Mother begins with a section titled ‘Morning’. Sujata’s sleep is broken by an oft-
recurring dream of her labour pain during Brati’s birth. The narration mixes past with present to suggest the intense nature of pain and to draw our attention to Brati:
In her dreams Sujata was back on a morning twenty-two years ago. She often went back to that morning. She found herself packing her bag: towel, blouse, sari, toothbrush, soap. Sujata is fifty-three now. In her dreams she sees a Sujata at thirty-one, busy packing her bag. A Sujata still young, heavy with the child she bore in her womb, packed her bag carefully item by item as she prepared to bring Brati into this world. That Sujata’s face twisted with pain again and again, she clamped her teeth on her lips to check the cry, the Sujata of the dreams waiting for Brati to be born.319
Sujata has dreamt this episode so many times that she can distinctly remember all the nitty-gritty of it. The ensuing narration does not divulge the reason of the recurrence, but does reveal her family’s indifference to her demands and needs in these difficult periods. But not the entire narration is in the past. The narrator uses a present tense to tell us Sujata’s age. This is useful because we get to understand the recurrent nature of the dream through the present indefinite use of tense and we are informed that Brati was born twenty-two years ago. This information is important because today, we are told later, is Brati’s birthday, hinting at a link between the narration of pain in labour and the description of her family’s cold attitude. The incompatibility, or rather, the serious tone of the narration (as against the supposed celebratory mood for the auspicious day) becomes clear as soon as we are told that Brati is dead. Sujata did not know what he was killed for, and noticed that his family helped the police erase all data from public notice, all objects that memorialise Brati from public view: ‘There
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were so many questions before his death, and so many after. Question marks. Rows and endless rows of question marks’.320 Devi’s narrator does not tell us right away that two years have passed and Sujata has come to see through more clearly the hypocrisy of her family, of economic exhibitionism and moral degradation, and the criminality in shutting a voice that posed uncomfortable questions to them. The narrator slowly develops her character, sometimes through a deep-time narration where a past narration explores further events in the past to establish coherence between events, or through sudden time shifts to the narratorial present within a longer flashback. These techniques push the narration further away in deep-time; for instance, Sujata’s thoughts about her family are broken by a telephone call, which in turn reminds her of the telephone call two years ago from a morgue called Kantapukur reporting Brati’s death. This deep-time narration suggests that the lives of Sujata and Brati are interlinked. Brati may be dead, but Sujata brings him back every day through her dreams, thoughts, and memories, in order to understand why he died, what his words meant on the day he was killed, what he was like not as a son but as a political human being, and finally and fundamentally why she failed to understand him.
Brati was soft-hearted, fearful, and imaginative, ‘haunted by fears, the fears that haunt an imaginative child’: ‘A funeral procession in the night shouting “Haribol!” was frightening, the street performer masquerading as a bandit was frightening. But then he outgrew all his fears’.321 He loved to read poems about death (in a line or two, Brati is already an adolescent). Sujata can still see him sitting on the window sill and reading poetry, which is then followed by the information that he considers his father a class enemy – this is clearly Brati in his early college days. So, in a few lines Devi’s narrator develops Brati’s character as a sensitive, strong, and politically conscious human being. It is, however, not clear whether the narrator is divulging this information objectively or whether this is all part of Sujata’s dreams: ‘When Sujata saw Brati in her dreams these days, a part of her mind would insist it was just a dream. Brati did not exist. It was just a dream. The other part of the mind went on insisting that it was not a dream, it was real’.322 This technique allows Devi to create the semblance of transparent narration. If, indeed, we consider that it is
320 Ibid, p. 12.
321 Ibid, p. 13. 322 Ibid, p. 14.
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Sujata’s dreams that kicks off the narration, it could be argued that the entire narration is an extended dream event. Dream and reality become mixed. But note that Devi does not use dream to alter the course of reality. Dreams, memories, and recollections help her explore Brati’s character and engage sympathetically with the Naxalbari movement. The diegetic narrator sometimes pluralises the consciousness and speaks of how a movement for social and economic equality was brutally murdered by the city’s police, bourgeois middle class, and civil society; how these young people who sacrificed their lives for a cause were murdered with impunity: ‘They [Brati and his friends] were all sentenced to death. Anybody was permitted to kill them. People in all the parties, people of all creeds had the unlimited, democratic right to kill these young men who had rejected the parties of the establishment’.323 From this sarcastic narration, the narrator then places vital political arguments, ‘The questions remained: Was Brati’s death futile? Did his death stand for a massive NO’.324 The moment we begin to think it is the narrator asking these questions, we are told that it is Sujata who is thinking about all these while looking at the things in Brati’s room. Thus, the suggestion here is that Sujata has begun to take note of the documents in Brati’s room, to work hard to recollect what Brati said and what they meant, to uncover the deeper meanings, and to politicise herself; that she has been thinking all these weeks and months about Brati, and trying to put together bits and pieces to find answers when the police and her family had closed the case file. In these psychological investigations, dreams are the reflections of her daily work. It is in dreams that she understands the logic behind Brati’s political decisions and the hypocrisy of bourgeois life, that she should have stopped him from visiting his friends on that fateful night: ‘In her dream, Sujata knew that Brati would not go to Ronu’s house, he would go to warn Somu and his group. In her dreams yearned to rush out and drag Brati back by the hand. She yearned to scream out – Brati, come back!’325 Dreams thus appear to be
not only a useful ploy to enter the main narration, but also a medium through which Sujata’s psychological journey and her affective politicisation are executed. In the quote above, it is not only Brati’s lies that Sujata spots, but also her own intense love for Brati and her passionate desire to correct her faults, to bring Brati back to life. Her motherly self, her sensitivity, and her emotions are not sacrificed by Devi for the
