum’ which the Adis use to carry a baby after birth. The last story tells about the
creation of sun and moon. Initially there were two suns only whose parents were Epanja and
Lanbbai. The younger sun, being bad started giving heat upon the earth to destroy everything and
made all suffer a lot. Anya, the great god of the Mishmis sent a messenger to the elder sun to let
him know the wrong activities of the younger sun along with some gifts. The elder sun, in return
gifted the messenger a silkworm to weave clothes by humans, a white jewel for necklace and his
presence in stone to give fire. Being angry, he threw his younger brother into a pool of mud
where the younger sun became pale and the marks of mud is still visible. From then, the younger
sun never appears in the sky when the elder sun is present sand comes only when he leaves the
sky.
Mamang Dai, by collecting these oral traditional tales of the Adis, gives them a fairy tale
appearance. While doing it, she takes the responsibility to present them in original with a touch
of tradition and belief. Her collections are given beautiful illustrations to support the tales. In
Folktales Retold Amie A. Doughty says,
All traditional folktales have undergone (and continue to undergo) some kind of
reshaping, even though most modern readers think of them in terms of a specific
version read during childhood (2006: 9)
To keep the original impression in the minds of the reader is truly a challenging task. It becomes
most urgent when these oral tales carry an identity of the race and people. The lost heritage can
be preserved through these tales in proper manner. However folktales have a timeless appeal for
its readers and audiences. There is no geographical boundary and limitations for folktales. They
get translated, distributed, spread through different mediums to every nook and corner of the
world. The way ‘Cinderella’ gets popular in India, ‘Tejimola’ of Assamese folktales may also get
same popularity through translation and adaptation, as both contain similar story elements. It is
the duty of every responsible person to safeguard his/her cultural heritage, whether tangible or
intangible.

Folktales in the form of fairy tales become an indispensible part of children’s literature.
The idea of the orient is very much present in any children literature. The folktales of the Adis
also contain oriental element in them. Mamang Dai tries to keep the stories near to original by
using the names in her dialect. The tales reflect the traditional Adi beliefs regarding the creation
Page | 62
of the earth and nature. The tales are mixture of both fantasy and tradition. The celebration of
Nyanyi Myete, the creation of the earth, the name of Adi gods, the birth story of a river- each tale
contains a true Adi spirit which is unique and celestial. When transforming a folktale into a fairy
tale, the story teller keeps in mind to attract a child reader first. So, each and every element is
presented in a suitable and easy manner for better understanding.
The preservation of folktales of a particular region helps in discovering and establishing
the national identity of its people. The presence of mythical elements gives folktales another
perspective to the race and nation. The Adis were once the followers of Animism who believed
the presence of God amidst Nature. So their folktales are about Nature and natural objects in
abundance. The folktales reflect that there is a close association of Nature with the Adis.
Since folktales are oral collections, they get shaped and re-shaped throughout the ages in
different versions. So their actual originality and singularity can never be recovered. What we
find today is the fractured and manipulated version of these tales. So printed versions of these
tales actually contribute to the permanent preservation, which can be easily available and
accessible. In absence of a script language, Mamang Dai thus takes help of a foreign language in
order to preserve her own culture. By doing this, she actively contributes to enrich the literary
heritage of her place and people.
Hailing from a postcolonial and postmodern world, Mamang Dai’s representation of the
folk tales becomes hybrid and ambivalent. Her presentation of the folktales in the form of fairy-
tales has a universal appeal which can be read and understood in different parts of the world. Re-
telling gives her a space to re-analyse and re-document the oral traditional folktales in a new and
attractive dimension and perspective. Vanessa Joosen in her work Critical and Creative
Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue Between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and
Postmodern Retellings talks about an intertextual appeal of folktales and fairy tales. She says,
The Intertextual relationship between fairy-tale re-tellings and traditional fairy
tales has a double effect. By critically distancing themselves from the fairy tale,
retellings invite readers to reconsider the traditional texts…Although a large

number of fairy-tale retellings problematize the traditional fairy tales, they are an
important factor in its canonization process (1977: 16-17)
It is sometimes necessary to become hybridized for the sake of a greater universal appeal. There
is also a risk of losing the track of originality and purity inherent in the folktales. But oral
Page | 63
tradition, on the other hand, always gets deconstructed when the stories tread down from
generation to generation. Each story-teller uses his/her own interpretation and manipulation
while re-telling the stories. So finally there remains the narrator’s version which s/he transforms
into written manuscripts and printed version gets a bolder outlook. Likewise, the lost heritage of
folk and fairy tales gets a material re-production which can be easily accessible and preserved for
future use.
Folktales and fairytales have great impact upon human lives. We grow listening to the
fairytales told mostly by our grandmothers. So there is a special link between woman and
fairytales. Theorists try to provide a connection between these two and find most fairy tale
narrators found to be female ones. Fairy tales leave the children in an imaginative world where
they get chance to be creative and adventurous. In the words of Cristina Bacchilega,
In its multiple retellings, the fairy tale is that variable and “in-between” image
where folklore and literature, community and individual, consensus and
enterprise, children and adults, Woman and women, face and reflect (on) each
other. As I see it, the tale of magic’s controlling metaphor is the magic mirror,
because it conflates mimesis (reflection), refraction (varying desires), and framing
(artifice) (1955: 10)
Mamang Dai with her two representational folktale collections, not only glorifies the lost
oral tradition of her community but also contribute to the greater preservation and heritage
conservation of the identity of the Adis. Due to the absence of a script language, many tribes of
north-east India have already faced the loss of identity and many languages are at the fringe of
death. So it is high time to re-collect and preserve the golden oral tradition available in different
dialects of north-east India. Mamang Dai, thus, takes a praiseworthy step to enliven the rich
cultural and oral traditions of the Adis.

