Mahasweta Devi was born into a distinguished family settled in Bangladesh when it was a part of undivided India and the British were in power. She was the daughter of Manish Ghatak, the eldest brother of late filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. Over four decades, Mahashweta Devi wrote twenty published collections of short stories and close to a hundred novels, primarily in her native language -Bengali. She championed the cause of 25 million tribal people in India, who belong to approximately 150 different tribes. Her writing reflects the ugliness, squalor and misery in the lives of the tribal people and indicts Indian society for the indignity it heaps on its most oppressed constituents. Is it possible for any Indian filmmaker to represent her stories in and through the language of cinema?

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Cinema is a director’s medium. Literature is a writer’s world. How can these two worlds be brought together in harmonious unity? How much freedom does a director have to toy around with the literary source he has chosen? Does he need to stick to the original literary work? Or can be interpret it differently, or, question the basis or the morals of the characters therein? Her writing reflects the ugliness, squalor and misery in the lives of the tribal people and indicts Indian society for the indignity it heaps on its most oppressed constituents.

Only a handful of directors have made films based on her work. Because, frankly, her writings hardly lend themselves to the multi-dimensional creative art of cinema because they do not have any ‘commercial’ or even ‘artistic’ value as we understand it. Of around 100 novels, less than a dozen inspired filmmakers to turn them into cinema. Her writing was too difficult to enter, imbibe and translate without knowing, understanding and internalising the struggles of the marginalised adivasis – the Hos, the Mundas, the Oraons, the Shabars and the Santhals she wrote about. Their social structure is different from our own. The language they speak in, the food they eat, their lifestyle, their customs and rituals, the clothes they wear or do not wear, the sources of livelihood and even the gods they worship are a mystery to mainstream people like us and the filmmakers.

Film scholar and critic Chidananda Dasgupta insisted that a film adapted from literature “would contain something of the chemistry of the mind of the filmmaker.” He said that not only would some aspects of incidents and characters undergo a change, “but the very composition of the elements, the molecular structure if you like, would undergo a transmutation.” (Talking About Films)

Choli Ke Peechhey and Gangor

This writer watched eight of her stories presented/interpreted/portrayed as feature films in Bengali, Marathi and Hindi while two short stories were made into Hindi telefilms by Buddhadev Dasgupta. The short story Choli Ke Peechey turned into a short film for Doordarshan by Buddhadev Dasgupta dark and so differently expressed that the very spirit of the tragedy of Gangor, the woman with voluptuous breasts, is lost. Her wretched life is destroyed by a city-based photographer who clicks her pictures and gets them published in a city paper. This destroys Gangor’s life beyond rescue. The very breasts that brought her to hog headlines are reduced to ruin her life.

Choli Ke Peechey had another celluloid version titled Gangor directed by Italo Spinelli in Italian. True that since cinema and literature are two different forms of creative expression, the filmmaker has the liberty to change the original story to fit into his/her thinking and ideology. Though Gangor won several International awards, it twisted the original story so much out of shape that the film no longer remained a Mahasweta Devi story and the same applies to Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Choli Ke Peechey in two different ways. Both turned into sob-stories of the misuse and abuse of a tribal woman with well-endowed breasts in a way that destroys her life and her faith forever.

The opening scenes of Gangor breastfeeding her baby and Ullas photographing her for display remind us of Mrinal Sen’s Khandhar but Sen’s film rises way above the objectification of the woman by the director’s camera. The focus of Gangor is more on the issue of gang-rape and less on the merciless exploitation of the tribal woman by a city-based photographer. Besides, one fails to gauge that when Indian filmmakers cannot get into the soul of Mahasweta Devi’s characters, language and narration, how can an Italian filmmaker even imagine that he could come anywhere near Mahasweta’s Gangor?

Arjun (2012) also directed for Doordarshan by Dasgupta, has a running time of 22 minutes. Ketu, a poor member of the Shabar tribe, survives by cutting trees in Bandihi village. He often lands in jail but believes it is his destiny. One day, a powerful man named Bishal Mahato and his friend Haldar order him to cut down the precious Arjun tree, a source of shelter and faith for the tribals. When Ketu and his friends realize the tree’s importance, they come together, claiming it has become sacred, and organize a festival around it. Their unity and ingenuity prevent the tree’s destruction, thus sending a strong message against the destruction of the oldest tree in the village which has protected them against the vagaries of Nature in their wretched lives and been a silent guardian. Bishal Mahato has no compunctions about cutting down an aged tree for his own profit. He is totally unconcerned about the Shabars of the village who turn the tree literally into a place of devotion and worship and begin to dance and play drums circling the tree thus, stopping Mahato and Haldar from axing down the tree.

Buddhadev Dasgupta’s film is not able even to touch the soul of Shabars, the neglected, impoverished tribal villagers who are forced to eke out a living through petty crimes and are often imprisoned. The film looks like a facile documentation of a large tree at the centre of the story which the ‘capitalists’ are trying to destroy and the Shabars are struggling to protect.

