Mahasweta Devi

To you the universe

Was a constellation of stars

Towards which you took a leap,

Only some of the stars

Were shrouded in a darkness, so deep.

You went close, you felt deeply,

And in your manner so intense,

Arose the speech of ants,

Within a sentence;

The sound of snails speaking,

The torment of a hungry child, weeping.

 

You discarded the middle-class morality of the Bengali bhadralok

For the mud huts of the Sabar tribes of Purulia,

And from them arose the words of Dopdi,

Defying the cop who raped her,

‘Can you look into my eyes

And see the undefiled, unvanquished dignity of my tribe?’

For the tribals you were a tireless scribe

Raising their issues in the Supreme Court

As to why Chotti Munda had slit the darogah’s throat.

He had gone to plant three papaya seedlings

On his own land,

When he saw another man’s hut on what was once his own fields.

 

You extended our depth of field,

Moving our inner compass

Urging the rich, powerful and pompous,

To see, that we were intent on occupying

Every stream, river and forest.

That belonged to the tribes,

And was now being parcelled to the

New India Company.

Sagari Chhabra