WORKS CITED AND REFERENCES
Page | 64
Primary Source:
Dai, Mamang. The Sky Queen. New Delhi: Katha, 2005. Print
___________. Once Upon A Moontime. New Delhi: Katha, 2005. Print
Secondary Sources:
Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Pennsylvania:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955. Web
Doughty, Amie A. Folktales Retold. North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers,
2006. Web
Howard, Peter. Heritage: Management, Interpretation, Identity. London: Continuum

International Publishing Group, 2003. Web
Vanessa Joosen. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue
Between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Michigan: Wayne State University
Press, 1977. Web
Smith, Laurajane. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2006. Web
Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. California: University of California Press, 1977. Web

Of Caste-Class and Dalit Writing: Monoranjan Byapari in Conversation

[MB: Monoranjan Byapari; S: Sayantan Mondal]
S. Your autobiography and in some of your other writings you have described yourself as a dalit
Page | 65 person born in a dalit family identified as a criminal from birth. Can you explain.
MB: When I say I am a dalit and criminal by birth, I situate myself within an inescapable system; a
system of varna and its exploitation. It is a system of prohibition; prohibition from entering into
temples, into schools, into accumulation of any sort. Even, prohibition of naming. We cannot just
give any name to our children, we have to think twice whether we are violating some social norms
or not. And all these are determined by shastras, sacred texts which treat us like criminals. So what
am I if not a dalit and a criminal.
S. For long time since British rule there had been criminalisation of tribes. Does your reference also
hint at that?
MB: No, not in this case. You have perhaps heard of tribes like Loda, Khetria, Sabar and so on.
They have been branded as criminal tribes. There are so many Banabasi, Adivasi tribes who have
been similarly treated by law even in independent India. Upper caste people tried criminalising
Namasudra caste to which I belong to. Some British officials were sent for investigation, I forgot
their names. You can find that in details in a book titled Guruchand Charit. However, after their
inspection, fortunately, they were convinced by the instances of Namasudra culture and creativity
that these people are no criminal.
S. The story of your life tells us that was hardly any respite; life has made you choose so many
abominable professions. Please tell us, why then writing and what made you take up pen one day?
MB: To answer it simply I would say lack of success. I have never succeeded in anything, that's
why writing. I wanted to do something which will help the society, the people. I wanted to
rejuvenate the consciousness of the society, of the people. But that cannot be done alone. I started
with writing but met with bare minimum success. I left all that, went to Chhattisgarh and worked
for Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha for eight years. In those eight years I did not write anything. I was
working for the people and I was happy. But then they killed Sankar Guha Niyogi. One bullet from
a country revolver finished that honest person. No one could do anything, I could not do anything. I
came back and started writing again, to create Sankar Guha Niyogis, a thousand Sankar Guha

Niyogis. I know I am not successful yet, I know success will not come so easily, but I will wait and
keep writing.
S. So from the jungle of Chhattisgarg to Jadavpur University rickshaw-stand and the world of
Page | 66 publishers. How had this journey been so far?
MB: The society is of the Baishyas. And the Baniyas, the Baishyas only know capital, profit and
that is the world. Let's think of Karl Marx. Marx was writing as a journalist. He was writing against
this capitalist system and his writings were being published in London and other places by the
capitalists business men. why? Those businessmen did not know that Marx was writing to abolish
their power? They knew it and despite knowing they published. The reason was the demand and the
profit. A businessman considers whether things will be sold or not. if yes, let's invest. it is same
with publication. Initially, when I started writing, I had to spent money from my pocket. Nobody
wanted to publish my work. Why would they? Because they knew it before hand that my books will
not earn anything, there will be loss and only loss. I had to bear those losses. I remember, Britter
Sesh Parba, my first novel, I had to bear a lot for it. And in that way I spent some fifteen-twenty
years, struggled. Finally, after 2011, after some recognition, I stopped paying money for publishing
my books.
Look at these books (pointing at the book rack in front of him), you see that Batase Baruder
Gondho, Amanush. Now, one can tell readers will become revolutionary, Maoists, Marxists reading
these novels. Some eleven hundred copies of these got sold. Those who published it, were not
bothered at all with the fact that these books talk against the people of their class. They were
concerned with the mere numbers. And that is the story behind this journey. The person who
published my autobiography Itibritte, is a Bandopadhyay, a Brahman; the magazine where parts of
it used to appear is by a Chakraborty, another Brahman. They and their clan realised long back
where exactly profit lies for them and they will stick to it. But I thank my readers - readers from my
community who have been reading my writings. There is this person, owner of a welding shop near
Durganagar. He comes and buys some forty odd copies of my books. When I ask, what will you do
with that in your welding shop, he says he will distribute among all his friends and relatives and tell
about his rickshaw puller friend who wrote this.
S. There seems to be a strong connection between writing lives and dalit writing, what do you think
is the soul of such connection? We know of celebrated work like Towards An Aesthetics of Dalit
Literature which talks about different aspects of dalit writing. What according to you is dalit writing?
MB: I believe that when a dalit person starts writing, the first thing s/he will write is an