In 1993, Sanat Dasgupta made Janani inspired from the story Bayen by Mahasweta Devi. The story revolves around Chandi, a young girl from the dom community who is tortured, abused and ostracized by the entire village because she is born with a fair skin. No one from her community is born fair and this turns into a weapon for the villagers to label her a witch when children begin to die for mysterious reasons. Chandi has a sympathetic husband but gets convinced by the other villagers and they drive her out of the village. She craves for her son but is not allowed to see him. In the climax, Chandi dies while saving a running train from getting into an accident as the villagers have blocked the tracks to rob the train. The film was no commercial success but won the National Award for Best Film on Other Social Issues.

Ullas (2012) is a Bengali social drama film directed by Ishwar Chakraborty. This film was based on three short stories namely Daur, Mahadu - Ekti Rupkatha and Anno Aranya. Writer Mahasweta Devi acted in the film in the role of Basuli goddess. In Dour, Kanna, a young tribal boy appears for the police constable examination in summer and drops dead at the examination venue. Suddenly he comes alive on his journey to the morgue and starts running.

The second story revolves around the struggle of Mahadu, a Korku tribe boy of Maharashtra. He grows to enormous size up to the mark, hunger and energy and destroys all the buildings around Mumbai that were built on the forest land, which is his native place. Anna is the protagonist of the third story. She is a girl from the Lodha tribe of Medinipur, West Bengal. A rich wood merchant's son sexually exploits her and she becomes pregnant. Anna takes her revenge. This film, screened with much fanfare at Nandan, came a cropper because the anthology tended to confuse the audience and the stories appeared to run into each other.

Swabhoomi (2013), directed by Ujjal Chatterjee, is based on Adhoba by Mahasweta Devi. The word ‘adhoba’ means a woman who is neither a widow nor considered a married woman because her husband’s last rites have never been performed and his body remained unidentified.

Saraswati (Debasree Roy) brings on celluloid the brutal story of her life where she struggles to claim her husband’s (Debesh Roy Choudhury) dead body but fails to because of governmental interference as the government is desperate to hide the intentional murder of the husband during the land-grab conflict in Shantigram in West Bengal. It is based on the real life story of Shyamali Pramanik whose husband went missing during the Nandigram killings and was discovered three months later from a ditch in the fields. Swabhoomi is unabashed mainstream masala fare.

A badly executed, choreographed and positioned item number (Dimpy Mahajan) sticks out like a sore thumb. Chatterjee use a Bangla band like a repeated metaphor but the band does not look, behave or even sing like a band and spoils the continuity of the narrative. Chatterjee has filled the narrative with too many characters springing out of the woodwork without logic. The sweet-and-syrupy ‘family portrait’ of Saraswati, her husband and the two artificial kids are dragging and melodramatic.

This brings us to the five memorable film adaptations of Mahasweta’s works. These are – H.S.Rawail’s grand film Sunghursh (1969), Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudali (1993) Gautam Ghosh’s Gudia (1997), Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (All in Hindi) and Chitra Palekar’s Maati Maay (Marathi).

Sunghursh had all ingredients for a lavishly mounted period costume drama. Set in Varanasi, this fast-paced film talks of thugs, the killers who were a terror in Northern India in the 19th Century. They mostly belonged to priestly families but under that disguise, they would rob unsuspecting pilgrims of everything they had. Rawail, loyal to the original story addresses the loot that goes on at pilgrim centres in the name of faith. The film demonstrates how the ritual of sacrifice is misused for personal gain and how men compromise love for spiritual virtues – issues that are relevant even today.

Rudali (1993) is a powerful short story. Revolving around the life of Sanichari, a poor low caste village woman, it is an acidly ironic tale of exploitation and struggle, and survival. In both incarnations of Rudali– the text (1979) and the film, it is a woman who has constructed and deconstructed the text and can be read and seen as an important feminist text. The text also leaves it open to different interpretations, liberating the context from its purely feminist message. The men in the story are no less victims of their caste, class and social status than women as seen from the death of Sanichari’s husband of poisoning from the prasad he partook in the temple. Their lives are as expendable as are their deaths.

The film is relevant because the subject it deals with is relevant today – socially, politically and in terms of casteist politics as it exists today not to speak of the ghettoization of women of some given Dalit communities trapping them into an occupation that is exclusively a female domain – selling tears and its associated paraphernalia – wailing loudly, rolling on the floor, chest-beating, manufacturing tears and so on just to keep body and soul together. These women are called “rudalis” probably derived from the word “rona” meaning crying. Ostensibly, they are paid for it in cash and in kind though this keeps their livelihood at the subsistence level.

Lajmi’s directorial works are filled with a lot of pomp and style that does not go at all with the raw reality and ugly poverty of Mahasweta Devi’s original story stripped completely of any melodrama or attempt to appeal to the reader through a garnering of sympathy for Sanichari’s and Bheekni’s terrible state. Lajmi is unable to give Rudali, the film, a distinct identity of its own.

Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (1998)

Mahasweta Devi created a watershed in Bengali creative fiction in general and her own writing in particular, when she wrote Hajar Churashir Ma in 1973. For the first time, she turned from a personalised, middle-class, auteurian setting to focus on the Naxalite movement in West Bengal. She chose as her subject, the impact of the Naxalite movement on an elitist, upper-middle-class, urban Bengali family, upon the violent death of the youngest child.

Though Nihalani’s film remains loyal to the spirit and the textual content of the story, Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (1998), the film, weaves a structure very different from the novel. The film opens with a woman stepping out of a taxi into a nursing home with a suitcase, all by herself, to deliver a baby. The camera immediately cuts into the bedroom of a middle-aged couple, with Sujata suffering from stomach cramps, reaching out to wash the mandatory pill down with the glass of water. The telephone rings, punctuating the ominous silence of the night that permeates the well-appointed house. The disoriented voice across the line asks her to come to the prison morgue to identify the body of her son. She arrives, all alone, and identifies the bullet-ridden body of Brati which has a number tagged on to a toe : 1084.

She is also the lone witness and implementer of his last rites. The reaction of the rest of the family to the tragedy is totally unexpected. Her husband uses his influence and contacts to cut out Brati’s name from all media reportage about the deaths. No one mentions his name either, because a Naxalite in the family, be it the son, even after his death, invests the family name with a stigma they can do without. She invokes the family’s wrath for questioning this, in her own silent way. Sujata is haunted by memories of her son, and reinterprets what he tried to tell her so many times, now, in retrospect. The mother of the other boy (beautifully enacted by Seema Biswas) offers another shock.

Gudia (1997) directed by Gautam Ghose and produced by Plus Channel, was Inspired by a short story by Mahasweta Devi, titled Urvashi O Johnny, Ghose took the core theme of a ventriloquist's freedom of expression, and then fleshed it out to define a full-length feature film—a formidable task even for a director of the calibre of Ghose. Especially when one is dealing with a Mahasweta Devi story.

Cinematically, the narrative is structured like the waves of the sea, which form the main backdrop of the film. Gudia thus, is a metaphor for life, for humanity, for the inseparable, symbiotic relationship between the artist and his art. Johnny's life rises and falls like the waves of the sea he is so fond of, more so when he loses “Gudia” or Urvashi, his favourite puppet, to those waves, he comes back the next morning to find out if the fishermen’s morning catch has brought her back. It hasn’t. Urvashi or “Gudia” is lost to the sand, to Johnny and to his performance.

While Johnny is linked to the restless movement of the sea, waves on the shore and the sky in the backdrop, Rosemary, the girl who falls in love with the ventriloquist, is perhaps linked to the moon, and the still surfaces of the water, sometimes broken by ripples. Yet, Rosemary is never able to crack the emotional cocoon within which Johnny has entrapped himself with his Urvashi, even when ‘she’ is lost to the sea. Rosemary does not seem to mind stepping into the shoes of a ventriloquist’s puppet and even act like “she” did, she is so much in love with Johnny. But Johnny does not seem to notice or pay attention.

Maati Maay directed by Chitra Palekar is in Marathi. Chandi is a young woman from a lower caste, whose family has traditionally been in charge of a children's graveyard. After the death of her father Chandi inherits the job in the graveyard. She performs the unpleasant task of burying the village's children which affects her body and mind. Her husband, Narsu, fails to understand Chandi's state of mind; society forces her to continue the job. Finally, Chandi rebels and her community become extremely hostile to her. On the surface, it seems to be a simple story.

The village is horrified by a cannibalistic ghoul (Nandita Das). The villagers do all in their power to keep their children away from her. Isolated, the ghoul finds no company, no sympathy. Until one day she bumps into Bhagirath (Kshitij Gavande), a sharp school kid innocently strolling around the village. Bhagirath fortunately is accompanied by his father, Narsu (Atul Kulkarni), who shields him from her evil hexes. Narsu shoos the evil lady away. Intrigued, Bhagirath asks his father how the woman got herself into such a predicament. Narsu's answer unfolds as a dark and dreamlike journey that reveals his connection with this ghoul. The story telling, to begin with is fast and crisp. It is chilling, yet at places touching. It sets into the central focus much later on in the film but at the same time, the film begins to lose pace. It marks strong resemblances to Mahasweta’s story Bayen made earlier as Janani but one cannot be quite sure if it is the same story turned into a different one by Palekar or a different story authored by Mahasweta Devi.

Summing up, Mahasweta Devi made significant contributions to literary and cultural studies in the country. Her empirical research into oral history as it lives in the cultures and memories of tribal communities was the first of its kind in India. Her powerful, haunting tales of exploitation and struggle have been seen as rich sites of feminist discourse by leading scholars. Her innovative use of language has expanded the parameters of Bengali as a language of literary expression, by imbibing and interweaving tribal dialects.

© Mathrubhumi English