Mahasweta's Narrating The Tribal: Pre-Colonial Discourse
There has been a long tradition of discourse in India related to the
tribal people, dating from pre-colonial times, through the colonial
period, to the contemporary era, which have largely determined their
historical, political and social status in the Indian nation. It was during
the colonial period that the academic study of the tribes of India was
undertaken systematically. The socio-cultural and historical
marginalization of the tribes that had begun in the pre-colonial periods
was also strengthened through the colonial discourses on race and
culture. Historical discourse has also been largely silent on the subject of
tribal history, which now is being resurrected from these silent spaces.
Literature is another area of discourse
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Mahasweta also engages with the discourse of motherhood
within the larger framework of tribal identity and articulates it as an
ambivalent concept with the potential for both restriction and liberation.
The fifth chapter, titled “Narrating the Tribal: Discourses in
Dialogue” examines the literary techniques used by Mahasweta Devi in
her fiction in the light of both Indian and Western critical theories. Her
writing style incorporates varied discourses drawn from the realms of
academic writing, official records, statistical data, literary and cultural
traditions, and the oral and folk idioms current in the period she is
recreating. Her use of the oral tribal traditions forms the key to her
foregrounding of the tribal’s voice in her narratives. These various
discourses are woven together with an artistic imagination and aesthetic
skill to produce complex and polyphonic fictional works that bring
together many different perspectives on the tribal subject within one
narrative.
The thesis concludes that Mahasweta Devi’s fictional
representations of tribal life show a depth, power and nuanced
complexity that can be attributed broadly to two factors, one related to
the thematic conception, and the second to the narrative technique of
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