autobiography. Actually, when a dalit person reads stories, novels; reads about pain and suffering,
that person realises how much greater his/her suffering had been and wants to place it before the
readers. And that's why autobiography. Now, there are complex issues involved. One, of being a
good reader and two, of dalit consciousness. Not all good readers may become good writers but all
Page | 67 good writers are definitely good readers, voracious readers.
As of me, let me tell you I have considered myself a dalit much much later. I used to consider
myself a working class labour, an exploited person and used to believe under the influence of Left
ideology that when revolution will come all these caste difference will be gone. I started thinking of
dalit consciousness after my writing got published in EPW (Is there a Dalit Writing in Bangla? by
Manoranjan Byapari and Meenakshi Mukherjee, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 42, No. 41
(Oct. 13 - 19, 2007), pp. 4116-4120 ). However, I discovered later, that also hardly matters. I will
tell you a story so that you may understand.
My father used to tell me many stories. One of such stories was the story of two zamindars who
invited a huge number of namasudra prajas to their house on the occasion of their father's last rites.
There was a huge feast and all these namasudras were invited to eat. These unfortunate people who
used to survive barely on anything and hardly had anything proper to eat in years were delighted at
this opportunity and ate to their fill. However, the most interesting part was the competition. Yes,
there was a competition, a game of the zamindars. They started bating on their namasudra subjects;
if one can eat five rasgullas he will give one rupee. People jumped at this provocation. They kept
eating. At one stage, it was so hard to eat anymore that the bating also climbed higher. The ending
was sad. A huge number of people died of over eating, of the games of landlords. I thought of
writing a story on that and wrote Atithi Seva. Many years later someone pointed to me that this is
nothing but a dalit story, a testament of dalit life, though I had no clue about it being so when I
wrote it.
S. In your writing you seem to take caste and class positions in a way that there remains hardly any
scope of separating them, they appear interlinked. How do manage to do that considering the never
ending debates between these two?
MB: Initially, I was not interested in caste, I told you earlier. I am a student of Marxism, of leftist
ideas. I prepared myself as an atheist. I never believed in god, caste, religion. I never believed that
there can be separate fight for them. However, when I started reading about them, I started
wondering. I started questioning my conviction. I went through a lot of agreements and
disagreements. Today, I have realised that there are some serious issues with left politics. one of
major issues is of leadership and representation. Look at any incident that left politics had engaged
in West Bengal; look at Singur-Nandigram. Do you think, had there been a farmer in the leadership
of that party, things would have been like this? Would they still manage to issue section 144 and

beat people like cattle? No, never. if there is any solution, then that is the change of leadership.
Leaders have to be from the Kawras, from the Bagdis (caste names), from the farmers, from tthe
working class and from women. Why do I say Kawras, Bagdis and farmers, working class
separately in a sentence. You have to understand that. There are many lower caste people who have
Page | 68 made it to the top. They have established themselves as doctors, lawyers and in so many other
respectable and profitable professions. Their ancestors, perhaps, suffered a lot. Not perhaps,
definitely had suffered a lot. But they are completely unaware of that reality. They themselves are
no victim of such oppression. That's why I am separating them. Representatives should come from
the oppressed section and no one should just capture that place showing some meaningless identity
card.
S. You have a very strong and clear idea about caste and class politics. So when you started writing,
how did you decide to go about it?
MB: I was a reader. And in some connections, I have mentioned in so many places, my path
crossed with Meenakshi Mukherjee. We talked and she suggested that whatever I know I should
write and make public. I am talking about the EPW's article again which was on Bangla Dalit
writings. Frankly speaking I had decided not to write such thing. Because I am not an essay type
person. I do not write essays. it is a different thing. But I was convinced that something needs to be
done, that knowledge has to go public. So I approached a number of professors, scholars and
requested them to write. Unfortunately, nobody took me seriously. I was a rickshaw puller. True,
people like Mahesweta Devi has blessed me, stood by me by that time. But what difference does it
make.... Even in peoples' movement, at times, your role is determined, your position is judged by
your social position. And I lost it there. No one paid any heed to my request. And you may say, it
was by chance that I started writing that essay because Meenakshi Mukherjee was sending frequent
impatient messages for it for a long time. And then it was published and coincidentally I was placed
in some corner of history. Everyone started talking about it. Oxford came forward to publish an
anthology. Prof. Tutun Mukherjee started working hard to make it possible. Jaydeep Sarangi
organised a conference. And in the process I started receiving stamps, brand names such Leftist,
Working class writer, Dalit writer. I bacame so many things.
It was difficult for anyone to manage so many identitties. But perhaps, it is best to leave them for
good and concentrate in your work. Today, when I speak, I write a group of Dalit intellectuals
disagrees, fights with me. I do not mind that. Why should I? These people or their ancetors were not
there when upper caste people like A.K. Roy, Charu Majumdar, Gouri Sankar Ghosh, Binayak Sen
were fighting for us, for our survival. Sankar Guha Niyogi and so many like him died fighting such
battles which are technically our battles. Can I just forget that because they are upper caste? Yes,
may be they had faults, their ways may have something wrong, something lacking. But in their

effort, struggle and sacrifice their was no lack. They gave it all smilingly and unasked for. If my
writing cannot recognise such people, then I better not write. If Dalit writing does not recognise
these people and their contribution, then it better not exist.
S. We have come back again to the point of Dalit writing and perhaps, we will keep coming back to
Page | 69
it so many more times. Do you find this classification of writing comfortable, useful? As a writer do
you feel compelled by such categories?
MB: Who creates such categories? Do you believe that in universities alone such categories are
born, in classrooms, in conferences? No. This is a complex process and we writers are equal
shareholders in this. There are numerous writers who proudly call themselves Dalit and write dalit
stories, poetry, novels. Nothing wrong in that as long as there is dalit consciousness in their writing.
But sadly a lot of them are just weakness of our movement. They call themselves Dalit, copy
pictures of pain from other dalit narratives, after every two pages abuses the upper caste, uses the
stock character of Brahman as the villain. It is impossible to differentiate them from the true
narratives as in reality those are almost true. However, as a dalit when I read them I know what is
going on. You have heard of Jatra , right? In Jatras, you see they often use a stock character of
honest Brahman and that character is pitted against a Bagdi Musalman, a bad character. One after
another Jatra has used this technique and ruined it. Because when it becomes a formula it looses it
purpose. Becomes blunt. The dalit writings I was talking about a few minutes ago are bringing back
and falling prey to this easy trap. Consequently, true analysis of exploitation, the politics behind it,
the solution are going out of our site. We are just catering a melodramatic story and the readers, the
audience go back to their happy life deciding to patroinise poor dalits when they meet them next
time. Who wants this sympathy? Ask any dalit, do they want it? You will never find a yes.
What I am suggesting is to go beyond this trap of good-bad games. There can be good and bad
people among every section. You see this (points to a scar in head). I will tell a story about it. First
of all you tell me was Indira Gandhi patriarchal or not? (perhaps noticing a confused nodding and
making a meaning of it, he proceeds again) Of course she was. See, no one has to be a man to be
patriarchal. It is in nature. Once you start practicing it will give you some benefits at the cost of
systematic exploitation. The scar you just saw came from a woman in whose house I used work as a
cook. You got it right (chuckles). Similarly, Brahminism is also not confined among the Brahmins;
rather it is a virus that has infested even the dalits. And we have to be self-critical. if we cannot be
self-critical, we will fall prey to brahminism. If we keep forgetting what people like Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay, Tara Sankar had written and people like Sekhar Bannerjee, Goutam Bhadra are
doing these days, just because they are upper caste, then our writing will be reduced to misuse of
truth. You see this house (his own house) and that one just opposite it are built on the land of two