323 Ibid, pp. 19-20. 324 Ibid, p. 20. 325 Ibid, p. 53.
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development of her political self. It is after all a novel about a mother and the loss of her child to state violence. As the narrator says, ‘Who is Sujata? Only a mother. Who are those hundreds of thousands whose hearts, even now, are being gnawed by questions? Only mothers’.326
Contrary to the narration of the Brati episodes, Sujata’s family is described in a fairly linear fashion. The descriptions here mark the patriarchal-consumerist nature of her family and her growing politicisation. As an upper-middle class woman whose husband is an established chartered accountant and whose daughters are married or engaged to top-level salaried executives or businessmen settled abroad, Sujata’s job in the family has been to remain silent and do her work as a dutiful wife and mother: ‘She was not one of those radicals, the independent woman conscious of her rights […] Sujata was quiet, taciturn and old fashioned’.327 But she was always self-sufficient
as the childbirth episode has suggested. Her mother-in-law never went with her because she disliked Sujata’s pregnancies (her husband died after Dibyanath, her only son and Sujata’s husband, was born), and Dibyanath never accompanied her because he found it unmanly. At the same time, Devi’s narrator tells us: ‘But he noticed things, he noticed Sujata, he had to be sure that Sujata was fit enough to bear a child again’.328 Here is a glimpse into the gendered nature of bourgeois family where women are considered a medium for an entire praxis of social reproduction. Sujata knows that Dibyanath has extra-marital affairs, but his mother indulges it: ‘For her it was a mark of her son’s virility; her son was no henpecked husband’.329 What these glimpses suggest is that gender is not about sexual difference. The mother-in-law’s thoughts are an indication of her absorption of the deeply sexist elements in patriarchal societies. Education and urbanity do not necessarily bring rational thinking. Indeed, the qualities and values one considers rational, progressive, and modern more often than not betray deeply-rooted conservative ideologies. Pointing these out is understood as a crime in a consumerist bourgeois society, like when the diegetic narrator says: ‘If Brati drank like Jyoti, if he could go about drunk like Neepa’s husband, if he could flirt with the slip of a typist the way Brati’s father did […] then they could have accepted Brati as
326 Ibid, p. 51.
327 Ibid, p. 46. 328 Ibid, p. 3. 329 Ibid, p. 31.
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one of them’.330 These thoughts and questions are consolidated in the fourth and final section of the novel, ‘Evening’. The today of the narrative, that is Brati’s birth and death anniversary, is also the day of the engagement party of Tuli, Sujata’s youngest daughter. Devi gives here a vignette of the established bourgeois upper- and middle- class life in Kolkata in the 1960s: Sujata’s eldest daughter, Neepa flirting with her brother-in-law, Balai; Tuli’s fiancé, Tony Kapadia talking about the profits he has made by selling Indian handicrafts in Sweden; and her friends being involved in debauchery, drinking, and discussion of social and economic development in India. Through these sharp pictures full of irony and bitter sarcasm, Devi shows how
bhadrata (decency) in this postcolonial urban society means playing the games of
consumerist capitalism, where the gendered role means either (for a distancing, unassimilated woman like Sujata) meeting the entire spectrum of gendered social reproduction (child bearing, child rearing, domestic labour, etc.), or (for assimilated women serving patriarchal needs and desires) allowing the female body to be available for objectification. ‘Auteurs’ Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray have powerfully captured these aspects in their Calcutta films.331 As in the films, the objectification of women’s bodies and their sexuality, the commodification of culture, the unending accumulation of material wealth, and the strict adoption of political conservatism are considered the standard aspirations for the upper-middle-class family here. Although patriarchal nature is tokenised through Dibyanath (in his powerful presence in both family and professional circles), it is mainly through the rendering of social and cultural life of Sujata’s family and neighbours that Devi implies a deep nexus between patriarchy, family, and gendered roles. In such gendered social structure, Sujata’s eldest daughter’s public humiliation of her husband as impotent and her glorified justifications for her extra-marital affair with her brother-in-law, or Tuli’s marriage to a businessman who is settled abroad, appears as much a pattern of patriarchal designs as Dibyanath’s dominance in the family. When, without informing Sujata, Tuli invites Saroj Pal, the inspector who killed Brati, to her engagement party, Sujata cannot hold her fury any longer; she cries out loud with rage and falls unconscious to the floor. The novel ends here.
