Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi, Jan 30, 2024

Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) front cover, 1974.

The central event of the novel Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) is an atrocity in which a youthful group of friends is attacked and killed by a gang of partisans from an opposing group. They were working to liberate poor people from domination and impoverishment by the wealthy strata of society.
                                                                           

Mahasweta Devi, Mother of 1084, translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay, 1997.

Calcutta is the scene and the time is 1970 when followers of Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, two left wing leaders of factions of the Communist Party of India led a struggle based on the Naxalbari Uprising of 1967 in North Bengal. That uprising was an armed revolt by tribals instigated by ideologues of the communist movement:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalbari_uprising

The Naxalbari Uprising of 1967 led to a splintered future among multiple factions.

Naxalism and Naxalites were terms in use at the time, and spread to some cities, where violence took the form of killing persons in power and snatching rifles from armed policemen deployed to quell the violence on streets. Joe used to live at the time in the area named as relatively calm in the novel (Park Street and Camac Street) but it was common to see policemen holding rifles chained to their waist lest Naxaals attack them and wrest the weapons from their hands.

Mahasweta Devi (1926 – 2016) was an eminent Indian writer and social activist. She is a prominent literary personality and best-selling Bengali author of short fiction and novels.

Mahasweta Devi may not have been violent herself, but her lifelong sympathies were with the tribals whom she worked to educate, uplift, and write about. Why she wrote this novella, at first a play, is no mystery. She wanted to depict the empty veneer of materialism that paraded as culture among educated upper-class urbanites, and contrast it with the idealism of those who revolted and led movements to bring justice to the poor. As she wrote:
“In the seventies, in the Naxalite movement, I saw exemplary integrity, selflessness, and the guts to die for a cause. I thought I saw history in the making, and decided that as a writer it would be my mission to document it. As a writer, I feel a commitment to my times, to mankind, and to myself. I did not consider the Naxalite movement an isolated happening.”

Nelson Mandela honours Mahasweta Devi with the Jnanpith Award in 1997.

The violence was not only by the government on the Naxal participants; it took place as bloody warfare between opposing groups of leftist partisans which Mahashweta Devi recounts:
“A bloody cycle of interminable assaults and counter-assaults, murders and vendetta, was initiated. The ranks of both the CPI(M) and CPI (M-L) dissipated their militancy in mutual fightings leading to the elimination of a large number of their activists, and leaving the field open to the police and the hoodlums. It was a senseless orgy of murders, misplaced fury, sadistic tortures, acted out with the vicious norms of the underworld, and dictated by the decadent and cunning values of the petit bourgeois leaders.”

In Mother of 1084 (published serially in a periodical in 1973, and later as a novella in 1974) Mahasweta re-enacts the senseless killings of the Naxalites. The author does it evoking the intense love of a mother (Sujata) for her son (Brati) whose motivations and struggles she does not understand. Much of the novel is given to the mother’s search for the secret life of her son with his comrades, including a lover (Nandini) who is tortured by the police to extract information about others in the movement. The third woman who suffers is the mother of Somu, a comrade of Brati, who is also killed in the internecine warfare; but she can wail her loss openly, in a way Sujata cannot.

The passage of time is referred to often in the pages of the novel by the women who bear the suffering of past grief, the unbearable grief of losing a beloved son, and the poignant loss of a comrade in arms at the flowering of his youth.

In the first simile on p.61 Time is likened to the flowing of a river, Grief is the bank of the river where sorrow accumulates. As the river flows, the alluvium carried by the river water is heaped on the accumulated grief on the bank, submerges it, and soon new shoots of hope grow to mitigate the sorrow.

In a second simile on p.77, Time is seen firstly as the compression of loss: the past is gone forever. Secondly time is seen (as above) through the same prism of flowing water carrying fresh alluvial soil to cover the mudbanks of grief heaped by the past. And that brings new hope.

In yet a third simile on p.79, Time is cast as an ‘arch fugitive, always on the run.’ It reminds one of the Latin maxim tempus fugit (time flies) which is shortened from Virgil's Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: “it escapes, irretrievable time.” In the novel Sujata ‘would never be able to retrieve the moment when Brati in his blue shirt stood at the foot of the stairs.’ Will the two women, Sujata and Nandini, be always in search of lost time, like Swann in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past?

Samik Bandyopadhyay, the translator, says he had the privilege of working with the author who contributed her own notes on the translation.