zamindars; Bihari Mondal and Khagen Nashkar, respectively. Who are they? They are dalits by
caste. Ask anyone about them in this locality, we will know that their exploitation had no limit. The
basic thing is simple. If you are a capitalist we are bound to exploit others. Exploitation is the
religion of Capital.
Page | 70 S: So as a writer-activist you maintain a fine balance, a very thin line that demarcates fake,
meaningless and true writing and your politics revolve around it. What is your suggestion for the
new writers who are still breaking their pens on it?
MB: I will tell them to read; read as much as they can and sit close and think about what have they
read. I am a storyteller so I am going to tell you another story to explain what I an suggesting. Well,
this story has three characters - Mahendra Karma, Binayak Sen and Sankar Guha Niyogi. One can
add a few more like Babulal Gour. Now who is Mahendra Karma, a rapist, a murderer. And he
inflicted all that on Adivasis, Banabasis, Dalits. And he himself was a dalit. Babulal Gour, a
minister from the Yadavs. Did he help when dalits were torchered and brutalised in Madhya
Pradesh. Despite being contacted numerous times by Sankar Guha Niyogi, this person could not
find a few minutes to solve problems of dalit workers who were dying everyday in the capitalist
machines. Have you heard of Amiya Mans and Gangadhar Nashkar...two police officers who
opened fire at Marchjhapi under the order of Jyoti Basu, at their fellow dalit brothers. We cannot
just avoid reading this. And on the other hand, we also have to know about people like Binayak Sen,
Sankar guha Niyogi and their fight for dalits and sacrifice. Let me tell you about Basantdeo sharma.
He used to be collector in Arjun Singh's time. Of course, an upper caste man. But this man
disregarded govt. orders for collecting Tendu leaves at a lower rate from poor banabasis. His
struggle made him leave his lucrative service and he began a movement under a banner of Bharat
Jana Andolan for Jal Jangal Jamin. Now, you probably got what I am hinting at. I want the coming
generation writers to know about all these, read about these, to know their surroundings well and
reflect on it. One has to be self-critical. And then s/he will know what to take along and what to
leave. And of course, one has to have the inspiration from life, the pains, the suffering of life and
not only cater it to the shameless market which is always there to sell it at the cost of our
humiliation.