330 Ibid, p. 31.
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Sujata’s screaming could be read as an act of political agency. We have noted that she has already politicised herself, and distanced herself from her family and become silent. Her silence has often made her family members think that she is an ‘unnatural’ mother, an ‘odd’ wife who does not mourn her son. But we are told that the day her family attempted to dispose of Brati’s objects and invited Saroj Pal to officially separate their relations from Brati, they no longer mattered, or even existed, for her. Devi’s narration here is dramatic but adequate to represent the depth of her hatred for them: ‘The way he [Dibyanath] had behaved that day [… it] had burst upon her with explosive force. Like one of those massive meteors crashing upon the ancient world billions of years ago. Like one of those explosions that broke up the solid mass of the earth into continents separated by the oceans.’332 This immense depth of hatred only escalated and turned into rage with Pal’s visits. Pal is introduced as a voice in the beginning who asks the family to come to Kantapukur and identify Brati. There is nothing to identify. Brati’s mutilated body and thrashed face, and Pal’s order that his body cannot be taken home, serve to justify the rage against Pal’s character. Later when he visits the family, Sujata is shocked to see him behaving like a perfect gentleman: ‘suave, sophisticated, handsome, the smile of a Prince Charming, a flawless intonation, Yes Mr Chatterjee, I quite assure you […] Mrs Chatterjee, I understand, I too have a mother’.333 Sujata cannot believe the contrasting nature of his character: he is not an illiterate, bloodthirsty, rustic, unkempt, dirty human, but an educated, urban elite, sophisticated individual. Again, the sarcasm and bitterness are too clear in the narration where Pal refers to the fact that he also has a mother, and we understand through Devi’s narration that he has hardly any idea what pain a mother goes through for the loss of an offspring. Devi also uses a juxtaposition of oppositional voices to build Pal’s character for the context. ‘Saroj Pal. Saroj Pal. No pardon for You. Empty, empty threat. For two years Saroj Pal has conducted “this massive investigation, search, and punitive operation. His supreme efficiency and courage has been […]”’.334 The first part is clearly an allusion to the Naxalite graffiti on cruel
inspectors, while the second part has a journalistic voice, reminiscent of the bourgeois media that promoted and celebrated the representatives of the repressive machineries of the state. Through this technique, Devi’s narrator extracts sympathy from us for the
332 Devi, Mother, p. 8. 333 Ibid, p. 29.
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Naxalite cause and manages to add more depth to Sujata’s hatred for this character. Thus, when Sujata sees Pal invited to her house and enjoying a life of comfort after so many killings, her pain and fury burst open in the form of her scream. The scream shatters the limits of toleration, her silences, and bursts open the deep rage within her – a tremendous energy to defy and resist the current culture of state violence and patriarchal injunctions, of consumerism and moral degradation. It is a declaration that she will not be co-opted any longer into this bourgeois project of the commodification of body and soul; she will resist both the repressive and ideological powers of the gendered social reproduction. In a recent reading of the novel, Srila Roy writes, ‘At the end of the novel, Sujata brings the revolutionary cause into the heart of the domestic sphere in her singular act of patriarchal defiance; an act that powerfully weds the personal with the political in the revolutionary imaginary’.335
However, the act should not be understood only as a result of Sujata’s psychological explorations. The platform for this act is also built through her dialogues with other women affected by the movement. This is where the non-linear action time of Sujata’s psychological investigations is juxtaposed with a linear plot development in order to help Sujata identify her class’s and her own blindfolded assumptions and practices and to educate and activate herself politically. The dialogues appear in the next two sections, Noon and Afternoon, when Sujata meets Somu’s mother and Nandini. Somu’s family lives in a refugee settlement in South Kolkata. They had come here from East Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. For the ensuing twenty years, the situation only worsened for them.336 Through Sujata’s gaze, we see the current condition of the house: ‘the thatched roof had come down on one side and had to be supported with a stick. The low bedstead was no longer there. Bricks on the floor supported a flat wooden plank instead’.337 Somu’s family has been destroyed; a few
months after Somu’s death, his father died of heart attack and his elder sister had to take care of the family. She has been facing public humiliation, rejection, and abuse for more than a year. Somu’s mother cries constantly, being scared of the future. She says to Sujata, ‘Didi, my daughter tells me she’ll never get a job because she is Somu’s
335 Srila Roy, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in the Naxalbari Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 65.
336 Through choosing this family, Devi also tells us why a large section of the urban Naxalite youth was actually from the refugee colonies. On this, see Roy pp. 27-28; Raghab Bandyopadhyay’s memoir, Journal Sottor [70s’ Journal] (Kolkata: Ananda, 2000), especially pp. 16-17.
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sister. Can it be true, Didi?’338 In Sujata’s first visit (this episode depicts her second), they cried together; but now she variously points at their class divisions: ‘Don’t