A (Re-)Versed World
Page | 71

How assured one feels when the exquisite cover page of the novelette – The Reverse Tree
by Kiriti Sengupta – announces: “trespassers won’t be prosecuted…/this is all about you & me!”
With such an open-to-all invitation, I did not dare rebuff the air of camaraderie the words promise;
I rather set out, murmuring like that Eliotian figure – “Let us go then, you and I.” But the casual
in me had soon been accosted and warned both by the author and the editor of the book. The author
Page | 72
sounds a caution – “Be a bit cautious, dear reader, you won’t find a smooth transition from one
chapter to another.” Luckily, I got alarmed timely. And I must say that while approaching the
book, one must not make the mistake of judging it by its size.
Sengupta’s book is surely not a voluminous one, just sixty-two pages long. It is comprised
of six seemingly unrelated brief chapters (the largest one spans just ten pages or so!): “Anti-Clock,”
“In Other’s Shoes,” “Long … A Metaphor,” “Crisis,” “Jet Lag,” and “Reversal … Reverse All.”
All these could have gone against the noble ventures of its author. But the strength of the book lies
in what could have been for many blocks of weakness or shortcoming: its uncanny precision, its
unmistakable casualness in tone intermixed with occasional gravity of the subject matter, and most
importantly its immaculate simplicity of narration coupled with enticing poeticism in its language.
What is contained inside this slimmest structure is a mine of dynamite: all it needs is a spark in the
form of concentration and a bit meditation and mediation, and what it gives, besides many things,
is a spark in the form of self-realization.
However, while talking about the idiosyncratic nature of treatment its author often does to
his subjects in his other works (that are mostly variegated in color and eclectic in subject-matter),
Don Martin, the editor of the book, rightly sounds a cautionary note to those who expect an easy
flow of thought or a linear story crystallized on the pages between the two covers or are much
concerned with a fixed destination or a clear-cut moralizing at the end. Its readers must be
cognizant of the fact that, while the book does not set forward a ‘story,’ it certainly offers ‘a take’
which is unfortunately not ‘the conclusion’ a casual reader wants to arrive at effortlessly. The
pages are strewn with potent ‘signifiers.’ What the readers need to do is to connect the dots the
way they are conditioned. Whatever their conclusions or whichever way they are reached, one
cannot escape the psychedelic experience its reading provides. Of absence of any overt connection
among the chapters, the author himself in Introduction says – “My life has never sailed
smoothly…. I believe, when lives can be random, why would I possibly plan to order and smoothen
the transitions? Let them remain as it is…” We get an explanation and a foreboding that once in,
the reader will simply be taken away along the stream of consciousness – the consciousness of the
author and the consciousness of the reader intersecting at points, not at will but by common sharing
– only to be washed ashore on the banks of the ultimate impartial indivisible Consciousness or
Soul. But it must be mentioned that it’s not sermonic. I will take up this issue later on.
Now of its one connecting link, the editor of the book mentions – “But keep in mind, as
you read The Reverse Tree, that not everything is what it may appear to be!” (This section of the
book is named interestingly enough – “Leading Along The Path To Understanding!”). The theme
of ‘reversal’ in its multidimensionality seems to link the different episodes. Before one reaches its
first chapter, “Anti-Clock” (the briefest of them, just a page-length!), one lands onto apparently a
wayward poem:
my tree is stout,
Page | 73 well-developed
it refutes gravitational pull
not always, you know…
my roots run
against the sap!
The image of a ‘stout’ tree, refuting ‘gravitational pull’ with roots running ‘against the sap’ does
not scintillate any bleakness or pessimism, it is the image of one (may well be a self-portrait) who
loves treading the untraded path, one who has the guts to be centrifugal, to be ‘unconventional’ in
attitude and treatment. It also hints the image of a ‘reversed’ tree which is explained in the
concluding section of the book. However, it strikes the note of ‘alterity’ and the reader is made
prepared to deal with its inherent unconventionality. This note, along with the image of tree, is
carried forward to the first chapter. “Anti-Clock” turns upside-down the male-image and the
superiority attached by making some significant observations:
Men are not physiologically enabled to bear the fruits of production, and thus they are the
non-yielding entities. Men are often referred to as trees, especially in familial setups, but
none has specified yet if they are the male trees, which don’t bear the fruits of love.
…Men are expected to be masculine, hence non-flowery. They are seedy, but are not
eligible to carry the fruits. …it is the ladies who turn out to provide better shade than the
men. (Page- 1)
The in-vogue power-equation is challenged.
The next chapter – “In Other’s Shoes” – is a tale of mimicry. The author narrates in
humorous tone how he met, after a long gap, his friend Shouvanik Dey (who is good in getting
into the soul of the person or thing he mimics, we are told), and how exquisitely, in a funny and
lively way, he presents a complete replica of a Youtube session (with all its buffering and
peculiarities) to teach the author how to prepare laccha parantha. Now behind the veneer of this
funny act lies a gesture towards complete understanding which can only be achieved through
suspension of the ‘self’ and by assuming the ‘selfness’ of the ‘other.’ Thus, a collapse of inkless

barriers nurtured by ego shall bring wisdom and understanding, and can effortlessly solve a lot of
problems the world suffers for just matters of miscommunication, for not being able to get into
another being, for not being able to see the other’s view.
The third chapter – “Long…A Metaphor” – speaks of the taken for granted status of the
Page | 74 long-haired poets (as if keeping long hair guarantees creative brilliance and extraordinariness!)
and exhorts the readers to investigate if there is really any serious connection between long hair
and poetry or art. What is interesting about male artists sporting a feminine metaphor (keeping
long hair is associated with women generally) is the implicated subversion of prefixed gender
roles. The metaphors need serious attention (may be re-working or re-adjusting). However, the
long poem beautifully records the encounter of the author with a long-haired poet who speaks of
him dismissively just for he has long hair!
The next chapter –“Crisis” – is the most polemic since here the author takes up the issue
of sex and gender roles, of bisexuality, homosexuality, transgenders and sexual preference, of his
professional life as a doctor, and of his meeting with Lara, a transgender who finally decided to be
a women and her pathetic but inspiring tale. An inquisitive Sengupta, in relation to a mix of the
both sexes – male and female – in the poetic voice in Sumita Nandi’s “Ichemoti,” quips – “Is this
what we refer to as a third sex or gender?” Perhaps. Perhaps not. But obviously in such a mix of
sexes (or gendered sensibilities), there is a possibility of apotheosizing the ideal male-female
union, as in the image of Ardhanarishwar (in Hindu belief) or of aestheticizing the whole
experience. For instance, take a few lines from the beautiful poem Sengupta wrote as he read
Sumita Nandi’s “Desirous Water” (translation of “Ichemoti”):
I’ve my own equation of love

my he throbs in fire
while my she is coy …(page-11)
This is, even the author will agree, aesthetically the most satisfying experience and so much
apolitical too. But what’s about the total LGBT clan and their experiences? Sengupta’s concern
here is their real rights and treatment they should enjoy purely as a human being first since he
knows “…living as a transgender is not an easy task…” (Page- 19). And since the Indian Vedic
literature speaks of three distinct sex-categories (Purush or male, Stree or female, and Tritiya
Prakiti or the third sex) and since it’s the world’s largest democracy, Sengupta wonders how can
India and its unruly laws become so insensible to this Tritiya Prakriti? The Supreme Court of India
by banning gay sex under section 377 of the Indian Legislative Code as a punishable offence not
only defies the ‘scriptural implications’ (Page- 13) but also violates human right. This is where a
serious reversal of attitude is needed. As he says –

I think, none is black or white when it comes to representing sexual orientation or

biasness. We all are biased … colors mark racial discrimination. (Page- 13)
And “sexual acts between two consenting adults (irrespective of their genders) can never be termed
crime” (Page- 14). The narrative concerning the life of Lara not only showcases a blistered face of
Page | 75 democracy but also sets forth a possibility as Lara is able to live life on her own terms. This is
again a reversal in attitude the transgenders need to inculcate.
In the fifth chapter – “Jet Lag” – the author offers us an amazing poem on sleeplessness
and speaks of his writing spree that ‘made a non-poet write poetry’. But more than that what this
chapters contributes to the whole scheme of the novelette is the reversal of our idea about ‘jet lag’.
He writes:
Although jet-lag affects our sleep pattern, it is not necessarily associated with the
differences in time zones. Jet-lag is also induced by the differences in attitude of the
people who facilitate the transit from one country to another. (Page- 23)
It’s the final chapter – “Reversal … Reverse All” – that first formally introduces its reader with
the features of ‘the reverse tree’, the description of which we find in the Srimad Bhagavad Geeta,
the last scripture of Santana Dharma: it is a tree “that stands upside down … that grows in reverse
order”( Page- 25). Sengupta quotes some of his favorite verses and tries to interpret them vis-a-vis
his society and literature. Thus here we are introduced to a plethora of subjects – from the recent
Israel-Gaza conflict to what religion is, what scriptures actually stand for, how a proper translation
should be, what the soul is, who is true master and in this context his mother’s indelible influence
on his being. But what ultimately is to mesmerize the reader is its aligning of the image of ‘the
reverse tree’ with that of a human being –
Humans are the only such trees that have their roots (brain) up and the branches (limbs)
down. (Page – 34)
The reader is sure to be overwhelmed with this grave realization, knowing what exactly the reverse
tree is.
It must be clarified, on the basis of whatever I have understood, that ‘reversal’ here is not
Bakhtinian carnival; it certainly does unsettle the power-equations of male-female, but it’s more
than that. It is reversal in/of attitude, in/of the ways we look at things. It is not going backward but
moving forward to self-actualization. Sengupta wisely remarks –
…reversal demands practice of the principles that lead us towards truth or realization.
Human-birth is graced as one understands the challenges of life and implements wisdom
to stand up to them. The Reverse Tree is all about our understanding of the existence of
mankind…
I’m no linguist…

I know
air and age are linked
since eternity…
Page | 76
and the wounds surface again

in all directions…
Sporting the guise of youth… (Page- 36)
Needless to say the book is a glimpse into the ‘personal’ of its author and the author never
seems to shy away from unfurling his private self. But for that I think he should not be called
unabashed. Instead, it does the much-needed service of adding authenticity. But then it must not
be termed as purely autobiographical. Just as it is not out and out religious. To some extent it’s
spiritual but more than that it’s a translation of thoughts intended to arouse kindred thoughts to
effect a true reversal(s). Of its poetic trait, it will not be an overstatement to say that, it is a book
of poems often punctuated with prose passages that again sometimes border on being poetic.
Moreover, the illustrations between the covers and cover-design do almost half the work in
forming an idea of the book.
Title: The Reverse Tree
Author: Kiriti Sengupta
Publisher: Moments Publication (Ahmedabad)
ISBN-13: 978-93-84180-77-5 (Hard cover)
About the Essayist:
Soumen Jana is currently doing his doctoral research on Indian Theatre, especially on Badal Sircar.
In the year 2012, he has had his Masters from Vidyasagar University, Medinipur, West Bengal
(India). He has also worked as a project assistant in a UGC-sponsored MRP on Bengali Dalit
Literature, conducted by the Department of English, Pondicherry University. He sometimes
dabbles in translation, creative writing including Poetry and book reviews, and also some academic
research papers.

Poems of Surya Kant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ Translated By Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi
Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi
Page | 77
Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala' (सूर्क

य ांत त्रिप ठी 'निर ल '), was an extraordinary luminary at kavi sammelans during his lifetime.Born on
February 21, 1896 in a Brahmin family of Midnapore in Bengal (originally from Unnao,Uttar Pradesh) he was a versatile poet and
pioneered the blank verse. He was a poet, novelist, essayist and story-writer.. He was an authority on various languages – Bengali,
English, Sanskrit, and Hindi. He ushered in a new style of poetry and acquired the pseudonym, Nirala (unique). Nirala died in
Allahabad on 15 October 1961. Nirala has a distinctive style which seems staccato or deliberate when translated into English. In
choice of words and brevity he achieves an uparallaled place : he is known to be a poet of words and not of sentences.
Nirala pioneered the Chhayavaad (छ र् व द) movement along with Jaishankar Prasad, Sumitranandan Pant (सुमिि िांदि पांत) and
Mahadevi Varma (िह दे वी वि )य . Nirala's Parimal (पररिल) and Anaamika (अि मिक ) are considered as the original Chhayavaadi
Hindi literature. His style of poetry was revolutionary for his time. He voiced his protest against exploitation through his verses.the
following poem subtly refers to the feminine struggle for an identity which is lost in endless toil and submerged in social disparity.
तोड़ती पत्थर
वह तोड़ती पत्थर
वह तोड़ती पत्थर
दे ख िैंिे इल ह ब द के पथ पर -
वह तोड़ती पत्थर ।
कोई ि छ र् द र
पेड़, वह जिसके तले बैठी हुई स्वीक र;
श्र् ि ति, भर बँध र्ौवि,
गुरु हथौड़ ह थ
करती ब र ब र प्रह र;
स ििे तरु - ि मलक , अट्ट मलक , प्र क र ।
चड़ रही थी धप
ू
गरमिर्ों के ददि
ददव क तिति त रूप;
उठी झुलस ती हुई लू
रुई ज्र्ों िलती हुई भू
गदय चचिगी छ गर्ी
प्र र्ः हुई दप

ु हर,
वह तोड़ती पत्थर ।
दे खते दे ख , िुझे तो एक ब र
उस भवि की ओर दे ख नछन्ि-त र
दे खकर कोई िहीां
दे ख िुझे उस दृजटि से
िो ि र ख रोर्ी िहीां
सि सहि मसत र,
सुिी िैंिे वह िहीां िो थी सुिी झांक र ।
एक छि के ब द वह क ँपी सुघर,
दल
ु क ि थे से चगरे सीक र,

लीि होते किय िें फिर ज्र्ों कह -

'िैं तोड़ती पत्थर'
She Breaks Stones (Surya Kant Tripathi ‘Nirala’)

She breaks stones.
Page | 78
I saw her along the road in Allahabad,
Engaged in her toil.
Not a shady tree under which she sat
With acceptance of her lot.
Dark skinned,fulness of youth restrained.
Cast eyes, her dear-work-engrossed mind,
A heavy hammer held her hand,
Striking repetitively−
Across stood a heavily wreathed palatial, type.
The sun was ascending,
At summertime
The day bore a scorched look;
The searing loo wind rises,
The earth cotton-like burns,
Engulfed with smouldering dust,
At around noontime −
She breaks the stones.
She threw cursorily a glance at me
Looked at the imposing structure,awhile ;
Perceiving none around,
She gave me that formal look,
As though post-beating the tears she brooked,
Adorned serene sitar,
I heard a strumming never heard before
After a moment quivered the belle,
From her brow fell off drops of perspiration
Returning unobtusive to her toil she seemed to say −
‘I break stones”.
( Translated from Hindi by Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi, Lucknow)

वसन्त आया
सखख, वसन्त आर्

Page | 79
सखख, वसन्त आर् ।

भर हर्य वि के िि,
िवोत्कर्य छ र् ।
फकसलर्-वसि िव-वर्-लनतक
मिली िधरु प्रप्रर्-उर तरु-पनतक ,
िधप
ु -वन्ृ द बन्दी-
प्रपक-स्वर िभ सरस र् ।
लत -िक
ु ु ल-ह र-गन्ध-भ र भर
बही पवि बन्द िन्द िन्दतर,
ि गी िर्िों िें वि-
र्ौवि की ि र् ।
आवत
ृ सरसी-उर-सरमसि उठे ,
केशर के केश कली के छुिे ,
स्वर्य-शस्र्-अञ्चल
पथ्
ृ वी क लहर र् ।
Arrival of Spring (Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala')
Dear friend, spring has arrived.
The heart of the wood is with joy filled,
Rejuvenation is all pervasive.
Clad in newly sprung leaves, dainty-youthful vine’s
Endearing meeting with heart-throb tree’s foliage,
Swarms of honey bees entrapped –
The cuckoo’s sonorous call rends the sky.
The soft breeze falters, flows gentle, gentler,
My eyes are enlivened to the richness
Of the wood and the youth.
In the sequestered expanse of
Luscious-heart-lotuses bloom,
Flowing saffron strands from opened buds,
Gold- verdant-saree pallu
Of the earth flutters.

( Translated from Hindi by Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi,)
Translation of 'Sandhya Sundari', A Poem by Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala'
Page | 80 Evening Beauty

It is the time of dusk -
From the cloudy skies she descends,
She the evening-beauty, fairylike,
Lightly, lightly, lightly
There's in the dusky drape no hint of mischief
Sweet, sweet are her two lips,
But slightly sombre, there is in her no sprightly laughter
Laughs but an only star -
Braided with those black-black tresses,
The queen of hearts it anoints.
Sloven like the creeper,
But the bud of daintiness,
With an arm around friend- quietitude,
Like a shade from the sky-path she started.
No Veena plays in her hand,
No note of love-rhythm-strain,
In her anklets too no sound of run-jhun run-jhun
Like an unspoken word only 'quiet quiet quiet'
Is resounding everywhere -
In the skies, in the water bodies -
She sleeps on the silent pond amidst the pristine lotus-crowd -
Amidst the vast breast expanse of the beauty-vain-river -
On the top of patient-brave sombre summit amidst snowcapped-unmoved-mountain-expanse
In the attacking-currents- hurricane amidst the strong-roaring-hightides -
In the horizon in water in the sky in air and fire -
Like an unspoken word only 'quiet quiet quiet'
Is resounding everywhere -
And what else? Nothing more.
She spills the river of ale as she comes,
To the tired souls with love,
she offers to drink a cup of ale.

She puts them to sleep on her bosom,
Shows them numerous sweet dreams of forgetfulness.
When she is steeped into midnight restiveness,
Incites the poet's passion,

Page | 81
From the lovelorn faint throat
Rises a song of desperation!
(गीत)
मेरी छबि ला दो!
मेरी छबि उर-उर में ला दो!

मेरे नयनों से ये सपने समझा दो!
बिस स्वर से भरे नवल नीरद,

हुए प्राण पावन गा हुआ हृदय भी गदगद,
बिस स्वर-वर्ाा ने भर ददये सररत-सर-सागर,
मेरी यह धरा धन्य हुई भरा नीलाम्िर,
वह स्वर शमाद उनके कण्ठों में गा दो!
बिस गबत से नयन-नयन बमलते,

बिलते हैं हृदय, कमल के दल-के -दल बहलते,
बिस गबत की सहि सुमबत िगा िन्म-मृत्यु-बवरबत
लाती है िीवन से िीवन की परमारबत,
चरण-नयन-हृदय-वचन को तुम बसिला दो!
‘Geet’ (Song) From the Collection : ‘Anamika’( The Anonymous)
Bring my reflection
Bring my reflection in every heart!
From my eyes these dreams you explain!
The sound which fills the fresh clouds’
Life felt blessed singing enraptured the heart,
The sound-shower which filled up river-lake-seas,
This earth of mine was blessed crowded were the blue skies,
That exalted tune sing in their throats!
The speed with which eye meets the eye,
Hearts bloom, crowds-of- Lotuses move,
The end towards which realization of life-death-detachment is awakened
Brings from life life’s supreme-worship.

To foot-eye-heart-word you teach!
तन की, मन की, धन की हो तुम।
Page | 82 तन की, मन की, धन की हो तुम।
नव िागरण, शयन की हो तुम।
काम काबमनी कभी नहीं तुम,

सहि स्वाबमनी सदा रहीं तुम,
स्वगा-दाबमनी नदी िहीं तुम,
अनयन नयन-नयन की हो तुम।
मोह-पटल-मोचन आरोचन,
िीवन कभी नहीं िन-शोचन,
हास तुम्हारा पाश-बवमोचन,
मुबन की मान, मनन की हो तुम।
गहरे गया, तुम्हें ति पाया,

रहीं अन्यथा काबयक छाया,
सत्य भार् की के वल माया,
मेरे श्रवण वचन की हो तुम।
From ‘Kavita Kosh’(Treasure of Poems ), Collection: Archana (Worship)
You are of the body, mind, wealth (Tan Ki,Man Ki, Dhan Ki Ho Tum)
You are of the body, mind, wealth.
You are of the freshly risen, you are of the bedtime.
You are never the overt enchantress,
You have always been the simple mistress,
The river-of- paradise you have flown always,
Of the eyeless, of every eye you are.
ttachment-perspective-ponderous-occupation
Life is never people-depraved,
Your laughter is shackle-binding,
Pride of the sage, you are for pondering.

I went deep, then I found you,
Otherwise a shadow of the form you were,
The only wealth of true utterance,
Of my aural speech you are.

Page | 83
( Inroduction of the translator of the poems of ‘Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’’ from Hindi to English:
Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi is Assistant Professor in English at Dr. Shakuntala Misra National Rehabilitation University, Lucknow.
She has been an Academic Counsellor in English, with Indira Gandhi National Open University for the past several years, where she
teaches various courses in English. Her Ph. D research was on Comparative Literature, the poetry of Philip Larkin and Nissim Ezekiel.
She herself composes poems in English.)

Companions
(Translation of Sahacharulu poem of Vimala)
Naresh Annem
Page | 84
Who are you in the many stars
Shining in the dark sky?
Where are you those
Voluntarily kissed the death for wiping our tears?
Tracing my beloved companions
Who embraced the sudden death
This night with empty despair,
Moan and anger
I’ll shout at the sky.
Then a cloud
Kindly leaning on earth with mercy
Will clear my tears
The clouds which embraced
The afflictions of many
Will greet as the first showers
The green sky will again spread over the earth

Poet details
Page | 85 Vimala is a Telugu poet, short story writer and script-writer. Her literary works have been
translated and published in various books and journals in Hindi and English. Two of her poems
are included in BA curriculum in Andhra Pradesh. Her best known published works include:
Adavi Uppogina Rathri (The Night of the Forest’s Uprising), Mrigana (Searching) - anthology
of poems in Telugu. Maa (Mother) is translated into Hindi.

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VOL 3, NO 2 April, 2015 ISSN: 2321-8274

INDINA JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

“Heritage Conservation and Preservation: - Connecting cultures in a global

ISSUE EDITOR : Dr. Lopamudra Maitra Bajpai

Editorial By Dr. Lopamudra Maitra Bajpai

1. From Pedagogical to Performatives: Re-postcolonizing Indian Sahitya Akademi

6. of caste-class and dalit writing_Monoranjan Byapari in Conversation By

7. The Reverse Tree By Soumen Jana…………………………………………………………..71-76

8. Poems of Surya Kant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ Translated By Dr. Archana Bahadur

“Heritage Conservation and Preservation: - Connecting cultures in a global world”

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the

Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

An interesting insight is rendered by Saswat S.Das (Associate Professor, Department of

In the paper by Jebamani Anthoney (Department of Languages and Literature, University of

Saurabh Bhattacharyya’s (Assistant Professor- Chandraketugarh S.S.Mahavidyalaya, under

Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

literature, highlighting significant aspects. Though it is arguably a relatively newly emergent

Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

Dr. Lopamudra Maitra Bajpai

Assistant Professor and Visual Anthropologist

Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication (UG), Pune, India

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From Pedagogical to Performatives: Re-postcolonizing Indian Sahitya Akademi

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

The Indian Sahitya Akademy is an anachronism in a transnational world and Indian

policy makers have failed to problematize the rationality of postcolonial institutions

India`s national academy of letters, established in 1954 is committed for promoting

varieties prevalent in India and does not believe in a coercive generalization of

culture through a homogenization of levels and attitudes. The predominant cognitive

suppressed asymmetries and subterranean discordant notes in a bid to reiterate the

official normative taxonomy of nationalism. Sahitya Akademi`s constitutional

legitimization was premised on tropes of national hagiography and unquestioned

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ethos of such norm-bound institutions in the current backdrop of dissemination and

dispersed nationalities and in that way we seek to expose the fissures of

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Postcoloniality may seem to be an abstract externality, indicative of that pure interventionist

The Hauntological Akademi: Disturbed by the Specter of the Nationalist Past

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Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

Towards a Linguistic Performance: Re-Postcolonizing Sahitya Akademi

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Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

performative postcoloniality, keeping the hegemonic configuration in check, while engaging

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1. Bhabha, Homi. K (2004) The Location of Culture. USA: Routledge.

2. Chakraborty, Dipesh (2008) Provincializing Europe, Postcolonial Thought and

3. Das, Prasanta, What was the Third World?,available at,

5. Habermas, Juergen (1979) translated by McCarthy, Thomas. Communication and

6. Derrida, Jacques (1998) Of Grammatology. translated from French by Spivak,

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A case study on Preserving Cultural Identity of Samburu Tribe in Kenya

moranism that promotes comradeship, self-esteem and its pride.

Keywords: Tribes, Samburu, Nilotes, Culture, ethnic, gerontocracy, egalitarian, moranism

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identity and moranism that promotes comradeship.

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KENYA`S TRADITIONALLY FLAMBOYANT "BUTTERFLY DANCING TRIBE"

language, the Samburu have an equally intricate and fascinating culture.

overlooking spectacular viewpoints. The aesthetic appreciation of beauty is a major part of

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Valley Province of Kenya.